Here's a word game that can bring you a lot of money if you play it well: Given something that people might search for on the internet, you must guess a keyword that at least a certain number of people (say, 1000) will type into Google each month trying to find it. Assuming your keyword has at least that many searches, you win if your keyword is guessed by the fewest of the other players. How does this get you money? Suppose you're trying to sell some product or service on the Internet. You want a lot of people to be searching for that product and to find your sales page. For the search engines to bring you any significant business, you need to end up on page one of the search results, preferrably in the first five so you are immediately visible. This gives the two parts of the game: 1. You need to have at least a certain minimum number of people searching for your keyword. If say there are only 50 searches for it in a month, that's less than two per day. Your product better be expensive to make money on that small number of potential customers. Three thousand searches a month gives 100 per day, a much more comfortable number of potential customers. 2. You need to have few competitors so you can earn a spot on page one of the search results. If someone types in your keyword and only four results appear, you're guaranteed to be on page one. If four million results appear, getting anywhere near page one is nearly impossible. You can get some help with this game. Google has a keyword tool that will tell you how many searches are made for a keyword in an average month and will give you some suggestions for related keywords. You can then feed these into a Google search page and see how many results they get. Even with the suggestions, you need to guess a lot of keywords and try them out. Here's an example: Say we are going to set up a print-on-demand T-shirt shop on the web at Printfection, Zazzle, or CafePress. What products will we be offering? T-shirts, of course, but how many ways are there to say T-shirt? At least these: T-shirt (which Google translates into "t shirt"), T-shirts, Tshirt, Tshirts, tee shirt, tee shirts, tees (but "tee" often means golf tee). There are other varieties of apparel available: tank, spaghetti strap, camisole, baseball jersey, sweatshirt. For that matter, we could generalize: shirt, shirts, apparel, clothing. ("Shirt" and "shirts" are frequently searched for.) And there are non-apparel items such as coaster, tote bag, cutting board, mouse pad, or generally, gifts. Suppose we are thinking about putting NASA photos on T-shirts. (We can use them for free.) Here are some words people may be using: astronomy, universe, galaxy, cosmos, space, nebula, star (although this is more likely used for movie stars), stelar, solar system, planet, moon, sun, mercury, venus, earth, mars, jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune, pluto, comet, asteroid, ... and people may combine those with telescope, hubble, photo, photograph, image, ... Now how can we combine the name of the product and the name of the design to win the game? There are a lot of combinations to explore -- a lot of work and a lot of opportunity. A problem with keywords is that, while we can find out how many times they were searched for per month, we don't know what the searchers were looking for. While we are finding the number of matching pages, we can take a look at what the matching pages are about. This tells we what the authors of those pages thought the searchers were after. For example, we're thinking of putting up T-shirts decorated with Hubble telescope photographs, so we try out the keyword "galaxy T-shirt". When we do, we find a lot of matches for "la galaxy t shirt". Spanish? French? A glance at the matching pages informs us that there is a sports team called the LA Galaxy. This warns us of two things: first, the people looking for that keyword phrase are not looking for our products, and the second, the owners of the sports team will not be pleased if we start identifying our products with its name. Finding great keywords for the web is a word game that can reward a nimble mind and can reward it very highly. The web is a way to convert wit into wealth.
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