• BlogStorm , Monday, August 4, 2008 12:45 PM

Tired of plain old, phrase- and term-based keyword research? Why not include URLs in your list of target keyphrases? As Patrick Altoft notes, the trend of entering whole or partial URLs into the search bar (as opposed to the address bar) doesn't show any signs of stopping, so taking advantage of this searcher tendency could lead to a competitive advantage.

"Ranking highly for popular URL's can send a huge amount of traffic and is a great way to target your competitor's customers," Altoft says. "For example if you saw your competitor running a newspaper advert with a URL such as xxxxxxxx.com/offer at the end of the advert you can expect people to be searching for that URL on the major search engines."

Altoft suggests keeping an eye on competitor's offline promotions, as well as using Google's Keyword Tool and Labs to find URLs to draft. "Simply enter 'www' as your keyword and it comes up with a list of popular URLs which can be ordered and sorted as you wish," he says.

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