I'm feeling a bit prescient today. Just last week, in my review of Google Wealth Wizard, I made this prediction:

It always amazes me how much the Internet marketing niche itself relies on the Overture suggestion tool. It's a mainstay of every ebook discussing niche discovery, including the three mentioned here. It's also used by many keyword tools, including KE. Given that most people seem to be using it to find niches for AdWords ads and AdSense content, not for Yahoo-related purposes, someday Yahoo! is going to pull the plug on that tool and there will be much panic in the streets as Internet marketers and keyword tool makers scramble to find alternate trusted sources of keyword search data.

That day has in fact arrived — the Overture keyword suggestion tool is now official kaput. A new version of Keyword Elite has already been released to account for this and all signs of Overture have been removed from it. They've already found an alternate source of monthly search data, though they haven't us what it is.

Anyhow, this throws a wrench into various processes that depended on the free Overture data. I'm sure the people at WordTracker and other keyword meta-search engines are quite happy, though.

We'll have to see how this affects the AdSense arbitrage experiment. Michael Plante's book relies heavily on Keyword Elite, so the fact that they've updated the software already probably means that the arbitrage method can be continued to be used as-is. We'll see…

Sponsored Link: If you like what I write, consider supporting me by buying Uncommon AdSense and getting some great AdSense advice in the process.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

I've put up another free AdSense template, part of my growing collection of templates. I call this AdSense-Heavy because, well, it's heavy on the ads. This template will NOT win you any design awards, let me tell you. It's a bit of a dirty secret in the AdSense community, useful more for arbitrage type situations than normal content. Take it for what it is. As usual, full instructions in the HTML and CSS.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

Being under the weather this weekend and also participating in an online mailing list promotion that seems to have backfired on me (more on that later) means that the next article in the arbitrage series will have to wait. But this post is semi-related, because we're going to talk about some neat stuff you can do with Google's keyword tool. The idea for today's posting came from a mail I received from the NicheBOT folks, although the idea itself isn't new to me. But I haven't discussed it here before, and so it bears discussion.

The AdWords Keyword Tool

AdWords publishers have had access to a powerful keyword tool for a long time now. About a year ago, Google made the tool available to the general public via this URL. (It's easy to find: if you search for “adwords keyword tool” in Google, it's the first result you get back.)

Google's keyword tool is an easy way to build up lists of relevant keywords. It won't give you exact pricing or volume data on the keywords — though you can get relative rankings — but it's a good way to build a list of related keywords using Google's own search data as its basis. Given that most of us are targeting Google search results to get our traffic and/or to display are ads, anything based on Google data should interest us.

When you load up the keyword tool, you're presented with two options for building your list: keyword variations or site-related keywords, as shown in the image below.

Chances are that you've used the keyword variations tab before to get a list of related keywords. But the two tabs are not mutually exclusive. You can use both tabs to build your list. And the site-related keywords are especially useful for building lists of semantically-related keywords — keywords that aren't directly related but are related in terms of a general theme or topic. All you need to do is find a well-indexed, authoritative site in the same niche as the keywords you're targeting. Plug the site into the keyword tool and then grab all the semantically-related keywords that Google gives you.

And what's the easiest way to find an authoritative site? Use Google's search engine, of course. For example, say I wanted to find keywords related to “dog training”. The #1 page for that keyphrase is Dr. P's Dog Training & Behavior Main Page as of this writing. So I take that and plug it into the site-related keywords tab of the tool:

What you get is a list of keywords that are all grouped by common terms — hey, if you're advertising via AdWords here's an easy way to get keywords for your different ad groups! — based on what Google thinks are related topics. Here's an extract of what'd you get for the dog training page I just mentioned:

Again, what's great about this information is that it tells you what keywords Google thinks are important. You can even see which ones are searched for more often than the others. It's an easy way to focus in one some specialized keywords without having to do a lot of fishing around.

So there you have it, another tool to add to your arsenal. Have fun playing around with it!

Sponsored Link: Looking for solid AdSense advice? My book Uncommon AdSense will help you get the most out of AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.