If you are anything like me, you often transpose letters when doing Web searches. For example, instead of typing ‘domain name’ I type “domian nmae’ or some alternative. I think to some extent it is hardwired in my brain because I often make the same mistake over and over.

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.

Filed under: Pay-per-click (PPC), adwords by Martyn Whittaker