Wordze’s Founder and Programmer Levi Reveals Future of Keyword Research

1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I’m the webmasters that hangs his hat at boogybonbon.com, and have been in the online business before it was called a business. As a webmaster I focus most of my time on subscription based services and paid advertising with a little bit of affiliate marketing and PPC programs like Adsense and YPN.

2. What is your specialty?
If I had to pick one specialty, I guess it would be the ability to understand how things work before someone told me how it worked.

3. How did you get started?

I was born when the 5.25-inch floppy disk becomes an industry standard, and two guys at Xerox invented the first worm program. LOL. Around the age of 7 a good friend of the family gave a computer to my mom and dad back in the 80’s. It was a TSR-80 COCO. Since my family was very poor, I could not buy a new computer or games for the computer that they gave us. Because of this, I sat down and just read the book that came with the computer, on how to write your own programs.

From there on out, it just spun out of control as I moved from developing funny programs in Basic, then turning to hacking into Bell Atlantic Public Data Networks and finally found my home with PHP and online network based applications in C, C#, and C++.

4. Any tips for inspiring webmasters?

Yes, forget spamming the search engines. You can find much more money with just a little thinking on how to produce a White Hat site that will add value to people’s lives and require less work.

5. You recently started a keyword service called WordZe - tell me more about it please.

WordZe is my new keyword research service that has opened with a lot of excitement and fanfare. WordZe’s service was designed to compete with some of the top keyword research services like WordTracker, and KeywordDiscovery. With WordZe we go beyond just providing basic keyword research services. We also give webmasters additional tools to help them really calculate the difficulty of keywords with tools like WordRank.Additionally we understand the need for more results then what others give. Because of this we return unlimited results and allow you to save as many projects as you would like. It’s really exciting to type in a keyword and see more then 250,000 keywords returned that are highly relevant to your needs, then be able to checkout the competition before you even select or download the keywords.

7. What is WordRank and what can you tell me about how WordRank gets its data?

WordZe’s WordRank tool helps webmasters judge a keyword or market difficulty in about 30 seconds or less. The tool collects its data from Google, MSN, and Yahoo, and a couple other data sources. Then it compiles domain PR, URL PR, Links Count, Age of Domains, as well as, possible authority sites, which includes InTitle and InUrl checking, and Edu and Gov Link count.Compare this to other keyword tools that only give you KEI, You’re talking about a slam dunk in keyword information and ranking. Some of the technology that is in the WordRank software is patent pending, so I’m unable to fully talk about it at this time, but it is one of the most popular features of WordZe’s services.

8. Any mentors that helped you to get to where you are today?
I remember when many websites would turn off at night to save money. SEO and making money online was not a hot topic back then, most were more into just making websites for fun. CPM did have a big spike at one time, but that was the start of the internet gold rush and crash of the 90’s.By the time sites like SEOCHAT.COM , and RandFish’s SEOMOZ.ORG hit the market. The days of mentoring were long gone for me. I had already forged my way with plenty of trial and error.

9. Can you show me a specific example of how WordZe works?

I think a good example of this is from the other day, when you and me used a home remodeling keyword. I showed that using InTitle, InUrl, Quoted search, non-quoted search, link count, domain age, and some other factors you could get a good idea of how hard it would be to rank for a keyword in around 35-45 minutes.After that, we turned around and ran the WordRank tool and in about 30 seconds you were jumping out of your chair with excitement when you saw how quick WordZe’s WordRank tool gave you all that data, and more, summed up in a nice format for you to judge for yourself.With the additional information like WordRank Index, you can quickly compare the WordRank data with KEI to get a more balanced idea of the competition for a keyword.

10. What other types of sites do you have?

Most of my sites are based on advertising, or subscription services, and cover just about any and all industries that I can find to buy and resell, or build my own online real estate to sell advertising on. I really like running advertising or subscription based ads. There is always a need for advertising space on any type of site.

11. Have you ever tried black hat? Which do you prefer black hat or white hat and why?

Yes, I spent somewhere around a year putting some serious time into trying my hand at Black Hat. In the end, I really felt White Hat sites are the best way to go. They last so much longer, add value to the internet, and they take less work in the long run than Black Hat does.

12. How many hours a day do you work?

This can go up and down. When I’m pushing out new sites or managing a new site and building others at the same time, I can work all the way from 5am till around 11pm, seven days a week. Once everything is out and there is less work to be done. I can work at my own speed. I’ll put in around 3-8 hours a day and only work around 1-3 hours a day on weekends.

14. What websites/blogs do you keep up with?

I’m not a hardcore reader of blogs, I get a good amount of info from webmasters that are already on my friend list. But the lists of blogs that I do keep on my feed reader are:

http://www.wolf-howl.com

http://www.lookwhatgmanfound.com

http://www.seoblackhat.com

http://www.seobook.com

http://www.seomoz.org

http://www.shoemoney.com

http://www.stefanjuhl.com

14. What do you see in the future of keyword research?

Keyword research has come a long ways since the first webmaster figured out they would be better off targeting keywords with more traffic. Nowadays webmasters are looking for more than keywords and traffic estimates.

Personally I think the future of keyword research will evolve around not only finding keyword popularity and trends, but will focus more on long and short term competition.

Keyword research tools of the future will quickly and effectively analyze a keyword market and show you what keywords are better for you to target, along with additional data to help you learn what it takes to reach your target audience in organic search results or PPC programs.

15. I have seen that you have been giving out a discount codes now and then. Do you think you could give one for the reader of my blog?

Sure.. The following link is good till Nov 29^th 2006, and it gives you access to all of WordZe’s tools for $25 dollars a month for the life time of your subscription, compared to the normal price of $45 a month.

http://www.wordze.com/subscribe.php?t=8af9809cc690ffcd7b2b63ab55f68a75

Edit: Discount Link Fixed.