SEO Blog

Wordtracker launched Wordtracker Academy this month. It’s basically a library of articles, e-books, case studies, and other helpful info on running your own keyword research.

Wordtracker sells keyword research software on a subscription basis, but the Academy is free. It covers some crucial topics for keyword research, including:

Long tail keywords. The “long tail of search” has been a hot topic lately–it goes along with the idea that marketing to a small but profitable niche can be more lucrative than going after larger markets. This article talks about the reasons why you should target longer key phrases–the more specific, the better.

Behavioral research. This goes beyond strong keyword research and delves into the mystery of what a customer actually wants when they’re searching for a certain word or phrase–and how to profit from behavioral trends among demographic groups.

When keywords fail. What happens when your perfectly-targeted keywords don’t bring the results you expect? What can go wrong, why you might be sabotaging your own sales efforts, and how to better convert visitors into buyers.

Choosing keywords before they’re popular. It would be great to optimize a page on your website for a phrase before it’s popular–it’s easy work and not much competition. Then when the keyword becomes popular, your website will be at the top of the SERPs for all that traffic. Nobody can know the future, unfortunately–but there are a few ways you can pick up on trends before they happen. This article discusses ways to determine which keywords may skyrocket in popularity–before they do.

Keywords in anchor text. How to optimize your anchor text; control the text of external links pointing to your site; the value of optimizing your title tags; and how to make your links more appealing to visitors.

Lots of SEO’s are enthusiastic about Wordtracker. But even if you don’t want to spring for the price, the Academy is worth a look. There are free keyword research tools over at SEOBook, Overture, Webmaster Toolkit, The Dowser, Google’s Keyword Sandbox, and KwMap.

Have you tried the Socializer plugin for wordpress yet? Remember what Socializer does? It is just a wordpress plugin for easy social bookmarking.

Well now I have found even a better one - OnlyWire.

Just like socializer, OnlyWire allows users to submit your articles and web pages to multiple social bookmarking engines at once. The main difference between these two tools are, OnlyWire is a lot better because it can automatically bookmark to 15 updated social bookmarking sites.

Here is the list of those 15 sites: Backflip, Blinklist, Blogmemes, del.icio.us, Feedmelinks, Furl, Linkroll, Looklater, ma.gnolia, Maple, Markaboo, Rawsugar, Shadows, Simpy and Wink.

How to Setup OnlyWire?

1. Register at OnlyWire for a FREE account.
2. Login and Submit the username and password of the social bookmarking sites.
3. Save your ID & password
4. Drag a Drop your OnlyWire bookmark link in your browser’s toolbar.
5. Now you can use the link to bookmark your site using OnlyWire.
6. Go to the page that you would like to bookmark, then click on the OnlyWire link on browser’s toolbar. Depending on your link type (standard or frame), it will open a new page or frame header.
7. Now enter your tags and comments, then submit.

All your previous tags will be recorded. Your page title and URL will automatically be inserted. You can also select your choice of social bookmark sites to be used. By default all of them will be preselected.

I think this is a must have tool for all bloggers in today’s blog network arena!

What Others are saying about Onlywire:

“OnlyWire is a refreshing change in the realm of bookmarking… …the most useful site of the bunch” - WIRED Blogs
“OnlyWire is great! It is one of my Must-Have blogging tools now!” - LiewCF
“Click to create an account or submit this page to OnlyWire. Yes! It is literally that simple” - Speaking & Marketing Tips
“Mother of all Bookmarks” - pacificIT
“Onlywire really beefs up product” - A Zulu In Silicon Valley

Another Similar Social Bookmarking Service

Multisubmit is a multiple social bookmarking service, just like Onlywire. Multisubmit can bookmark in netscape.com, reddit.com, digg.com, furl.net and many more.

There are some great free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tutorial videos available online by Gareth Davies of GSINC. All the videos are very small and precise with an average length of 2-4 minutes. It mainly covers the basics of SEO along with some lessons on Google searching.

The videos are presented and structured well by Gareth, which makes it easy for his viewers to understand the SEO basics without knowing any of the technical jargon.

The topics which are included in the free video pack are:

1. Importance of Title tags
2. The site command
3. Allintitle command
4. The tilde command
5. Google’s Cache
6. Google’s allinanchor command

If you are a pro in SEO then there is nothing much for you in those videos, but if you are new to SEO and eager to make your hands dirty then these videos can definitely help you to get some very useful information on SEO. All the videos are well structured, easy to understand and most importantly it’s going to take very little time of yours. You can watch or download the SEO tutorial videos from here.

If you want SEO tutorial videos for more advanced learners try the amazing Search Engine Optimization 2006 video by VTC. It’s a 7 hour video tutorial by James Gonzalez, who teaches the ins and outs of SEO with his 111 non stop lessons.

This is also a good time to tell you all about link baiting. It has became a very important part of a strong link building strategy so be sure to read Andy Hagan’s article on this topic.

v1.1 ILQ Firefox extension now works with Firefox v2.0
The web based ILQ Rating Tool is now available as a FireFox Extension. This tool give you the ILQ (Inbound Link Quality) rating of the current site showing in your FF browser.

v1.1 FireFox ILQ Rating Extension

CLICK HERE —–> Download FireFox ILQ Rating Extension

SEO Company has released a new ILQ Directory Checking Tool! You can use this tool to check your to see if you sites are in these top ILQ rated 40 free & paid directories.

My programmer just put up my ILQ Rating Tool. It is written in PHP and requires PHP5. The tool accesses the Yahoo API to parse the displayed information.

If you are using the searches per month from Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool to help you decide which keywords to target there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind.

Some people use Overture to rank the competitiveness of keywords they are targeting by the number of searches the words get monthly. When you use this tool you need to keep in mind that the monthly search numbers combine the plural and singular and in some cases combine the search numbers for combined words like “Website” and “Web site”.

If you like the higher numbers that Overture usually gives, you should use Wordtracker to show the numbers for the plural and singular forms and in some cases it is also important to do this for combined words.

Wordtracker gives you the same information but its number are usually lower. If you want to compare Overture and Wordtracker keyword research tool results, Shawn’s Keyword Suggestion Tool on Digital Points Free WebmasterTools page works great.

I just did this with a list of a clients top 10 keywords and it is kind of interested what shows up. You can see my lists at the bottom of this post.

Many Webmasters and Website owners are making their decisions on what keywords to target with out breaking out the plural and singular forms and checking to see if there breaking up the combined words like “Website” and “Web site”.

When you get inbound links with “flash template” in the anchor text those links will still give you some ranking juice for “flash templates” but not as much as if you put the plural form in the anchor text.

Overture tells you “flash template” was searched 15,856 times in the month of February but when you look at Wordtracker data you might be surprised to find 81% of the searches for the phrase were in the plural form.

Here you find out some important data that Overture didn’t tell you. Really the Overture searches were problem more like 12,939 for “Flash Templates” and 2,917 for “Flash Template”.

This means if you were targeting the singular form based on Overture data you were targeting the wrong key phrase.

Now I am not advocating targeting words just based on Overture or Wordtracker data. There are a number of other factors including convertibility and your currently ranking. What I am noting is don’t just use the Overture results.

The following are three lists that show the difference it makes when you use Wordtracker to break out the plural, singular and combined word forms.

The first list is the clients 10 keywords what was based off Overture data only. The second list shows what they look like after I broke out the plural, singular, and combined word forms with the help of Wordtracker. The third list is the new list of their 10 keywords.

Original top 10 list.
Keyword Overture
49195 - Build a Web Site
30935 - Web Site Template
23682 - Ecommerce Web Site Design
15856 - Flash Template
16749 - Free Web Site Template
8181 - Free Flash Template
18413 - Web site Builder
18413 - Website Builder
8542 - Free Web Site Builder
8915 - Build a Free Web Site

New list with web/site and plural taken into consideration.
Keyword Overture
24778 - Build a Web Site
24417 - Build a Website
15734 - Ecommerce Web Site Design
7948 - Ecommerce Website Design
12939 - Flash Templates
2917 - Flash Template
6551 - Web Site Templates
899 - Web Site Template
20924 - Website Templates
2561 - Website Template
7367 - Free Flash Templates
814 - Free Flash Template
6965 - Web Site Builder
6332 - Website Builder
5116 - Website Builders
8717 - Free Web Site Templates
3605 - Free Web Site Template
4427 - Free Website Template
1825 - Free Web Site Builder
377 - Free Web site Builders
3744 - Free Website Builder
2596 - Free Website Builder
5898 - Build a Free Web Site

New top 10 list with web/site and plural taken into consideration.
Keyword Overture
24778 - Build a Web Site
24417 - Build a Website
20924 - Website Templates
15734 - Ecommerce Web Site Design
12939 - Flash Templates
8717 - Free web Site Templates
7948 - Ecommerce Website Design
7367 - Free Flash Templates
6965 - Web Site Builder
6551 - Web Site Templates

Well how time zooms on. I have been busy working to get two tools out of beta. I will post on the Indexed Pages tool and the Overture Keyword Ranking tool a bit later. They will also be moved to my Free SEO Tools page soon.

I have decided to use a Java app to do the front end of the Keyword Ranking Monitor Tool (KRMT). I have had a mock up done and it is going to look a lot better then doing it with PHP/GD.

The KRMT was targeted to have been done on Nov. 30th but things are taking longer than I planned. I am moving the beta release up to Jan. 15th and the finished tool to Feb 15th.

The HUGE DEAL on SEO/SEM Services page got very good response, so much I had to shut it down while I get caught up. Becky was taking care of my submissions but she has moved on and I am training up Laura to over see this part of my business. Laura is currently doing reviews on my directory sites so this will be a natural progression for her to move into this. Sorry I am running some what behind on this.

We should start clearly the back log out soon and probably will have the Hug Deal page back up in the first or second week of December. Until then I am placing people that insist on getting in on the Huge Deal on a first-come-first-serve list. I am only going to be selling 50 packages that the $499 price.

Bad Neighborhood Checker
* Checks if you’re linking to bad neighborhoods *
Checks link pages and reports if there are links to bad neighborhoods.
The tool also has the ability to search on multiple levels (so for example if you maintain a directory it is able to spider the categories and subcategories).
Reciprocal Link Checker
* Checks if the partners still link back *
Free links partners script. Periodically checks all your partners links to see if they’re still linking back.
Search Results Compared
* Google, Yahoo, MSN results in one search *
Search in all three major SEs at the same time and displays the results on a single page. Very useful when it comes about comparing top SERPs.
URL Trends
* Full page popularity stats *
Full off-page (popularity) statistics (like number of backlinks, indexed pages, etc).
Uptime Bot
* Off-page (popularity) stats *
Off-page (popularity) stats. Great for keeping track of your progresses.
Link Popularity Tool
* Statistics regarding a site popularity *
Off-page (popularity) stats including number of backlinks, number of indexed pages, number of pages containing the URL.
Free Site Monitor
* Server monitor and alert service *
Monitors server status at every 5 minutes and e-mail in case of problems. Also can display stats when a server was down; may be also useful for checking and competitors uptime.
Redirects And HTTP Headers Checker
* Checks for redirects on a domain *
Checks for redirects that may be in place on a domain (301, 302, 200, etc).
W3C Markup Validation Service
* Official W3C compliance validator *
The official W3C validator. A great help for making your pages W3C compliant.
Atom & RSS Feed Validator
* RSS feeds validator *
RSS feeds validator. It may validate any kind of RSS feeds, from the simplest ones to the most complex ones.
Del.icio.us - Social Bookmarker
* Social bookmarking *
Social bookmarking. One of the newest trends in SEO.
Your Personal Web File
* Social bookmarking *
Social bookmarking. One of the newest trends in SEO.
RSS Feed Generator
* Easy to use RSS feed generator *
A very easy to use RSS feed generator. Using it a RSS feed may be created in less than 3 minutes.
Cut And Paste Feed Builder
* Easy to use RSS feed generator *
A point and click RSS feed generator. No technical knowledge about RSS are required in order to use it.

SEO Company came out with a RSS feed for the SEO Tools Directory about a month ago. I spend the last few weeks testing it it on 3 different site and fine tuning the code.

Of course the db to xml RSS feed was simple. It was the XML to XHTML that the time had to be spend on. The presentation for the SEO Tools has been put in CSS so all the editing is done there. The XML to XHTML file xml2xhtml.php is encrypted.

There SEO Tools Directory has 125 tools in 23 categories. SEO Company is offering a feed of these tools where site can place them on your site for added value to your visitors. The XML to XHTML file is set up so that you can show all categories or just one specify category.

The full feed is add to your site page with a simple PHP include.
< ?include ’seo-tools-xml2xhtml.php?’;?>

If you want to remove the New SEO Tools category and just show one category you add the following code to your new file.

<?php

$_GET[”cat”]=2;

$_GET[”hidenew”]=1;

include ’seo-tools-xml2xhtml.php’;

?>

The following are the current SEO Tool categories.

• 2 Alexa Tools
• 3 Combined Keyword Suggestion Tools
• 4 Combo Search Engine Ranking Tools
• 5 Compare Search Engine Ranking Tools
• 6 Domain Tools
• 7 Google Ranking Tools
• 8 Keyword Suggestion Tools
• 9 Keyword Tools
• 10 Exchange Link SEO Tools
• 11 Link Popularity Tools
• 12 Misc Tools
• 13 MSN Ranking Tools
• 14 Web Site Optimization Tools
• 15 Robots.txt Tools
• 16 Related Page Rank Tools
• 17 Page Rank Tools
• 18 Toolbars
• 19 Yahoo Ranking Tools
• 20 Search Engine Position Tools
• 21 Pay Per Click Tools
• 22 Text Link Ad Value Tools
• 23 Google Sitemap Tools
• 24 Backlink Tools

Michael Hargove of Web Submission Services Inc. jumped at the chance to add the SEO Tool directory to his site. He placed them all on his SEO Tools Set page and created another 22 pages and placed one category of the tools on each page.

Here is a sample page on the Web Submission Services site for the Alexa Ranking tools.

You can download the Tools-RSS-HowTo.txt, test-file.php, test-file2.php, seo-tools.css, and seo-tools-xml2xhtml.php here seo-tools.zip. The seo-tools-xml2xhtml.php is encrypted and copywrited by Solutions with Service the owner of the SEO Company Website and content.