Product: Keyword Niche Power
Platform: Windows only
Retail Price: $97
Fair Price: $5 (on sale here at that price)
Rating: 1/10

These days, I don’t expect everything I buy to come with a manual, but even a simple “README” file is nice to have. When I purchased Keyword Niche Power (KNP), I ran the install and then started the program and I must admit I had no real clue what to do next, which is unusual for a software developer like myself. I played with the tabs a bit, but nothing was really obvious, until I noticed that buried within the ZIP file was another ZIP file called “KNPDemo.zip”. When I extracted it I discovered a web page with a Flash video demonstrating how to use the program. Well, rather than explain it to you myself, just watch the video yourself (opens in a new window). The video’s just over 6 minutes long.

Once I understood how you were supposed to use the tool, I immediately ran it on my personal site to see what keywords it would find. Here the first problem presented itself: KNP only accepts URLs that start with “www.”, which means I couldn’t use it on my pet fence guide site, which is not accessible using a “www.” form. Oops.

The second problem was less evident: when I entered www.EricGiguere.com, it found only one link on the page. When I entered www.ericgiguere.com, however, it was able to spider 10 pages. Nevermind that it missed a whole pile of internal pages (I had set the search depth to 10), but treating EricGiguere.com and ericgiguere.com differently is inexcusable.

I then got it to extract keywords from the pages it did find. This took a while, because I think it got confused by my Amazon order page that automatically redirected you to Amazon.com and added a copy of my AdSense book to your Amazon shopping cart. Oops.

After adjusting things, the final list of keywords it came up with was less than impressive, especially since there were repeated URLs in the list. Yeesh.

Maybe the keyword density tab would redeem the product. Again I entered www.ericgiguere.com (lowercase only, of course), only to be presented with this lovely message:

Oops again. So much for analyzing the keyword density of my page. But that’s OK, there’s a much better (and free) online keyword density analyzer available here.

It looked pretty hopefully for KNP at this point, but I decided to try the last feature, the keyword lookup feature. The user interface was even less obvious for this one, so I’m glad I had that video to guide me. Basically create a list of keywords in a text file and then run it from the “Search Specific Keywords” tab. The text file normally comes from the keyword extraction process we tried earlier, so I went back and redid an extraction and saved the results to disk. I then ran the search.

Now, the programmer who wrote this stuff is very lazy, because KNP doesn’t prompt you for a directory to use. It just saves things in a “Keywords” directory wherever you installed the application. Lazy, lazy.

What the “Search Specific Keywords” function does is take each keyword in the text file and run it through Yahoo!’s keyword suggestion tool, storing the results for each keyword in separate files in the “Keywords” directory.

Of course, the Yahoo! suggestion tool is actually free to use, so the only benefit to this is making it easier to scrape the results for tens or hundreds of keywords, saving them either as text or Excel files.

And that’s why I think this product is only worth $5, not the $97 it’s advertised at. If you’re a programmer you could probably write yourself a quick app to scrape the keywords in short order, or find someone else’s script to do so, so really only non-programmers will find this function useful.

Bottom Line: If you want a tool to extract keyword suggestions from Yahoo!, Keyword Niche Power does an adequate job, though you’ll probably have to edit the input file manually to make sure it gets all the right keywords you want scraped. Otherwise, look elsewhere for better tools. If you really want it, you can buy it for $5 from me and I’ll go buy myself a latte for my efforts at reviewing it.

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