Search Engine Optimization

Google Alerts is a free tool that allows you to monitor Google search results containing predefined keyword phrases. Businesses commonly utilize Google Alerts to find out what’s being said about their brand online. You can choose to have the results emailed to you on a daily or weekly basis.

Not only is Google Alerts an effective reputation management tool, it can also be used to get content development ideas, build relationships, and keep up with important industry news. Google Alerts is also a great addition to your SEO toolbox because it is a wonderful source of potential link-building opportunities. The following are 7 ways to build links to your site with the help of Google Alerts.

1. Find relevant blog posts on which to comment

When you are alerted of blog posts related to your industry and feel that you could contribute to the conversation, leave a comment with a link back to your site.

2. Build relationships

Google Alerts makes it easier for you to find other people in your niche, so it’s an effective relationship-building tool. In the world of internet marketing, relationships = links. By keeping up with who’s who in your industry and forging connections with the webmasters/bloggers you encounter via Google Alerts, you will be able to build valuable, relevant links back to your site.

3. Find relevant references and link to them

Writing an article for your website? Use Google Alerts to find relevant references to link to within your article. The webmasters you link to may even link back to your article if they think it would be beneficial to their readership.

4. Find videos to share with your audience

Use Google Alerts to find relevant videos about your industry. When you find a great video, you can embed it in one of your articles and share it with your audience. Videos are great because they allow you to increase the value of your content quickly and easily. Furthermore, you may even get a link back from the producer of the video.

5. Spy on the competition

Want to know where your competitors are getting mentions and links? Use your competitors’ company names as keywords and keep track of them with Google Alerts, so you can determine where they get their links and whether it would be feasible for you to get links from the same sites.

6. Keep track of sites that are picking up articles and press releases you publish

Whenever you distribute articles or press releases, keep track of their exact titles using Google Alerts. You will be notified anytime one of your articles/press releases is picked up by another site. Contact the sites that pick up your article/press releases and offer to provide them with original content in the future. You can embed a link back to your site within the content.

7. Get links from people who are already talking about you

Keep tabs on your company’s name with Google Alerts so you can find out which sites are mentioning your brand online. Doing this will help you spot the best link building opportunities, since someone who’s already mentioned your brand favorably is more likely to provide you with a link than someone who’s never heard of you before.

In April of 2010, Google announced that it had added site speed to its search engine ranking algorithm. Site speed carries less weight than other ranking factors, so less than 1% of search queries were affected as a result of Google’s update. That being said, site speed isn’t just important for your search engine ranking; faster sites also improve user experience. Studies have shown that visitors spend less time on slow sites. That’s why it’s imperative to increase your site’s speed.

If your website takes less than two seconds to load, you’re good. Studies show, however, that users will leave a site if it hasn’t loaded in four seconds. So, if your website takes longer than four seconds to load, you’ll annoy your site visitors and your search engine rankings will probably be affected.

Check How Fast Your Site Loads

The first thing you need to do is determine how fast your site loads. You can check your site’s speed with the following tools:

WebPagetest allows you to test your site’s performance in different web browsers and geographic locations.

Pingdom Tools will test the load times of all elements on a web page and find bottlenecks.

GTmetrix will grade your site’s performance using information from Yahoo! YSlow and Google Page Speed and then provide you with actionable recommendations.

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you can go to Labs > Site Performance to see how fast your site loads for users around the world.

How to Increase Your Site’s Speed

Here are several quick fixes that will help to increase your site’s speed:

Website Compression

Compressing your website’s content will decrease the time it takes for your web server to send content to your website visitors. Tools like Gzip compress the size of the page that’s sent to the browser, which will decompress the information before displaying it to users. A tool like Gzip is capable of reducing file size by upwards of 70%.

Minimize 301 Redirects

If possible, avoid using 301 redirects because they force the browser to a new URL and require it to wait for the HTTP request to come back.

Remove Unnecessary Code

Code for external services, such as a widget that shows your company’s most recent Twitter updates or social media “share” buttons, can slow your site down. If an external service isn’t absolutely necessary and is providing you with little benefit consider removing it.

Upgrade Your Hosting Package

Switch to a hosting company with a better reputation, or upgrade to a better package with your hosting company to increase your site’s speed.

Reduce HTTP Requests

Your website will load faster if there are fewer HTTP requests. To reduce HTTP requests, minimize the number of scripts, style sheets, images, and other items that need to be loaded.

Optimize Images for the Web

Don’t use images that are larger than necessary. In addition, when you save images in a program like Photoshop, click “save for web” instead of “save” so that the file size is smaller.

Whether you’re a small mom and pop business or a large corporation, one of the most effective strategies in your online marketing arsenal is spying on your competitors. From identifying important keywords in your industry to determining where your competitors get their links, spying on your competition is a great way to improve your SEO campaign and ultimately outrank your competitors. Here are 5 simple spying techniques that will help you figure out exactly what your competitors are doing that gives them such great search engine visibility, so you can beat them at their own game.

1. Sign up for Google Alerts

Not only is using Google Alerts a great way to keep track of what’s going on your industry and what people are saying about your brand online, it’s also a great way to stay on top of what’s being said about your competitors. You can sign up to receive alerts anytime your competitors’ names or websites are mentioned online. Anytime a competitor is mentioned, it could also be a chance for you to request a link or market your business. Just be sure to keep a log of each competitor’s mentions so you can actually follow through.

2. Find out Every Time They Make Changes to Their Sites

Monitor changes to your competitors’ websites by entering their URLs and your email address at Changedetection.com. Every time your competitors make changes to their websites, you will receive an email. By keeping track of your competitors’ website changes, you’ll get a head’s up when your competitors add new services, content, etc.

3. Check Their Backlinks

Using the Yahoo! Site Explorer is a great way to find out how many links your competitors have and who is providing those links. If you find out where your top ranking competitors get their links, you can then determine if it’s possible to get links from the same sites. Furthermore, researching your competitors’ backlinks will help you determine approximately how many links and what types of links you’ll need to outrank your main competitors.

4. Determine What Keywords They’re Targeting

To get an idea of what keywords your competitors are targeting, inspect their meta tags and use the Google AdWords tool to generate keyword suggestions based on the website’s URL. You can also type your competitors’ URLs in Backlinkwatch.com to find out what keyword anchor text their backlinks have. This information will provide you with clues about which keywords they’re targeting in their SEO campaigns.

5. Monitor Their Social Media Accounts

The search engines have made it clear that social media mentions matter in SEO. Monitoring your competitors’ social media accounts is important because if you determine who is talking about your competition and what they’re saying, you can use that information to supercharge your own social media marketing efforts.

To start with, subscribe to your competitors’ RSS feeds, monitor the comments sections of their blogs, and follow their activity on social networking sites. To take your social media monitoring efforts up a notch, you can use a service like Social Mention, which notifies you anytime a competitor is mentioned on the social web.

Firefox is an excellent browser for SEO. Many bloggers and SEO experts use Firefox as their primary browser because of the variety of SEO extensions that are available. The following Firefox extensions will help you monitor the status of your site, analyze the competition, and make changes that will improve your site’s ranking.

1. SEO Quake

SEO Quake allows you to view several important search engine parameters, helping you rank and promote your websites more efficiently. Ultimately, SEO Quake makes it easier for you to estimate the competitive ability and effectiveness of your SEO campaigns.

2. Niche Watch Tool

The Niche Watch Tool helps you analyze niche keyword competition and provides you with the technical information necessary to beat your competitors in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Information that it provides include the indexed pages, backlinks number, and page rank of both the domain and the specific webpage.

3. KeywordSpy SEO/PPC Plug-In

The KeywordSpy extension will revolutionize the way you research keywords and track your competitition in Google and Yahoo. This free extension allows you to view and investigate core SEO parameters both in the SERPs and site pages that you visit.

4. SEO Doctor

SEO Doctor is an SEO problem-solving tool that is made with both beginner and advanced SEOs in mind. Based on accepted SEO methodology, this tool points out potential issues and warns you about pages that may not be indexable by the search engines.

5. Foxy SEO Tool

The Foxy SEO Tool is a free, open-source toolbar that provides you with access to a variety of search engine functions, including Google Site, Live Fromlinks, Yahoo! Site Explorer. It also allows you to check a site’s listing in important directories like Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory.

6. SEO Blogger

If you have a blog, you’ll love SEO Blogger, an extension that enables you to find the most sought-after keywords in your niche without leaving your blog editing screen. This tool is compatible with all types of blog publishing software, so you can conduct keyword research and optimize your blog posts as you write them.

7. Google Semantics

This tool helps you optimize your content more effectively by providing you with synonyms of target keywords using a method known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

8. SEOpen

SEOpen provides users with quick access to basic web-based tools that help with SEO. You can use the included toolbar or right click on an open area of a webpage in order to quickly check inbound links, http headers, page rank, and more.

9. SearchStatus

SearchStatus is a versatile Firefox extension that displays a number of important measurements, including Google PageRank, Alexa rank, complete ranking, and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank. The extension can also analyze keyword density, highlight keywords and nofollow links, and much more.

10.   Google Global

Google Global is an unobtrusive Firefox extension that allows you to see what the Google search results are in different geographical locations. This is a very useful tool if you want to compare the organic and paid search results in different countries.

Have you just launched a new website for your small business? If so, be aware that the old adage, “If you build it, they will come,” does not apply to websites. If you want more potential customers to find your website, you’ll need to complete some basic SEO tasks in order for it to appear in the search engine results more quickly.

It doesn’t matter how fantastic your website is; if people can’t find it, it won’t make any difference to your bottom line. Regardless of what industry you’re in, here are 5 easy SEO tips that you can implement right away to improve your new website’s search engine visibility and keep track of user behavior in order to make ongoing improvements to your site.

1. Install Google Analytics

Start tracking your website visitors right away by installing Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that is very easy to install and provides you with tons of information about your website visitors and their usage patterns. You can perfect your website’s sales funnel by using your analytics program to track actions on your site, such as contact form submissions, downloads, and purchases.

2. Set up Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools are free and useful for any webmaster who wants to know how their website is performing in Google. Google Webmaster Tools provide key information about how Google indexes your site, insight into anchor text links on your site, information about the interlinking of your site’s pages, and much more.

3. Submit an XML Sitemap

Submit an XML sitemap to the major search engines once your website is complete to get your website crawled faster and ensure that the search engines crawl all of the pages of your website, including deeper pages that are harder to find. You can submit your XML sitemap to each search engine directly from Google Webmaster Tools.

4. Set up a Local Business Listing

Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have business directories that allow you to add a free local business listing. Setting up a local business listing is beneficial because it increases the chances that your website will show up in the search results when users type in local search queries. Anytime users type in local search queries, the local business listings typically show up before all other search engine results. This makes it much easier for small, local businesses to compete with large companies, which dominate the search engine results for competitive keyword phrases with their high powered SEO campaigns.

5. Start a Blog

Your site will appear less on the search engines if it is static and seldom updated. You can dramatically increase the chances of your website showing up when users search for relevant search queries by adding a blog to your site. Search engines love websites that frequently publish fresh, unique content, and having a blog gives you the opportunity to do just that. As an added benefit, blogging can be an excellent way for you to interact with your current and future customers. A blog also increases your business’s authority in its respective industry.

These might seem like simple tasks, but it’s shocking how many small business owners ignore this advice. You’ll be several steps ahead of your competitors if you implement these basic SEO tasks. Just be aware that this list only includes a few techniques for increasing traffic to your website and improving your site’s SEO. Stay tuned and we’ll share additional on-page and off-page SEO techniques that will help you build a strong presence in the search engine results in no time.

Social bookmarking refers to posting links to your website content on websites that store, organize, and manage bookmarks, such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Propeller.    Some claim that social bookmarking helps you achieve high search engine rankings in a short amount of time, but is it really worth it?

To put it simply, yes.  Social bookmarking is worthwhile because it increases the number of backlinks to your website.  Link building is one of the most important SEO techniques out there, and for keywords with moderate to low competition, social bookmarking can quickly improve your website’s search engine rankings.  To ensure that your social bookmarking efforts actually complement your link building strategy, use only social bookmarking sites with the dofollow attribute.

Another benefit of social bookmarking is that it widens your audience.  Social bookmarking allows you to publicize your website’s content in order to attract more readers.  If your content is well received, you could get more bookmarks from other users, and ultimately, more links.  If your website or article gets bookmarked many times and reaches the top page of a bookmarking website, it could bring hordes of traffic to your website.

Generally speaking, the traffic that you get from social bookmarking websites isn’t high quality.  Users of social bookmarking sites usually click on the links, take a quick look at the content, and then leave.  But their bookmarks make a difference because they give your website more authority in other people’s eyes and help you build a larger following.  The more people there are who know about your site, the more likely you are to receive visits to your website from potential customers.

Tips for Maximizing Your Social Bookmarking Efforts

Make sure you insert a link to your sales page or product page in your content.  While it’s essential to write great content in order to promote your website on social bookmarking sites, if your ultimate goal is to get more customers and sales, you should casually link back to your sales page in your article, as well.  Don’t submit content to social bookmarking sites that is a blatant sales pitch, but don’t create good content just for the sake of creating good content, either.  Your content should serve a higher purpose.  If you include a link back to your sales page or product page, potential customers who are interested in what you have to offer will click through.

To make your social bookmarks easier to find and to help them rank better for target keywords, make sure that you add relevant keywords and keyword phrases to the bookmarks in the form of tags.  Some social bookmarking sites allow you to include an unlimited number of tags.

You can make it even easier for people to share your content on social bookmarking sites by adding share buttons to your content.  If you use a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger on your website, you can upload a plug-in that adds share graphics to your website.  All that your readers have to do is click on an icon in order to bookmark your article or blog post on a social bookmarking site.

Just be cautious about bookmarking your content excessively on social bookmarking sites.  Spamming bookmarking sites could lead your site to get penalized by the search engines, which would defeat the whole purpose of your bookmarking campaign!

There are many advantages to using WordPress as a content management system.  Whether you use WordPress solely for your blog or to manage your entire website, it is a great choice because of its search engine friendliness, resistance to spam, and easily customizable interface.  To maximize your WordPress website’s search engine visibility, download these top 10 SEO plugins.

1. Related posts

The Related posts plugin posts entries with related tags or words after each of your blog posts.  This plugin is good for SEO because it improves your website’s internal linking structure.

2. All in one SEO pack

The All in one SEO pack plugin is the Cadillac of all SEO plugins for WordPress.  It allows you to add title tags, keywords, and descriptions to each page of your website. It also helps you avoid duplicate content.

3. SEO slugs

This plugin removes words that the search engines ignore from your site’s permalinks (unique URLs of your blog posts) so that they rank better for target keywords.  For example, if you write a post titled, “Why you should use this WordPress SEO plugin,” the permalink normally looks like this: “/why-you-should-use-this-WordPress-SEO-Plugin.”  The SEO slugs plugin removes the unnecessary words so that the permalink looks like this: “/WordPress-SEO-plugin.”

4. Nofollow case by case

By default, the comments on WordPress blogs have the nofollow attribute, meaning that commenters do not get any SEO value from providing a link back to their site.  The Nofollow case by case plugin enables you to make the links on blog comments dofollow.  This plugin is beneficial for new websites because it encourages people to comment, drives more traffic to your site, and builds community.

5. Google positioner

The Google positioner plugin helps you choose the right keywords to target in your content.  Rather than blindly targeting keywords that you think people might use to find your site, you can use this plugin to determine exactly which keywords are leading searchers to your site and then optimize your content for those specific keywords.

6. SEO friendly images

This plugin will help to ensure that all of the images on your site have alt and title tags so that they are indexed properly by the search engines.  Images are often a great source of traffic, particularly when they are optimized for search.

7. Google XML sitemaps

This essential plugin creates an XML sitemap that is readable for Google, Ask, Yahoo, and MSN.

8. Redirection

Whenever you make changes to your blog, the permalinks also change.  The Redirection plugin will ensure that visitors are redirected to the new permalinks in order to reduce the amount of traffic you get to pages that no longer exist.

9. SEO blog roll

To prevent the blogs listed in your blog roll from feeding off of your page rank, install the SEO blog roll plug in so that all of them receive the nofollow attribute.

10. Automatic SEO links

With this plugin, you can choose a word or phrase for automatic linking (internal or external), set anchor text, and then choose the dofollow or nofollow attribute.  This plugin will only create an automatic link for the first mention of the word or phrase in a post, so the same page isn’t linked to multiple times in one post.

Video is exploding on the web.  According to stats, the average American internet user watches approximately 3 hours of video online each month.

Since videos are now incorporated into standard search results, you can dramatically increase the visibility of your website by utilizing search engine optimized videos.  However, you have to create compelling, entertaining, and search-friendly videos that people are eager to watch and spread virally.

Although everyone and their mother can record a home video, creating remarkable videos that have good searching rankings and help you generate traffic and sales is another story.  15 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, so take the following steps to ensure that your videos don’t get lost in a sea of oblivion.

Use Keywords

Make sure to use target keywords in the video file name as well as the video’s URL.  You should also include target keywords in the title, tags, and backlink anchor text.  In addition, write a brief, keyword-rich description for each of your videos to ensure that people searching online can find them more easily.

It’s important to optimize the textual content on the web pages where you post videos so they can be found more easily.  For example, you can bundle videos with their transcripts or include transcripts in the video descriptions to improve spiderability.  And last but not least, be sure to include the word, “video,” in the title of each of your videos to accommodate searchers who are looking specifically for video content.

Distribute Your Videos All Over the Place

In addition to posting videos on your site, make sure to distribute them to various video sharing sites on the web.  If you don’t want to do this manually, you can pay a video distribution service like TubeMogul to do it for you.

And don’t forget to optimize your company’s channel pages on video sharing sites with keyword-rich content.  Additionally, be sure to place a link back to your site at the very beginning of each video’s description at sharing sites so you can drive some traffic back to your site.

Build Links to Your Videos

Just like they do with textual content, search engines judge the value and relevancy of videos based on the backlinks they have.  To help build links for your videos, make sure you enable sharing and embedding on video pages.

In addition, you can bookmark your videos, share them on Twitter and other social media sites, and link to them on relevant blog posts and web pages.  And don’t forget to cross-link your video to other relevant videos on your site.  Not only will cross-linking help to improve the search engine ranking of your videos, it will also lead to more views and make your site more user-friendly.

Increase the Number of Views

Okay.  So you’ve created a wonderful video, optimized it, and distributed it.  Now what?  You need to increase the number of views, that’s what!  Although sharing videos via social media will help you do that, there are a few other strategies you can apply as well to increase views.

For example, on video sharing sites like YouTube, you can submit video responses to highly popular videos in order to generate traffic to your own video content.  You can also pay for placements in YouTube’s Promoted Video program.  In addition, you can approach social media power users, explain to them why you think your videos will benefit their audience, and ask them to share your videos with their audience to give them a viral push.

Keyword Spy Review

From the homepage: Keyword Spy is a keyword research tool which tells you exactly which keywords work and which do not by gaining access to your competitors’ keywords. Keyword Spy system helps you pin point easily the keywords that are driving traffic to a particular website.

• Learn keywords your competitors are bidding on – Priceless if you’re running PPC campaigns. With one click you can learn all the keywords your competitors are bidding on. It takes time, effort and a lot of budget to develop effective keyword lists, yet here you get it for a flat fee. You can run reports on as many website as you wish.

Click to enlarge

• See Competitor ad copies, headlines and landing pages – Don’t just learn keywords your competitors bid on – see their ads! For each keyword you can see: ad headline, and ad copy. Here’s the sweetest part – you can see their landing pages for each unique keyword!

• Organic keywords that send referrals. - Learn what your competitors rank for on search engines and in what positions. This service is also free with SEO Digger.
• Keywords used by competitive site affiliates – Many marketers rely on affiliate networks for promotion. Affiliates run their own websites, do their own SEO and pay per click campaigns. Affiliate Keyword feature lets you see the keywords your competitor affiliates bid on. All you need is the domain name of your competitor!

Keywords

Once you select competitive domain and run a search for it, Keyword Spy will produce keyword results. Keyword information includes data such as:

• ROI – Known as Return of Investments it is the measurement of the profitability of a keyword. ROI is computed by dividing the benefit of a keyword investment against the cost of the keyword.

  This is another unnecessary measurement, like Wordtrackers’ KEI.

• Position - Position of the ad on search results
• Competitors – Number of competitors bidding on this keyword
• Clicks Per Day - Estimated number of click per day for keyword
• Price per click – estimated price per each click.

Summary Page

Another cool feature. To get to the summary page , you need to: 1. Select competing domain and search for it. 2. Select a keyword this competitor bid on.

Keyword Spy will flash some real valuable info:

Top Competitors

Market Coverage

The graphs are self explanatory. Real valuable insight.

Some Tough Questions

Where does keyword spy get data from?

Keyword spy does not specify this. Quick Google search revealed a Google Group discussion where one of the members made this statement:

I recently noticed hits from a keyword spy service on my site. Is there a way to conceal the keywords that I use.  Is this service revealing my Google Adwords keywords or merely puling what is in my meta tag.  I don’t want my competitors knowing my advertising strategy. Thanks

And another member answered:

There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of “keyword spy” services out there.

They generally follow AdWords (and YahooSM & MSN AdCenter) links, creating a database of:

In some cases, these services may also try to determine some “derivative” data, such as “most common keyword(s) on your landing page” and “pagerank”; some will also suggest the ability to identify your bid rate, based on other data (such as the bid rates paid by their client[s] for the same keyword, and the relative position of your ad compared to the client’s).  They may also gather factual data (for example, extracting your WHOIS data and perhaps attempting to scrape email, telephone, and mailing-address data from your site).

Depending on the depth and breadth of the spybot’s activities, they might also try to identify some of your “negative keywords.”  What they absolutely do NOT have is any data from Google about your AdWords campaigns, which keywords you use (other than the ones they use to find your ads).

So where do they get data?

Not clear. it seems they scrape it from all over the web. Said that – their keyword data set looks very impressive, for many websites.

What ad networks are featured in the results?

From that same post and from a number of other posts, we assume its Adwords, Yahoo and Adcenter.

Regardless, if you got PPC on your hands, give Give Keyword Spy a run – you might find some useful keywords.

Hello.

Since the Overture is out, there is a very similar and more updated version available
with Yahoo Search Marketing. This keyword tool is very nice when looking for the write key words to optimize for.

Just pick the timezone/market and it will take you to the keyword research page.
Though this is setup for Yahoo PPC you don’t have to complete it to use the keyword
research. It shows the numbers very similar to overture, but this one is updated. This Keyword Selector Tool is a seo’s best friend!

Good day.

Today I’ve signed up for NicheBOT v2.0, with an intent to write a full scale review about this keyword research tool, as well as compare it to WordTracker and Yahoo Overture.

This article however, is a warm up, with basic topics covered, such as the structure, database sources, as well as a usability review, gathered from videos featured on Nichebot.com.

A little History.

Nichebot is registered to Full Throttle Enterprises Inc. owned by Jim Morris, President/CEO. NicheBot head office is located in Torrance California.

More recently Jim has combined WordTracker, Yahoo Overture, Keyword Discovery and Google results into all-in-one comprehensive keyword research suite and named it 2.0.

How Does NicheBot Work.

The process of keyword harvesting with NicheBot, from my understanding works this way.

You sign up with Nichebot, for either a trial, a month or for a year. You are given an amount of credits as a start up, with an option to buy more as you continue the usage, meanwhile Nichebot has premium subscriptions to the top of the line research tools, such as the WordTracker, Overture and Keyword Discovery.

Whenever you query information from those sources, you are tapping into the data bank through NicheBot account and get full enterprise results per request. In order to maintain full access to those sources through NicheBot, you are required to purchase credits, since Nichebot has to pay its own bills for the usage of a foreign database. On top of an enterprise access, Jim offers a comprehensive suite of applications, all flawlessly integrated within the interface.

Nichebot Website.

As you land on the homepage, you are greeted with a friendly structure, where the left navigation bar serves as a teaser to what options are available, while on the center of the screen, Nichebot offers to take a tour or watch a video presentation.

For starters I have picked “Take the Tour and see…” which redirected me to a 43823 character long sales messages. The approach is very direct, SEO expert oriented, where Jim Morris details on one to one basis all the great benefits of Nichebot. On right side a pretty woman in a slick, grey dress is explaining the summary of material written on the page, finishing the dialog with “I’ll see you on the inside” – very original.

The five step video presentation is flawless in terms of showing usability and power of NicheBot – a must see for anyone who prefers to get an inside look of the product before committing to it. Jim presents you with a step by step tutorial, explaining how to use Nichebot detailing the following:

• Core keyword research
• Related keywords
• LSI related words gathered from Google.
• Keyword basket usage
• Competition analysis, with a view of highest PR sites for a particular keyword
  • Number of backlinks
  • Indexed pages
• How to merge research from Overture and WordTracker.
• Keyword discovery usage for themed breakdown.

Jim does a really good job, giving a full in-depth overview of Nichebot, making it irresistible to avoid a trial.
Read More »

This is a summary of some of the useful SEO extensions developed by Firebox Community. There are thousands of extensions and widgets that are meant to make your life as a SEO professional or a copywriter a lot easier. In my quest I have set a goal to review all of them starting from page one, so as you might’ve guessed by the title of this article, this is part one, with many sequels to come.

An Introduction to Anyone Who is not Familiar with Firefox

“Mozilla is not a traditional software company. We are a global community and public benefit organization dedicated to improving the Internet experience for people everywhere” mozilla.com

Firefox is the most popular product developed by Mozilla, which is maintained by the community, with countless numbers of add-ons and extensions. “According to Market Share by Net Applications, 14.88% of the world’s Web browsers used Firefox in September 2007, with 14.42% using version 1.5 or higher” Wikipedia

The advantages are quite clear.

• Improved Security Over IE
• Immense amount of customization, with extensions designed for SEO, web designers and copywriters.
• Speed. Though Internet Explorer has improved in version 7 I still have to shift towards Firefox.

There are numerous categories of useful extensions for Firefox. In this article I’ve managed to get to page 241, of the Web Development section. All the tools featured below have been installed and personally tested by me.

First of all download and install the Firefox itself.

Here you can find all SEO Firefox extensions as well as other helpful tools and color themes. To install them – simply click install button and restart the browser. However if you do run into any problems you can check Firefox FAQ section.

SEO Firefox Extensions.

1. Web Developer.

It adds a toolbar in your interface with options such as ‘CSS’ ‘Forms’ Images’ ’Tools’ ’Resize’ and more. Personally I did not find the tool very useful since I do not engage in web design or development, however if there are coders or designer reading this – you might find this tool interesting, since it does let you work with CSS, forms and tables, as well the ability to highlight any given elements in a very visual way.

2. Is Google Analytics Installed?
This Firefox SEO extension lets you find out if Google Analytics is intalled on any given site. Whenever it is, this wigged will let you know by lighting up on the bottom left hand corner.

3. Hyperwords 2.8 – this is a must who is engaged in any type of copywriting! You can view short youtube demo over here.
A very useful, flexible tool, with over 200 commands. Some of them are:

• Translation from and to more then 10 languages right in your open webpage. Just highlight the text, choose translate and it will do so right away in the copy you are reading.
• Reference – highlight any word or phrase and check it in Wiki and Google Definition, Dictionary.com
• Highlight any Address then simply pick the maps of your preference to find out the detailed geopraphical location using with Google or Yahoo Maps.
• Other functions include weather, search, blog, email, info – all with the convenience of simply highlighting your words.

Note: By default after installation Hyperwords bar will automatically come up every time you highlight anything, which can get annoying at time, so to disable that go to your plug-ins>Hyperwords>Behaviors and pick the one of your preference.

4. Firefox Ruler.
This tiny Firefox SEO extension puts a ruler button on the left hand bottom side of the browser allowing you to activate it anytime and precisely measure height and width of any web elements in pixels.

5. Advanced Dork.

Gives quick access to Google’s Advanced Operators directly from the context menu.
Search intitle: inurl: intext: site: ext: and a lot more useful SEO extension options.

6. Google advanced features.
This Firefox SEO extension will put up 3 windows in your toolbar menu and give you a shortcut to all of the advanced Google features, the downside however is the fact that you have to enter the actual URL into the field, while other extensions allow you perform same functions by simply highlighting any content of your liking.

7. Fireshot!
A wonderful mini application that allows you to snap a screenshot of any webpage and then edit it. Features include cropping, marking, and commenting – something very useful if you write reviews and engage in copywriting.

8. Show IP.
Will show your IP address in the status bar in red. Some might not find it helpful, but I always wanted to know what my IP is =)

9. Firefox Accessibility Checker.
Check any elements of any page and find out how accessible is it.

10. All in one side bar.
This Firefox extension is not related to SEO field in any way, however I still find it very useful. If you are an Opera user this extension will bring you as close to Opera sidebar option as possible.

11. Proxy Manager for Firefox.
Play around with Firefox proxy settings.

The tools listed were tested and considered by me to bring benefits and make your life easier at some point. I hope it helps you to increase your performance and save some time on repetitions tasks. Part 2 will cover the rest of the Web Development Section and get to News and Feeds Firefox SEO extensions section, so by all means come by!

Microsoft Invested $240 Million in Facebook Stakes .

Microsoft will sell banner ads for Facebook outside of the United States.

Considering the market share for Microsoft in a search spectrum against Google, it is clearly a valuable relationship for the enterprise which opens doors to more integrated deals in future.

Also Facebook is working towards an integrated ad system, which will be targeted at all of its 42 million members, broken down to the most detailed aspects, such as location personality profile, income, interest, religion, age etc. If all goes as planned, expect Facebook shares to soar, opening an opportunity for marketers of all industries to jump in, big and small. if Facebook is to take PPC approach merged with banner/video ads, expect Facebook marketing for your clients to be on your to do list.

Full Story by New York Times.

Google is Offering Online Seminars for Search Engine Experts.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007 10:00 am
Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -07:00, San Francisco)

As stated by Google:

“Join Product Manager Tom Leung as he discusses the importance and benefits of optimizing your website design and content, provides a detailed introduction to Website Optimizer, and reviews the product’s latest features. Website Optimizer support staff will also be online to chat individually with attendees and answer questions in real time.”

You can register here
SEOs do not miss!
A review is definitely to come!

Google Analytics to be Released as Software Discussed by Sage Lewis

Sage Lewis of searchengine.com discusses Google Analitics which is to be released as a 90 day software trial. He also reviews YouTube which is now appearing on Google News.

He also discusses updates and new benefits for the following:

Google Reader:
Google AdWords Keyword Tool:
Google Webmaster Tools:
Yahoo!:
Gooruze:

Original Story here.

Is Keyword Suggestion Tool Overture dead?

Because I have to work on many SEO projects right now and desperately in need of a new keyword tool since Overture broke up with me, I did some research and here is what I found. Thanks to SEOmoz.

KeyCompete.com is a tool designed by Tiger Technologies (www.w5.com)

“KeyCompete is an online keyword research tool that identifies the keywords your competitors are using in their pay-per-click campaigns. KeyCompete also identifies the competition that is bidding on your keywords.”

I searched for a couple of popular keyphrases and the results are interesting. In many cases, you will get an average of the amount of searches per month (like Overture) and a list of 5 competitors that are currently doing a Pay-per-click campaign. It’s a very useful tool to check what some of your competitors are doing and what keywords they are using. You can then adjust your own keyword targeting strategy depending on the results you’re getting from the KewCompete tool, your own competitive analysis and personal observations.

It is fun to run a website blog that is clean, informational, and readable. Most blog softwares generated from website scripting and certain blog section such as “web user or visitor comment” grants permission to certain user type. As the blog administrator, you would like to have REAL web users who are posting REAL comment related to its pages or posts.

Your blog could be spammed to the ying yang and it is not FUN at all! You will lose web visitors and registered user because you lose their interest to read what you have posted. You do not want that to happen.

Read More »

Here is a list of useful tools that you can employ during your SEO campaign!

Link checkers: It is always a good idea to verify your links after you created your website, just to make sure that you didn’t make any mistakes, even if you are optimizing your site or not. Most web design package include a built-in link checker, there are also many link checker program on the internet. My suggestions are :

Free Broken Link Checker

Site Link Analyzer

And if you wanna download a program to your computer, you can try

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Like all the programs that you download to your computer, remember to always check the software for viruses before starting it. It’s free, quick and very easy to use and you can use the program to verify both external & internal links on your site.

You can also verify the backlink of your site with the tool below. Backlinks are inbound links that point to a certain website. They are required in order to get good rankings in the search engine results.

Backlink Check Tool

Google Zeitgeist: This is an analysis of what people are looking for, when and where: this is a tool that is worth checking from time 2 time just for fun . The site is:

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/archive2006.html

You want to see what people are looking for with Yahoo? Sure can

http://buzz.yahoo.com/

What surprised me is to see how obsessed people are with celebrities .. Amazing

Seeing what the search engine see: This could be another interesting thing to check every now & then for your site. Visit this site

http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

You can also a text-mode browser like Lynx to visit your site. Linx is: A Web browser that supports text and not graphics.

Keyword density: I had discover that tool on the net that I just can’t do without anymore. I kept it as my secret tool but since I want you precious readers to learn as much as possible, I have to give it away!  One thing though, you need to be running a Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox browser to install it.

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus

Wait, there is more:

Keyword Density Analyzer

Keyword Density

Keyword Density Analyzer

Analyzing your site traffic: Knowing how many people visit your site is extremely important. Usually, your web hosting company should be able to provide you with that info but there is another way to verify this too with Google: go to

http://www.google.com/analytics

Google states: Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

ONE LAST TOOL THAT I DISCOVER THAT IS VERY USEFUL FOR ME:

It has nothing to do with SEO but I want to share it with the world. I am a very fortunate mother of a healthy son who is starting to browse the web.. It all started on a very sunny day when….  no, seriously, I am not going to make you fall asleep with my mom stories (next time maybe) I have discover a program that allows me to control where he can &cannot go on the web, I can manually start /stop the filtering with one password. I am using it for my son but you can set it for games.. anything… plus the name of the program is a beautiful one, it is naomi

Visit: http://www.radiance.m6.net/

YOU MIGHT NOT NEED IT BUT I’M SURE YOU KNOW A COUSIN, NEPHEW, NEIGHBOR.. please pass the message..for the kids sake

Once we got our blog going, we realize how spamilicious it can get. This is what you have to do:

You will have to install the askimet spam filter plugin. This is good for any aplication with submitted content like forums, content forms.. go check it out!!!!

You will need a API key for wordpress, to get one, you go to http://wordpress.com/signup and sign for an account. (YOU DON’T NEED TO SIGN FOR A BLOG TO GET YOUR API KEY) The API key will be email to the email address provided.

Now what is left to do if you are using wordpress or not is explain there, just follow the instructions. If I can do it, you can http://akismet.com/download/

One last thing, if you are using wordpress for your blog, I strongly suggest you to visit this site.. I am not gonna tell you why, find out yourself ! http://lorelle.wordpress.com

Enjoy!!!!

Here is a short list of social media sites that will bring traffic to your website. First, try to get a listing on the home page of :slashdot.org

Then go to: squidoo.com, write some content and place a link to your site.

Try to post on social media sites like

• digg.com
• netscape.com
• reddit.com

You can also go to :Yahoo Answers

Link Tools

Backlink Check Tools

Whether your site have 10 or even 100 pages, you have to make sure that all your pages are indexed, it is your SEO goal after all right and the best way to ensure tha the spider will crawl all these pages is to have a site map. Because sometime, search engine can have troubles finding links that are buried within your site’s structure.

What is a site map?

A site map is a page that display every section of your website, think of it like a book’s table of content. You could use pictures, diagram or even an image to display your section but since your are reading our SEO blog.. which confirm that you are looking for the best tip and advice:

1. FORGET the pictures and so on and go with plain text.
   
2. Make sure that you use keyword when you descripe your pages.
   
3. Each location have to be an active link.
   
4. Your site map have to be linked from your home page. 

First, having the site map on your home page will push the search engine to look at every pages of your site which is of course a very good thing. Imagine: all your pages will be indexed by the spider and once in the search engine database, it will make your site more likely to come up in the search engine result.

Second, have you ever navigat through a site and then.. before you know it you realize that you are just lost…what do you do then?? You head back and look for another web site right? With a site map, your visitors won’t run away anymore unless your site is very boring and that my friend.. we can’t really help you with No seriously, details each section and sub sections of your site with descriptive text will make it easier for your visitors.

And please, do not forget to update! If you make changes on your site, you should update your site map as well