Position monitoring, bid-optimizing, popularity checks, etc., are typically conducted directly at search engines themselves. It would be pointless to conduct such automated queries on a meta- engine because meta-engines do not "add-url's" nor do they offer pay-per-click options. They are simply a search engine that queries other search engines. And, since there is no "metacrawler" of meta-engines, search query counts are unlikely to be artificially skewed by such artificial searches.

Furthermore, duplicate searches are eliminated because query counts are being tabulated from a single source instead of combining results from myriad partners.

Therefore, query counts taken from meta-engines are far, far more representative of number of searches conducted by actual people - but even this is not yet a perfect solution due to a relatively obscure form of keyword spam.

Keyword spam (in this case not to be confused with word stuffing or repeating keywords within a Web page) refers to practice of using cgi-scripting to manipulate Metaspy metacrawler voyeur to artificially promote certain products or services.

By entering a flow of terms or phrases at predetermined intervals, such spammers hope to inflate importance and significance of certain search terms thereby artificially increasing value of such terms related to their products.

In a perfect world, adjustments should be made to filter out this flavor of spam. In a minute we'll share with you how such filtering is done but first, let's address issue of combining plurals with singulars and upper with lower-case searches.

Plural, singular, upper, and lower-case searches represent a decision-point for search engine optimizers because sometimes it's good to combine search query numbers while other times it isn't.

For instance search terms "keyword and keywords," whether singular, plural, or in upper or lower-case, are similar enough in meaning that they could arguably be combined into one search query number.

However, search terms "tap, taps, Tap, and TAP" can have entirely different meanings. Take a look at results for search term "tap" on Overture. The following references were all found within top ten sponsored listings:

Machine threading taps, Tap / Rap support software Beer taps Tap Dancing TAP A Stock TAP Terminal Phone Numbers

Note that none of above has any relation to others! Obviously if we are selling any of these items, we'd want more specificity regarding search queries than simple 10,485 searches that STST reports were conducted in past 30 days.

The example above illustrates importance of obtaining search query tabulations for each version of a selected keyword independently of other.

After all, it's easy to manually combine numbers while it's impossible to break them out into their own categories once they've been compressed by Overture's STST into a single search term regardless of potentially different meanings.

(Continued in Part 3. Contact Robin@SearchEngineWorkshops.com for complete article.)