Here’s an article that shows you some new keyword research tools like Google’s wonder wheel and older tools like word tracker. Check out the article - http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/development/how-to-find-best-keywords-ideas/
Was checking my old emails today and found these 2 videos about social media that is pretty cool. One is from Google advising brands how they can leverage social media and another is social media explained in plain English.
Google’s Advice On How Brands Can Leverage Social Media
Social Media in Plain English
This post was inspired by revisiting some of the old tools I used in the past and I thought why not pay a visit to memory lane on some of the tools and sites that brought online marketing to where it is today. Do note – this is just a small list of random tools that came to my mind at the point of writing, so I know there would be others that I missed out.
Keyword Research: GoodKeyword tool, this is a free keyword tool where one can conduct keyword research. The data is pulled of overture, but since overture is pretty much not maintained I guess the tool wouldn’t be that useful.
Competitor Analysis: Alexa ranking at one point in time was the only place where we could openly get competitor stats for free. The toolbar helped tracked user behavior and how many people visit a particular site. However as the data is skewed towards individual who had installed the toolbar many had question the accuracy of the rankings.
Site Indexing: In the past when launching a new site it used to take about months to get the search engine spiders to find your site. One of the tools Google came up with to help them be aware of which sites are new would be the Add URL page. Found here – www.google.com/addurl.html. These days Google can index your site in hours, so no need to manually submit your site anymore.
Search Engine Rankings: DMoz.org the webs open source directory. It was known as a source of authority, getting listed here means you have a very powerful inbound link to your site. Ran by volunteers, the site was the crazy for many webmasters and SEO professionals. These days, it’s more like a forgotten site where having a link is good to have.
Link building is a very important portion when it comes to off page search engine optimization. To get rankings for your targeted terms, keyword rich anchor tags from similar themed or authoritative sites is the key. However link building is the hardest SEO activity to date, as the search engines are looking for natural links instead of 100s of useless links from spammer sites. In this article, I like to provide some simple steps that my team and myself use while conducting link building for our clients and own sites.
Step 1: Set your results set to return at least 30 to 50 results. This would help you be able to go through the top 30-50 sites in one go.
Step 2: Conduct a Google search for your target keyword terms.
Step 3: Visit the sites from top to bottom, take note of sites that are of quality and jot down their contact details.
Step 4: Start contacting the sites that you had identified earlier. Be sure to send personalize emails so that your emails stand out from all the spam that is out there.
This should help you find links that would be of value to your sites targeted keyword terms. The hit rate for doing something like is normally 1-5% but getting as many emails out to like minded webmasters is the key.
When you are conducting search engine ranking position reviews has anyone face such a problem, where your competitors are ranking higher with lesser backlinks even though your website is almost similar in size, structure, keywords and Pagerank? If this is you, don’t worry you aren’t alone. Many of us are facing this within our niche. If you are wondering why, we can’t absolutely pin point the cause, but we could try to intelligently turn the tables into our favor.
As a start, I would conduct a SEO review of your competitors and your own site to ensure that you have done all you could for the on page optimization before heading out to off page. But for the purpose of this topic, I would like to assume that all else are equal and only the quality of inbound links to both your competition and your sites are the deciding factor for higher search rankings.
So you will ask how can ensure that the quality of my inbound links are really of quality and they aren’t discounted from providing link juice. The straight answer is you cant sure, but you can use the following checklist to help you determine if the site does add value to link juice.
1 – Check if the site is indexed in Google, no point getting links from a banned site
2 – If the site is indexed, check when the last date of index occurred, the more recent the index it means it does have some value
3 – Does the page have a lot of outbound links, if it has a lot of links you might want to reconsider dropping your link on the page?
4 – Where does the outbound links go to, are the sites considered as good neighborhoods or bad neighborhoods? Again if its linking out to bad sites you might want to move on.
5 – Is the content on the page relevant or complementary to your page? No point getting a link on a page that is totally way out from your site’s topic as it doesn’t help much for SEO or attracting users to click on the link as well
6 – In the past, I would normally advise marketers to pay attention to the PR of the page. But its no hidden secret Google wants to remove PR, so focusing on PR should only be a nice to have instead of a deciding factor for dropping your links on the page.
This is my checklist that I use when I conduct link building, do you have others to add into the mix? Feel free to drop a note below or email us.
Here’s a common dilemma web marketers face, after spending some time and money your website is ready to go. However where is the traffic? You have already optimized your site with standard practise SEO checklist, but where is the traffic. Well if you just launched your site, you might need sometime for Google to index and rank your site before getting any kind of traffic. This wait could take awhile before reaching a huge critical mass where online marketers like yourself reach a breakeven point for your initial site’s investment.
Now as a marketer, you might want to try other means of traffic acquisition to increase the flow of traffic to your new site way before organic traffic kicks in. How you might ask? Let me share 3 methods I normally use for my own sites.
Method 1 – Buying Traffic
This is the fastest way to divert traffic to one’s site. However before jumping into this channel, you should set aside a budget and the maximum amount you would like to bid for per keyword. Failure to do so could potentially make you lose more than the benefits.
Platforms that I recommend for one to buy traffic would be Google Adwords, Yahoo Search/ Bing Search if your markets are targeted at the US. Facebook is also another up and coming platform to use.
These platforms all follow the same basic “Pay Per Click” model of charging advertisers for each click to their website.
Method 2 – Tapping into the Social Stream
These days, social networks and micro blogging platforms are the rage. Sites like facebook and twitter have huge communities of people which could be your potential traffic source. Therefore joining the social platforms and being involved in the conversation would help add another traffic channel to your mix.
One way to draw traffic from these sites to yours would be to find like minded people or your target audience and hang out around their space, either becoming fans or following them on their list. After getting them on your list, converse with them and start adding value to their hang out and they will come to your site in no time.
One of my favourite sites would be twitter as it is easy to join and finding my target audience is pretty simple.
Method 3 – Borrow Traffic
This method has a mixture of paid and free implementation. Let me explain the free implementation first. If you have friends with websites that already have traffic, you could ask them to help you out with maybe a promotional banner, a textlink or place a feature written by you on their site to help a friend out.
If you are in it alone, then you could try using article syndication services. These services allow you to syndicate your written articles to hundreds of webmasters who have similar sites or complementary websites to your business. What’s best these websites normally signed up to be alerted of new content so that they can place them on their site. Besides article networks, you could seek out sites with mailing lists and ask if they accept email endorsements where you provide content for their newsletter and they blast it out to their subscribers.
Now that you have 3 methods of generating short term traffic, here’s a tip on how not to let your efforts go to waste. Before running any traffic acquisition campaigns, make sure you have mechanism in place on your site to help capture all users that land on your site. So having an email capture or a call to action to get users to come back again is a good way of not letting your traffic acquisition go to waste as these users could become your repeat visitors.
I know this isnt a SEO topic however as I work on my clients and personal sites, I tend to seek or broaden my mind on how we can generate and get traffic with other marketing channels and means besides SEO or PPC. That’s why I thought it would be good to share these ideas with like minded marketers like yourself.
In this article, I like to cover promoting websites via the granddaddy of social media. What is it? Simple we call them Forums. Forums used to be the social platform where people congigate before sites like friendster, myspace or facebook. These forums are still in existence today and some have good traction that used correctly can help you increase traffic to your site and open up another traffic source. Besides being a traffic source, visitors on a forum can help provide free user reviews and feedback to help increase your site’s usability which helps increase stickness in the long run.
So how should one go about getting traffic from forums?
Step 1 – You have to search and research the forums that serve your niche or website industry. A simply way is to Google for forums that are of use to you. Try “[Your Niche] forums” or “intitle:[Your niche] forums or “[Your Niche] communities”.
Step 2 – Review the top 50-100 results and evaluate which forum sites should you join. Some tips on evaluating to see if the forum site is worth your while – check the lastest post, how recent are they. Are the content in the threads relevant, informative or are they just filled with spam. When was the lastest user registration, is it recent. For forums that are relevant in content and have recency, I would recommend them worth registering for.
Step 3 – Start the conversation, dont just drop your very first post with “Come visit my new site” Do yourself and the community a favour join in the conversation. As a tip your very first post should be at the introduce yourself section or answer a few threads that you are expert in. Do make sure your reply adds value and not put “nice comments”, “I like it”. If you like it, try to explain more about why you like it. By doing so, you wouldnt be seen as a spammer. For sites that allows things like that, you would be better off not posting in them.
Step 4 – Once you have a few posts in your bag, you can stir towards the section that best suits for you to ask questions or promote your site. Some tips would be like “I need your help with a new site that I am launching.”, “Looking for comments”, I have a site that I am launching which has the follow features, feedback would be appreciated”. You can also ask about your navigation, ask about the content, ask about the colours, or whatever else may be bugging you.
Step 5 – Review the comments provided and followup with the thread. Last use the feedback and work into your webiste, also do keep the thread alive as forums tend to push the most recent thread up to the top which is what people normally see first.
With these 5 steps, you should be able to get some forum traffic coming to your site for the initial launch. However don’t expect thousands of visitors from this method as it really is just one of the many other ways web marketers can use to generate traffic to their site. Remember at the end of the day it’s all about getting the ball rolling and anything you can do to proactively promote your web site has to be considered. So best foot forward and get exploring all those forums.
Keyword Elite 2.0 is the new product from Brad Callen, a person who has created some powerful software before this as well. Here are some of its features.
There is just a one time fee of $197 and no monthly fees to do your research. You can use it to search in all three major search engines Google, Yahoo & MSN. It shows you a huge list of profitable keywords. See different profitable Adwords campaigns and copy what they are doing and find JV partners online using the JV Diamond Miner
You can create your initial keyword list by adding long tail and short tail keywords using this program. After you have created a list you can filter out the keywords in all the different ways that are used. It will be possible for you to use Ask.com, Google Suggestion Tool, Meta Tags and Free Keywords to get keyword ideas.
With this program you can find out how competitive a specific keyword is in each of the paid “pay per click” search engines, such as, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing (MSN).
You don’t have to worry about creating your own marketing strategy, by using keyword elite 2.0 you can easily find profitable Adwords advertisers whose marketing strategy you can use.
Checkout Keyword Elite – Click here
You can see the Adwords advertisement history of a keyword for every website that has advertised with that keyword for at least in the past six months. You can also find out how good a specific keyword is in getting you a higher ranking in the 3 big search engines.
The software also allows you to see what percentage of people searching on your keyword are just surfers or could be potential buyers.
Another important thing that this software will show you are the “on page” optimization elements for each of the top 10 ranked websites for the keywords you input, giving you information on how you should be optimizing your own web page to make it to the top 10.
You will be able to see different specific keywords/website combinations in Adwords over a period of time. This will give you information about which keywords are used repeatedly by people.
This JV Diamond program enables you to find websites that are building an email list. You can partner with these websites because these can send some targeted traffic to your website by sending e-mails to their list.
With this program you will able to find CPA offers to match the niche that you’ve found to be profitable niche to pursue. You can search through 13,000 CPA and affiliate offers to find the best one.
When you use the software for the first time you get confused in trying to work out what each tool can do, but the amount of information it provides is huge.
Keyword Elite 2.0 can be used by both new and experienced marketers to get to identify profitable key words and products. The software comes with a 30 day search marketing elite membership and 8 weeks money back guarantee.
Click here to check out Keyword Elite Today!
Read an article coverage on Webpronews.com about YouTube testing a new video rental feature on its site. Publishers can know have an option to either rent their clips or make them ad supported. What this new rental feature allows publishers to do is set rental pricing, duration and IP target geographies in terms of who can view and who cant view. These features are good for YouTube in terms of supplier relations and monetization. Now Youtube has a revenue model that suppliers are familiar with and are more willing to place their content on.
Now the only thing I wonder is if this catches on, would it kill companies like Netflix who predominately does dvd rentals by mail, after all YouTube has the support from Google infrastructure to bring cost down. I guess only time will tell.
(FYI – netflix is focusing on web streaming rentals as well)
Would if when this video rental feature comes out of testing would Google have a platform to allow independent film makers rent their video wares as well, it could open up a whole new stream of content boom in YouTube.
Photo Credits – Yuya Tamai
Matt Cutts just released a powerpoint presentation for Wordcamp May 30, 2009. The presentation covers aspects of SEO and its a good read as it comes from Google. The doc covers blogging, what software to use, how to setup the wordpress, what is pagerank and many more.
Check it out – http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=ddvhbrqf_126gc346qdh&skipauth=true