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Notice that in 2., the ‘a’ in ‘cat’ has been replaced by the letter to the right of ‘a,’ i.e. ‘s.’ In 3. the ‘t’ has been replaced by the letter to the left of ‘t’ on the Qwerty keyboard, i.e. ‘r’ and in 5.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

This set me thinking about useful tools to add to one of this site’s “sister” site formatclick.com.

So far the site allows you to perform various tasks with keywords. Including:

• Adding square brackets [] or quotes”" around keyword phrases.
• Adding spelling mistakes to lists of keyword phrases.
• Finding all the permutations of a list of keyword phrases

So, for example, say you had the following list of keywords:

• domain name registration
• register your domain name
• cheap domain names

You might surmise that many people misspell domain as domian. By entering domain:domian into the mispelling field updates the keyword list as follows:

• domain name registration
• register your domain name
• cheap domain names
• domian name registration
• register your domian name
• cheap domian names

You could do this manually, but for a large list this will save a lot of time.

If you were to take this list and enter it into the “permutator,” you would then get the following list:

• domain name registration
• domain registration name
• name domain registration
• name registration domain
• registration domain name
• registration name domain
• register your domain name
• register your name domain
• register domain your name
• register domain name your

etc etc

You could further take this list and using the tool, add square brackets. By using the updated list in an Adwords campaign might result in you being able to bid a lesser amount for keyword phrases that others are not bidding on.

The new tool is a letter swapper. It takes each word, ignores the first letter and then swaps successive letters until it reaches the end of the word. Finally the tool finds combinations of the newly misspelled words. It is probably easiest to explain by way of an example. Say you entered the phrase: “search engine,” the tool would give you the following key word phrases:

• search engine
• search egnine
• search enigne
• search engnie
• search engien
• saerch engine
• saerch egnine
• saerch enigne etc

The Google Adwords Broad match means that the ad will appear provided the words appear somewhere in their search term. Google also look for spelling mistakes and synonyms when using Broad Match. However, by putting spelling mistakes as exact match items gives you more control over your PPC campaign, together with more data with which to analyse a campaign.

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.

You can also use a negative keywords specifier to ensure that advertisements are not displayed if certain words appear in the query. A classic example would be to exclude advertisements for queries including the word: ‘free’.

Exact match ensures that you get the most exactly targeted advertisements, however, at the same time your advert will appear far less often.

Create different combinations of keywords for exact match

A way of getting the best of both worlds is to include a number of different combinations of the words and to include them in your ‘exact match’ campaign. I developed a free tool to help with this which can be found at formatclick.com. Go to the site and scroll down until you find the ‘permutator’ button. Enter a phrase and press submit and you will get a list of permutations of the phrase or phrases.

For example, if you entered:

• hosting with updates

you would get the following permutations:

• hosting with updates
• hosting updates with
• with hosting updates
• with updates hosting
• updates hosting with
• updates with hosting

Some of of doubtful use, but you may find some combinations worthy of inclusion in an exact match campaign.