After releasing my VB Keyword Combiner yesterday I started doing some research to see if anyone else had written a similar tool. I was looking for a tool (either web-based or downloadable) that could combine multiple keyword lists together for use in Adwords or any other PPC advertising program. I wasn't expecting too many results, but to my surprise I found quite a number of them in searches for "keyword combiner" and "keyword combination".

Since the majority of the results I found were web-based tools, I decided to make a web-based version of my own. My Adwords Keyword Combiner is a web-based tool that allows you to enter a list of base keywords, then optionally a list of prefix and suffix keywords and it will generate a new list that contains all possible combinations of the 3 keyword lists.

But how can this be useful? Here's an example. Let's say you owned a website that sold shoes and you wanted to use Adwords to advertise your site. Rather than bidding on a broad serch term like "shoes", you would more than likely bid on a more descriptive search term such as "nike shoes" or "reebok shoes". To make it even better you might even bid on keyphrases containing individual shoe sizes, such as "nike shoes size 10" or "reebok shoes size 11" that bring users to individual product pages with those sizes pre-selected. But what if you had 100 different brands of shoes available on your site and each shoe came in 6 different sizes. That's 600 different possible keyword combinations. On top of that, what if you wanted to bid on the keyword "shoe" and "shoes", that's now 1200 different possible combinations. It would be rather tedious writing out all those keyword variations by hand so that's why I wrote this tool. You simply give it a base word such as "shoes", then tell it which words you want to add before that word, such as "nike" and "reebok", then tell it which words you want to add after that word, such as "size 10" and "size 11". Then it will generate all the different possible combinations that can be made from those words.

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

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As I was organizing some of my old code, here's an interesting program I came across that I wrote back in June of 2005 called "Keyword Combiner", which I wrote just one day after completing a similar program, Word Combination Maker. Instead of re-ordering words, this program allows you to add a series of words before and after a given word to make a list of new words. In the zip file below you'll find both the Visual Basic source code and the program itself. Feedback and comments are welcome. If you're looking for a web-based version of this, check out my Adwords Keyword Combiner. Enjoy!

Download keyword_combiner.zip (June 07, 2005)

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Here's the source code to a Visual Basic project I originally wrote on June 06, 2005 called "Word Combination Maker". This is somewhat similar to my Word Combiner program. This program has to do with string permutations (or rather the permutations of words). It takes a series of words and it can tell you all the different possible ways those words can be re-arranged. Here's an example, let's say I type "A B C". This is composed of 3 individual words (A, B, and C). This can be arranged 6 different ways: "ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA". Well that's easy to understand but what about for 4 words, or 5 words? There's a lot more combinations as the number of words grow (it grows exponentially in fact). It can get pretty complicated by hand, so that's why I wrote this program. It would probably be most useful for people advertising on PPC advertising programs like Google Adwords because it allows you to pick out certain keywords and phrases that you can bid on "exactly". All the different ways of combining a series of words can be found with this program. Feedback and comments are welcome.

Download word_combination_maker.zip (June 06, 2005)

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