SEO & Keyword Research Über Tip

I happened to visit Ask.com the other day while doing a bit of research and notice something very interesting there. I can’t even remember the previous time I actually used that search engine, if ever, but here I was so I thought I’d throw my test phrase “make money online” in and see what pages turned up…maybe I’d find a hidden gem.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprise by the results. Not so much, by the sites that were returned, they were probably a bit worse than Google, which is pretty much what you’d expect. But what was really cool and definitely useful was the panels on the right hand side of the page.

On the top was this list:

Narrow Your Search
Make Money Free Online
Make Money Fast
Ways to Make Money Online
Make Money at Home
Making Money on the Internet
Earn Money Online
Free Online Work
Opportunities to Make Money Online
Make Money Quick
Make Money with My Computer
Easy Money
Make Lots of Money Fast
Money Making Ideas
Free Cash
Envelope Stuffing Work from Home

And at the bottom was the even more useful:

Expand Your Search
Online Jobs
Surf Pay
Online Business
Paid Surveys
Affiliate Programs
Working Online
Home Employment
Home Based Jobs
Rich Quick
Free Online Store

Now why would I be so excited by these auxiliary search suggestions?

Two big reasons.

1. These keywords are like a look behind the scenes of how a search engine “thinks.”If a search engine considers these terms (both the narrow and the broad) directly related to your primary keyword, then there will definitely be a benefit to using them on your site.These keyword synonym branches are the foundation of advanced SEO theories like latent semantic indexing (LSI) which play a major role in search engine ranking algorithms these days.

   The bottom line is if you want to own this keyword write stories about all the Narrow Your Search terms and use the “Expand Your Search” terms as possible categories for your site (and then write stories about all of them too.)

2. Increased market understanding.
   
   Often times we have a very limited understanding of our target audience. I might think that the people I want to come and visit my site are searching for “make money online” but in reality my site might be a better match for people who are looking for “rich quick.”With most keyword tools, you don’t get this kind of lateral diversification. In short these related broad terms are gold. Now you can use them to find many more ways to connect with your market and to drill down in to them and do some market research and find many more products to promote and a greater understanding of your audience.

A free and instant SEO blueprint and a some incredible new doorways into your target market; two great reasons to try out Ask search engine – maybe we should nickname it the SEO’s search engine.

Note: You can get a similar result, although I’ve never seen it to be anywhere near as useful as Ask’s, in Google by putting the “~” tilde character in front of your searches. This is supposed to highlight and return all the related terms.

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