Back to basics: Overture's Search Terms Suggestion Tool

This is something which will help people who've never used the Overture's Search Terms Suggestion Tool. One of the major problems I see with new TGP galleries, free sites, or just about any kind of adult project, is that the creator has not targeted a specific area of the adult market. I'm not going to rant about this in yet another article - suffice to say it's very important to get into the habit of picking the right topic for each site. Overture's Overture's Search Terms Suggestion Tool is a free and easy way to do this.

The most important tool in the world

Here's the web address that you'll need to bookmark:

Overture's Search Terms Suggestion Tool
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

It's a free tool which was devised some time ago by Overture. It's real purpose in life is to help people buying traffic from Overture's pay per click search engine: http://www.overture.com/

The idea is that the webmaster who is buying the PPC traffic would put a word into the box, and the tool tells them how many people have been searching for that phrase at Overture in the previous month. If say I'm interested in buying some PPC traffic for my site which sells "sex toys", I'd put "sex toys" into the box and I'd press submit. I'd get back 100 lines of information. They are broken down as follows:

Count | Search Term

The count is the number of searches that were made by surfers last month. Think of this as a 'score'. The higher this number is, the more interest you're likely to get in that search term.

The two main uses of these results are:

1) To find out if a specific phrase is 'popular' - eg. if I want to make a page for the search engines for "black grannies" - ARE people searching for that phrase?

2) To find ALTERNATIVE phrases that are related to the niche.

An alternative to Overture's STST is Word Tracker:

REVIEW - Wordtracker

... which has a fee but offers much more options.

Implications for other search engines

The Overture tool's results do not just apply to the Overture search engine. It's safe to assume that if "sex" has a score of 3386599 on Overture - and that many people searched for that word last month, then a lot of people will also have searched for that word on Google, Altavista, and other search engines. The more traffic a search engine has, the more searches something like "sex" will get. By finding out what the 'score' is on Overture, we can get an idea how many searches that phrase would get on other engines.

The Overture suggestions tool will offer slightly different results from month to month. Some subjects grow in popularity (for example the growth of the "MILF" niche in this year - 2003) and others will change their popularity.

Start to mine

Let's start to use this tool and assume you want to make a mature porn website (or gallery!). Sure, you could make a general mature website, optimize if for some phrases you might be able to come up with "mature sex", "mature porn" - but let's go further than that. Let's REALLY look at what surfers have been searching for - and then match up our website to that. It's a basic principle of marketing. I remember being on a marketing course and learning that the fastest way to make a product fail was to come up with a product and THEN try to find a market for it, rather than finding a market and THEN designing the product to fit the market. Porn sites, pages, and galleries are exactly the same.

So go to the Overture tool and put in "mature"...

You'll be given 100 lines of information on what people really searched for in the previous month. This information is gold. It's real and I guarantee you 100% that there'll be phrases there that you'll never have thought about optimizing pages for, or building whole sites around.

Unfortunately the results are completely unfiltered. While this is good news for adult webmasters really, it also means that you'll see some searches that were made for 'illegal material' too. I just thought I'd warn you. I hate seeing those phrases but hopefully they won't crop up too often.

Stop! Important:

Before we go on, it's important to touch on NICHES. Because, as you've probably guessed by now, Overture's tool is not only useful to people who want to optimize their pages for the search engines. It's also a tool which can mine NICHES. Or I should say SUB NICHES. We just searched on "mature" and we got a long list of phrases. But look at one of the results that we got from that search:

10488 mature amateur

So you might look at that and think to yourself "aha! so people want to see mature AMATEUR women!" Now we're starting to pull ahead of the competition. While other webmasters are building 'general mature' sites (or just regular 'porno' sites) - we've done our research and drilled down to find what surfers really want. If you can then go and find a) content for this niche (if you're making TGP galleries or link list sites), and b) sponsors for this niche - you've got the potential to make some serious money.

Refining further

Stay with the page of results for our "mature" search. One of the recent and very welcome additions to Overture's tool is the ability to click on results. If you scroll down that page to "mature man", and click that - then you'll be given the results as if you'd searched on "mature man" - and you'll see phrases related to "mature man":

10122 mature man
3908 mature gay man
845 mature older man
784 mature nude man
742 mature naked man

And so forth...

So by clicking on a phrase - you can refine your search further.

If you could get traffic to a page about "mature gay men" for example - and had sponsors for that kind of niche there... you'd be light years ahead of your competition. While others were getting the 1:2000 ratios on "general porn pages" and wondering what went wrong - you could be doing far better.

Summing up

Overture is a marvelous, powerful tool. It's easy to use, fast, free, and while it does have some limitations (not case sensitive, doesn't separate plurals and singulars), it's still one of the best bookmarks an adult webmaster could ever have. I hope you get as much use out of it as I have over the years.

TOM ^"^

ICQ 12616560
Email tom@tomsnewbiebooster.com

Enter TOM'S NEWBIE BOOSTER

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