Noble Samurai

The biggest problem with web-based video training is that you have to sit in front of your computer to watch it.

Sadly, most people just don’t have the time to do this.

That’s why we’ve made a major improvement to the Noble Samurai Dojo…

All our training is now available via the new Noble Samurai iTunes Training Feed.

You can now get all the latest training directly from iTunes in a variety of formats, including iPhone-ready video, AppleTV, and PDF. You can even view the training on your iPad!

This means our training will now come to you – so you can stay up to date with the latest tactics and techniques from the Noble Samurai Dojo automatically, without lifting a finger…

You can access the training at times that suit you – on the train, plane or bus; at home; on a lunch break; even when you hit the treadmill at the gym – anywhere you are with your iPod, iPad, iPhone, computer or Apple TV.

Dr Anthony and Ben ‘Video Guru’ Galt have been working flat out, creating a host of in-depth training for every aspect of Market Samurai and there’s still even more to come!

The iTunes feed will ensure that you stay up to date with everything they have to offer – with the feed updating automatically as new training videos are added.

How to Subscribe

Subscribing to the Training Feed is simple and free.

Each page of training has links on the right hand side that look like this:

PDF FeediPhone FeediPad FeedApple TV Feed

To subscribe, just click on the relevant button and when you are taken to iTunes, click on the ‘Subscribe Free’ button.

Then plug in your iPhone or iPad to sync or just open the feed on your computer or Apple TV – the choice is yours.

Enjoy!

Alex

In the last post, I discussed one of Google’s last remaining SEO biases – its bias towards keyword optimized domain names.

Today, I want to look at something on the opposite end of the SEO domain spectrum – something almost impossible to influence…

…And then I want to show you some search engine jiu-jitsu that allows you to overcome this seemingly impossible SEO factor.

You see, there are a LOT of techniques that we use to try to come out on top in SEO – keyword placement in title tags and URLs, keyword-rich content throughout the site; submitting our pages to DMOZ and Yahoo! – all things that we can do almost instantly to make our pages more tempting to search engines.

But there’s one aspect of SEO that even the best Internet Marketer has trouble defying…

Time…

Some aspects of SEO just can’t be blitzed in the same way that others can – which is why search engines put a lot of “trust” in some factors above others when it comes to ranking pages.

For example – if you want to target your webpage to a specific keyword, within a minute you can immediately edit the page to add the keyword to the content. It’s not a hard thing to do, and it’s something you can influence almost instantly. So while having your keyword in your webpage’s content is beneficial, Google places little trust in this by itself.

A more trusted SEO factor is backlinks. Backlinks can be influenced, but it takes a lot more time and effort to build quality backlinks than it does to simply add a keyword to a page. Because this process is slow – because it’s harder to influence or manipulate or game – because it takes a lot of TIME and EFFORT to affect – Google can put a lot of trust into backlinks when it comes to deciding which pages should get top rankings.

But there is one “trust” factor that simply cannot be influenced using money or effort…

Domain Age.

If you purchase a domain today and your competitor has already existed for two years, then when you hit that two year mark they’ll still be two years older. There is just nothing you can do to make your domain age at a faster rate than another domain.

Remember the “outrunning lions” story from our recent blog post?

The one that discussed why we should look for ways to be as-good or better-than our competitors in as many ways as possible if we want to outrank them?

Domain Age is one area in which a new site can’t expect to beat a competitor.

If you’re competing against aged competitors, their domain age creates a huge area of uncertainty. We might be able to draw close, or beat them in other areas – but they will always be ahead in domain age.

So we can’t be sure how much extra effort we’ll need to put into beating them in other areas (areas that we CAN influence) in order to outrank them – or even whether that effort will be successful.

If all of this sounds a bit hopeless – like some aspects of SEO just cannot be influenced, no matter how much effort you invest into them, and your older rivals will always have at least this one advantage over you – don’t give up just yet.

Here’s a tactic you can use to sidestep time.

It’s clear that we can’t make a domain older than it is – so instead, if we want to influence Domain Age, we have to work the other way. We need to find domains that already have age, and yet suit our needs.

The answer is to simply BUY an Aged Domain.

Aged Domains are domains that have been purchased in the past and have either fallen into disuse or were parked and never saw the light of day.

They can be great sources of pre-cultivated traffic, backlinks, sometimes even content.

But most importantly, they have that key feature that we’re looking for – established domain age.

Rather than trying to build domain age over time ourselves, we simply let someone else do the hard work for us – and then come in to reap the rewards.

The theory is very simple…

But getting your hands on a pre-owned domain can be a little trickier.

Typically aged domains only become available if they expire, or if their current owner decides they want to sell.

Some domain registrars, and sites such as Flippa.com, have created online marketplaces for aged domains.

The unique feature of Flippa is that it allows you to purchase entire web-sites, including all content – not just the domain name, like many registrars and auction sites do.

(There are a lot of “how-to’s” and tricks here that I want to come back to and show you in more detail in a later blog post. But for now, make sure you take some time to have a play with Flippa. It’s something that is going to be huge for internet marketers in the next 12 months.)

What if you can’t find the “right” domain for sale?

Well, there’s always the proactive approach.

If a registrant’s contact details appear in WHOIS records you can also approach them directly via email or phone and make them an offer.

Obviously if a site is well established then the owner may be less likely to sell – but if the domain is inactive then the owner may well part with it if you make it worth their while.

Watch the market regularly

Finally – if you’re buying domains in your market for age or other authority factors, don’t just check the auction or sales sites once.

Make sure you keep a regular eye on them so that you see the relevant, high-value domains that pop up in your market – before they get bought by someone else.

It’s effort-intensive, and time-intensive to search through all of the auction sites, sales sites, and domain registrars on a regular basis – but it’s one of the few effective ways to get your hands on high quality domains as they become available.

Plus, the potential SEO and traffic boosts involved in getting your hands on just a single high-quality, matured, keyword optimised domain can often repay your time investment many times over through the traffic that it brings.

Brent

P.S. – So far, our previous two blog posts have received over 375 comments [wow!].

Among the comments were a lot of questions about choosing the right keyword optimized domain: keyword selection; adding prefixes and suffixes; hyphens or no hyphens; .org, .net, .com, .info, etc – which is best; etc.

I want to get as many of these key questions answered for you as possible in the next few posts, plus go through a lot of the “how-to’s” – so I’ve asked a friend and SEO domain name expert to help share his knowledge and experience in these areas. It’s shaping up to be some killer content, but give us a day or two to finish it for you – there’s a lot for us to get through here.

Most aspects of SEO work on “equal” ground.

No matter how exclusive and high quality a backlink is, your competitor can always get a backlink of equal value.

No matter how relevant an article is, your competitor can always write an article of similar keyword relevance.

Almost every aspect of SEO can be duplicated by your opposition.

So when you find an aspect of SEO that is entirely unbalanced – and effective enough that it can tip the scales against the sites of multi-million dollar companies – it’s worth knowing how to use this aspect to your advantage.

A picture’s worth a thousand words.

Open up Market Samurai and look at the SEO Competition matrix for “Credit Cards”.

You’ll see 10 results that look a lot like this:

Notice anything strange?

It might be something that you’ve seen in your own niche. You might even notice it practically every time you do a Google search.

These 10 results reveal important story about one of Google’s great biases.

Let’s start looking at the 2nd result, and continue through the results immediately below it.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express – all huge names, synonymous with the term “credit cards”.

In terms of search engine relevance – these sites (synonymous with the term “credit cards” itself) are some of the most relevant credit card sites online.

Below those, there are some credit card comparison services, and smaller credit card providers such as Discover Card, Citi and Chase – the sort of “mix” of sites that you’d typically expect to find on a search engine results page… All relevant sites, but with lower levels of authority and relevance.

But the first result…

Here’s where things get interesting…

The first result on the page is www.creditcards.com

It sits ahead of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express – all multi-billion dollar companies with marketing budgets that could buy a small country…

Their names are synonymous with the words “credit cards”…

They have plenty of high PageRank links, including links from some of the largest and most reputable sites online…

And 100,000’s more links than their smaller rival…

…And yet they’ve been beaten to the punch – they’ve met a real David versus Goliath scenario with this “creditcards.com”.

This story repeats itself…

It’s something you can see in practically any keyword niche you analyze.

Smaller sites with keyword-optimized domains are seeing their SEO efforts magnified over time – giving them an unfair advantage that allows them to outrank competitors who boast more links, better content, higher PageRanks and more.

Let’s look deeper into the SEO analysis to see it in action…

Here are the off-page results again from Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module.

www.creditcards.com has lowest PageRank (PR) of all domains on the first page of results, and fewer Backlinks to the Page (BLP) and Backlinks to the Domain (BLD) than most of its competitors.

Its domain age is roughly on par with most of the domains there (some are higher, some are lower).

But it has one clear feature almost exclusively absent from the competition – it has the keyword “credit cards” in the domain name.

This demonstrates just how valuable it can be to get a good keyword-optimized domain.

Good domain names make SEO a whole lot easier.

They leverage or magnify your SEO efforts – so that each link you build, or article you create, counts more heavily towards your rankings – so you can put in less work than your competitors and still get the same (or better) effect.

This gives you a strong advantage over your opponents.

Think about the value of getting better results, with less time and effort.

Could it mean you have more time on your hands to devote to improving your site in other ways? Could it mean you get more visitors? Could it mean more sales? Could it mean bigger profits?

These opportunities to leverage your results in SEO are rare.

Using keyword optimized domains is one of the few “jiu-jitsu” SEO techniques that still remain effective, allowing you to use the search engines’ heavy bias towards keyword optimized domains to your advantage.

So what should you do now?

4 Action Points for Using Domains Effectively

1. Use Keyword Domains for SEO – Obviously if you’re setting up a new site, and you aim to invest in SEO to attract visitors, get a keyword optimized domain.
2. Consider Moving to a Keyword Domain – If you’ve just set up a site, and it’s still in its early phase, consider moving to a keyword optimized domain. If you have an older site, the decision might not be so clear-cut though, because moving to a new domain name usually means starting afresh in the eyes of the search engines.
3. Keep Your Competitiors Out – Check for, and get, any high-value keyword domains in your market. Remember: no matter how successful you come to be you can always be unseated by a competitor bearing a keyword.com domain – so even if you don’t use the domains immediately yourself, protect yourself and keep potential competitors out of your niche by holding onto dangerous domains yourself.
4. Just Wait For What’s Up Next… – Over the next week, we’re going to drill deeper and deeper into how to find, select and utilize domains effectively for SEO, and look at some of the advanced techniques that professional domainers use to secure dynamite domains, and outrank established high-PageRank competitors like they were taking candy from babies.

Remember to watch the blog, and your email, for the next instalment on using domains for SEO.

Again, over the next week we’ve going be covering some little-known advanced strategies for domain names, with nuts-and-bolts how-to examples – and it’s something you won’t want to miss.

Most people still don’t reap the huge benefits of properly tagging their blog posts and videos.

Maybe it’s because they’re not sure of the best way to do it or maybe it’s becasue they’re not aware of the traffic returns good tagging can actually yeild.

The fact is: Tagging gets results!

With that in mind we’ve made the process of tagging even easier, and heaps faster, so you can experience the benefits of increased traffic to your website with very little effort.

(See video below)

There’s no excuse now not to tag your videos and blog posts with juicy search engine loving tags since Market Samurai practically does it for you.

Enjoy.

-Ben

P.S. If you haven’t already, get your free trial of Market Samurai here and see for yourself how easy it can be.

Hi Team,

After my last blog post on the new clickable results arrows inside Market Samurai, I wanted to give you some insights into search engines that will save you a lot of unnecessary confusion and frustration – and give you a better understanding of the way search engines work.

Now that you’re getting closer to the raw data sources, and doing deeper analysis, it’s important that you know about the way that Google, Yahoo and other search engines keep their data.

Otherwise, some of their “quirks” can cause confusion.

The Beast with 1,000 Heads…

Most people believe that Google is a single mega-computer.

This is untrue.

In fact, it’s a series of perhaps thousands of computers (servers) – all working together to provide Google users with results for their search queries.

Keeping thousands of computers up-to-date with all of the changes that are happening online is a mammoth task!

These thousands of servers are constantly being updated with new information – but it doesn’t all happen at once.

This means, depending on which server Google gets your results from, you can see slightly different results server-to-server.

Which Data Source is Correct?

It can be confusing for some people, when they see an SEO Competitor count of [say] 104,000 for a keyword inside Market Samurai, and 102,000 when doing a search manually on the same keyword – in “quotes”, just like Market Samurai does.

They ask “Which data source is correct?” or start to wonder if they can trust Market Samurai results since they’re different to what they see manually.

It can be confusing for people if they don’t understand the way servers are structured – but the truth is simple if you know…

Both numbers are accurate.

They both come from the same data source (Google) – and an end user is just as likely to see either.

When you’re doing analysis, it’s rare that the numbers will be substantially different (normally they’ll be fairly close to one-another if there is ANY difference at all.) So it shouldn’t make too much difference to any analysis.

However, if you have concerns, it’s wise to use the more conservative number – the number that works least in your favor.

And now that you know this little tit-bit about how search engines operate, you now know more about the technology behind search engines than many professional SEO’s.

Brent

Hi Team,

Market Research creates Market Understanding.

Market Understanding creates Market Leaders.

Market Leaders create opportunities in their markets – including the opportunity to choose the direction of your market, and the opportunity to make the greatest profits in a market.

But it all stems from Market Research.

If you’ve been reading Ed Dale’s blog recently, you’ll know that I’ve borrowed the “Market Research; Market Understanding; Market Leadership” mantra from him.

But today, I want to start making it “real” for you.

I want to show you a recently-added feature inside Market Samurai, and share with you some specific strategies for how to get the most value out of something that is so deceptively simple that practically everyone will overlook it…

…That is, everyone except you – because you’re reading this blog post right now.

So let’s open up Market Samurai, and open up some opportunities for Market Leadership…

Getting a Deeper Market Understanding

These new arrows appeared in the latest versions of Market Samurai.

Many of you have noticed them already (you’ll see them inside the SEO Competition and Keyword Research modules) – and their function is very simple…

Click them, and they will open up the raw data sources for you in a web-browser.

This means if you click on the Adwords Advertiser (AWA) numbers in the Keyword Research module, you’ll see the Adwords Advertisers for that keyword.

If you click on the Page Backlinks (BLP) you’ll be taken to a list of the external backlinks pointing to that page.

If you click on the SEO Competition (SEOC) counts in the Keyword Research module, you’ll see all of the web pages that mention the keyword phrase on their sites (all of your SEO competitors)

…And so on!

Simple, yes.

Important? Very.

The value of Digging Deeper

I’ll go into some specific examples of how to use this feature in a moment.

However, as I’ve mentioned already, the real value of going through this raw data manually is to become immersed in your market.

(Obviously this is for people who have already chosen a market – because if you did this for every market that potentially interested you, you could spend forever learning from other sites!)

By working out where, and how, your competitors are getting their links;

By working out what they are selling, how they’re marketing it, and what their price points are;

By working out what value your competitors are delivering to potential customers…

…You will understand the market better, and equip yourself to be the market leader.

And market leadership may be one of the few more valuable opportunities to you in your internet marketing.

What To Do Next

Open up Market Samurai, and start by clicking on the SEOC or AWA results in the Keyword Research module.

Use the results to “dig deeper” into your market and find out what you can discover about your competitors:

• What products do they sell, what price points are they selling at, and how are they pitching their products?
• Are there opportunities to improve your marketing strategy, and use some of their good ideas?
• Are there opportunities to get links from their sites? (Blogs, forums, links pages, etc)
• Are there opportunities to work together with the people who are already making money in the market?

Analyze the top 10 competitors in the SEO competition module too:

• What sites are they getting their backlinks from? Can you get backlinks from those sites too?
• Do they have any Government / Educational backlinks (.gov/.edu)? Can you also get links from the same places?

And analyze the content on the top sites in your market:

• What great information do they have, that you should also be talking about on your site?
• How are they communicating with their market / customers on an ongoing basis? (Feeding the flock)
• What value are they delivering to their market? How are they delivering it?
• With all this in mind, how can you deliver the greatest value to your customers? (Search engine rankings favor the value-makers)

This is how to cross over from using Market Samurai for SEO, to using Market Samurai for Market Understanding and Market Leadership.

So open up Market Samurai now, and play with this tiny new feature.

What do you discover about your market?

Brent

Hi Team

This is something I’ve never told you about.

Some people have already worked this out for themselves…

And it’s the reason Market Samurai works the way it does today.

In Fact, Market Samurai was Built Around This…

Before Market Samurai was released to the public, we were using the same tools ourselves to do semantic site structure analysis for sites that we were building.

The reason was simple – with the right site structuring, linking and keyword use (all using semantically relevant keywords) we could achieve rankings with fewer links, less PageRank and less site-age.

And that meant a better return on investment from any SEO work we did.

“Better Results? Less Effort? How do I get this!?” I hear you say.

Well, let me show you what we were doing – and how you can do it yourself.

How to “Sharpen” Your Site – Samurai Style!

First, thing’s first…

You need to find a core site keyword – something that has high levels of traffic, high levels of value, and relatively low levels of competition.

Everything will revolve around this one core keyword.

Finding a Core Keyword

You’re looking for high-traffic, low-competition, high-value keywords here.

I like to set my Market Samurai filters to these levels: Above 80 hits per day in SEOT, below 100,000 competing pages in SEOC (although below 30,000 is best), above 15% phrase usage in PBR and over $1 in SEOV.

However, I personally like to see something that is better than the bare minimum levels.

SEO Analysis on your Main Site Keyword

Next, you’ll also want to do SEO Competition analysis to make sure you’re competing in a market where young, low PageRank, poorly optimized sites with few links are already ranking.

What I like about this example is the low PageRanks of pages appearing in the top 10, the lack of on-page optimization on most sites, and the low levels of Page Backlinks to the pages.

The ages of some of the domains, the fact that most sites have DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory backlinks, and the high number of domain backlinks make me think twice about this keyword.

I might still try it out – but with these factors working against me, my chances of getting that illusive top spot easily might be more difficult – and that means it may take a lot more work to get there.

Refocus your Keyword Research

Once you have this core site keyword, create a New Project in Market Samurai for your main site keyword this keyword – because we’re going to refocus our analysis onto this one keyword.

Start by generating keywords around this keyword using the Google Synonym Tool option with “Include Additional” selected.

Find Category Keywords

By tapping into Google’s Synonym Tool to generate keywords, Market Samurai is able to show you up to 200 related “branches” around your core keyword.

You’ll want to (again) filter out high competition, low traffic, low value keywords. The keywords we’re left with will be good for our web-site categories.

In this example, I performed almost identical analysis to before, when I was finding a core site keyword – however, I dropped my minimum traffic filter to an SEOT of 10 or above.

And then, there’s a little manual labor…

Remove any keywords that you see as being irrelevant to your core theme by clicking the “X” on the far right hand side of the keyword. And you’ll be left with a nice list of relevant, valuable, high traffic, low competition keywords – like I have above.

Article Keyword Research

Click on the key icon beside any of your category keywords it to open it up in a new tab – and do some more keyword research to find content topic areas within each category.

For this step, it’s handy to use the Google Search Keywords option, as well as the Google Synonym Tool with the “Ignore Additional” option selected. This will give you a nice “long tail” list of topics.

The next step is researching and creating web-site content in each one of these topic areas.

But how do you research these topic areas?

Find Content: Research or Republish

Market Samurai’s “Find Content” module is purpose-designed for this!

It was built to research the content that is already published on the web to help you to write your own articles, or to find articles that you can legally republish (although check the site terms and conditions before doing this.)

Click on the key icon beside the keyword, go to the Find Content tab, and begin research.

We can analyze the content based on authority factors here.

Content that has high PageRanks, Backlinks and Age might be a sign of good quality information – and a good article to research before writing your own article on the same topic.

Content that has low PageRank, Backlinks and Age might be content that you can republish on your site for testing the niche (because writing content is one of the most time-consuming parts of setting up a niche web-site) – and see if you can get rankings using someone else’s article on your site (a very promising sign if you do!)

(This is something unique to Market Samurai. I’m yet to come across any other software that analyzes the authority of a piece of content in this way.)

Next, we need links…

Get High-Quality Backlinks

Finding backlinks is easy. Focusing on the high-quality backlinks, the ones that will give you the best result for your time and effort, is difficult.

The Promotion module helps here, by showing the PageRanks, Backlinks, and the use of Follow/Nofollow on pages where you can receive backlinks.

You’re starting to see how all of this ties-in, and how each step impacts on all of the others.

And by putting it all together, we can get faster rankings in search engines, more traffic sooner, a better return on our time and effort on SEO, and better results in the long term – with less time and effort required.

But we didn’t do it for you.

We created “Market Samurai” originally (well before we released it) because we were doing these things ourselves – and we wanted to achieve the best results, faster, with less time and effort.

The Next Step

The next step is to just do it!

Market Samurai will give you the semantic keyword relationships you need for site structuring, for internal linking, for link-building, for tagging and more if you use the keyword research procedure I’ve described above.

If you don’t have Market Samurai yet – get it. You can download a free 12-day trial here.

If your trial has expired, you’ll be able to use the Keyword Research features still – but you will need to get the full version of Market Samurai to use the other features. You can purchase Market Samurai for lifetime access to all Market Samurai features here.

As I say, these semantic site structures can help you to get better results in search engines, with far less effort, and fewer links. So I challenge you to try using them for yourself using Market Samurai, and see the results you get.

Brent

Hi Gang,

When I first came across the Google Search-Based Keyword Tool, and did what I’m about to show you for the first time, I was gobsmacked.

It blew my mind.

I’ve never seen such an incredible resource full of ripe ideas for niche online marketing.

So if you’ve ever struggled to come up with a new idea for a web-site, this is going to blow your mind too:

Here’s How It Works…

You tell Google what you’re interested in, and it comes up with up to 800 relevant, high-traffic keyword ideas that you can put into Market Samurai to begin your research.

Now, imagine if you were getting in on the first wave – that many of these ideas lay untapped online – and that you’re one of the first people to be using the data in this way.

I know – it’s freakin’ awesome, isn’t it!

Brent

P.S. – One more handy tip. Obviously you want markets with relatively high levels of traffic (because a site is worthless unless it has traffic!)

So when you’re picking potential niches, keep an eye on the Monthly Searches column inside this tool, and focus on keywords with several thousand searches per month (they’ll generally be at the top of the page).

P.P.S. – After I stopped the video, I looked at the results that Market Samurai found for that keyword – the keyword I picked at random.

I found 14 of the keywords Market Samurai found around that niche idea had over 200 searches per day (SEOT of 80 or above, PBR of 15% or above), and fewer than 30,000 competitors (SEOC).

Random. First one I picked. Blind.

Did I mention? …Freakin’ awesome.

WARNING: Advanced SEO Concepts Ahead

Q: What’s the fastest way to cause a riot at an SEO conference?

A: Just mention the words “Latent Semantic Indexing”.

It’s true.

Just about half of the people there will tell you it’s an incredible way to get top search engine rankings; the others will say LSI is a lie or a myth.

What I’m going to share with you today is probably going to cause some controversy, because I use the words “Latent Semantic Indexing” (or LSI)…

…So after I show you this technique, I’m going to put an end to these stupid LSI arguments once-and-for-all.

Perfect LSI Structuring

If you’re creating a site with an LSI silo structure, you can receive a big boost in the rankings that you receive in search engines – put simply, because search engines see you as being more relevant to the topic.

What I’m talking about when I say “LSI silo structure” is categorising content in a logical keyword structure, and grouping content on similar topics together, in a way similar to what search engines expect to see.

And, for the most part, they expect to see tree-like category structures – with categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories all branching off one-another.

The problem is finding the right structure.

If you’re developing a new site, and you’re trying to get the best search engine boost from LSI, how should your content be structured?

What keywords should go where? What should your categories be? What topics should you be building content around?

Or, if you’re actually doing it as part of your core web-site, no-doubt you’re finding categorising content is a pain. You write an article, and then wonder where you should put it to get the maximum benefit.

So you’re always second-guessing the way that the content should be categorised for maximum SEO value – should it go in one category? Or another? – particularly when content can be related to multiple categories.

And once you’ve built categories, how do you know what other topics should go into that category to fill it with the “right” sort of content?

The Google Search-Based Keyword Tool isn’t just good for finding long tail keywords – it’s also fantastic for categorising and grouping keywords.

That’s because the Google Search-Based Keyword Tool is showing you structured, categorised, hierarchical keyword relationships – and blog/site structures tend to be structured, categorised and hierarchical.

And, where keywords are related to multiple categories, it shows you all of them.

Debunking LSI Myths

There’s a lot of confusion about whether or not “LSI” (or Latent Semantic Indexing) is used by Google or not – so let me clarify things.

There’s a lot of convincing evidence suggesting that “LSI” is NOT used by Google – largely because it doesn’t scale well.

(We did our own research and testing months ago to find out for sure. The more information you give it, the bigger, slower and less manageable the structure becomes. With the amount of information Google indexes, LSI doesn’t seem to be a logical solution.)

However, there’s also a HUGE amount of evidence proving that they at least use something similar – another way to work out common relationships between keywords, (as Stompernet also suggested recently.)

And there is a growing amount of evidence that suggests that LSI’d internal site structures, and the way pages are linked (from both within and beyond the site) “turbo-charge” search engine rankings. (Although this is something we won’t go into now.)

If you want to see LSI-style keyword relationships in practice, you don’t need to look far.

You only need to look at Adwords broad-match keyword matching, Google’s new Wonder Wheel, use the Google Synonym Tool, or watch some of the little-known Google Tech Talks where they show their internal related keyword generator being used, talk about how they developed it, and discuss organising information on the semantic web.

So even though “LSI” isn’t a technically correct term to describe the system that is being used, it’s still a de facto name for describing structured relationships between keywords. So if we say LSI, this is what we are referring to.

Back to the Nuts and Bolts…

I wanted to share this with you, even though there’s no financial benefit to us, because we made a commitment to equip you with the best internet marketing tools available…

…And not all of those tools can fit inside Market Samurai.

Tomorrow, I’m going to be releasing one final video in this series – and show you the#1 thing that blew me away when I first came across the Google Search-Based Keyword Tool.

So make sure you’re subscribed, watching your inbox, and ready. You won’t want to miss this one.

Brent

Edit: Here’s the link to Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool – http://www.google.com/sktool

“The days of 5 cent Adwords clicks have been dead for years!” they say…

…Or maybe we just haven’t been looking in the right places?

“AWA” (the Adwords Advertisers count) is a recent addition to the latest version of Market Samurai – and one of the sneakiest ways to use this tool for your own advantage is to find the keywords that your competitors are overlooking.

Check it out…

Being able to filter out keywords with high levels of competition means it’s easier (and cheaper!) to get your ad into one of the hallowed top ad positions for your keyword – meaning more exposure and more clicks, for less money.

That’s because you can often sneak in underneath competitors who are paying excessive cost-per-clicks – and pay just a fraction of the amount for almost as many clicks.

You can find this feature under the “competition” section in the keyword research module as seen below.

From here all you need to do is filter out the high competition keywords, thus revealing the low competition keywords.

(click here to view a larger version of the image above)

But before you rush out and start bidding on keywords with low levels of competition, remember: Even though this new AWA feature is cool, it’s cool because it gives you a more complete picture when analyzing Adwords keywords.

Make sure you analyze the Adwords Traffic estimates (AWT), and Adwords Value (AWV) to get a feeling of the size and value of the keyword – and, like always, test keywords before committing a big Adwords budget to them.

Now go put this new Market Samurai feature to good use!

Ben