adCenter Top Tool for Vanity Related Keywords
August 2, 2006
There are three main types of vanity related keywords, and each has it’s own unique characteristics. Understanding keyword relationships is critical to both PPC and SEO.
However, the fun related keywords are when you can see what a search engine things about you (or your business, website, etc). When examining what the various search engines think about people, very obvious patterns exist - is there data or not? After going through several tools, Microsoft’s adCenter tool seems to be the most capable keyword tool. So, what does MSN think about you?
When examining semantic keyword relationships, it’s first important to understand the three major ways that word associations happen on the web.
The first is a thesaurus relationship. A quick look up the keyword in a thesaurus and see what words have been associated by linguistic experts. This is both the most straightforward, and the hardest to scale for vanity searches and as new words emerge on the web.
The second would be to examine the semantic relationship. Any two words have a semantic degree of separation. At one to two levels, those keywords can often be considered closely related. The further one moves from the original source, the further apart the semantic relationship.
It is worth nothing that Google is heavily involved in semantic relationships. For Google, these relationships help them rank documents for their organic search results. They can also be used in broad matching for their Google AdWords product. The one advantage that Google has over most of us is searches. They can see how searches are refined, and how keywords are used within the Google.com onebox. Correlating that data with a natural crawl (not an easy feat) can help them automate the categorization of keywords
into semantic relevancy.
The third major way (there are many minor ones) in which words are often associated is keyword dependency. What words are found near, on the same page, and associated with another word within a single document can help drive the automation of word dependencies.
But really, do we care how the engines derive information, or the final result as it relates directly to us?
In talking to someone from Yahoo Local (and having heard this same fact from MSN and Google employees), the vast majority of time someone visits a new local search property - they search for their own business. The majority of time that someone visits a mapping software page, they search for their house. In fact, this trend is so relevant that some engines have through about automatically plotting the first search result with a users location. This line of thought turns into geographic location, so we’ll leave
it as interest thoughts for the moment and get back to the task at hand.
When visiting a new search engine, one often searches for oneself. These searches often have no relevance, otherthen to see who is writing about us, or who else shares our name - just simple curiosity. Vanity keywords are usually a name or brand. However, with larger brands, these relationships can also be used to see related products, and their relationship with the problems they fix (i.e. Most products can be turned into a simple statement in what problem of mine it solves, or how it makes my life better -
however, we’ll leave the in-depth benefit case analysis for another time).
One of my favorite keyword tools on the web (and it’s free) is the Google Keyword Tool. (To learn more about this tool, there’s a free eBook available on this website).
Therefore, when examining semantic relationships, I turned to the Google keyword tool first.
As you can see from the below screen shot, Google’s keyword tool didn’t have a lot to say about me. In fact, when using Google’s semantic search query, I also received zero results.
I would include a Yahoo screenshot here, but Yahoo hasn’t made any of their word dependency tools available on the web or via API yet. So, we’ll move onto Microsoft’s adCenter tool.
The results of adCenter were stunning.
Internet marketing has the highest volume and is the most expensive keyword I’m related to - makes sense - it’s what I do on a daily basis. I found ’san jose’ interesting as I don’t live there, so there isn’t any address relationship. However,I do visit San Jose often, and am speaking there next week. So, there are now a few websites that list my name on speaker pages that include San Jose as the venue. (It’s also where I travel if I’m visiting Google, which I’ve done several times this year, so San Jose also
appears on my blog on occasion).
The last result was what I found very interesting, ‘Brad Geddes’. MSN managed to associate my nickname (remember, the query was ‘eWhisper’) with my actual name. In fact, whenI did the same search for ‘Brad Geddes’, MSN also returned eWhisper (which gets quite a few more searches per month than my actual name due to my WebmasterWorld moderating).
It appears by analyzing the data that MSN must be crawling the web to create their assocations. I couldn’t fathom any other way they could be aggregating this data. Therefore, I gave them a call and had a chat with a few technical people at MSN who confirmed that they are in fact crawling the web and making word dependency associations for their related keywords. Not only was it fascinating, their vanity related results are the tops around.
I then started examining some so-called semantic keyword tools to see if they could return vanity search information. The vast majority of them returned zero results for any of my queries. However, I did manage to find a search engine that gave me semantic relationships as a sidebar navigation.
Direct Taps Clustering is basically a search engine (with some strange results as it ranked my corporate site, LocalLaunch.com higher than my blog or WebmasterWorld for the search on eWhisper. It appears that they have been purchased by Microsoft However, if you wan to try out a semantic search engine, I’d recommend seeing how many categories this one finds for an eWhisper search.
One of the keys to online reputation management is to understand what search engines think of your and your business. By understanding these basic core components, you can start to control your online reputation and semantic keyword relations.
So - what do the search engines think you’re related to?
Related Information:- Where to find Overture Keywords
- adLabs “Keyword Group Detector”
- Yahoo Panama Keyword Tool Allows For Site Spidering
- Microsoft adCenter Supports Dynamic Parameters for Links
- Google AdWords New Keyword Tool Spider’s Websites
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[...] The tools seem to be pretty amazing over at AdCenter Labs. Geddes (TV’s eWhisper) covered one of their keyword tools, their new free analytics program (coming soon), and touched on the contextual hype. Check out the official MSN Adcenter Blog for more updates. [...]