You should see a pop over window when you enter this site asking you to join the public beta. Simply enter your first name and email address to sign up for our beta program.

What is the Maverick Keyword Researcher?

It is a web-based keyword research application that is hosted on your own web server or web host. You may install it on your personal computer as long as you have a PHP-enabled web server installed.

What Can the Maverick Keyword Researcher Do?

• Brainstorm a virtually unlimited number of niche ideas for your online business.
• Uncover profitable niches by separating the goods ones from the duds.
• Generate keyword suggestions from Amazon, Ask, Google, Yahoo, Bing and other undisclosed sources.
• Get the Google search results, Google search volume, number of Google AdWords ads, average Google AdWords CPC, Google PageRank, KEI, R/S ratio and OCI of your keywords.
• Gain more control and flexibility of the Google Matching Options with the following options:
  • Broad
  • Phrase
  • Exact
• Gain more control and flexibility of the Google Search Volume with the following options:
  • Local Search Volume
  • Global Monthly Search Volume
• Gain more control and flexibility of the Google PageRank with the following options:
  • Highest Google PageRank on the first page of the search results
  • Average Google PageRank on the first page of the search results
  • Highest Google PageRank of the top 5 search results
  • Average Google PageRank of the top 5 search results
• Enables you to outsource the boring and tedious job of keyword research to someone else.

What Makes the Maverick Keyword Researcher Different?

1. You Can Finally Outsource Keyword Research!

I created this keyword research application because I was sick and tired of doing the keyword research myself. I wanted to be able to outsource my keyword research activities to my freelancers so that I can do more important things.

With desktop software, I had to deal with licensing issues because some software can only be installed on 1 or 2 computers and I found it very troublesome to activate the licenses on my freelancer’s computer because they are based overseas. I knew a web-based solution would solve this problem once and for all. You install it on your web host for all your freelancers to use without the drama of purchasing more licenses and managing them when you hire a new freelancer.

2. It is All-In-One

I wanted all the keyword sources to work seamlessly with one another and to have them all in one place to save me time and money. I did not want to have to copy and paste keywords from some web site, import a keyword file from another keyword tool or use a paid membership site to get my keywords.

3. Loads of Keyword Sources

Amazon, Ask, Google, Yahoo, Bing, undisclosed shopping sites, eBay, Alibaba and other search engines…. I dare you to find another keyword research tool with more keyword sources than the Maverick Keyword Researcher.

4. Flexibility is the Key

Other keyword research software try to force you to adopt their own proprietary SEO formulas. The Maverick Keyword Researcher allows you greater control and flexibility on how you choose to filter your keywords. Everyone has their own idea on what makes a good niche. That is why I included as many common SEO statistics like the R/S ratio, KEI, Google PageRank etc so that you may have greater control and perspective on your keywords.

I have also completed the user guide for this application and I hope to get feedback on both the user guide and application during the beta.

The public beta will begin once I have set up the newsletter and squeeze pages for the public beta.

Thanks to everyone who has shown support and encouragement during the development of this product. Let’s make the Maverick Keyword Researcher the best web-based keyword research application in the market!

I am implementing the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) into the Maverick Keyword Researcher. However, the original formula does not work with Google keyword statistics unless I make some tweaks to it.

First up, let’s take a look at the official explanation of the KEI by its creator, Sumantra Roy:

The KEI is a measure of how effective a keyword is for your web site. The derivation of the formula for KEI is based on three axioms:

1. The KEI for a keyword should increase if its popularity increases. Popularity is defined as the number present in the “Count” column of WordTracker. This axiom is self-explanatory.
2. The KEI for a keyword should decrease if it becomes more competitive. Competitiveness is defined as the number of sites which AltaVista displays when you search for that keyword using exact match search (i.e. you should use quotes around the keyword). This axiom is also self-explanatory.
3. If a keyword becomes more popular and more competitive at the same time such that the ratio between its popularity and competitiveness remains the same, its KEI should increase. The rationale behind this axiom requires a more detailed explanation. The best way to do this is to take an example:

Suppose the popularity of a keyword is 4 and AltaVista displays 100 sites for that keyword. Then the ratio between popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 4/100 = 0.04.

Suppose that both the popularity and the competitiveness of the keyword increases. Assume that the popularity increases to 40 and AltaVista now displays 1000 sites for that keyword. Then the ratio between popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 40/1000 = 0.04.

Hence, the keyword has the same ratio between popularity and competitiveness as before. However, as is obvious, the keyword would be far more attractive in the second case. If the popularity is only 4, there’s hardly any point in spending time trying to optimize your site for it even though you have a bigger chance of ending up in the top 30 since there are only 100 sites which are competing for a top 30 position. Each hit is no doubt important, but from a cost-benefit angle, the keyword is hardly a good choice. However, when the popularity increases to 40, the keyword becomes more attractive even though its competitiveness increases. Although it is now that much more difficult to get a top 30 ranking, spending time in trying to do so is worthwhile from the cost benefit viewpoint.

A good KEI must satisfy all the 3 axioms. Let P denote the popularity of the keyword and C the competitiveness.

The formula that I have chosen is KEI = P2/C*1000, i.e. KEI is the square of the popularity of the keyword multiplied by 1000 and divided by its competitiveness. This formula satisfies all the 3 axioms:

1. If P increases, P2 increases and hence KEI increases. Hence, Axiom 1 is satisfied.
2. If C increases, KEI decreases and hence, Axiom 2 is satisfied.
3. If P and C both increase such that P/C is the same as before, KEI increases since KEI can be written as

KEI = P2/C*1000 = P/C * P * 1000. Since P/C remains the same, and P increases, KEI must increase. Hence, Axiom 3 is satisfied.

You may be wondering why I am multiplying the figure by 1000. The reason is that since the popularity will be very small compared to the competitiveness, the KEI for most of the keywords will be in decimals. This makes it slightly difficult to use. However, introducing the 1000 makes it easy to compare the KEI between different keywords.

Note that the formula for KEI is not unique. In fact, this is one of the nice things about the KEI. If, instead of using 2, you use any power of P greater than 1, the resultant formula will also satisfy the 3 axioms. For example, P1.5/C*1000 and P3/C*1000 both satisfy the 3 axioms. The exact power of P that you choose depends on how much emphasis you want to give to the popularity of a keyword viz-a-viz its competitiveness. Higher the power of P in the formula, higher will be the emphasis on popularity. If you are very confident about your search engine positioning skills, choose a higher value for the power of P.

If you are not that confident about your search engine positioning skills, choose a lower value for the power of P (but the power should still be more than 1). Thus, the KEI can be adapted to your skill level! Feeling confused as to which power you should choose? Stick to 2. It maintains a nice balance between both popularity and competitiveness.

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You can use the concept of KEI or any derivation of it in your own articles as long as you display the following resource box at the end of the article:

The Keyword Effectiveness Index was invented by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. For more articles on search engine placement, subscribe to his 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by sending a blank email to 1stSearchRanking-subscribe@listbot.com or by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com.

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Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) with Google Keyword Data

I hope that wasn’t too much math for you to understand. The KEI was created quite a few years ago while Altavista was still some kind of big shot in the search engine industry. Today, Google is the king of the search engines so we need to use Google’s data instead of Altavista and Wordtracker.

I tried using the original KEI formula with Google keyword date and the numbers looked unbelievably good. So good that is must be false.

Let’s replace all the Competion and Popularity jargons with something easier to read and remember. So here’s the KEI adapted to Google’s keyword data:

KEI = Google Search Count² / Google Search Results x 1000

Let’s use the keyword phrase “internet marketing” as an example. I shall use the exact match to search for internet marketing at Google.com. Please note that exact matching on Google.com refers to the use of quotes around the keywords wheareas brackets [] are used for exact matching on Google AdWords. Please refer to the Google Web Search’s search basics and Google AdWords’ keyword matching options for more information on the differences between Google’s matching options on Google.com and Google AdWords.

My search settings are as follows:

• Country: USA
• Language: English
• Google.com exact matching
• Google AdWords exact matching

I get my keyword data from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google.com. I shall use the Global Monthly Search Volume divided by 30 for my Google Search Count and the number of results I see in the top right hand corner of Google.com’s search pages for my Google Search Results. The original formula uses daily search counts from Wordtracker so it is best that I use a daily search count from Google to get the formula right.

So here’s what I’ve got…

KEI = (201000/30)² / 44400000 x 1000
KEI = 1011.04

1000 is a really good KEI index. In fact, it is too good to be true. It should not be that easy to rank for the term “internet marketing”. The problem with this formula is the x1000 part at the end. If you remove that, the formula seems to make more sense. Google is a monster compared to Altavista and I believe there is no reason to multiply the results by 1000.

What if we don’t multiply it by 1000? Here’s what the KEI index will be:

KEI = (201000/30)² / 44400000
KEI = 1.01

I prefer the tweaked formula because the number returned makes more sense to me.

Updated Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) Formula for Google

If you are planning on using the KEI for your web site’s SEO research, here’s my updated KEI formula for your quick reference.

KEI = Google Search Count² / Google Search Results

There could be a better way of calculating the KEI. Some people use the “allintitle” search parameter to get different results. If you know a better tweak for Google keyword data, please let me know.

Some of the information includes:

• improving title and description meta tags
• URL structure
• site navigation
• content creation
• anchor text

This PDF guide confirms some of the SEO principles we already know and helps us to optimize for Google without the fear of running foul of their rules.

My previous post was inspired by Google webmaster blog’s post on meta descriptions. Today, I no longer use the Another WordPress Meta plugin because the All in One SEO Pack plugin is so much better.

Examples of Terrible Meta Descriptions

I forgot to add the meta descriptions when I posted the content above. This is how ugly it looks in Google.com at the moment. I hope Google will clear their cache and retrieve my latest meta descriptions for these pages soon.

Examples of Good Meta Descriptions

I remembered to enter the meta description for the posts above and see how different they look in the search engines. A tiny bit of effort really makes a lot of difference in the search engines. A good meta description encourages searchers to click through to your web site if your description is enticing enough.

On Wikipedia’s entry on nofollow links:

Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website. This is an entirely different use than it was intended originally. Nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, SEOs realized that a nofollow used for an internal link should just work as well as nofollow used for external links. It makes sense, for example, to use nofollow for internal links to pages that are not relevant for search engines and only for visitors who are already on the website. This includes pages, such as “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Terms of Use” or “Privacy Policy”. Matt Cutts, one of the initial designers of the nofollow attribute, encouraged this use of the attribute.

At the bottom of this snippet, there is a reference to an interview with Matt Cutts, in which he endorses the use of the nofollow link. Evisibility has a great blog post about nofollow tags with nice illustrations to explain the “Google Juice” theory.

Dan Thies has a free SEO book that explains the basics and advanced uses of the nofollow tag.

What I did for my own blog was to add the nofollow tag on these links:

• About Me
• Contact Me
• Copyright
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• RSS Feed

I also made some minor changes to my blog by removing the “month chunks” plugin, which had a lot of links to my older blog archives. It would be interesting to see the effects of this minor change on the traffic of my blog and other sites.

What is Google’s position on the value of generic web directories that market to webmasters as a way to boost link strength, PageRank and relevance? Would you largely agree or disagree with my assertions about the value of generic web directories on the subject?

SEOmoz also has a post titled “The Wisdom and Folly of Directory Link Building“. You’ll get tips on what to look out for when selecting a directory to submit your site to. The good ones are usually very difficult to get in and they almost always require you to pay them a substantial amount of money to get reviewed with no guarantee that your link will be added. What’s worse, they might not even refund you your money if they reject your site!

The big lessons I learnt about SEO are:

1. Quality over quantity when it comes to incoming links to your web site.
2. Be willing to do the hard work that most people are unwilling to do on a consistent basis.

Quality Over Quantity

Have you ever bought into the hype of a particular software that promised to blast your site to hundreds of directories to get hundreds of incoming links, increase your search engine rankings, get more traffic so that you will get more money? I have! What a waste of my time and money.

I bought into software that submits my web sites into free article directories and software that submits my articles to hundreds of article directories. I falsely believed that even though most of these directories were crap, I would at least get an almighty back link to my web site and that would be worth it. My belief back then was “a back link is better than no back link“. That was just stupid and ignorant of me!

What I discovered was Google was way smarter than all these software programmers that created these submitters. If you think you can beat Google, think again… They created their search engine and crap like this just won’t last. You can’t build a real business around a temporary loophole in their search engine algorithm.

Technically, you should have 800 plus links back to your web site if you submit to the article directories and web directories in those submitters. What they don’t tell you is Google literally ignores these links. Just do a back link check in the Google by entering “link:YOURDOMAIN.com” and you will get what I mean. Why don’t you have 800 plus incoming links listed in Google? Obviously, Google doesn’t care about 100% of these 800 plus links. Yahoo and MSN tends to detect more incoming links but the traffic they send you is very little compared to Google.

I have tested paid directory links on 4 of my content sites and left 6 other content sites without paid directory links. All 10 sites have free directory links from the list of free directories in SubmitEaze. The maximum Google PR I got for the 6 sites without paid directory links was 1 while all the 4 sites with paid directory links had PR 3-4. I paid about $100 for 2 links to each of the 4 web sites and the traffic they generate beats the pants out of the ones without them.

Therefore I came to the conclusion that paying for a submission into a high Google PR and high Alexa ranking directory is way better than submitting my web site into a few hundred free directories. The time it takes to submit to a few hundred free directories is a waste of money because I could have used that time for more productive activities.

Be Willing To Do the Hard Work

• Most people are too lazy to do the necessary grunt work to get lots of traffic to their web sites.
• Most people are too stingy to pay $50 or more to get their web sites reviewed and listed on legitimate and high quality directories.
• Most people are too lazy to create high quality content for their web sites and syndicate high quality articles to promote their web sites.
• Most people want something for nothing and will not take as much action as they should to get the results they desire.

You don’t have to worry too much about your competition as much as you have to worry about your own levels of self-discipline, commitment and consistency. Hard work needs to be synonymous with productive activities that produce the results you want.

We all want more traffic to our web sites and we all know we need more incoming links. If we purely focus on getting more incoming links, we might lose our main focus of getting traffic. It was not until I asked myself “Which link back to my web site would result in more traffic?” that I began to prioritize my activities on the effective links and cut out the ineffective ones instead of blindly blasting to directories.

I used to look at a web site’s Google PR and assumed that it would be beneficial for my web site if I had a link back from a high Google PR site. What I failed to see was would that link from that high Google PR site bring me a lot of traffic? Ultimately, I want more traffic to my web site so why should I care about the Google PR when it does not indicate the traffic levels of a web site? Instead, I began to look at the Alexa rankings of a web site to determine if the link from a particular web site would be beneficial for me in terms of traffic.

It is possible to get a link to your web site from a high Google PR and high Alexa ranking site. Incoming links, search engine rankings, Google PR and everything else ultimately leads to the main goal of getting TRAFFIC. Forget that and you’ll be like me in the past – doing a lot of unproductive hard work that led to little or no productive traffic.

1. Similar Posts

There was an older version of this plugin created by someone else. The author of “Similar Posts” upgraded the older version and it is much better and easier to install than the previous one. You will see a list of similar posts on every one of my blog posts.

2. Subscribe To Comments

Sometimes a particular blog post can become a popular talking point for a lot of people. This plugin makes it easy for someone to keep updated on all the latest follow up comments via email.

3. Math Comment Spam Protection

I get loads of comment spam every week. The default anti spam plugin “Akismet” does a fairly good job of filtering comment spam but sometimes a few of them manage to sneak through the filters. This plugin forces the spammer to enter a simple math sum into a text field before his comment will be posted. This isn’t perfect but it surely will stop most “auto spam” software.

4. Simple Trackback Validation

Previously I did not receive a lot of trackback spam. I don’t even know how it works but this plugin makes sure the person blogging about something on your blog does include a link back to the exact post or your web site.

5. Social Bookmark Creator

I used to have a row of cute little icons after each blog post for people to add my posts to their social bookmark accouts. I found this plugin neater because it displays the bookmark urls in a drop down menu instead. I don’t like the loading times of the icons and not everyone recognizes the logos of the social bookmarks sites they use. This one is simpler and more functional in my opinion.

6. Ultimate Tag Warrior

I looked high and low and this is the best tagging plugin I could find on the internet. What I have implemented on my blog is only a fraction of what this plugin can do. You may also display “tag clouds” and “tag pages” for your blog.

7. Another WordPress Meta Plugin

I think the name of this plugin sounds rather silly but it works very well. I discovered that this plugin conflicts with the old “Adhesive 3.2″ plugin so if you plan to use this plugin, you need to disable “Adhesive 3.2″. Now I can add a default meta keyword and description tag for my entire blog or tags specific to each blog post only.

8. Feedburner Feed Replacement

If I could restart me blog with what I now know, I would have used FeedBurner from the start. I redirect my WordPress feed to FeedBurner. I even turn off the ping URLs in my WordPress settings because I use FeedBurner’s “PingShot” pinging service now.

9. Feed Control

My blog feed now includes my WordPress pages thanks to this plugin. I personally make use of WordPress pages in my blog. Not many people do that but I think it is necessary to separate blog content and non-blog content.

10. Filosofo Home-Page Control

This plugin lets you select a WordPress page to replace the default blog post front page. Great for turning WordPress into a regular web site instead of a blog.

11. My Page Order

This is must have plugin if you use pages and you want them to be sorted by ID. The default interface is not very good for mass updating your page IDs. You can edit your template code to sort by page titles too but this ones let’s you sort your pages by IDs in your customized order.

12. Google Sitemaps

No WordPress blog should go without this plugin. It does not make sense to use a WordPress blog and use another script or software to generate the XML sitemap for your blog. There is also a free Yahoo sitemap script that lets you generate a Yahoo-friendly text file with all the links in your blog for their new “Site Explorer” service. Remember to rename the text file to “urllist.txt” to get it to work with Yahoo.

13. Smart Archives

This plugin builds on the WordPress tag functions to create a better archive of your blog posts. Check out my archives to see how it looks like.

14. monthchunks

This plugin displays the links to the monthly blog archives of your blogs. The default list by WordPress displays them in a long list with one month per line. This one shortens it to a neat and compact list instead. Great for blogs that have a few years worth of posts.

15. wordTube

Not too long ago some internet marketing gurus were selling these video products like hotcakes. Did you know there are free video players you could use for your web site? I should cover this in greater detail in the future. You will need to download the recommended mp3 and flash video player for this to work. It even includes “Media Center” area to store all your media files.

16. WP-ContactForm

When I started this blog, I simply displayed my email on a contact page with a “spam proof” script. It did not work very well. My original email vincent at vincentrich.com was infested with spam so I had to delete it to stop wasting time deleting them. With this plugin, you will only know my email address if I reply. It makes the sorting of emails easier because you may edit the subject line to whatever you want.

These are all the plugins I use at the moment. If you have a plugin that you find very useful for WordPress, leave a comment and let us know. It would be a great time to test these plugins on my blog to see if you would like them on your blog.

If you have a couple of domains then Domain Dashboard is not for you. If you have 50 to hundreds of them, you will be wasting your precious time adding them one by one to your web host. You need Domain Dashboard to get your life back!

My Old Way of Adding Domains to My Web Host

1. Fill up the add account form with the domain name, password, email, and package type
2. Wait for the creation process to complete
3. Copy and paste the username and password into my password manager software
4. Copy and paste the username and password into my FTP software

The time it takes to add 1 domain according to the steps above will take me a minimum of 5 minutes. If I add 100 domains this way, I would need to spend 500 minutes or 8.33 hours. That is equivalent to 1 full 8-hour working day.

My New Way of Adding Domains to My Web Host

1. Copy and paste my list of domains into Domain Dashboard
2. Enter the username, password, email, and package options I want and submit
3. Export my username and password to a text file for use with my password manager software and FTP software

Domain Dashboard creates 1 account in less then 30 seconds on my computer. In less than 30 minutes, I had 100 accounts created in my web host. I can export my domain usernames and passwords into a text file. I need that information to FTP my sites and also to keep a record in my password manager software.

Unfortunately, there is not integrated FTP program in Domain Dashboard. Adding the FTP information into my FTP software is still quite a lot of work. The author promised to add this “mass FTP” feature in the “Pro version” for free if you purchase the current version, which he calls the “Lite version”.

My Old Way of Checking My Site’s Statistics

1. I copy and paste my list of domains into a free PHP search engine index checker PHP script to see how many pages are indexed for each web site
2. I login to my web sites’ AWStats randomly to check if the search engine spiders or real visitors have visted

To be honest, I find this approach a rather haphazard way of checking your stats. It’s just too much work to check them one by one so I got lazy and stopped checking them as much as I would like to.

My New Way of Checking My Sites’ Statistics

1. I simply click on “Update” in the “Pages Indexed”, “Traffic”, and “Robots/Spiders” tabs and wait for the results to be updated

I no longer need to login to each domain’s control panel to check my stats. Now I have them in an easy to use interface with all the information I want about my web sites. You will need to get a Google API key to make this work. There is a link in the software to redirect you to get your own Google API key so that was a piece of cake to do.

Requirements

• WHM web host with cPanel
• AWStats
• Accounts with “Overselling”

You will need a minimum of a reseller web host to use Domain Dashboard. I found that if your reseller web host does not allow “overselling”, you might encounter disk space and bandwidth allocation problems if you add too many accounts to your WHM. A VPS or dedicated web host should also have all the features above.

Domain Dashboard Pro Version

You will receive the “pro version” for free if you purchase the “lite version” now. I am not sure when it will be released but the author mentioned in his newsletter that it would be released in the “coming months”.

Here’s some of the new features in the “pro version”:

• Add on domain support
• Sub domain support
• Mass FTP
• Advanced stats and reports
• Plus more…

Even without the FTP features built in, Domain Dashboard is still a big time saver for me. It’s also very easy to use. I did not even need to read the user manual to get it to work for me.

Conclusion

I give Domain Dashboard 2 thumbs up! If I have to give it a score, it would be 5/5. This is the benchmark on how internet marketing software should be created. Simple, intuitive, and effective.