For example, entering the phrase ‘search engine’ into the tool would yield:

1. search engine
2. search egnine
3. search enigne
4. search engnie
5. search engien
6. saerch engine
7. saerch egnine
8. saerch enigne etc

Notice that in 2. the ‘g’ and the ‘n’ are swapped. In 3. the ‘g’ and the ‘i’ are swapped and in 4. the ‘n’ and the ‘i.’ These chnages cascade through the word to the end.

The tool tries to mimic people accidentally transposing letters when typing words.

Another problem that keyboard users sometimes have is to accidentally hit a key to the right or left of the key being targeted. The new tool, key word switcher, goes through every keyword and replaces each letter, in turn, with those to the right or left of it. So for example, if you typed ‘blue cat’ into the tool, you would get the following key word combinations:

1. blue cat
2. blue cst
3. blue car
4. blue cay
5. bkue cat
6. bkue cst
7. bkue car

etc

Notice that in 2., the ‘a’ in ‘cat’ has been replaced by the letter to the right of ‘a,’ i.e. ‘s.’ In 3. the ‘t’ has been replaced by the letter to the left of ‘t’ on the Qwerty keyboard, i.e. ‘r’ and in 5. it is replaced with the letter to the right of ‘t’ on the Qwerty keyboard, i.e. ‘y.’

If these new keyword combinations are surrounded by square brackets they could be used in Google Adwords, for example, to target unusual keywords that may be available for a lesser cost per click than their correctly spelled equivalents.

The big advantage of the new approach is the ability to try different combinations of advertisement to test which one garner the most clicks.

One of the options with domains such as these was to have third party companies display advertisements on them and then cut you in on a proportion of the ad revenue. Google has now announced Adsense for domains which will allow Adsense users to display advertisements on underutilized domains. Google is currently rolling out the capability of doing this to its North American Adsense account holders.

I, for one, will be taking advantage of the feature as soon as I can, apparently the adverts convert fairly well and it means that at least I should be able to generate a little revenue from my unused domains.

What is slightly surprising is Google’s desire to do this. They are always banging on about user experience but the sort of contentless pages jammed with ad links are a terrible user experience from my perspective. If they do convert it can only be because people are anxious to get away from them as expeditiously as possible and clicking a link is faster than clicking the back arrow on the browser. To be fair to Google, they do mention adding content, but how ths pans out remains to be seen.

The phrase ‘better portrait photography’ is determined to be non-commercial. The searcher may be looking for equipment to improve their portrait photography, but the chances are, they are just looking for tips, tricks or tutorials.

A powerful use of this tool is to determine the commercial intent behind phrases used in pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Assuming that you are selling something on your site and the objective of your PPC advertising campaign is to generate revenue. If you are bidding on a phrase that is not rated as having a ‘commercial intent,’ if someone clicks on your advertisement, the chances are that they do not have commercial intent to buy anything when they get to your site and hence the amount you paid for the click is wasted. So a good technique is to go through your list of PPC phrases to screen out any that do not have commercial intent implicit in them. By doing so, you should be able to significantly improve the ROI of your PPC advertising campaigns.

The adCenter link included above also includes other useful tools including:

• Demographics prediction (the demographics of someone making a query or visiting a certain site)
• Keyword forecast (the number of searches of certain keywords and a prediction of the demographics for the person searching)
• Search volume seasonality forecast