Best ways to find relevant keywords and keyword traffic when building an organic SEO campaign?
I am looking for any tools and tricks which may help me put together a solid SEO campaign – in the past, I used Overture’s bid tool (now extinct) to help expose keywords and traffic trends. Google’s Adwords tool is OK, but it does not report much for the niche terms which relate to my site, and its "suggested terms" are far too general to target.
Are there any tools which have worked well for you?
Any strategies you might recommend?
Sorry if I came across as too general – I am most interested in others’ suggestions for tracking keyword traffic and keyword suggestion as it applies to multiple-word queries.
For example, does "green and blue widgets with dongles" get more traffic than "purple and blue widgets with dongles"?
Hi
the most effective strategy is to know your market, the sector your clients work in and the jargon they use – this will influence your keyword strategy. another method I have used is to look at competitor sites and explore their keyword strategy!!
SEO of this nature should be no different from any other marketing strategy and this is about knowing your customers and their requirements.
good luck.
Originally posted 2010-01-29 22:37:58.
Internet marketing: The Beginning of the End of Search Engine Optimization
One of the constants in life is change, and this is especially true in this Internet age. It is either you evolve, or you dissolve; nothing stays the same.
As far as Internet marketing is concerned, times have really changed. Before, online marketers were obsessed with learning any tips and tricks available in order to get favorable listings in the search engines. But now, the trend seems to veer towards unconventional Internet marketing strategies.
Instead of being trapped in the complicated mechanics of search engine optimization (SEO), the wave is now flowing towards the more accurate and humanized features of user-driven indexing systems.
Right now, you may be thinking: Huh? What do you mean ‘humanized’? Worry not. Let us now analyze how Internet marketing has evolved.
Search engine optimization – the beginning of the end
Search engine optimization, or SEO, has dominated the Internet marketing industry for many years. It is widely accepted that more than 80% of your website traffic will come from the search engines. Although not many online marketers have come forward to back that claim, getting a good position in the search engines is still the way to go.
But search engines are not 100% perfect. They rely on robotic spiders to crawl through every single webpage on the Internet. These spiders will then index the pages according to the algorithms prescribed by the respective search engines.
There is nothing wrong with the process here. But the problem is that everything is automated. The robotic spiders cannot think like a human, therefore everything is either black or white to them; there is nothing in between. They might even list your web pages in the wrong category without your knowledge!
Humanized features of user-driven indexing system
User-driven indexing systems are totally different from the algorithms of SEO. Since the features are humanized, the users are able to classify websites under appropriate categories, or more commonly known as tags. This feature is so much more reliable than the approach of the spiders, because these websites are seen by actual human eyes.
Exit SEO, enter social bookmarking websites
Social bookmarking websites are the most popular kinds of user-driven indexing systems. There are a lot of these websites available on the Internet today, and they are very widely visited websites, if their Alexa rankings are anything to go by. Some of the more popular and hot Social bookmarking websites are Technorati, Furl and Feedmarker.
So what exactly are social bookmarking websites?
While surfing the net, when you see a website that catches your attention, you will add the URL of that site to your favorites under your ‘My Favorites’ folder on your web browser. With a click of your mouse, the URL is saved on your hard drive. This whole process is known as bookmarking.
Social bookmarking websites work pretty much the same way. But instead of saving a URL on your hard drive, you will be able to save it on a web server, under an appropriate tag. For example, if you come across an interesting dating website, you can save the website address under the tag ‘dating’.
Another interesting feature of social bookmarking websites is that you can share your list of ‘tagged’ websites with other users. If some of them are looking for dating websites, you can do your bit to help them by sharing your list with them. How cool is that?
How can Social Bookmarking benefit Internet marketers?
This exciting new technique can benefit fellow Internet marketing professionals in the following ways:
1. It will soon replace the search engines
This is a frightening prospect. Some experts are predicting that social bookmarking will soon replace the search engines as the information finding process of choice by most Internet users. The best way to take advantage of this growing phenomenon is to start using its features as early as today. Google and Yahoo!, you have been warned.
2. It can easily be manipulated
Social bookmarking is so much easier to manipulate. You have all the freedom in the world to place all your favorite websites in any desired tags without going through the sickening algorithms of the search engines.
3. The potential of tags
Tags are widely considered as the ‘keywords for the new Internet age’. They are now beginning to establish an interconnectivity that will soon cover many platforms and channels. If you want to dominate certain specific tags, then social bookmarking websites can be your launching platform.
Social bookmarking is destined to be the next big thing in Internet marketing. The current phenomenon that has taken the Internet by storm is blogging, and those who have taken early advantage are now reaping handsome rewards.
If you do not want to miss out on the next big thing, then now is the time for you to embark on the bookmarking adventure so that you are one step ahead of your competitors.
Wyatt Lee
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/internet-marketing-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-search-engine-optimization-65437.html
Tricks and Techniques in Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is shortly termed as SEO, which is measured to play a vital role in website promotion. It is a real fact that, optimizing a website is the best method to make your business to reach your targeted audience. All you need is a good technical knowledge with the awareness of simple basic HTML coding. Search Engine Optimization Campaign is the simple and powerful method to get an increased number of traffic towards your website. A good and effective optimization will obviously make your website to hit browsers search results.
It is quite usual that, internet browsers never have the habit of visiting page after pages to get their relevant search results. At the maximum, they visit a maximum of 5 to 7 pages while surfing the net. So, Search Engine Keyword Optimization gives a strong hand to make your website hit the search results of search engines. The simple equation is, “The higher your website ranks, the greater your site gets visited”. A powerful search engine optimization will make your website get visited by all the internet browsers and thereby draws a good number of traffic towards your website.
An excellent and best search engine optimization involves a complete gamut of optimizing techniques to make your website get visible in the search engines. Generally, search engine spiders crawl down every single web page of a website for indexing. So, make it a point that your website must always be designed and optimized search engine-friendly, so that the search engine spiders result a better positioning and ranking of your website.
Promote your website by means of all possible ways such as forum posting, blog posting, blog promotion, article writing and submission, social bookmarking, and many more. Are you really curious to know, how these techniques really work? Well, just read through to get a better understanding.
Participating in forum is certainly the best promotional technique, as it comprises and binds plenty of visitors online. Give precise information about your services and products to your network people, as draw their attention towards your website by placing a link back in the resource box.
Article marketing is ultimately ethical, as you give excellent chance for the visitors to read through your services better in detail. Moreover, rich and unique written content is the king of search engines and as a result it features your website with better search engine rankings.
Blog linking is undoubtedly impelling, because they bring potential business customers towards your website. Blog promoting will make you to accomplish your business goals, as most customers refer blogs for particular business updates.
There are different keyword optimization tutorial that helps you to understand the significant deals that comes under SEO. Be vigilant and watchful, so that you will be alarmed with all the latest cutting edge deals to make your online business even more powerful.
Rahul
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/tricks-and-techniques-in-search-engine-optimization-681835.html
Your Site Benefits From the Search Engine Optimization
Internet has opened many ways of earning income and search engine optimization has become very important for getting the fullest benefits from the internet services. Maximizing the facility for search engines are the main aim for Seo. Everybody knows that Google is a very popular search engine. Yahoo is also preferred by many. Different search engines want to top the list of the ranks for providing more services to the people. In order to make the Seo and search engine optimization successful you need to remember some tricks that will be of much advantage for you. Investments of cash assets are very important. So invest the amount that are sufficient and will yield good result. A professional help is very important. Even though you know a great deal about the Seo and search engine optimization you can learn even more from the competent, trained and experienced professionals. Along with their help you can think how to develop the search engine optimization plan that will suit best for your need. Do research work which is very significant when you are thinking of Seo and you must study the various aspects that affect Seo development. The trends and plans for the websites don’t remain the same so you have to remain aware of the various changes that take place. The most excellent of plans even require change with the passing of time. You must properly teach yourself so that you can produce valuable programs for your website. You have to keep on learning the different developments in the field to become more successful. Search engine optimization mainly involves two designs which are “on-page Seo” as well as “off-page Seo”. “On-Page Seo” deals with the work that involves the web page itself. But this type of Seo is not very vital. This type of Seo deals with the basic and fundamental levels of search engine optimization. And the expression “off-page Seo” deals with the factors other than the web page itself. In off-page search engine optimization the work normally involves the establishment of the links which are enhanced on behalf of the keyword axiom as well as the keyword for the particular web page. So those who are developing a web site or already have one site and wish to make more popular generally think about reaching the top of the list for search of sites. The main secret is the hiring of learned professionals and taking enough time to understand the whole functioning of the Seo. The website does not reach the top of the list overnight but rather does take sufficient time to be successful.
jamiehanson
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/your-site-benefits-from-the-search-engine-optimization-696416.html
10 Ways to Kill Your Site
This post covers 10 common mistakes people make with their technical SEO.
1. Brand new website, completely flash
I had the privilege of explaining to someone recently that the 5k he had just spend on his new website recently was not money well spent. The whole site was one flash file, and had no text content, making it invisible to search engines. The sad part was that the site didn’t need flash – animation effects were limited to mouseovers on buttons, easily replicated using javascript.
Just because Google says they can read content within swf files doesn’t make it a good idea. If search engine rankings are important, make sure there is plenty of text content for spiders to find.
2. Forgetting to redirect old pages
When you replace that old Frontpage site with your swanky new CMS and completely change all URLs on the site, make sure you setup 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages.
If you don’t, all the links you have naturally been accumulating will now be broken, meaning Google is likely to ignore them for ranking purposes, and webmasters are likely to remove them from their sites.
Anyone who has gone through the process of building links naturally will know how precious these are, so 301ing the old pages to the new pages is critical.
It takes only a few minutes to do, pay someone to do it if you have to.
3. A robots.txt blunder
Putting a bad line into your robots.txt file is a pretty fast way to axe your site from the search results. If you don’t know what robots.txt is all about, then perhaps it’s worth thinking twice about playing with it?
Google has a tool for checking your robots file, so take the time that any changes are done correctly.
4.No H1 headings
I hate this one so much. Who really knows if the H1 is weighted heavily or not in Google’s algorithm, but my gut feeling is that it is important. I so often see websites where the major heading on the page is not a H1, it’s a styled paragraph or simply a div.
CSS can be used to redefine the styles for existing page elements, such as H1 headings, so it just makes sense to use a H1 tag for your major heading.
5. Sitewide meta description
It’s really easy to stick a meta description into your website template and see it used on every page of your site. Unfortunately, this can axe your site from the search results pretty quickly. If you have a sitewide meta description, then all it takes is a more powerful site to steal your meta description and suddenly they will be ranking instead of you (your site will be lost in the duplicate content filter).
Take the time to use a unique meta description on every page, or leave it blank.
6. Splash pages
The splash page or flash intro page is essentially an empty page (as far as the search engines see it) with a single link to your homepage.
What this means is that your navigation structure is now one level deeper. The page that would have beena PR5 is now a PR4, and Google visits your “homepage” less often (because the splash page is actually the homepage).
If you really really must use a flash intro or splash page, do the right thing and add a little paragraph of text at the bottom for the search engines to see. Also place links to your other top-level pages, not just the homepage, so the link juice spreads around the site properly.
7. 404s with content
I have seen some interesting ways of rewriting URLs, and my favourite had to be the 404 method. Basically, every page returns a 404 header, and a custom 404 handler (a php script) was used to deliver the page content to the browser.
Unfortunately, Google ignores the content and just sees the 404 error, so this site had no show of appearing in search results.
This is uncommon, but it’s worth using a little extra caution when delivering a 404 to the browser. 404s can spell bad things for your site when you get them wrong.
8. Ads, ads, ads
While not strictly a technical issue, nothing screams “don’t link to me” like an affiliate thin content site crawling with Adsense. If you expect to do well in the search engines, you need links, and it’s not worth losing links for the sake of a few dollars a month in Adsense revenue.
Advertising is something that should be added to an established website with established traffic, it’s unlikely you will get rich from advertising revenue on a brand new domain with no links.
9. Black hat that doesn’t need to be black hat
Har har, I’ll write this paragraph of really crap content with some useful keywords and make it white on a white background so people can’t see it.
Thing is, it doesn’t take much more effort to create good content with useful keywords in it and make it visible to your users. People spend time creating dodgy doorway pages when they should be optimising their content pages. Adding crap hidden content to the homepage when they should be writing good sales copy.
Black hat tricks like this are an invitation for other webmasters to burn you (Google never finds out on it’s own). Before going ahead with a black hat scheme, look for white or grey hat alternatives first.
10. Multiple domains and dupe content
I once brought a site from top 60 rankings to top 20 by doing nothing other than removing 14 out of 15 versions of their homepage.
They had…
www.domain.co.nz
domain.co.nz
www.domain.co.nz/default.asp
www.domain.co.nz/default.asp?pageid=1
www.domain.com
www.otherdomain.co.nz
otherdomain.co.nz
secure.domain.co.nz
secure.domain.co.nz/default.asp
etc.
Each version of the homepage had a certain amount of link authority, and the version with the most power showed up in the search results. I redirected all that link power into the main page, and all of a sudden, the rankings jumped, having changed nothing else.
Is your site wasting precious link juice on duplicate versions of yoyur homepage?
Other
There are plenty of other ways to kill your website in the search engines, and I have deliberately skipped some of the obvious and less interesting ones. SEO is often less about doing things well and more about not doing things badly – Intresting SEO Articles
wayne
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/10-ways-to-kill-your-site-716889.html
Search Engines and Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a “Black Hat” technique. Cloaked pages, keyword stuffing and hidden text are just some of the techniques tried by many webmasters which are unapproved methods by search engines. One of the most widely used techniques is what is called keyword stuffing; this is defined by repeating the same word again and again in the Meta tags or main the main body of the site.
Sometimes SEO experts go too far in their desire to push their clients’ sites to top positions and resort to questionable practices, like keyword stuffing. Black hat SEO involves old tricks and some new ones that have become widely used in search engine optimization. If you choose to hire an SEO company that is trying to stuff extra keyword phrases into this tag, I would be concerned about this because in the long run this type of SEO technique will not hold up. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and key phrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries. SEO tactics are not always honest this has spawned the negative aspects of SEO. Keyword spamming or stuffing is just the tip of the iceberg.
Some firms use methods called invisible keyword stuffing. What is invisible text? Invisible text is text with the same text color as the background of the pages. There are many ways to make text invisible. One of the ways of using invisible keywords is by making the keywords the same color as the page; if the page is white you make the text white. The text or a link is invisible to the naked eye on a web page, but are seen by spiders. Since the invisible text is read by the search engine crawlers the text or keywords are picked up and indexed. Invisible keyword-rich text in page code is old news to search-engine spiders, they are more advanced and can recognize when a page is using keyword stuffing. The other types of black techniques are content spamming which includes meta tag stuffing and implementing gateway or doorway pages.
Some older content on websites could be considered keyword stuffing due to overuse of the keywords. Yet a website’s content still plays an enormous and fairly direct role in search engine ranking. Add new content or webpage’s daily or weekly to increase a search engine spider’s frequency. Web content keyword optimization is one of the most important step in SEO. Make sure your site is full of unique, high-quality content. Make sure your meta keywords and meta description tags reflect the true meaning of your site and is not simply hidden keyword stuffing. When search engines index the content, the content will be analyzed by the search engine, it could be interpreted as an unapproved technique which will then get your pages de-indexed. Content is the most important part of optimizing your web site for search engines. Try to write the content naturally for the readers rather than the search engines. Good content brings return visitors who may eventually link to your site.
If you are going to promote your website you should stick to white hat SEO methods and recognizing that the black hat SEO tactics which are quick and dirty techniques will not help your business in the long run.
David Marc Fishman
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/search-engines-and-keyword-stuffing-73431.html
