Use Quotes to Find Hidden Keywords When Reseaching

Why do keyword research with quoted search phrases rather than single words? (Example: search engine optimization vs. “search engine optimization”.)

Well, your objective in research for organic optimization is not to collect thousands of keywords. It is to find highly profitable keywords. With high conversion rates.

When you quotes your key phrases, it forces the keywords to be considered as whole phrases or “clusters of words” that are very revealing. They are often much more telling than single words and will often reveal interesting content opportunities.

Now if you are searching for huge lists of words for some other reason such as PPC, that might be fine, but I still find more interesting and revealing behavioral trends with the quotes on.

In any case, we tend to look deeper than researching keywords. We believe that it is much more powerful to research exactly how keywords are being used to reveal search behavior.

Your best bet for this kind of keyword research, is to use Wordtracker. With Wordtracker you can turn quotes on and off at the touch of a button. They also provide you with value-added analysis tools and robust reporting for research purposes. Try a Wordtracker free trial today.

Tags: keywords

Increase Backlinks with Free Directory Submissions

Directory listings are a great way to start to build backlinks for your new blog or website. If you don’t feel like outsourcing 1000 directory submissions, you’ll have to do it manually.

The following is a list of free directories where you can list your Web site: free directory listings.

All these directories are free but some require that you link back to them or a partner site. Some of these directories have paid submission options.

The list owner has submitted, or has attempted to submit, to each directory and he updates the list as he gathers feedback on the submissions. Since he links back to all directories for review purposes, he notes his experiences on not linking back to directories where link backs are optional, based on client site submission results when available.

This page is a continual work in progress.

Tags: backlinks, directories

Increase Conversions with Audio Testimonials

This post is more about increasing conversions than it is about SEO, but converting your traffic is very important. As web developers and Internet marketers, we try split testing ad copy and calls to action. We try optimizing landing pages and increasing targeted traffic. We also try listing testimonials, which provides a big trust factor when it comes to making that first purchase.

Have you thought about the power of using audio testimonials on your Web site? A service such as Instant Audio provides you with unlimited audio potential. They even give you your own 1-800 toll free number so your customers can talk about your business. The power of the spoken word is an extra dimension and powerful!

Tags: conversions, testimonials

Discover New Keywords by Examining Audience Trends

How many new behavioral trends have you discovered by exploring Wordtracker data?

Do you ever feel like you are running low on keywords related to your business?

Stop exploring keywords related to your solution or service and start exploring the trends that are related to your audience’s challenges.

In many cases, we tend to only be focused on our own services, rather than focusing on the conditions in the lives of our customers. Most of the time, when we begin laboring at our research, all we need to do is shift the focus of our research. Yet so few people ever to learn to become comfortable doing this.

Get yourself into the right frame of thinking again. Ultimately you need to stop focusing on a hunt for keywords and instead… learn how to explore the trends in the data that is already there in front of us. A great business oriented motivational speaker once said,

“Learn to love your clients instead of your business.”

He was right.

Give it a try the next time to use Wordtracker, or any other trend reporting tool, for your keyword research.

Tags: keywords, trends

Do You Rely Too Heavily on SEO Tools?

Are you obsessed with some SEO tool set or software program?

Think about software tools more as having a very specific purpose. There are some excellent tools to know about for sure. I even have a growing list of them here => SEO Tools.

We must also realize that the single most important key to understanding SEO in ways that will quickly profit your business, is to focus on skill-building through practice. It is important to gain and possess your SEO skills first, before fiddling with tools.

Tools are nice, but there is no tool that can match the human brain for creating and implementing a brilliant and profitable high traffic, high conversion strategy.

Everyone tends to love cool tools, but I encourage you to build your SEO comfort level manually and you will gain the comfort level much faster along with a sense of understanding exactly how to optimize, without always being prompted by a tool. Are you obsessed with some SEO tool set or software program?

Check out the various SEO conferences, seminars, and expos held throughout the year. Two of the most popular conferences include the Affiliate Summit (ASE), and the Search Marketing Expo (SMX).

Tags: knowledge, practice

Go Viral by Adding Humor to Your Website

What type of content are you adding to your Web site? Do you want to go viral? To go viral you will need some kind of content that makes your visitors want to show everyone they know. This could be controversy, humor, a list, a rant, an image, a video. Let’s talk about humor.

The use of humor at times is very powerful. It can be in the form of text, graphics, audio, or video, but just make sure it is good humor tastefully done. People want to feel good on your Web page.

Good humor will influence emotion and great humor can funnel volumes of traffic into your site just by word of mouth.

Can you recall seeing humor used on a Web page that made you laugh out loud?

If so, just think back and see if you don’t recall telling a friend to check it out! There may be sites where it might be hard to use humor, such as perhaps a funeral parlor or a divorce lawyer. On the other hand, with a little creativity, who is to say it could not be done…. with greatest of tact and care, of course.

Sometimes we have to think outside the box. Take a concept from your niche and a concept from either another niche, a cartoon, a video, local or world news, and mash them up. You might be excited to see how much traffic a silly image can drive to your site.

Tags: humor, viral

Fix Those Broken Links!

Search engines hate broken links. Visitors hate broken links. Everyone hates broken links. It’s such a pain to go through and analyze your site by hand. Well now you can do it with a couple clicks.

Here is a 5 star rated link checking program that you can download for absolutely free. The program Xenu displays an updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria.

A full report can be produced at any time.
One of the best free link checker tools out there!

Grab it here at:
Xenu Link Sleuth

Tags: dead links, hyperlinks, links

10 Tips for SEO Friendly Content Generation

Here are 10 useful tips for creating good content for SEO. These tips promote SEO friendly, as well as socially important, content.

• Create content that serves your customer’s needs first and your own needs second.
• Create content that will meet your visitor’s exact search query and satisfy it.
• Create content your visitor will be glad that they found - something that is useful.
• Create content that is based on real research rather than guessing at keywords.
• Create content that is written for your specific visitor so that it flows smoothly and reads well to them.
• Create content that is original and you feel proud to have created it.
• Create content that has a solid, well written “call to action.”
• Create content based on recent news and events in order to get traffic and backlinks.
• Create content that is controvertial or worthy of discussion in order to rank well in social networks.
• Create content that is scannable, highlighting important thoughts and ideas.

Tags: Content

Using Latent Semantic Indexing to Improve Content and Authority

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing by which we can analyze relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. In the context of its application to information retrieval, it is sometimes called latent semantic indexing (LSI). LSI is an extremely powerful influence to relevancy.

How LSI Works

LSI uses an occurance matrix that describes the occurrences of terms in documents. This term-document matrix is a sparse matrix whose rows correspond to terms and whose columns correspond to documents.

An equation that is typically used to assign values to the elements of the matrix is ‘term frequency–inverse document frequency’ (tf-idf), which says that the term-elements of the matrix are proportional to the number of times the terms appear in each document, where weights of rare terms are increased to reflect their relative importance. LSI then draws indirect relationships between terms and documents, by related then to some concepts.

It’s actually way more complicated than this, but you can read more here: LSI at Indiana University

Just remember that it does not ever replace good basic optimization factors, but it is something that you can study and apply to specific pages for those occasions where you have very low KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) phrases, that are highly competitive.

LSI is an influence that is at work in the background rewarding you for writing higher quality, well written content.

When you hear Matt Cutts from Google talking about writing better quality content, he is not offering deep hidden meaning in his advice. There are excellent reasons to right higher quality content that
reads well to your visitors.

Best advice is to create content that is useful, reads well and that serves some legitimate purpose.

Tags: Content, kei, lsi

5 Rules for Writing Attention Grabbing Headlines and Titles

You’ve probably thought a lot about using different styles of headlines in your articles. You headline is one of the most important aspects of your page as a good headline hooks the reader and gets them reading your content or article.

Here are a couple rules for writing headlines:

• Use title case. That is, all words with 3 or more characters should be capitalized.
  For example: How to Write Attention Grabbing Headlines and Titles
• Do not capitalize all letters in a word except for acronyms.
  For example: even when writing ‘ONLY’, or ‘TODAY’ or ‘NOW’, avoid using all upper case in titles.
• Quantify the point. Include numbers, measurements, timelines, etc…
  For example: see results in only 3 days!
• Use numerals rather than spelling out numbers.
  For example: 10 Easy Tips on building your business.

  is better than…..

  Ten easy tips on building your business.

• Use strong, emotional adjectives and verbs.
  For example: catastrophe, kill, demolish, love, annihilate.

Letters versus numerals is not based on SEO, but on what appeals the the human mind from a usability point of view. Please read this study:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-numbers.html

Tags: headline, title