So many people ask what the top search keywords are. Generally this is an unimportant topic. What is important is the top keywords in the subject you know or are interested in. Looking at the general terms means you must compete with the entire web. Thinking of your specific segment (and those who compete with it) makes it easier to determine which keywords are important to you.

Here are some of the top keywords lists though just for the heck of it...

Yahoo Buzz index (also in UK version)
Lycos 50
Google Zeitgiest
Ask Jeeves

and of course the traditional Keyword tools
Overture Search Term Suggestion (also in UK verion)
Espotting
Wordtracker

and Hitwise offers a monthly search term report

many of these were found in a thread at Highrankings Forum

Some recent articles ("Google's House of Cards" "A Perfect Storm for Pay Per Click") have been saying that the ROI for paid advertising is going away. It has been. It was not very competitive a few years ago, but now with over 150,000 people in the market you need to be more effective to extract profits from a campaign.

I honestly think many of the articles are suggested / written by people who want to make their own jobs easier and make more money while doing it. Some articles may even be written to scare away competition or drive leads to firms who provide the services.

In the past a sloppy website with low conversion rates was ok because there was little competition. Now some areas are requiring a smooth ad, which is well targeted, that leads to a smooth site, which has great usability, and is customer centric. In essence the shakeup of the organic listings and the rising costs of pay per click ads are forcing websites (and the internet as a whole) to be more functional.

There are few mediums which have feedback as rapid as AdWords does. Pay per click is here to stay. Those who know how to use it will make a ton of money.

In any medium there will be free rides as new adopters take advantage of knowledge not share by their competitors. While there is always a new technology which creates new markets, this quick read does a good job of explaining why off the page optimization is more effective than on the page optimization. Chris Ridings explains "The Glass Ceiling."

Update: above link to chriseo.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=62&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 delinked, as the site is owned by a domainer and is a page full of ppc ads

Update 2: Linking to Archive.org version of the page here, along with a quote:

Consider each keyword phrase as being a little market economy, an interpretation we can intuitively justify by seeing the keywords can have monetary values attached to them in advertising systems. The optimizer who is working o­n o­n-the-page factors alone is looking for an economy with extremely low competition (less than 10 competitors). This economy must also provide a profitable return. The market must have practically no barriers to entry. In short, this optimizer would be looking for a newly emerging market or a niche (a forgotten keyword). What we begin to see is that our solely o­n-the-page optimizer is less of an optimizer and more of a researcher and opportunist. That is no negative statement, being such is a skill in and of itself. However, we can also see that should they prove successful then their very success is an indicator to the competiton that this opportunity exists. i.e. people will wonder why they do so well and begin to analyse it more in depth. Thus, given time competition will form and them will become an attractor to competiton. Sooner or later they will have more than 10 competitors and the opportunity no longer exists.

Given increasing usage and competition o­n the internet we can say two things: that the quantity of such opportunities is likely to decrease and that the period of time for which such opportunities persist will decrease.

So it is, wisely, arguable that o­n-the-page optimization is a short term, unsustainable option without off-the-page optimization. It also follows that such optimization will often, but not always, be the least profitable in terms of results.

Just another tip on improving conversion rates with Google AdWords. When search words appear in a Google ad they are bolded. A good way to improve click through rate (and thus lower price per click) is to place keywords in the ad.

Sometimes it may not be practical to create 100 different ads and 100 different groupings. If you have similar terms which can use the same creative description, but you would like to have the title dynamically match searched keywords you can.

The syntaxt for Google AdWords Dynamic Keyword Insertion is {keyword: }

When you create the AdWords creative place {keyword: } in the first line and then fill out the rest of the creative like normal. Automatically your title will match the search terms which will improve click through rates. Please note that Google does not want this feature used on search terms which are mis spelled or otherwise break their ad policies.

When you use {keyword: } make sure you place a keyword after it so that search terms which may be too long or are not processed correctly still have an ad to show. I know this because I had one of my Google AdWords ads disapproved for not doing this. For me I would probably use something like {keyword:SEO Book}.

Some people will want to try this with a huge catalog of products and will lose money in the process. When products are widely varying you want to send the person to the specific page for that product so you must specify that as well.

This technique is likely to be most profitable to those who use it on smaller niche specific areas...the whole thing that makes Google so appealing is that you can customize every aspect of your ad and track every cent spent from begining to end.

Dynamic keyword insertion capitalization:
{keyword:} will make the title small
{KeyWord:} will capitalize all the words in the Google AdWords ad title.

Many people have claimed to have seen this on a limited basis, but I have been seeing Ink on Google for a while today. I was first tipped off by my friend at Just Paper Roses.com. I have asked some other people and the switch appears to be only be seen by some.

People in the past have been happy with Google search (Google is one of the top brands in the world right now). With Yahoo branding the hell out of Yahoo search they want people to think Yahoo search. They do not want people thinking Inktomi or Google. It really would not make sense for them to announce a change. With Google's recent massive algorithm shift and upcomming IPO this would be a good time to switch search results.

Again, only some people are seeing the shift, but today is the first time I have. Time for me to tweak a few pages :)

Inktomi relies more heavily on page criteria vice links. The problem with really optimizing a page up for Inktomi is that one might trip the believed over optimization filter of Google. To give you an example of how easy it is to optimize for Inktomi take a look at this search for "website copywriters." Somewhere in the top few pages you will see my Website Copywriters on Search Marketing Info page which is rather short and has low link popularity.

There are a few techniques I would recommend:

1.) optimize the pages each for different terms by search engine. If one sold 5 HTP, they could optimize Inktomi for 5 HTP, and they could optimize the same page for 5 Hydroxytryptophan on Google. This should help you pick up traffic in the short term while you

2.) build a solid linking campaign which will eventually lift you in both engines for the desired terms

Some people may recommend making pages in two different versions (one for each engine), on a rare occasion I may try this. I do not recommend building an entire site this way though as it will make updating confusing. The end goal should be to generally have a strong enough link network that you can do well on both engines.