A comprehensive list of keyword research tools

A list with all available keyword or market research tools would be useful. I hope you like my list. I will add any new links you post here to keep them organized.

Traffic:

http://www.alexa.com
http://www.compete.com/
http://www.quantcast.com/
http://www.hitwise.com/

Keyword services:

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
http://www.wordtracker.com/
http://www.wordstream.com
http://wordze.com/
http://www.wordpot.com/
http://www.nichebot.com/
http://www.keywordcountry.com/
http://www.themezoom.com/

Free keyword tools:

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
http://www.wordstream.com/keywords/
http://www.wordpot.com/KeywordTool.aspx

Search suggestions:

Google
Youtube
Yahoo
Bing
Ask

Google tools:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
http://www.google.com/sktool/
http://www.google.com/insights/search
http://www.google.com/trends

Competitor research:

http://spyfu.com/
http://www.keywordspy.com/
http://www.adgooroo.com/
http://www.semrush.com/
http://www.keycompete.com/
http://www.ispionage.com/
http://www.keywordcompetitor.com/

Software
http://www.keywordelite.com/
http://www.micronichefinder.com/index.html
http://ppckeywordtoolz.com/
http://www.marketsamurai.com/
http://www.seoelite.com/

Online
http://www.majesticseo.com/
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

Get Indexed Super Fast!

Submit your site url to Digg. Don't worry about how many other Diggs you get. The title and description should be interesting (for as high a CTR as possible, later on) and keyword rich too (for ranking purposes).

Then take your Digg url:

example: digg.com/Ferrari/Best_Auto_Suspension_for_Rich_Lovers

Get over to http://www.kping.com

Submit your url.

Go to http://www.pingomatic.com

Add your keywords to the title, and add what you want to rank for, too.

Thats it!

Take it further:

Get a couple of Digg accounts, behind a few proxies. Don't bother digging your own urls. Try and give your Digg accounts names which are relevant to your vertical (car-lover, super-car-lover etc).

Make sure you only Digg 2 urls per account. So if you have 10 urls you want to get indexed, only digg urls 1 + 2 with digg account 1, then with digg account 2 digg url 3 + 4 etc.

Add each account to your other accounts, as friends, and still behind a proxy.

Go to Digg and see your friends activity. You'll see the list of diggs that your 'friend' has submitted. You can get the RSS feed for this friends account (orange button near the top):

digg.com/urers/yourfriend/friends.rss

Get this for each friends account.

Submit at http://www.pingomatic.com

Each one with a different title you want to rank for.

Add each at:

My MSN
My Yahoo
My Google
BlogoWogo

Use a RSS submitting program if you can get one, and paste the RSS feed urls and submit to directories.

Voila!

Now I'm not saying this will definitely get you ranked at the TOP of each search engine, but sometimes you need to get indexed super fast (sales of a new site/blog whatever). So use this for that stuff and you should be golden.

From there, add more backlinks to push yourself up the SERPS.

Ways To Get Indexed Very Quickly

This is all about how to get your website or webpage indexed as quickly as possible. If the method gives you a backlink, that's cool too but it's not required. If you have a trick in your sleeve, please share it. I'll start.

Propeller method:
- Submit a story in Propeller and use popular tags like "news", "google", "barack obama" or better yet, find a hot hot news story and see what tag it uses
- For some reason search engines love love love Propeller. My current record is getting indexed in 11 minutes.
- Your story will be changing pages constantly so backlink value isn't that good.

Warning about using Digg to get indexed:
- I don't know if it's just me but it seems that submitting your story to Digg and getting 0 diggs does more bad than good for you.
- For some reason my pages don't get indexed unless they receive diggs. If somebody has opposite experiences (recent ones), please contribute.

Press releases:
- Use free press release service and publish a press release.
- I haven't used this for ages because Propeller works so test yourself.
- This works because Google has their own news aggregator that loves to scrape all press releases
- If your press release gets picked up and not just spidered, you'll get good backlinks too.

About Tag & Ping, Blog & Ping, Commenting, etc.
- Only for link building in my opinion.
- It just looks way too spammy if you start with pinging or commenting.

Traffic to your blog from CNN

Found this:

I discovered quite by accident that you can get a lot of quick traffic from CNN, especially if it's a "hot trend" type of thing.

If you have a blog, write about a topic that's really hot -- like the April Fool's virus. Cite some authoritative stuff from CNN and give them a link. They give you a trackback in the "what blogs are saying" section under the article.

I got over 190 visitors from CNN in just one day. More continue to come in.

I'm taking a look at other news media and will put together a list that gives trackbacks. Some of my blogs were getting traffic from news sites and I just wasn't paying attention. By capitalizing on what's hot and linking to current articles, I think this could be a huge boost to any blog. It sure was more effective than Digg, that's for sure.

I can confirm this.

Also Politico.com allows you, to post your blog links in comments.

A few British news outlets lets you post it as a live HTML link with keywords.

Twitter Success Strategies

I want to share everything I've been doing to create a successful Twitter account. My hope is that I can help you out. :)

Background (before I knew what I was doing):

I recently started a new website with a partner. I had created a Twitter account having known about Twitter for a while, but never really used it.

I went around following all the top dogs in my niche and the people they're following. I would post about different things I was doing and throw a link on when I created a new article or something of that nature.

My response? Nothing!!!

I thought to myself, "Twitter sucks... what a stupid website. What is the big deal about Twitter?"

I write this here because this seems to be most people's experience. They get on there, put their product, their website or themselves up there, only to be totally ignored! And as a result, frustrated and unenthusiastic about Twitter.

The strategy I figured out (that DOES work well):

Twitter is about conversations - Yeah, yeah, you may have heard that before. Let me translate it to something meaningful: Twitter is about MUTUAL INTERESTS. When people are making that split second decision on whether or not they follow you, they look at the following things.

- the number of people following you (we'll get to inflating this later)
- the value of the content in your posts ("tweets")
- the regularity at which you converse with your followers

Let's talk about that last thing - how often you talk with your followers. See, if people see that you DON'T talk to the people that follow you, they will not want to follow you either. Again, Twitter is about MUTUAL INTERESTS, so if they believe that you won't acknowledge them as a follower, they're not going to bother following you (and by extension, your interests).

Talking to followers involves writing @ and then your message. That user can then see your @ reply to them in his/her @ list. It makes them feel warm and fuzzy because you are publicly acknowledging them, which means you are implicitly endorsing them to your followers.


Twitter is about contributing value to your followers - OK, how can you do this (and how have I done this effectively)... People value posts about:

a. Breaking news (and links to the news)
b. QUOTES (I post about 5 quotes relevant to my niche everyday and my followers go bananas!!)
c. Something funny.
d. A great, relevant link within your niche which is not self-promotion.

When you tweet things that are of value to your followers, they will often "retweet" you. This means that they will write "RT @ ... your message ..." to spread the message you sent to all their followers. YOU WANT THIS. It's a great way to get new followers and it also shows users that you are a good, legitimate person to follow who gives value.

To make yourself more "retweet" worthy, write posts about the 4 things I mentioned above regularly and choose a SHORT twitter name (if possible). Also, because twitter messages are limited to 140 characters per message, leave about 12 - 20 characters unused in your original message to leave room for them to credit you on the retweet.

With that said, give back by retweeting the posts that you find valuable. It's the ultimate compliment to give on Twitter.

People will judge you on your number of followers... get a bunch! - It's true, people treat people differently depending on the number of followers they have.

When I had 300 followers, people didn't really care all that much about what I was saying. But after I broke 2000 followers, tons of people started coming out of the woodwork, kissing my butt and trying to get on MY radar screen!

The difference goes back to mutual interests again. People know that if you have over 2000 followers, you have a good sphere of influence. Therefore, they are going to try and get you to like them so that maybe you will say something good about them to your following, which helps them out.

Good luck and hope it helps.

Googles next Major PR update is 3/31/09, are you ready?

I don't think PR update will cause as much a stir as it would a couple years back. Two reasons:

1. I highly believe Google's ranking PR is heavily dynamic, so an update may mean the toolbar value will change, but the SERPs should largely stay the same for the non-naughty sites out there.

2. Any last minute hastiness isn't going to secure anything, except Red Flags. Rather stay natural - should be my advice. If you want to pass trust by linking to high authority sites, that different. Don't make this PR Update a big issue than it already is.

Another laid back attitude towads this PR update is :

It doesn't affect SERP changes as it used to be. For link sellers it maybe a bad thing, but last year when my toolbar pr dropped from 5 - "Two" - my serps weren't affected at all. Sure some of my sites gained massive serp boost, which means some of the top pages lost their position, I'd still recommend everyone sticking to their linking schedule. If theres new competition in the Block, have a Fight Plan.

Best of Luck everyone retaining their SERPs or Boost.

Tips To Get Indexed Fast On Google

1. Put your site up

2. Create 10 different Social bookmarking profiles

3. Create blogger blog make a couple of post with links back to your site then ping and social bookmark the posts.

4. Create Squidoo lens with a couple of links back to your site and social bookmark the lens.

5. Create Hub page with a couple of links back to your site and social bookmark the Hub page.

6. Create a Wordpress blog on wordpress,com make a couple of post with links back to your site ping and social bookmark the posts.

I usually get indexed doing this within 24 to 48 hours.

If not then Rinse and Repeat

Note: if you have Fantastico in your c-panel make a wordpress blog as a subdirectory of your site and do the same as above.

Preferably the links going back to your site should have the keywords you want to rank for them.

Optimal Seo Tips And Tricks

For anyone who wants to rank well in a certain niche, given a moderate competition ( Adwords avg CPC is not too high example like the good ol' Mesithelioma, quoted results between 500,000), these are the surefire methods which will rank them high in search engines ( Usually in Google first, followed by Yahoo and Live) :

Have optimal site structure, with relevant: follow, no indexes : in archival and other duplicate content possibilities. Silo structures help you to rank for long tails easily (while waiting for the more competitive rankings), keywords in the title, variations as header etc. all been discussed.

O.P.O.S - Clever deeplinking, example NOT using anchor texts as a outbound link if you want to rank that particular page for that anchor text. On Page Optimization is very essential, I'm talking about Alts, relevant variations in keywords, careful management of link juice flow throughout the site, etc.

Content : Put original content, lots of them. Consistent pace is very essential. Most of the times consistency will make the difference. Putting 100 articles up a weekend don't work anymore. Adding original, well written content consistently will make the spiders love your site. example: for many QDF ( Query deserves Freshness) queries, the site will slowly start to rank.

LinkBuilding : Try to get at least 3-4 links from the top 20 sites ranking. Its easier than you think. There are lots of ways - call them directly, be a chick, hire a chick, give a reward, guest blog, - and of nothing helps - start a false controversial flame war accuse them something stupid, once you get mentioned in their site/blog - apologize and everyone will forget. Even John Reese publicly apologized for his Tweeter comments with mashable.

A. Try to build links gradually. Age of site is very important. Experience says if the site is 8 months - 2 years old, aggressive link buildings are often blind eyed by the search engines. However, should try getting 300-500 links in 2 months, do-followed, good targetted anchor texts, pointing to your sites. Relevant niche forum signatures works both as relevant links and a source of initial traffic. Provide value in the forum posts rather than spamming them. Of course article marketing, blog comments etc helps, but make sure you first use original content in your own sites before syndicating.

Fail Safe is a completely different topic, maybe ill share it sometime later for what to do when someone is stuck in the rankings.

B. Consistency is the key. 99.9% in house self starter SEOs fail because they get frustrated after month 1 or 2. Five to six months time of gradual efforts to the site must bring it to the front pages of the organic searches. there is a big BUT though..


...search engines brings you targeted traffic - means more or less the conversion centric buyers will be aware of the niche. Monetizing them is an art, which I lack. Traffic alone is BS if you cant convert them. Marketing is 100 times harder than SEO - although both are Arts of its kind - I firmly believe one should know how to sell himself in order to be successful.

ClickTale - Traffic Analysis Service

ClickTale

Basically you can see exactly what users are doing on your site,
it captures a visitor and records how he navigates throughout your site
and then you can watch it like a movie.

It provides heat maps, where the user is focused the most, where he
stops and thinks, from which point in the site he leaves, etc...

Free for up to 100 records/week

The value of getting listed in DMOZ

Dmoz never indexed sites, never has or will - it's not a search engine - it's a human edited directory which you have to submit to for inclusion. It's extremely difficult to get in but it isn't essential to have a listing there to achieve good rankings.

However, a DMOZ listing will help your search engine rankings. Google is known to apply a higher weighting score to links given from Dmoz because it can indicate the usefulness of the site to the web as a whole (in theory).

Personally I think the quality of the site's listed on Dmoz are questionable. There's a mix of okay and terrible.

It was much easier to get in 8, 9, 10 years ago when it was young than it is now, so if you managed to get your mediocre site listed in 1999 and you haven't let the domain expire you're laughing.

There are site's on there that offer no value whatsoever, they've just been there since the beginning so they'll stay there. They're part of the decor.

If you've got a recognized brand, you're more likely to get in. If not then you're at the mercy of the Dmoz editor for your websites category.



There were some site's that I have been trying to get in for years with no luck, other's I got in on the first or second attempt (not many though). I've actually given up with Dmoz, I tell people how to submit for best chance of inclusion - it's up to them if they want to persist.

There is a backdoor that I haven't tried for a couple of years - have a look through your preferred category for expiring domains. There are a lot of domains that were registered in 1996 - 1998 for the maximum period of 10 years that will now just be expiring. If you can snap them up, you've got yourself a Dmoz listed domain to build on or 301 redirect to your main site. There are usually multiple categories that your site could fit in to so there's usually a few worth watching.

SEO - Google way

Check out the video below for a Google presentation on how

to get organic search results.

Description:

Website enhancement
1) Crawling : accessibility, flash, ajax and images
2) Indexing : promoting quality content and reducing duplicates
3) User friendly search results
4) Search Tips

SEO for new domain

Web semantic is heavily related to Trustrank now...the more trust juice you can direct to your site - the better response you can get. Of course the whole campaign of link building must "seem natural" if you want to be a consistent performer for the adwords competitive keyword phrases - surely Google treats them differently than the non competitve keyword phrases.

Although No-Follow tags are not so important in terms of pagerank evaluation or anchor text votes, some of them are surely one of the heaviest links you can ever get. Try getting your site in a wikipedia page - you will see what im trying to say here. And Google might not take the no-follow into account (thats what they say) - but im 103% sure they monitor them all around. No-follow tags IMHO are one of the biggest proofs that the link campaign was indeed "natural".

First thing I do with a new domain, with often stratospheric effect is :

Search for the related forums of the related keyword phrases
Pick out all the high pagerank pages one by one (Parse them)
Add my link there in a 4:1 ratio ( 4 being my targetted keyword phrases, one being a related LSI phrase)
Add my links to the other pages as well.
Find the right place to Outsource ( 100 forum postings cost me $5 )

----This is not even a tiny portion of the link building I will do for the next few months, but keeping in mind the domain is fairly new - it gives my site a very good chance to sip in some relative authority before going the speedy way.

Search Ranking can give me very targeted traffic - THATS IT! I would never rely on it 100% (Any More!) and rather try all the other traffic methods for my sites. The MFA days are long gone, and now only long term internet business models can survive.

This can go along forever, but what I have learnt from experience - a business is a business - no matter if its offline or online - you can treat whatever traffic you get like a king OR you can kill the goose to rip all the Golden Egg at once - and get NOTHING!!

My Experience with Google Analytics

Despite Google doing whatever they want to with their Analytics installed - it SURELY gives the site a number of passive advantages in Google SERP.

#1. With the confidence of letting Google track web statistics using their own Analytics system, its like a 'Raise your hands, who is not afraid to expose anything evil'.

#2. Google Analytics was the easiest analytics programme, and also one of the most charismatic - on avg. I increase CTR of 250% studying the visitor clicking semantics - which i dont think any other Analytics program displays as vivdly as Google Analytics.

#3. If your website is genuine with no apparent rush, Google Analytics can only help you learn your site better, especially for better conversions. It worked for me since the beginning - and its working perfectly fine now. I have never seen any inconsistency in my PPC income - since i was always consistent in what I do.

Bottom line : Google Analytics is still my favorite web tracker, because it works for me. If it doesn't for you, I could not share your hatred, since I firmly believe you are doing something - which Google doesn't like.

Lowering PPC cost with SEO

From a market perspective, SEO will not lower PPC bids - as more and more people enter the online market, they will only become more competitive and more expensive.

From your own personal perspective, then yes, having a strong SEO campaign can give you the ability to lighten your PPC budget (if we're talking just search engine PPC here). For example, if your keyphrase is "Blue Widget" and you're currently paying $1.00 PC in Adwords to be the #3 spot. Well, with a strong SEO presence you can get yourself to rank naturally for #1 for the search "Blue Widget". With that being the case, you may not need to be #3 in Adwords anymore, as most people have a tendency to click on natural listings before paid anyways. So, from that perspective, you could lower, or even eliminate much of your search engine PPC costs for the phrases you naturally rank well for.

Content or Links: What Drives a Higher PR?

You have probably read time and time again about the power of linking, whether they are from link trades or simple one-way back links. In addition, the phrase “Content is King” seems to pop its little head up all over the place in informational products dedicated to Internet Marketing. Both are very important to have, but which one has more of a driving force when it comes to Google PR? I decided to conduct an ongoing experiment with this almost one year ago, and my results are actually quite surprising. At this point, I would like to share my two-tier test with you.

Background:
I bought two brand new domains (Site A and Site B), both with an initial PR of 0. Site A would be dedicated to acquiring links, while Site B would just focus on daily unique content. Both sites consisted of a homepage and a blog, and both were in a relatively similar niche. The time difference of getting Site A and Site B live was two weeks. On both sites, the homepage remained static, and the blogs were updated twice a day every day for about 7 months, then I dropped it down to once a day. All of the blog posts were created by me, which focused on discussing recent articles as well as including information the articles may have missed about the niche. Both blogs used WordPress.

The site that went live two weeks earlier (Site A) was the one I used for acquiring links. There were three sites I used for establishing my links: www.linkmarket.net (the free version), www.linkalizer.com (the free version), and www.backlinks.com (once I acquired enough of a PR to sign up for free with them). Also, the links I received were not all related to my niche; I just simply created a link directory on my site (not on the homepage or blog) and threw all of the
links I traded for into it.

Tier 1 Test:
After about 7 months of doing this, I was interested to see what the Google PR was for both of these sites. Here were the results:

Site A:                                        Site B:
Homepage PR: 4                      Homepage PR: 1
Blog PR: 4                                 Blog PR: 0

I found this to be pretty interesting, particularly Site B. Since all of the linking I did with Site A was all directed to my homepage, I can understand the PR 4. Seeing all the unique content I inserted, I also wasn’t surprised to see that Site A’s blog PR was 4 as well.

In terms of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), Site A ranked number 1 for about 10 different 2 to 3-word phrases and ranked in the top 5 in about 15 other 2 to 3-word phrases. With all these phrases, the competition ranged from 2 to 212 million other pages for the affiliated search queries (don’t let that fool you though: just because I ranked in the top 5
for queries with 212 million other pages doesn’t mean they are all directly competing for the same phrase. This ‘competition’ also consists of things like random blogs, static websites, products that had the search phrase in them, etc).

Now Site B is still an enigma to me. I did no active linking with this site whatsoever, and even though the homepage remained static the entire time, it got a PR of 1. In addition, Site B’s blog, which provided all of the daily unique content, had a PR of 0!

In regards to the SERPs for Site B, I couldn’t find my website in the top 50, which is when I stopped looking. I wasn’t expecting to find this site in the SERPs anyways…

Tier 2 Test:
Seeing how much better the PR was for Site A compared to Site B, I decided to see how Site A’s PR would change once I stopped actively acquiring links. So, for about 4 months, I completely stopped getting links for Site A to see what would happen. Still providing daily unique content to both blogs, here are my present results (month 11):

Site A:                                   Site B:
Homepage PR: 2                 Homepage PR: 1
Blog PR: 3                            Blog PR: 0

So just from not actively getting any more links, Site A’s homepage and blog PR both dropped while Site B’s PR remained the same.

Keep in mind, the reason I stopped actively acquiring links wasn’t because I couldn’t get any more (those of you who are familiar with the above linking services will know what I mean); I just wanted to see how my PR would react to the changes in link activity.

Site A’s changes in the SERPs were pretty dramatic. It now doesn’t rank number 1 in anything, a few three word phrases are ranked 6-10, and some of the phrases I ranked for I couldn’t even find in the first 50 results. Site B’s phrases did not change in the SERPs.

Conclusion:
In the end, I was very surprised to see the lack of impact quality unique content had on Google’s PR algorithms. Granted, unique content is not designed for spiders and bots, but I really thought that writing daily unique content for over a year would have had more of an impact on Site B’s PR.

While there are many variables in this test that were out of my control (i.e. people naturally linking to my blog posts, people social bookmarking my sites, etc.), this should help explain how much of an impact linking can have on your site’s PR and the SERPs. Personally speaking, I know how much of a pain it can be to actively get links, even with semi- automated software solutions like Arelis (which is what I used). What’s even more of a pain is contacting people via
email in your niche and trying to give them free articles that have backlinks to your site (which I also did).

Just remember, if it’s a high Google PR you’re looking for, you have to be willing to go out of your comfort zone and start focusing on elements you don’t have complete control over; for these are the areas where you will be most rewarded.