There are many keyword tools out there, one I particularly like is WordTracker. What is WordTracker?
People use different words when they search for your products online. Use these ‘keywords’ in your website copy and people will find your site when they search.
No matter what business you are in, Wordtracker will tell you the words people use when they search - and how popular each word is.
The way it applies to domains is you can take a wordtracker list, clean it (remove chars you are not interested in, spaces), add .com, and check for availability
For example, wordtracker list for “brain” may include the following:
brain teasers
brain games
brain cancer
Using NoteTab (or other tools to edit text) you can replace all spaces with “delete”, making the list looks like this:
brainteasers
braingames
braincancer
Again, using NoteTab or Excel you can now add “.com” or other extensions to end of list, making it a domain list:
brainteasers.com
braingames.com
braincancer.com
Now you have a good list to run and check for free domains, but that isn’t all. This is just the beginning!
At this point, using again your favorite text editing tool, you can do a “search and replace” and come up with more good lists. For example, let’s do synonym “search and replace” (brain -> mind):
Mindteasers.com
Mindgames.com
Mindcancer.com
Now let’s do opposites “search and replace”. What is the opposite of “brain”? How about “brainless”?
brainlessteasers.com
brainlessgames.com
brainlesscancer.com
If we had a keyword that has different spelling between say, American-English to English, such as “color” and “colour”, we could switch the two. For example:
livingcolour.com
colourblind.com
haircolour.com
And “search and replace” to:
livingcolor.com
colorblind.com
haircolor.com
Other use of such lists is those domains that are registered, not the free domains. Years ago I used to check on all the registered domains in such a process, opening all registered domains in browser tabs (using “linky” in firefox), checking out how domains are being used, if they are being used, and email purchase inquiries to owners where I felt there may be good chance to purchase.
What other ways would you use? And how would you go about pushing the envelope on domain mining? For me, I play with these methods once in a while, mostly staying on two word natural combinations, avoid three words. Not saying it is what you should do, just what I do.
Happy mining!
Good tip, I signed up and played around a bit. Nice application.
I wrote a similar tutorial about a data mining technique using Google’s AdWords Keyword tool:
http://www.dotsauce.com/2007/11/07/how-to-find-search-keyword-domains/
Mining is usually about identifying domains with traffic. With IDN that has been a major problem as natural traffic has hardly existed to now, but their are IDNers out there that have put their pit helmets on. Without browser the most popular approach appears to have been to check the dictionary against Overture. There are local overture tools, notably in Japan and I think it is safe to say that has been mined out now. I think mining against single words is probably not likely to be profitable in either Chinese or Japanese now, and perhaps not Korean either. I know some mining of this type has been undertaken in Thai, but I am unaware of it being done for Russian, Arabic or Hindi.
Problems/opportunities arise where Yahoo’s market share is very weak of course, but the obvious language Russian is fraught with difficulties, because of the grammatical complexity. Each noun has half a dozen cases, and search tends to equate the less useful ones with the main terms. There is also the problem of agreement with adjactives and verbs which result in forms that probably have little value in a stand alone situation. In Russia, the most used search engines are Yandex and Rambler rather than Google and Yahoo, although Google is making a serious effort to crack the market. I also understand that Google is improving its Trends service to provide more quantitative information, because globally Yahoo’s coverage is very patchy at present.
With Chinese most popular words are two characters. Some are one or three but two is the magic number. I have not attempted this but this leaves open a unique mining technique. Internet pages of Chinese text would be analysed to find popular terms by sampling two characters at a time and seeing what their returns are in Google Search. I believe there is some kind of Overture style tool for Baidu as well now. Having got the key popular word, it is then possible to test it combined with the characters that immediately precede or follow the top term.
Those who are interested in Search Results from Google or Yahoo, should always stick to results generated from strings between quotation marks. If you search on Latin Characters without putting the quotation marks in place accented searches will also yield non-accented results. Similarly associated results will be produced in other scripts, and for combos you will get results where both words appear anywhere on the page rather than together and in the correct order.
thanks Sahar, just what I needed before turning off for the night
FYI,
If you paste
brain teasers
brain games
brain cancer
into GoDaddy’s bulk registration tool, you will get availability results that look like this so no editing is even needed. GoDaddy takes out the space and adds the .com.
brainteasers.com
braingames.com
braincancer.com
Good post.
WordTracker - I am liking it more and mroe lately, particularly after the Yahoo/Overture keyword tool has been so flaky lately (that one is here: http://inventory.overture.com/)
A few days ago Aaron at SEOBook has updates his keyword tool that is now powered at least in part by WordTracker. If you want to check out some capabilities, this is a quick way to do a quick comparison:
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
Though for all features I guess you’d have to pay for WordTracker.
I also use Google Trends for domain mining:
http://www.google.com/trends
It shows supposedly relative keyword search volume to one search vs another.
For example if you have domains or developed sites with some specialties where you know what the traffic pattern is like, Google Trends lets you compare those keywords to some other keyword combinations you are considering for registration (new or on aftermarket/drops, etc). So relatively speaking it can show you if that term happens to be used widely enough to make it worth your time, and if so in which countries. You can discover quite a few surprises there where you can see domains being dropped or resold for very cheap, yet the potential search volume is there and not really tapped into yet. Which brings me to SEO…
Google Trends goes hand in hand with some SEO skills (besides type-in value of course which isn’t that high for two word phrases). That is, if you get the name registered for the phrase AND develop the name right, get some natural links - you can get enough traffic by coming up high on search engines. I know the holy grail of domaining may be type-ins and not to rely on Google (shudder) but if you’re interested in re-selling then this is relevant. If a domain has a high search engine ranking potential, then it’s worth much more to a potential buyer.
Just watch out with Google Trends - there are plenty of domains which don’t have any real search volume to speak of, yet they are highly valuable. Probably anything that is in the business with high amounts per transaction is worth a lot even without moderate traffic. For example Funeral Arrangements.com (heard it was sold for $9k ), elevator parts, etc, you get the idea.
Thanks for the forum to share, Sahar.