• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 11, 2010

Cutting time and cost will increasingly become important to online marketing and advertising as the industry matures, and companies will begin to see many more tools emerge aimed at automating processes. Fred Rassam, business development manager at business incubator The Triana Group, brought one such longtail generating keyword tool to my attention. Triana helps European companies grow in the U.S.

France-based Synomia, founded in 2000 as a search engine, has developed a patented semantic analysis technology and a suite of products based on the technology aimed at content analysis, smart navigation and search engine optimization (SEO). It relies on 10 years of research and computational linguistics to crawl a Web site and come up with relevant keywords in the content on the site.

Supporting the need to discover hundreds of new expressions from content, the tool crawls internal links, site indexes and landing pages attracting search queries to the longtail of keyword terms. The site index creates a network of links between the expressions, landing pages and tags to increase the PageRank of the site index.

Rassam says companies typically only perform link development for about 50 of the top keywords. The thinking that thousands of longtail keywords live within Web site content and never get exploited, though about 70% of the traffic comes from longtail keyword search terms drove the development of the tool.

Managing the tool through an administrative interface gives marketers insight into the terms people type into search engines to find the brand's site. The list of keywords that companies can append to the Web site with a goal to attract high-quality search engine traffic from natural search results to leverage content on the Web site. The company boasts supporting about 300 clients such as Dannon, Merck, Nestle, and Doctor Without Borders in the United Kingdom, France and Canada, but wants to take the tools into the U.S. market.

When I asked for companies with a similar type tool, Rassam mentioned Endeca, because both are based on natural language processing.

Sounds simple, but brands have found success extracting thousands of keywords, creating an index and appending it to the site, according to Rassam. It's a way to optimize the site with longtail keywords that, in turn, helps to rank better in search engine results. There are several payment options. One way is to not charge anything upfront and then pay 9 cents or 10 cents per unique visitor from the tool based on predetermined cap.