I’ve done a couple sponsored posts, but this one hit home with me. Like most bloggers, I’m always looking for a larger audience, and unfortunately, that means I need to learn search engine optimization rules, tips, and tricks. So when I was given the opportunity to review Wordze.com, I was eager to review it after taking a first peek. If you don’t believe me, scroll down. I think I got a little carried away, but it was easy to do because Wordze offers so many tools to help you improve your search engine ranking with keywords, ultimately resulting in more income for your blog or web site. In any case, I should start with a few definitions of terms used in this review:

- Count : This is the estimate number of searches for a keyword. (The Keyword Search, Expander, Importer, and Dig tool are all based on 30 days, while the Keyword History tool is based on daily traffic.)
- Estimated traffic : This is an estimate of search traffic over 30 days if you get in the top three positions on google, yahoo, etc.
- KEI (Keyword Effective Index) : Summarizes your competition in a number the higher, the better.

Wordze provided me with an account at http://www.wordze.com to play with and I have to admit, after watching a couple screencasts, I was already liking it and eager to dive in and play with it. One of the more interesting tools offered is the Digger. This tool allows you to “dig” through the search engines and find out what keywords some of the top sites are using, based on an initial keyword or phrase you provide. Sounds good. Of course, I entered “technology” and braced myself to watch a “processing” animation for ten minutes. This is where some forethought and elegant design shows up. Instead of an animation and a wait, I got this message: “Your dig has been started and you will find the results in your download manager when it’s done!”. We’ll come back to the download manager and the digg tool in a few minutes.

Guessing that a dig might take a while to complete, I headed back to the members menu and right into the core of Wordze’s business, the Keyword Research Tool. Again, searching for “technology”, 10,000 results are delivered to me within less than a second. I imagine 10,000 is a limit imposed upon my test account, but it should be more than plenty for me to see what this service has to offer. Having watched the screencasts, I started clicking, refining, and narrowing my list down to something more manageable. The first phrase on my list is “technology ps camera”. I turned on all the filters, and four seconds later, I had a new list of 10,000 words. I added “geek” to my search terms and found myself with no results. Switching my search style from Exact Match (the default) to Any Match opened me back up to 10,000 results again. Interestingly, when I made “technology” optional and “geek” required (“technology +geek”) I was able to narrow down to 362 phrases, but there’s a lot of competition. This tool is probably more useful for other industries (or perhaps if I experimented with other keywords), but I’m anxious to get back to those dig results.

I headed back to my download manager and found that my dig for “technology” had completed to the tune of 10,344 keywords and phrases. The download manager lets me know that I have many options to start using my new data. I can download it as an Excel or text file, with or without KEI and with or without the count, or I can view it online. Optionally, I can delete the result if I made a typo or something. It’s not much to look at until you use the another tool to manipulate and narrow the results to your liking.

I had over 10,000 results for my dig on “technology”, so I definitely needed to trim that down. I played around with this tool until I was able to save 134 keywords related to technology into my project.

Keyword density is also a big concern when you’re trying to optimize for the search engines. I pulled up Wordze‘s keyword density tool, which allows you to see the keyword desnisty for various keywords on a given site or find related keywords for a given site. I tried it out on JoeTech.com and found some funny results. Namely my links to Stumble, Digg, Reddit and deli.cio.us showed up with pretty decent density because they’re found on every post. If you ignore those and click on a valid keyword that ranks high for your site, you get a list of suggested related keywords and phrases, which is a good way to re-evaluate your strategy for keyword density.

One great tool that I nearly overlooked was the typo search. At first, I figured it sould be like the rest, but it offered up some good matches. For example, I entered “search engine optimization” and one of the results was “earch engine optimization” with a KEI of over 8,000. I’m still learning, but I’m pretty sure that means that if I had an SEO blog, I could get some pretty cheap (per click) traffic for it from AdWords and would likely want that phrase in my keywords list to increase my chance at showing up as one of the top 3 links when someone accidentally searches for that phrase. I searched again for “technology” and found “technologu” with a KEI of 2,637.5 and finally, I tried a very profitable phrase, “web hosting” and netted “wweb hosting” with over 5,000 KEI. Already, I’m imagining more uses for Wordze, and I’m adding “technologu” to my keywords list for kicks.

Finally, I tried out the keyword trends tool. This is a great way to get a quick snapshot of the search trends for a specific keyword or phrase. You may not notice anything that seems too useful when you enter a keyword or phrase that has steady public interest, but get creative and you’ll see how useful it is. For example, I typed in “blackwater” (prominent in world news this past month) and below is a partial image of the results. You can clearly see that this became big news around this time last month. Anyone who knew how this would hit and blogged about the topic probably saw some new traffic coming in because of it. A way I might use this is to watch for items of importance in the technology industry that I think created a buzz yesterday, check with this tool, and blog about items that seem to be gaining search momentum.

Some other tools are pretty self-explanitory, so I didn’t dive in too much. These include an import tool to import lots of keywords to search on, a keyword thesaurus, the screencasts I mentioned above, keyword market competition (which looks pretty useful), and the affiliate program.