Free keyword research guide : WordTracker

Click to download

When you create content for your website or blog it is vital to include keywords within your content that your readers will use when searching for your content. In other words, you need to optimise your content using the most popular keywords that are appropriate to your product or service.

But how do you know what those magic keywords are? Which ones will make the difference between you appearing at number 1 in Google and number 10. (Research shows that the drop-off in clicks from the number 1 to results further down the page is exponential).

The key to success in building the best, most optimised content is to carry out keyword research before you start writing. There are a number of tools out there that can help, but one of the best is WordTracker. They have a database of over 330 million keywords with statistics on each.

Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client's business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.

As well as telling you how many searches are carried out for a bunch of keywords, it will also tell you how competitive a keyword is - allowing you to go after high volume, low competition niche keyword phrases, thereby increasing your chances of appearing higher up the search results pages.

They have a free keyword research tool which you can use to test their service and a free downloadable keyword research guide (PDF).

I've found it a great service. And with more and more competition out there grabbing visitors away from your site, optimising your content for search is vital if you're going to get your product or service in front of the right people.

Top 10 tips for SEO

Well...11 tips actually...you get one extra for free...ok, so they're all free...anyway...

I recently joined Smorty, a blog advertising brokerage, and found this easy guide to SEO on their site which has 11 great tips for search engine optimising your site.

It's nicely written (especially for beginners) and has lots of links to great, practical tools to help you optimise your site such as a keyword density checker (has a nice keyword cloud view), duplicate content checker.

I particularly like their keyword suggestion tool which, given a URL, identifies the theme of the page and then suggests keywords on the same theme, ordered by the volume of searches per month for that keyword. Very nice.

The article is well worth a read. In fact, I wish I'd written it myself!

Google "launches" (shhh) behavioral targeting...or not, as the case may be

Not if you ask Google, that is, since it is trying to distance itself from the term behavioral targeting. But what they are doing amounts to something not a million miles from it though...stitching together different search queries to produce search results that become increasingly focussed, based on the combined terms used in the different queries.

Try searching for Paris and then hotel. You'll notice that on the second search, the ads are for hotels in Paris.

As Enquiro reports, the launch of this new functionality was kept low key. There were a couple of articles written about it on ClickZ and SearchEngineLand.

Is this behavioral targeting? Sounds to me like it is. But as Reuters reported, Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management for advertising is distancing Google from this term. Reuters quote her saying:

"That is not something that we have participated in, for a variety of reasons," Wojcicki told reporters at a briefing at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

"We believe that task-based information at the time (of a user's search) is the most relevant information to what they are looking at," she said. "We always want to be very careful about what information would or would not be used."

Although on the face of it, this is a useful technology, I'm sure there are many people out there who will become even more uneasy about their privacy and just how much the mighty Google knows about them.

Paid submission...a rip off?

I receive a whole host of search engine related emails and feeds and a common recurring theme from one of them is the old 'Get listed in 48 hours, GUARANTEED'. I've never believed in paid submission to search engines - if you optimise your site properly, you don't need to.

There are some tips & techniques that you can use to get your site into search engines quickly which I'll post on soon. One of them that I've used is to add your site's feed to your personal MSN or Yahoo! page. Effectively, you're telling these search engines about your site...and a short while after adding your feed, you'll start to show up in their results pages. That, coupled with adding a Google sitemap should have you well on the way to being indexed.

What techniques do you use to get listed quickly? Have you ever used a paid submission service? And has it been worth the cash? Leave a comment and let me know.