Texture design

Posted by rebecca

Last week I chatted with Levi from Wordze about the keyword research tool he built. Levi, who's chummy with Designmoz's resident black hat blogger G-Man, is a programmer who tinkered around with various keyword research sites and decided to build his own. ┬?

Wordze has the token keyword research tool, where you type in a keyword or phrase, set the match to exact, broad, or any, and receive a list of related keywords, their 30-day cycle count (Wordze gets their data from meta crawlers and a couple of ISPs), their estimate of search views on that keyword, and their KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index, which is a comparison of the number of searches to the number of search results; the lower the KEI, the more difficult it is to rank for that keyword).

Wordze will also show you the historical search data for a particular keyword (based on daily traffic):

You can also analyze a keyword's WordRank, which analyzes the search results for a keyword and gives you an idea of how competitive the domains are:

Another interesting feature is Wordze's Dig (not Digg) tool, which apparently searches through over 10,000 websites and returns a crapload of keywords. It takes a while to generate a report, but once it's finished, you have a couple hundred pages of keywords to sift through. I ran a report for "playground equipment" and received 232 pages' worth of keywords.

Other Wordze features include importing keywords, downloading saved results, a keyword misspell and typo database, keyword density, an API service, and a thesaurus. Membership is pretty cheap at $35/month (or a 24-hour day trial for $7.95). While Wordze doesn't have nearly as much data sources as KeywordDiscovery or Wordtracker, it is cheaper to try it out for a month.

One of my gripes about Wordze is that the site has no information about the creator, why he created Wordze, where the data derives from (I found out when talking to Levi), where the company is located, etc. The site's trustworthiness can be improved greatly.

Obviously, another complaint is that there's no way to figure out how accurate any of Wordze's search counts are (I'd say they're probably low, seeing as how the tool is still new and hasn't yet built up a large enough database), but I'll stress that, just like any keyword research tool, you shouldn't read into the numbers--instead, use the tool for a relative comparison between various keywords. A good way to check how "accurate" Wordze is would be to compare its results for a keyword with other keyword research tools (Overture, KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker, etc). If all of the tools reach a consensus that keyword X is more popular than keyword Y, then I see no harm in tinkering around with Wordze.

If you want to see some of Wordze's tools in action, check out their introductory videos (http://www.wordze.com/videos/KeywordResearch/ and http://www.wordze.com/videos/CompetitorKeywords/) and listen to Levi (who I think sounds a bit like Vin Diesel) give you the grand tour.

Posted by JaneCopland

Cameron Olthuis over at Link Building Blog has been pondering the importance of positive comments on social media stories. His take is that even good content can be irreparably wounded by a few negative comments appearing first on its comment thread. We know about the classic social media trait of voting for (or voting down) a story before actually reading it, but I was always of the mind that voters made their decisions from the title, subject and short description of a story. I did not consider the possibility that others' comments made much of a difference.

Whether a comment is "good" or not is also a bit subjective. If the story is about something that really gets people's blood up, the definition of "positive" is harder to determine. For example, stories about Fox News reporting falsehoods and gossip frequently make it onto social news sites and the majority of comments are tirades against the network. They rarely say anything, positive or not, about the actual story that's been submitted.

If an initial comment is negative enough, it sometimes ignites a flame war that seems to attract readers to a story. I'm more likely to take a look at the comments when there are a lot of them, and lots of comments usually indicates a disagreement or two. When readers gang up on an early commenter, they tend to vote for the story out of spite, simultaneously voting down their other person's comment. The mental process here appears to be "I disagree with your negative review of this thing, so I'm going to vote it up just because I can."

Cameron talks about the immaturity aspect of some social media contributors, and it is surely immaturity that makes readers decide what they're going to vote for and what they're going to vote down based on the views of other people.┬? His advice is to ask your friends to make a few positive comments on stories you submit or have an interest in. I'd go as far as to say that "baited" comments should probably be even more than positive - they should begin a discussion that other readers will feel compelled to join. I know that I'm more likely to vote for something that I've commented on, instead of just clicking through, looking at the external story and then leaving. I'm also more likely to comment if there's already some interesting discussions taking place.

That said, a story whose first comment is "thus story sucks" is already somewhat disadvantaged. A better comment to see would be, "this story sucks because ____." At least then, despite your story being cursed with a negative thread, readers actually have something to talk about.

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