Wordtracker and other keyword tools are helpful in a general sense, but make sure to take the data with a a great big bag of salt. Check out the results for the word “Student” v.s. the Google suggestions for the word. It is amazing how obviously off the Wordtracker results are.

Wordtracker:

Google

I’m headed to Las Vegas next weekend and was doing some research today on restaurants. I googled “aureole las vegas” which is a well regarded restaurant in the Mandalay Bay hotel. The first listing that came up (along with 4 site links) is for aureolelv.com .

After about 30 seconds on the site I couldn’t believe that a restaurant featuring a 42 foot high wine locker and an $85 prix fix menu would have such a crappy web site. It took me a minute to realize that it wasn’t the Aureole site, but it was a site designed to look like it. In the fine print at the bottom the site reads “This web site is owned and operated by Las Vegas Restaurants Online as a service to Aureole for facilitating online reservations.”

My hunch is that “as a service to Aureole” is probably not something Aureole has any say in.

The real Aureole website is ranked either #3 on Google (the Chef’s Website featuring the restaurant) or / and at #16 (on the Mandalay Bay site ) Both are clearly better sites that do a much better job of selling the restaurant and giving the right impression to potential customers.

I bet a lot of people go to that page every single day and get the same impression of the restaurant that I did, except very few of them will realize it wasn’t the real site.