I was describing the other day to my 14-year old daughter Chloe about how websites make money by displaying Google ads. Faster than you could say "AdSense" she abandoned her idea of starting a dog walking business and embarked on building a website about cheats, tips, giveaways, backgrounds etc. for the hugely popular Neopets.com. It's a website that she knows inside and out, I might add! Using a couple keyword research tools I showed her, she decided what to name her site and what to focus her first pages of content on. She's going to continue building content before worrying about the Google ads. A wise decision.

Of course for her plan for world domination, er, easy money, to work, she needs links. I'll do the honors and be her first inbound link, and here it is: The Ultimate Neopet Cheats Site. Note that she's targeted "Neopet cheats" instead of the more grammatically correct "Neopets cheats" because ranking highly for the former will be a much more attainable goal, and it's still fairly popular with searchers.

Anyone else willing to link to Chloe's first website? She'll be very grateful! :-)

UPDATE: My daughter has now moved her Neopets Cheats site off of WordPress.com, due to their policy of forbidding the posting of AdSense ads.

On the face of it, Trellian's PrioritySubmit.com keyword research tool is quite cool. Paying subscribers can get a full year's worth of historical keyword popularity data. Finally, a way to quantify the seasonality of various keyword markets!

However, I have to say after using it, I'm not real impressed. The main problem I have with it is that I just don't find their data to be believable. Too many discrepencies, too many gaps. Let me show you some specifics...

For starters, witness a huge spike in searches for "Christmas shopping" mid-year. Then it's relatively flat during the Christmas buying season?!? This next one leaves me totally incredulous: no activity whatsoever throughout the year for the search term "holiday shopping" except April, May, and, to a lesser extent, December. Finally, for the very popular search term "shopping," the month of April appears to have been totally lost.

So, although the PrioritySubmit tool sounds good in theory, until their data starts looking a lot more credible, I'll be relying on WordTracker, Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool, and Google's Keyword Sandbox for studying keyword popularity with search engine users. (In case you're curious, according to Overture's tool, keyword searches across Yahoo! and the rest of Overture's network during the month of October for "Christmas shopping" was 13985, for "holiday shopping" was 2751, and for "shopping" was 2273098.)