At first, you may think the answer is trivial. After all, you understand your on-line enterprise better than anyone. You know what keywords you would use during the course of a search to find your business and others like it. The problem is that, unless you believe yourself to be a gifted psychic, you cannot really anticipate exactly what word or phrase an Internet surfer will type into the query field of a search engine in order to find your home page. If you did have access to this information, the results might (or might not) surprise you. Having realized this, you might resign yourself to the fact that you are actually playing a "guessing game" (albeit using educated guesses).

However, you can still exercise somewhat more control over this situation than many realize. To that end, I will let you in on a little procedure that I heard about a few months ago over the WWW grapevine. Most of us probably are aware that the popularity of certain keywords is not in doubt. For example, those on the Internet have access to resources like the most popular 200 keywords at Yahoo! (http://eyescream.com/yahootop200.html). There is much to be learned from lists like this, but they also leave much to be desired. For example, upon surveying lists such as this, one quickly sees that keywords such as "free", "mystery", "secrets", "naked", and "sex" are quite popular. At this stage you are likely to be disappointed, and I am not referring to the fact that the strong interest in these keywords establishes the distinctly unintellectual bent of the general public. What I am referring to is the utility of these lists. For example, what if you have an on-line business selling antiques, and you would like to ascertain the popularity of keywords such as "antiques", "memorabilia", and "collectables" (see also "collectibles")? How can one obtain information about the use of keywords like this? Obviously, lists such as the one found at Yahoo! will be of little to no use in this case.

One answer is to use the search engine known as Overture ( http://www.overture.com). Before I describe how this is done, I would like to clear up some possible confusion about Overture. You may have gotten your URL in Overture by paying money or it may have gone in for free. However, if it was a "freebie" your rank for popular phrases probably isn't very impressive. The reason for that can be found in how Overture operates. Your URL does not have a high rank in Overture by virtue of your being savvy about things like meta tags. Rather, the people with high rankings, who have paid to get in, achieve this lofty placement by bidding on keywords/phrases that they are interested in. Those of lower position who did not pay (i.e., the rest of Overture's database) are there because they registered through Inktomi, which Overture uses to supplement the entries of the paying customers. Thus, if you registered with HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com) you may also find your URL in Overture even though you did not pay (since HotBot is now powered by Inktomi). The point of all of this is as follows. If people want a good rank at Overture and are willing to pay by bidding on keywords, they must be informed as to the popularity or lack of popularity of their anticipated keywords.

Therefore, Overture supplies this, and that is where my procedure comes in:

(1) Proceed to overture.com (http://www.overture.com).
(2) Click on the navigation bar entitled "Get Listed on Overture".
(3) On the page which appears, click on "Client Tool Kit".
(4) On the page which now appears, click on "Search Term Suggestion List".
(5) A window will appear with a query field just below the phrase "Get some suggestions for".
(6) Type in your query (example: "antiques" or "memorabilia" or "collectables").
(7) Click on the circular button entitled "Find It".

Following this procedure for Overture during the month of September 1998 (usually the data which appears has been compiled from the previous month) one would have found for the searches done in August 1998:

"antiques": antiques (1946), antiques price guides (313), antiques roadshow (50), etc.
"memorabilia": football memorabilia (137), disney memorabilia (89), nasa memorabilia (89), etc.
"collectables": collectables (356), avon collectables (50), nascar racing collectables (44), etc.

Thus, one can obtain a listing for a keyword/phrase from the most popular query to the least popular, with the number in parenthesis representing how many times that particular keyword was inputted to Overture's search engine during August 2000.