A few months ago Yahoo! shut down a long used free SEO tool known as the Overture Keyword Selector Tool. This weekend, it appeared back online. The problem is, its data remains dated January 2007.
The tool was developed to help Overture advertisers find lists of words or phrases to bid on in the original auction-style PPC format but became one of the most heavily used SEO applications. It was free and provided the relative value of topical keywords and phrases. When a keyword or phrase is queried, the tool produces a database of related words or phrases Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing) users entered while conducting searches under similar keyword queries.
Over the years, it was also incorporated into several other free SEO tools, many of which have not functioned properly since Yahoo! shut the service in the early summer.
Though the data it displays is nine months out of date, its return shows the importance of keyword selection and keyword tracking. For advanced SEO shops, that sort of tracking has come a long way.
Metamend uses a more advanced search metrics tool named Enquisite to develop keyword target lists and track the search queries of visitors to our clients’ sites. Before forming as an independent company, Enquisite was originally developed by Metamend SEOs. It does not rely on keyword lists supplied by third parties, including the major search engines.
Enquisite allows us to track words and phrases used to find our clients’ websites, compare those search results against traffic generated by multiple engines and pin-point to the zip or postal code where that traffic originated. This gives us the opportunity to present ideas on geo-specific target marketing, campaign deployment timing, and landing page optimization for specific regional or demographic markets.
Functionally, Enquisite is light years ahead of early tools such as Overture’s. While Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool could be considered a great-great grandparent to advanced SEO analytics tools, its absence and return are worth noting.
Have a question and need quick answers? 
Have you noticed any changes in your Overture PPC account now that Overture no longer has a fixed bid of 10 cents? Out of several thousand keywords in my account, I have only seen 10 – 15 require more than 10 cents to activate. I haven’t a single one that will activate with less than 10 cents.
Comment by Brent Crouch — Monday, April 28, 2008 @ 10:12 pm
Nice tool
Comment by charles — Tuesday, September 23, 2008 @ 10:05 pm
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