Google has introduced the Search-based Keyword Tool (currently in beta). The tool suggests keywords for you to target in your Google Adwords campaign, based on their relevance to your website.

According to Google, you can benefit from the Search-based Keyword Tool in two main ways. Firstly, if you are running a campaign the tool will suggest keywords that are highly relevant to your website, but are not currently part of your AdWords campaign.

Secondly, even if you aren’t currently advertising in Adwords, you can use the tool to discover nuances about your target market. The tool essentially generates keywords often used in association with the keywords you have chosen to target.

Right now, the Search-based Keyword Tool is available to advertisers in the U.S. and U.K., with additional languages and countries to follow in the near future.

Check it out here: http://www.google.com/sktool

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Announcing the Search-based Keyword Tool”, Inside AdWords, November 18, 2008

For all the hoopla about Chrome… Mozilla Firefox (ideally version 3 and over) is the browser of choice for many Internet marketers.

Why? Simply because there are tons of powerful free extensions and plugins for Firefox that can give you invaluable information on the fly.

Aaron Wall’s plugin, ‘SEO For Firefox‘ is one such tool. In fact, it’s one of my favorite search engine optimization (SEO) extensions. (I’ll cover some of the others in future articles.)

What does SEO For Firefox do? Well, when you perform a search using Google or Yahoo, it yields a host of other data about each of the search results.

Specifically, the tool pulls market research data into each of the search results, including the following:

• PR: Google PageRank - an estimate of global link authority.
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org - the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider (and theoretically the search engines).
• Links: Yahoo linkdomain - a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain.
• .edu Link: Yahoo .edu linkdomain - a rough estimate of the number of .edu links pointing at a domain.
• .edu Page Link: Yahoo .edu link - a rough estimate of the number of .edu links pointing at a specific page.
• .gov Link: Yahoo .gov linkdomain - a rough estimate of the number of .gov links pointing at a domain.
• Page Links: Yahoo link - a rough estimate of the number of links pointing at a page.
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us.
• Technorati: an estimate of the number of links to a site from blogs.
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic (heavily biased toward Internet marketing and webmaster sites).
• Cached: Google site - how many pages from a site are indexed in Google.
• dmoz: based on the number of pages from a site listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: an estimate of how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: indicates whether a site is listed in the Yahoo Directory or not.
• WhoIs: a link to the whois data for a site.

SEO For Firefox also provides links to the given data sources to enable you to verify and further analyze the data. You can also choose which data points and links you want activated at a given time.

SEO For Firefox is a handy, free extension that can save you a LOT of time when conducting keyword, SEO and competitive research.

Just one tip - and this applies to similar such extensions - turn SEO For Firefox OFF when you are casually browsing.

If you always have it switched on, then each time you perform a search, you will effectively be running hundreds of search engine queries… to the point where the search engines may view you as a robot and ban you for a certain period of time. (This has happened to me, so I speak from experience!)

==> Click here to get SEO For Firefox

I won’t hold my breath just yet, but a new search engine, SearchMe, has emerged that may just change the search paradigm.

I can’t really give SearchMe justice by describing it. You’ll more easily appreciate its potential by trying it out for yourself (see link below). However, in essence, SearchMe provides a visual preview of the webpages that result for a given keyword search. In my opinion, this provides a much richer indication of what a given webpage is about than the text listings you find in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live.

SearchMe has also just released a swag of new features including new video and image search engines, as well as a new visual bookmarking tool called stacks, which allows you to bookmark, group and share sites with others.

If SearchMe’s underlying search algorithm is anywhere near as powerful as Google’s - and, as you’ll see, it offers some interesting search options – it may eventually build a serious market for – and dominate - visual search. Whether visual search itself will ever become preferred over text-based search is another question. However, with  100,000 - 200,000 queries per day and growing, SearchMe is certain a search engine to keep an eye on.

The only thing SearchMe will need to work on is a viable business model. Not particularly hard, given the examples set by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. If it does opt for an advertising revenue model, SearchMe will just need to balance the interests of searchers with the monetization aims of Internet marketers. Alternatively, it may do well to emulate Google and focus on attracting and achieving a critical mass of users before it seeks to monetize them.

As a search tool, SearchMe does not anywhere near match the depth of Google’s data  but is still worth using. Also, note that you can submit websites that it hasn’t already indexed – perhaps a good opportunity for getting exposure among the “early adopters” in your market. Most of all, keep an eye out for the marketing opportunities that SearchMe may present.

Click here to try out SearchMe for yourself

Source: Michael Arrington, “SearchMe Launches Stacks, Gets Serious About Search Relevance”, TechCrunch, June 24

It may have 118 million users… but MySpace has missed its $1 billion revenue target and its owner of 3 years, News Corporation, is looking for ways to increase revenues and appease the increasingly unhappy financial analysts who follow the company.

One such initiative is a redesigned website. Expected to be complete by early fall, the redesign will see MySpace sporting a less cluttered look, include a new navigation bar, search tool and video player, and be more “advertising-friendly”.

According to MySpace’s president of sales and marketing, Jeff Berman, revenue per MySpace user has increased by 50 percent since last year, but is still hovering around $6 to $7 per user per year. Meanwhile, eMarketer expects MySpace to announce revenue of $755 million for the financial year ending June 30, 2008, far below the $1 billion target. At the same time, healthy profits continue to elude the social networking site – the word is that Fox Interactive Media (the News Corporation unit based around MySpace) will barely break even this year.

Unfortunately for MySpace, social network advertising is expected to soften, with eMarketer revising its December forecast of $1.6 billion to an April prediction that such spending would be $1.4 billion.

This isn’t all that surprising, given a growing awareness among advertisers (including our clients) that, for all their popularity, social network sites are extremely difficult to monetize.

The good news for Internet marketers – specifically advertisers - is that MySpace intends to become more ad friendly. And although further commercializing MySpace may deter some (or many) of its users, the benefit of turning away unprofitable MySpace users may well be to increase the revenues and profits generated from the remaining users.

Sources: Brian Stelter, “MySpace Might Have Friends, but It Wants Ad Money”, The New York Times, June 16, 2008, News Corporation, “News Corporation to Acquire Intermix Media, Inc.”, July 18, 2005, Peter Kafka, “News Corp. Blows MySpace Targets, Dumps Sales Chief (NWS)”, Silicon Alley Insider, April 4, 2008