Essentially, Wordtracker does two things:
Helps you develop a list of likely keyword phrases. Wordtracker searches other Web site’s KEYWORDS tags and searches a thesaurus, to help you create a preliminary list of keyword phrases.
Based on these keyword phrases, it shows you what people using the Web’s search engines are actually typing into the search engines.
Here’s an example:
Step 1: Begin with your own keyword list—you need at least one keyword, or keyword phrase, though most users begin with a few dozen terms. Let’s say you start with nothing more than the term, golf.
Step 2: Ask Wordtracker to suggest similar and related keywords—Wordtracker will use your term to search two major search engines, then visit 200 related Web sites and pull a total of 300 keywords from those sites’ KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION metatags. You started with golf, and Wordtracker now suggests pga, clubs, putter, irons, and hundreds of other terms.
At this stage, you don’t know if people actually search for these terms or not. Just because Wordtracker suggests a term at this point, doesn’t mean that the term is ever used. For instance, Wordtracker may suggest golf in europa ... but does anyone actually search on this term?
Step 3: Ask Wordtracker if people use a term, and if there are other terms that contain the same words. Wordtracker can search its database of over 300 million searches, and find out if anyone searches on the term you picked. Does anyone search on the term golf in europa? No; Wordtracker did find another term, though, europa go-carts and golf in bellevue but it’s very rarely used, too. (These are the results for the term golf in europa at the time of writing, though of course the situation could change.)
Wordtracker uses search databases that are created by monitoring what people actually type into search engines.
The Wordtracker Database comprises over 300 million searches carried out at MetaCrawler.com and DogPile.com.
The Overture Database comprises searches carried out through the Overture Pay Per Click network (owned by Yahoo!).
Each time someone types a search term on one of these search systems, that information is added to the database. For instance, every day MetaCrawler.com and DogPile.com users type the term golf clubs into the search engines a total of around 50 times, and each time someone does so this information is added to the database. So we can look at this information and see that (at the time of writing), the term golf clubs has been typed into these search engines around 3,400 times.
No longer do you need to guess at which keywords are important. Wordtracker can help you see what people actually type into the search engines!