Are you spending too much time trying to get on the first page of Google for the “big words”?

There are more words out there than the ever-coveted “top tier” terms. If you aren’t researching keywords that are a little less competitive and possibly a lot easier to rank your website with, maybe you should consider it.

There are a ton of great tools out there to help you figure out what those keywords are.

Google Insights for Search

For starters, Google has great tools that are built just so you can see what’s going on out there in web world – specifically, what people are out there looking for. Google Trends and Google Insights for Search.

http://trends.google.com and http://www.google.com/insights/search allow you to type in certain keywords, and find out different keyword trends that vary by city, and by date.

You unfortunately won’t get exact numbers – for instance, you would be able to see that 1,431,000 people worldwide searched for a particular keyword in May of 2006. If that is the type of specific information you’re looking for, you might want to look elsewhere.

Google will, however, give you an idea based on a linear of scale of how the search volume of a particular keyword has changed over time. You will also get city and country information for top searches, and can narrow your search by region.

Google Keyword Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google’s Keyword tool is also an incredible asset, as it lets you examine the competition you’ll find for each keyword. Take a look at the competition meter next to the keyword you type in within your results. It’s a very handy tool to determine which words have little competition.

Keyword Spy

There are plenty of other keyword tools out there that are subscription-based. Keyword Spy, Spyfu, and other popular tools can help you figure out what keywords your competitors are using. This could be valuable information to determining the lowest competition keywords out there for you.

I’ve Got My Keywords – Now What?

After you’ve made a creative list of low competition keywords, start local. Target a few local markets in major cities of your choosing, and make sure tracking is in place to see how your SEO efforts are going. When you get good rankings in those local markets, then you can move on to more and more cities. Make sure to keep track of your national or global rankings, if applicable, throughout the process.

There are plenty of ways to do effective SEO. Make sure that you continually improve your on page factors and continue to hunt for effective backlinks throughout building your SEO campaigns. And remember … if you don’t have tracking software in place, you really shouldn’t start any campaigns. If you don’t have any idea how far you’ve come, you won’t be able to measure tangible goals, and develop a plan to get there.

Selecting the right keywords for your website content and html tags is still one of the most fundamental parts of any SEO strategy. While anyone starting a website or blog is likely to spend a considerable amount of time selecting the keywords they think will get them top search results, how often should you revisit the task, and how can you determine whether you have selected the keywords that are working the hardest for you? The following tips can help you keep your SEO strategy fresh, and your keywords the most effective they can be for your website or blog.

Evaluating your results

The first thing to consider when deciding whether it is time to rework your keywords is to determine whether they are performing as they should. There are a number of great tools on the market, both free and proprietary that can make this a fairly simple task. One of the best free keyword tools is part of Google’s popular Analytics application. If you haven’t signed up for this application then you absolutely need to. It is a great tool for your overall SEO strategy, and the keyword tool can help you determine the overall search results for each of your keywords.

If you are in the market for a more customizable SEO tool then you may want to consider purchasing the top selling SEO PowerSuite, though you may also want to think about the rather expensive price tag before making this decision. It has a variety of features that can really help you maximize your SEO strategy, and the keyword tool will not only help you evaluate your keyword results, but give you suggestions for more effective keywords as well. Though Google Analytics also has this feature, SEO PowerSuite is much more effective overall, and will improve not only your Google ranking, but your overall ranking online.

Improving your Keywords

Both Google Analytics and SEO PowerSuite can offer you tools to improve your keywords through suggesting ones that may be more effective. While this can get you started on improving your keywords, what sort of strategy should you have to maximize these results? The temptation to “keyword stuff” can be overwhelming, and while this can temporarily improve your rank, if your content quality goes down this may have the reverse effect on your revenue stream from PPC links or donations. One way to get around this is to try including keywords in areas of your website other than the content. Using meta tags in your pages title, using multiple domains, and working on your backlinks can all improve your overall ranking.

So in general, developing a regular routine of checking your keywords with some sort of SEO keyword tool and making improvements based on the provided suggestions, as well as your own experience will keep your website or blog where you want it to be.

If you’ve worked with a self-hosted WordPress blog, you understand the SEO ranking power of blogs. Blogs, when updated frequently, optimized for SEO and kept spam-free, can be powerful tools to help you rank higher in Google than any ordinary website can.

If you’ve wondered why blogs seem to do so well in the search engines, and get picked up more quickly, the secret is in the power of the ping. Pinging is an important part of the way your blog works, notifying various websites when you update your blog, or change content in any way.

To find out which ping services your blog notifies, go to your WordPress dashboard, and find the Settings menu. Then click on Writing. You should see a list of services, which will likely include http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. This is the default ping service WordPress uses. Ping-o-matic will notify search engines and other services that you’ve updated your blog, which can be really helpful to getting you indexed. Since WordPress automates this process for you, if you’re paying attention to your blog, you’re going to be sending out pings. Your pages will be crawled on a much more consistent basis if you’re notifying the engines of new updates via pings.

What about Pingbacks?

A pingback happens when another website links to one of your blog posts. If you have pingbacks enabled on your blog, you’ll receive a comment notification when your article is linked to. This will also increase your blog’s SEO power, and help improve your ranking.

Is it Possible to Ping Too Much?

Every time you edit or make an update to a blog post, your blog sends out a ping. It is possible to get penalized in search engines or with different ping services for excessive pinging. In the case of ping services, too much can be a very bad thing.

For instance, say you are working with a blog posting, and realize there are several typos. You edit your post and publish the changes, only to realize there were several other typos you missed. Before you’re finished, you’ve published at least three more times. You also decide to check your other postings for errors, and you end up finding several. In the end, you’ve re-published various posts several times, and sent out a ping to your different services each time.

Even if you’re not prone to typos, there are other situations where you may need to make several post edits. As an affiliate, you may also be using different TIDs for products listed in different parts of your blog. Say you need to change TIDs for your affiliate links on several different posts. You may end up re-publishing posts several times – and again, pinging your services multiple times in one sitting.

So, how can you set your blog up to keep you from getting penalized or banned as a result of multiple pings?

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

MaxBlogPress is a the most popular ping optimizer plugin for WordPress on the web. Best of all, it’s free! You can try it out at: http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mpo/

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The interface is super easy to use, and will actually allow you to specify a time increment for pings. This ensures that you will still be pinging, just not excessively.

In terms of optimizing pings, the MaxBlogPress plugin is virtually unrivaled. You can continue customization of your pings by researching the ping services that are best for you. There are many ping services out there, so research carefully to ensure that your list is up-to-date, and utilizing the services that are best for your blog.

Even more than Facebook, Twitter is fast becoming the social networking site of choice for virtually everyone who wants their presence known online. Twitter was developed as a micro-blogging platform that allows users to post text-based messages, or “Tweets” up to 140 characters that are then sent to their followers, or subscribers. While the vast majority of Tweets are personal in nature, the marketing potential of Twitter is fast being recognized, and using Twitter to market your blog can mean a quick, easy to use, and free way to increase your web traffic.

The simplest way to use Twitter to market your blog is by getting people to become your followers, and tweeting them every time you create a new post. Advertising your Twitter account on your blog, topic-relevant forums, through article submission, and on other websites can get the followers to sign up, and then simply sending a tweet can inform them all to check out your latest blog.

Using Twitter, however, can certainly get more creative than that. Likely the more creative you get, the more interested your followers will become, and the more traffic you will draw to your blog. Engaging your followers, soliciting their input on your blog’s topics, and asking for reactions to your posts can gain more interest than simply advertising your latest blog. It is also important to reply to your followers, both on Twitter and on your blog. Making your readers feel like you value their input will keep them coming back, and may even gain you some of those ever valuable backlinks.

Now that you have decided to enter the new world of social networking, avoiding the temptation to over tweet can be difficult. Setting up two twitter accounts is one way to prevent your followers from feeling like they are being spammed. This allows your readers to sign up for tweets that simply update them on new posts, or for those that are interested, receive more information, like appearances you may be making, relevant industry updates, and general responses. This will keep your follower interested and not overwhelmed. Just don’t forget to include a link to the blog too!

In today’s web business industry successful Search Engine Optimization tactics are absolutely fundamental to your online business’ or blog’s success. While onsite SEO involves choosing the right keywords or phrases, and correctly embedding them in your html code, Back Linking involves getting as many quality links to your webpage as possible, and is quickly becoming the most important tool to getting top, and lasting search engine hit results.

There are generally two types of Back Links that produce desired SEO results; one-way and reciprocal. One-way links are links that appear on other sites, the higher ranking themselves the better, that lead to your website or blog. It is these types of links that are generally most effective in getting higher search engine result, though are often more difficult to maintain. It is for this reason that more and more online linking businesses, often called Link Farms have sprung up in the last few years, and they usually charge a fee to maintain the links on their page. Though effective, Link Farms are often regarded as “spamdexing”, and can sometimes be removed from search engine results. Reciprocal links are links that appear on your website which take you to another page that also contains a link back to your site. In general these are less effective as a SEO strategy.

From simple contacting webmasters of sites that may attract your potential customers or readers and asking for a link, to paying companies that specialize in one-way Back Linking, there are a number of ways to use this SEO tactic to get online traffic to your site. All methods, however, are not created equal. Avoiding Link Farms, and hiring expert companies or individuals can keep your website active, and produce the revenue you are looking for.

Lastly, an important part of Back Linking is knowing how to keep track of how this strategy is working. The most effective, and ultimately the only way to truly evaluate the success of your Back Linking strategy is implementing software. This type of program can keep track of the live links that Back Link to your site, and the number or percentage of traffic that each brings. Most CMS, or Content Management Software includes these types of programs.

Here are a few tools I regularly use to speed up my blog commenting for link building campaigns.

easyComment

easyComment is a lightweight FireFox plugin that makes blog commenting fast, and easy to maintain. Simply install the plugin, restart firefox, and right click on “easyComment” in the bottom right hand corner of your browser window, then click Manage Profiles. Create as many profiles for as many sites as you want. After you’ve setup a profile, follow our blog commenting tutorial and you’re on your way to building quality back links.

SEOquake

SEOquake is a firefox plugin that every webmaster should be using. I won’t get into all of the details of this extension since it is so powerful, but I will explain how to properly use it in order to maximize your blog commenting campaign.

1. Install the SEOquake Firefox Plugin
2. Restart Firefox
3. Go to Google.com
4. Type yourkeyphrase “remember my information” “notify me of follow up comments”
5. Click “Advanced Search”
6. Click “Results Per Page” and change it to 100
7. Click the “Advanced Search” button
8. Click “Request Parameters”



9. Sort Page Rank by descending order (see screenshot below)



10. Now you have a list of relevant blogs that allow comments, sorted from the highest page rank (top) to the lowest page rank (bottom)
11. You can even export this list for future use by clicking the “Save to File” button, (next to request parameters)

More Uses for SEOquake…

So there is one, fantastic use for SEO quake. But, I’m not done yet! There’s yet another great feature that will help your blog commenting for link building campaign. What you ask? Do you see that little, tiny, square icon in the bottom right corner of your browser? It should say “SQ”. Right click that icon, and click “line through no-follow and no-index”. Now, on every page you visit, there will be a line through any link that is marked as no-follow. Extremely useful if you’re blog commenting only to increase your page rank.