

Strategizing with Google's Keyword Tool - matt1
http://www.mattmazur.com/2009/02/strategizing-with-googles-keyword-tool/

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jasonlbaptiste
This is a really useful article when it comes to actually applying SEO to your
startup/product. SEO has gotten an insanely sleezy reputation over the years,
and rightfully so with a lot of the practices people pull. At the end of the
day try to ignore the bad rep it's gotten, because it's something you can't
overlook when planning out your growth strategy. It can bring you a
substantial amount of customers and a leg up over your competition (your
competitors (the bigger ones) will spend a lot of money to outdo you in SEO.

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matt1
As sleezy as it seems to craft your site in a way to increase its pagerank,
that's the system we've got and to ignore it is to miss out on a major traffic
source.

We had a phrase in college... "Shut up and color" :)

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akronim
Be careful basing decisions off the keyword tool, it's far from accurate.
Comparing sites at #1 on the search results for different phrases there's
often little correlation between traffic from those keywords and what the
keyword tool predicts. It's a good starting point for experimenting, say to
get ideas for A/B testing, but I wouldn't put a lot of money towards something
based solely on its results.

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matt1
Yes, good points -- thank you.

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ggruschow
"Free domain"?

His own data shows people are searching for "free domain" and "free domain
name" far more often than his declared winner of "available domain".. right?

Maybe he overlooked it because his mind only translated "free" to mean "no
money"?

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matt1
Nah, not overlooked.

Domain Pigeon lists domain names, but it doesn't let you register them for
free, which is what I think "free domain" refers to. That's why I didn't
consider them much.

Also, I'm afraid of the competition for those terms... "Available domain
names" seems like a better fight.

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hotpockets
Have you also checked:

available URLs

available websites

available website names?

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matt1
Just now, yes. For volume:

available URLs - 320 available website - 2600 available websites - 1000
available website names - 1000

So, not bad (a lot better than unregistered), but not as good as the ones that
contain the word "domain" too.

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jupiter
Did you try to insert some of the actual free domain names into your ads?

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matt1
No ads yet; the purpose of this exercise was to find out what to focus the
copy on the site. Ads will follow... maybe...

