CLUSTY…THE FREE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOL

Blue-collared Clusty works harder than most search engines. (You gotta love that logo.) Venturing into brave territory beyond simple search, Vivisimo's Clusty is a flexible metasearch engine, combining searches of other search engines' SERPS with a kicker: keyword concept-clustered results. "Too many search results? Clusty it!" That's the Clusty motto.

Clustering has the unique — and seemingly paradoxical — effect of both expanding and refining search results. Clusty's Clustering Engine retrieves traditional natural SERPs, then intelligently sifts those SERPs into subtopics, which are aggregated from the words and phrases contained in the results or documents themselves. These thematically related results are presented alongside the natural SERPs in folders lableled with keyword phrases. And while Clusty doesn't present every possible cluster, it does slice a chunk of relatively broad results into suprisingly useful sub categories. Clicking the plus sign beside a cluster displays a drill-down of that cluster's subclusters.

Clusty does some of your thinking for you. You don't have to guess exact keyword phrases to find that one needle in the haystack. A quick trek through Clusty's clusters and subclusters will often save you the effort of having to think of subcategories in order to narrow your search.

In addition to retrieving traditional organic SERPs, Clusty's clean, simple tabbed interface offers categorical searches of news, government and shopping sites, jobs and image databases, yellow pages directories, blogs, Wikipedia and Web+. You can even personalize your own tab. Choose your own news sites, shopping sites and search engines (currently Open Directory, Ask, MSN, Gigablast, Looksmart and Wisenut). In addition to clustering by topic, results can also be clustered by sources: Ask, Gigablast, MSN, or Sponsored Listings (currently provided by Ask.com), or by top-level domain (.gov., .com, .org, etc.).

And now we come to the sleuthful side of Clusty…

Clusty As A Keyword Spy Tool

Use Clusty to spy on your competition. Let's say you're strategizing a pay-per-click ad campaign…

Enter a keyword phrase that you're considering. When Clusty returns your clusters, click the Sources tab and select Sponsored Listings and you can view your competitors' sites sorterd into keyword clusters. Not only can you quickly pinpoint which keywords are in circulation, you'll know who's using them. Much more efficient than manually entering keyword phrases one-by-one into search engines and scanning, bleary-eyed, SERP after SERP to see who pops up.

Now, since Clusty is currently partnered exclusively with Ask.com's pay-per-click ad network, this exercise will only tell you whether your competitors are running PPC ad campaigns on Ask.com. That's the downside. But advertisers often run campaigns simultaneously across various PPC networks, so knowing what the competition is up to on Ask.com may well tell you what they're doing on the other PPC networks. It will certainly reveal whether or not they're running ad campaigns on Ask.com.

Clusty As An SEO Tool

Use Clusty to optimize your website content. Clusty can help you ferret out those valuable niche keyword phrases that are often hard to identify, especially if you're not using advanced keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker. Clusty can be particularly useful in identifying those long-tail keyword phrases that, as we all know, generate laser-targeted, higher-converting traffic. And you can use Clusty to strengthen your keyword portfolio in pay-per-click campaigns. Often intriguing themes will emerge amongst your clusters and suggest the very unique advertising slant you've been looking for.

Let's say you're about to launch a new website devoted to all things wedding. You want to both optimize your site for search engines, as well as run a PPC campaign to promote your new site. Enter a broad search query below such as, well…wedding, and Clusty returns clusters for Wedding Favors (45), Photography (51), Wedding Planning (3) and many more.

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Get the picture? Clustering is a powerful brainstorming technique. Popular word tools such as Visual Thesaurus, for example, have long been used to help define brands and add creative spark to advertising copy.

Does Clusty offer the sophistication and power of keyword research tools such as Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker? No. Not yet. But hey, it's free. And kind of fun.

Is Clusty A Contender?

The major search engines, in their quest to win the superlative Most Relevant, are ever scrambling for new ways to provide value-added SERPs. If Clusty's SERPs included the vast Google results database, Clusy would win Best All-Around today. But Clusty's partnership with Ask.com might suggest the potential, long-term, to upset the apple carts of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

For searchers, search engine marketers and pay-per-click advertisers alike, Clusty does offer a few advantages over search market dominator Google. Clusty's results tend to be less spammy, and aren't subject to Google's link popularity ranking algorithms.

See Related Story: The Cloudy Side of Clusty

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES: Visual Thesaurus: Writing the Natural Way. (Paperback) Learn the technique of creative clustering.