One of my favorite keyword tools is the Google AdWords keyword tool that lets an advertiser spider one’s site. This functionality is useful in finding high quality score keywords, understanding what Google thinks a page is about, etc.

Yahoo Panama keyword tool now has similar functionality.

In the Yahoo Search Marketing keyword tool, one has several options:

• The typical ‘find related keywords’ 
• Look for words from a particular URL
• When searching for keywords, one can specify which words those phrases must contain
• When searching for keywords, specify which words must not be included

One must input three keywords that Yahoo will use as it’s ‘seed’ keywords. In other words, these are keywords that you can find related keywords to, or if you are using site spidering (find keywords from a particular URL) it helps Yahoo to narrow down what it finds on your site.

However; what if you want Yahoo to spider your webpage and bring back results regardless of what you wish to filter by?

It’s easy – use blank spaces as a keyword.

Essentially, Yahoo’s only verification is that a character has been entered. It doesn’t care about the spelling, that it’s a space, etc – they just care something was entered.

Below is a screenshot of the input functions.

I inputted my Free AdWords Keyword research ebook (which I think will finally be update in the next couple of weeks) into the tool, and was presented with this information:

Now, because this is a blog and has recent articles, there are a lot of poor keyword choices such as ‘hotel Denver’ and ‘Chicago’. Therefore, I inputted the phrases ‘marketing’; ‘AdWords’; and ‘advertising’ to see what would be presented.

These seem a bit too general. So, what to do next?

Use the ‘refine feature’. This I do like quite a bit. You can tell Yahoo what words are relevant and what aren’t relevant and then the keyword tool will refine your results based upon your input.

Overall, Yahoo’s keyword tool is decent. It’s defiantly better research than their old interface tools. I still think Google’s is better at present; however, this is large strides for Yahoo and I can only hope to expect more of this in the future.

As Yahoo goes towards more quality score, this tool will be more useful in finding out what Yahoo thinks about your page. If you want to expand your keyword research, its also a good place for some expansion.

It is still a tool. The major effort first comes from brainpower.

Note: I’m currently sitting in a Yahoo seminar about Panama right now which is pretty good. I’ll post random useful notes later.