[Bump and update: two hours after posting and  we have the number one slot for our own  whois search.  Neat.]

This is not yet another weary re-telling of the Google Blogscoped article on whois this morning. I am sure our readership has an almost 100% overlap with the blogscoped guys. I am also sure that at least a few "SEO Bloggers" will duplicate the article with some added tips and tricks.

No, whenever I read a google "trick" or "feature" article I always use it on my site name and our key, er, keywords to see what will happen. I can't remember who suggested this to me, but I'm sure it was someone a lot smarter than me (that's a bit set!)

Whois Promote-My-Site.com on Google

So type in "whois promote-my-site.com" in google and see what happens:

Which is accurate and cool and handy - at least a dozen times a year.

But what struck me is that our site did not get even one mention in the results.

Hmmm.

So I tried some other SEO domains (seomoz.org didn't show up in the first two pages, etc...) and found that this is a common issue - lots of mentions of the site from other sites, but no direct link.

Then I bumped into seobook.com having the first four results. And it is because he has a "whois tool."

Not being entirely without wits, I immediately wrote this post about google's whois tool and what I found when I queried "whois promote-my-site.com."

Because now I'll rank with a good article on whois and how it affects my site. Assuming that there isn't some strange search logic going on in google-land.

Ever used Baidu? I haven't because, well, my Chinese is not much better than my French or my German. And without even cognates from five years of Latin to guess my way around a site, heck, I don't think I've ever used it.

And, yes, yes, I know that there are more internet users in China than there are people in the US, blah, blah, blah. I am focused more on the fact that my 12 year old makes more mowing lawns in a weekend than the average Chinese guy working in a factory for a month. And I sell stuff that doesn't cost a dime, so the vast masses of Chinese consumers are worth significantly less to me than they are to, say, P&G.

Logs Are Worth Reading

I was looking through our logs, saw a search string, and clicked on it. It turns our that we rank for:

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. This e-mail address is not monitored

Which is the strangest search string I've seen in a while.

Wile there I tried searching on "Promote My Site" - we usually rank between 4th and 6th or so on Google, depending if Matt Cutts had oatmeal or a biscuit for brekky that day. Here is the result for that on Baidu (we are 6th):

Ok, the string they show is:

GOTO=http://technorati.com/blogs/promote-my-site.comblogreactions&&HREF:http://technorati.com/search/promote-...GOTO=http://promote-my-site.com/authtrans.php?authority_string={{!VAR1}} TAG POS=1 TYPE=DATA EXTRACT=...

Perhaps this all makes sense in China. But it really reminds me of the very very early days when everyone was switching from X to google and every once in while you'd get a result where you just had to scratch your head.

I think we forget how much better that all works now.

I do not normally just point at an article and say: read this article on How to Choose a Popular Niche for Your Blog. But not because it's well written (all his stuff is) and not because we need more bloggers (we don't!) but because it is a very well written example of how to do keyword research.

Hitting Homeruns With Keyword Chains

I'm not going to repeat what was in the article, just note that the process is a lot like the more formal brainstorming techniques (if that isn't an oxymoron!) where you take an idea and do the permutations and combinations.

And what results is called a etiological keychain. And now you know why he didn't use that term - I think I just heard 100 people groan and leave.

But what you have is a primary cause (keyword) and all the phrases and keywords associated with it and their probability (search frequency).

The value of this sort of graph is that you can determine which words you need to use around your content in order to get the right kind of SERP love.

Actionable

It all sounds very intellectual and theoretical, but it is very actionable information. If you have the phrase "driving technique" as a key phrase and the suggestion comes back that "snow driving" has 1K searches a day, well, you can do something about that to capture traffic.

Product Keywords

The only problem with the above examples is that you have to create content around them. Which is expensive and time consuming. But if you are selling products then this is a pretty quick exercise, even if you have a LOT of products.

And, of course, you can get a LOT of leverage from this quickly if you use google base to make sure your products are powerfully searched and displayed .

Unfortunately Manual

Here's the problem: you need to keep up with this stuff. And you need to refresh it regularly because search terms do change. And this is a manual process, which means that it is:

• Expensive to execute
• Tedious