The Greatest Keyword Tool of All Time

Google is set to release an updated version of its Keyword Tool which will combine features of the Keyword Tool (primarily for AdWords users) with features of the Search-based Keyword Tool (which is based on actual Google search queries) to create one of the most comprehensive and valuable keyword research tool on the Web today. It might just be the greatest keyword tool of all time.

The new Keyword Tool offers flexible search options, enabling users to search by any combination of keyword, website/URL, and category and receive a single set of results.

Users will also be able to filter result by word or keyword match type, and even view statistics for mobile search and use data filter based on local search, as well as search and ad share. It might just be the greatest keyword tool of all time.

Google also added some new features based on user feedback including the ability to remove duplicate keywords (which appear with an “Already in Ad Group” message) and the ability to add negative keywords automatically to your account from your keyword idea list.

The depth and value the upcoming tool provides kind of makes me wonder about the viability of commercial keyword research services. If Google dominates the search and ad space, what do the others know that Google doesn’t? Do you even need to consider using alternative providers? Is Google’s upcoming keyword tool the greatest keyword tool of all time? Share your comments below

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Building Brand Identity With Twitter

Twitter, the net’s networking success story, is intriguing and intimidating because of its message limitations: they can be 140 characters, and no more.

This is to say; each message sent on Twitter can be no larger than the previous sentence. Not an additional letter, space, period or dash can be added. These limitations have proven to be the greatest asset and the greatest challenge for people trying to use Twitter for any number of purposes.

On the advantageous side, the short messages have created an entire culture of Twitter-fluent writers. The brevity of the message stretches creative muscles, making people use every trick to get the most information into the fewest characters. On the other hand it creates a severe headache for the marketing minded, as it doesn’t leave much room to present a case. Thus the vast majority of Tweets are short little social comments or updates, and most marketing revolves around calling attention to particular links.

Of course, there are always ways around limitations, and Twitter is something that every seriously market-minded organization needs to embrace in order to see continued success on the web. In the case of short message services like Twitter, the key lies as much in the peripheral data that builds up around the message as in the content itself.

Be SEO Minded

Twitter profiles are now ranked by search engines, Google in particular. Every SEO technique you’ve learned now has a new, exciting purpose. For example, consider the biography you’re able to construct using Twitter. This is a ripe opportuníty to develop some brand recognition right away. Put the title of the brand you’re marketing in the bio, and consider including the most relevant keywords in your profile. As ever, do so in a way that respects the user’s intelligence, and gives them something worth reading. Simply stringing together a chain of keywords is not the way to go.

Include keywords in your Tweets as well, taking care not to be terribly obvious about it. The first 20-30 characters are the best place, as later words are of decreased importance in a Google ranking search.

Identify Your Audience

Each brand rises and falls on the whim of the audience, known in this case as tweeple.

There are a number of applications available to help you with the process of identifying the tweeple that you want to cultivate into an audience. Twitterholic can help you identify the movers and shakers based on their Twitter traffic and their location. If you know your field or brand well, you can use this to locate groups with similar interests and woo them to your feed. Tweepz is a similar tool, focusing on location, and Twitter itself has a ‘near this location’ feature that can be used to identify tweeple nearby your center of business.

Let’s Give Them Something to Tweet About

Yes, Twitter is an effective way to quickly distribute information. But its real power is in its ability to create conversations about something interesting.

In theory you could simply gather up a large user list of tweeple and start spamming them with links promoting your latest gig. This is a surefire way to get flagged for abuse or ignored entirely, and thus is rather counterproductive to good marketing goals.

Instead, consider using alternative methods to drum up those conversations that travel like wildfire.

For example, there is the technique of Alternate Reality Gaming. This is a phenomenon based on the idea of taking ‘real’ events and building a game out of them. Last Call Poker was an ARG that intended to drum up sales for an upcoming video game, GUN.

LCP spread out information about gatherings, online incentives, and other attractions to get people excited about the western theme of the game. Tokens such as poker chips and other goodies were given out at these events, and GUN went on to have a very successful launch. People were invited into the world of the western, and the chatter eventually included 8 million participants.

This kind of rogue advertising is tailor-made to work with Twitter. Locations and dates can easily fall within the 140 character limitation, as can short explanations. Consider creating an ARG with a short story designed to work within 140 characters, locate an audience with the assorted Twitter tools at your disposal, and plan some exciting events to promote your brand. The chance to get involved always gets people talking, and the more esoteric games can span entire continents.

There are other methods, some more appropriate to each individual brand. Perhaps a modest bicycling business isn’t suited to promote a large ARG experience. They could, however, organize a bicycling flash mob by hopping onto the local bike hobbyist twitter feed and posting a date and time. The trick is less which technique you use, and more that you do your best to make it relevant. As always, strong content and clear presentation will win out over gimmicks and sales speak.

Also, consider one last thought. The introductory statements of each section in this article are Twitter compatible, and so is this one. Good luck and happy Tweeting.

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How Does Google Rank My Site?

As we have seen, top rankings in the search engines are crucial for driving free traffic to your site.

So how is it that your competitor’s site gets top rankings in the search results while yours seems to be buried on page 10 or lower?

Let’s look at the factors that Google takes into account to decide which sites will get those coveted top positions, and which will be relegated to obscurity.

First we need to recognize that there are both on-page and off page factors.

On-page refers to stuff that is actually on your page. In other words, the stuff that both Google and your visitors can see and read. Off-page factors are everything else.

In order to understand how these work together, you need to start to think like Google. Google’s goal is to provide the most relevant up-to-date information it can. They want to do that so that people use their search engine, and they want that so that people get to see those sponsored Adwords listings, which is where Google earns their money.

So, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that your web pages are good – that they contain quality information that the reader will want to read.

The second thing you need to do is to make sure that your website has the correct information in its meta tags, titles, and content. For more details on this, the best resource I can recommend is Google’s own guide to SEO. http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf.

This is where you use the information from your basic keyword research. Make sure that your most valuable keywords are the ones that you include in your site’s title, meta tags, headers and so on. And of course in your content.

Remember, Google likes content – it likes sites with lots of content, and it likes sites with recently updated content, and it like sites with themed content about the chosen topic – again, guided by your keyword research.

Now let’s get to the off-page factors.

Go over to Google and type in the key phrase ‘click here’. Here is what you will likely get:

Look at these results. See how the words ‘click here’ are in bold? That is because that was the your search phrase, and so Google highlights your search phrase in the actual results.

Now look at the number one result, Adobe . Notice that they don’t have the words click here anywhere on their page. If they did, then they would show up in bold on the search result listing, just as they do on the other results below.

So, for the search term ‘click here’ the Adobe site is totally lacking in on-page factors. Their page is certainly not about the subject of clicking here, or anywhere else for that matter.

So how did they get to number 1? Once you know their secret, then you can apply that to your own site too.

The answer is in their backlinks.

Let’s look at this diagram for a minute:

This shows a hyperlink on a hypothetical site, example.com.

As you can see, the blue underlined text on the link says ‘dogs’. That blue text is what we call the link’s ‘anchor text’. If you clicked on this link, it would take you to another site, which we will call site A. So one can say that this link is pointing to site A.

Here is another link. On this one the anchor text says ‘dog allergies’. It just so happens that this link also points to site A.

Here are a couple more links, with different anchor texts. You can see that these point to site B.

Now, looking at that diagram, what would you guess is the topic of site A?

Yep, Dogs.

And the topic of site B? Yep, cars.

So you can see that you can get a good idea of what a site is about, based on the anchor text of all the sites that point to it.

So, if you were to search in Google for ‘dogs’ which site, A or B, is Google more likely to serve up to you in the search results?

You got it – Site A.

That is because site A has link reputation for ‘dogs’ whereas site B has link reputation for ‘cars’.*

Ok, now lets look at this diagram. Here we have a bunch of sites, all with anchor texts about dogs. 10 of them point to Site A and only 2 point to site B.

Other things being equal, if you searched Google for the term ‘dog’, which site would rank above the other?

Yep, Site A would sit above site C in the results, because it has more ‘link popularity’. In other words, it has more links pointing to it than site C.

So, going back to Adobe – it just so happens that Adobe has thousands of links pointing to their site, all with the anchor text ‘click here’. And so they rank number 1 for that search term, even though they have zero on-page factors for it.

Putting these two factors together, you can see that if you want to rank highly for your own search phrase, then you need both lots of links pointing to you (these are called back links, as they point back to you) AND you need lots of these links to have anchor texts that match your target keywords.

Ideally you would have thousands of links all with different anchor texts matching not just your top ten most valuable key phrases, but your top hundred, or even thousand. In this way you will get top ranking results for all those different key phrases that real people type into the search engines. Some may not have much volume, but when you add them up it can result in huge amounts of free traffic.

Let me repeat that, as it is important. To drive huge amounts of FREE traffic to your site, you need to have thousands of backlinks, all with different long-tail keywords used in the anchor text.

Where do you get this long list of valuable long-tail key phrases?

So, let`s summarize all this.

1.You need to be at the very top of the search results if you want to receive any organic (ie FREE) traffic. Being hidden down on the second or third page just won’t cut it.
2.You need to make sure that both your on-page and your off-page factors are optimized for your target search terms.
3.For on-page factors that means lots of quality relevant content – for example lots of articles about your subject matter. If your site is about dogs – then you need lots of articles about dogs. And, of course, make sure that your meta tags and titles are all correct too.
4.For off-page factors you need lots of back links. How many? That depends on how competitive your target search term is. For something very broad and competitive like ‘music’ or ‘how to make money’ you will need tens or even hundreds of thousands. But for more specific terms, and especially for localized terms, like ‘chiropractor West Vancouver’ you might need only a few hundred. And of course all those backlinks should use the correct anchor texts.
Those are the crucial fundamentals of SEO.

The next step is to devise a strategy that will gradually and consistently walk your own site up the search rankings. It doesn’t happen overnight. If you want that, then you need to go for those paid adwords advertisements. But that will cost you a lot of money.

But, if you do just one simple thing every week, you will get those top positions.

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Make Sure Your Backlinks Count

As you know, backlinks are the key to search engine rankings.

But what if the backlinks pointing to your site don’t get indexed by Google? Then, for all intents and purposes, they are basically useless.

So how would it be if we could find those links and get them indexed by Google?

Now a brand new plugin, created by a UAW member, does exactly that.

Here is how it works (note, this does require you to have WordPress sites).

First you need to get the plugin. It is available at clickbank.

In there you will find two plugins:

The indexing Tool Plugin

And the Trackback Plugin

Ok, so here is what you do.

Let’s assume that you have a WordPress site, which we shall call your Money Site, that you are promoting through the wizard or by other backlink building methods.

Now, the clever thing about WordPress, is that it finds and records all links pointing to your site that come from other blogs. So every time a blog posts a link to your Money Site, for example when they publish one of your articles, then YOUR site will know about it. In fact, it will show up in your dashboard when you next log in to your admin panel.

What we are going to do is to convert all those trackbacks into an RSS feed. Don’t worry, you don’t need to know that that all means, as it is all done for you.

All you need to do is install the Trackback PLugin onto your Money Site. This is done just the same as any other plugin, so it is dead simple. The plugin will provide you with a URL which is where your feed is located. Make a note of that.

The next thing you do is to install the Indexing tool on your site. Preferably this would go on a different wordpress blog, not on your Money Site. We will call this site your Traffic Site – the only requirement for it is that it gets spidered reasonably often by Google, so you could use a site that gets lots of traffic, but doesn’t make you any money.

Once you have installed it, go to the settings and configure them as you want them. Probably the default settings are fine. You will need to input the url to your trackback RSS feed that you just created on your Money Site.

What the Plugin Does

Now, what this plugin will do is to take that RSS feed and extract the URL’s to all the pages that are linking to you. Then it will check Google to see if those pages have been indexed. If they have, all well and good.

If they haven’t then the plugin will display those URL’s on your site – either in a sidebar widget, or underneath your blog posts. So, now you have a link pointing from your Traffic Site to the Third Party site that is backlinking to your Money Site.

The idea is that those links are now visible to Google. So when Google next visits your site, it will find the links, follow them to the distant URL. There it will index THAT page and, in turn, find the link from there back to your Money Site.

Hey presto! Now your backlink is properly indexed and COUNTS for SEO!

But this is where gets even more clever: Every few hours the Indexing Tool will go and check with Google to see if any of those pages have been indexed. Once it finds that a page has been indexed, it now removes that link from your Traffic Site, goes over to the RSS feed on your Money Site, and pulls out another page to be indexed.

So the links stay on your Traffic Blog only long enough for the backlink to your Money Site to get indexed. How cool is that?

This is a VERY powerful tool. I strongly recommend that you use if for all our Money Sites. If you don’t then, unfortunately, many of the backlinks you are building are being wasted. Sad, I know, but unfortunately true.

You can get the plugin here:

Why Not Put the Indexing Tool on your Money Site?

You can if you wish and you will probably be fine, but here are two reasons that I think it is preferable to use a different site:

1.The indexing tool creates a link to the page that is linking to you. That sets up a two-way reciprocal link. Not a huge issue, especially since that link will come down as soon as the destination is indexed, but Google isn’t too keen on reciprocal links. It likes one way links.

2.Do you know who it is that is linking to you? If you are using automated tools to create backlinks (such as UAW and other submission services) then your articles or backlinks will end up on a whole raft of site over whom you have no control. In fact, in most case you won’t even know who they are or what they are about.

Now, in the vast majority of cases that is not a concern. However, it is theoretically possible that some of those site may be what Google considers to be ‘Bad Neighborhoods’. If that is the case, and Google finds you connecting to them, it won’t be very happy with you. You don’t want that.

Furthermore, since the bad neighborhood site is probably itself banned from Google, the indexing tool may never find it when it checks with Google to see if it has been indexed. In that case, the link won’t be removed from your site, and Google will STAY unhappy with you.

All of this is, I believe, a remote risk. But I like to err on the side of caution, and the last thing I would want is for my site to be harmed because I am inadvertently linking to a bad neighborhood. For that reason I suggest putting the Indexing Tool on a non-money site, so you won’t cry too much is something does happen to it.

That’s it! As I said, this is a very powerful tool. Even with my slight note of caution, I DO recommend that you use this.

There are some other ways to use this plugin that are also very powerful – for example, putting in your author RSS feed from Ezine Articles to make sure all your articles there get indexed. Full instructions are provided

Get the Indexing Plugin Here

P.S. Here is a video that Paul (the author) just posted on You Tube to helpd explain the trackback plugin:

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The long tail of keyword research (and why single keywords are for losers)

This is a clever article written by by Mark Nunney about LongTail Keywords.

First, for those of you that don’t know what a long tail keyword is, it’s basically a 4-5 word keyword phrase, like “10 speed mountain bike gear shifter.” It’s fast becoming the right thing to do when building your content for your website to go after these longtail keywords instead of slugging it out with everyone else for the more competitive single and double keywords, like “mountain bike”, or “bike parts.”

In one month, a small website about management and leadership received 95,036 visits from search engines via 44,655 thousand different keywords. That’s a lot of keywords for a little site; and it’s a glimpse into the long tail of keyword research. For most websites, how to make a profit from the long tail is the same as how to make a profit.

Here’s a grab of the report showing those figures from our example site:

Here’s another from a busier site on which we see 379,243 keyword (search engine) visits from 210,441 different keywords.

Single keywords are for losers
It is clearly impossible to specifically target 44,000 single keywords. Or as I like to put it more rhetorically:

Single keywords are for losers

And yet SEO advice and professional services are almost all about single keywords.

Clearly we must choose our SEO help wisely and make our return on investment calculations carefully.

The insignificant top 10
When looking at a site’s stats, we often look at the top 10 keywords.

Those top 10 keywords (I’ll call these the ‘head’ keywords) bring 9,400 visits between them which is less than 10% of the site’s keyword (i.e. search engine) traffic.

If we have a look into our example site’s long tail – the other 44,645 keywords – we find that only the top 900 bring more than 10 visits a month.

I clearly don’t have time to even look at all these long tail keywords. And if I spent time targeting any of them, how much response would I get from 10 visits? How much money would I make? Not enough to make it worth my while.

Let’s go deeper still…

Only 8,135 out of the 44,645 keywords (less than 20%) bring more than 1 visit a month. That means over 80% bring just one visit. And those single-visit keywords make up approx 40% of the site’s total keyword (search engine) traffic.

Targeting single keywords is starting to look daft.

We have a dilemma. Just targeting head terms leaves the big money on the table but it is clearly not profitable to target single keywords in the long tail. The answer is simple:

Target groups of keywords

Which as it happens is quite easy. But before we look at how to do it, let’s look beyond our little example website…

The long tail is very long
Bill Tancer in his now seminal post, Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search, looked at 14 million searches and concluded that the long tail is so long that the head is of no significance. As Bill puts it:

“If search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”

Here’s Bill’s graph of the top 10,000 search terms from his sample (the y-axis shows the % of all searches for each keyword on the x-axis):

The significant thing here is that the head terms shown in that graph above make up a miniscule % of all searches in the sample.

Some figures illustrate this further. In Bill’s sample, the:

•Top 100 terms bring 5.7% of searches
•Top 500 terms bring 8.9% of searches
•Top 1,000 terms bring 10.6% of searches
•Top 10,000 terms bring 18.5% of searches
But the long tail is even longer than this. Bill Tancer’s figures amaze but they greatly underestimate the size of the long tail because he used just 14 million searches and, in July 2009 alone, 113 billion searches were made on search engines.

So Bill’s sample was about 0.01% of the number of searches made in a month.

I can’t do better than quote Bill again: “There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend”.

Another thing about head keywords
Head keywords remain irresistible to many SEOs and website owners. They want to see their site top of Google’s results pages for them. They become trophy keywords.

Plus, few people want to go through the learning curve required to start thinking about groups of keywords (keyword niches).

But as well as ignoring most searches, head keywords are very competitive. Increasingly, despite Google’s fight against paid links, to get top of Google for the big money keywords you need to pay for your site’s inbound link power. Which we don’t want to do, so…

So let’s learn how to play with the long tail…

How to make a profit in the long tail
How do you make a profit from keywords that bring just one visit a month? Easy, you target lots of them at once – you target groups of keywords (keyword niches). Here’s how…

Let’s start simply with one page. Your SEO might focus on one or two keywords but you’re really targeting those keywords and their long tails. And the more relevant and related words on your page, the more of that tail you can get results for. I love 2,000 word articles. Let’s look at an example…

The following image is from a Google Analytics report for a page from thinkingmanagers.com about swot analysis and strengths and weaknesses. We can see it gets results for up to 10,000 different keywords.

This long tail tactic is so effective that you can get great results from a page without getting anything from its primary target keyword. E.g. the page mentioned above doesn’t get a top 10 ranking for either swot analysis or strengths and weaknesses. I summarize this tactic as …

Target the head and exploit the tail

This does not mean that you should spend hours stuffing (or just adding) relevant keywords to your pages. That spoils your copy and usually takes too long to be profitable. It means that you:

•Plan the structure of your site’s content, organizing it into categories, e.g. sports cars and family cars for a car site.

•Allocate (e.g.‘tag’) existing content to relevant categories.

•Each category has a category home page, e.g. a sports car page, that lists links to relevant pages on your site.

•For each category, find target keywords (of course I really mean keyword niches). E.g. italian sports cars, sports car insurance.

•If a keyword niche is big then make it a category. E.g. italian sports cars might become a category. Planning a site’s structure can be a big job.

•For each target keyword, commission or write a long article with lots of words.

•Don’t sweat on the individual keywords within your articles. Leaving that copy natural will target 1000s (sometimes 10s of thousands) of keywords. The big job is the initial keyword research and subsequent site planning.

•Analyze results. Which keyword niches bring the most response? Continue your keyword research – looking for more keyword niches to target.