Using Search Tools for SEO - Yahoo Search Assist, for SEO
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If you’ve never used Yahoo Search Assist, I suggest you play with it for a while to understand it better. Or you can read my article reviewing the new, free service from Yahoo. Keep in mind that this tool is intended to improve the user experience by suggesting related terms. So how does that help you?
Well, let’s assume for a moment you’re putting together a web site that will focus on holiday recipes. Food is a topic that is near and dear to the hearts of a lot of people, so one can imagine that this is a pretty competitive keyword. Look what you get when you put that keyword into Yahoo Search Assist, however:
You can be more specific about the focus of your site, attracting a subset of web surfers interested in specific categories of holiday recipes. Do you want to lure those looking for healthy holiday recipes? Or perhaps the busy folks who need easy holiday recipes fit your target demographic better? You can scroll for more options. And all this without even clicking to do the web search!
So what happens when you click the web search? You get all the sites that Yahoo thinks show content relevant to the key phrase. But if you hit the little tab underneath the search window, you also get to explore related concepts, as you can see in the screen shot below:
In addition to recipes for various specific holidays, related concepts include party recipes, crafts and dessert. You can also scroll sideways for more ideas.
Every single one of these related concepts, as well as the original options Yahoo turned up for you with Search Assist, is a possible keyword related to your main keyword choice, “holiday recipes.” Many of them help you with what’s known as the “long tail” of search. These are longer, more specific search terms. Web surfers make fewer searches using them, but there are also fewer web sites trying to compete for those words. Searchers who use long tail keywords know what they’re looking for, and are more likely to convert than searchers who use more general keywords.
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