Looking to find keywords that will drive traffic to your site? How about keywords that convert? Here are several tools that I use when looking to find keywords that matter in terms of traffic and conversions:

• Quintura is a nice visual keyword tool that shows keywords and their related terms in a 2D visual graph. Punch in a term or phrase and get back semantically related words that can be mixed and matched, a pretty good way to help brain storm and find words that you might not otherwise think of.

• Try using WordTracker’s Free Tool and compare to Keyword Discovery’s free tool. This comparison can be a great way to find keywords that matter in terms of search traffic, if one term finds it’s way near the top of both search tools then you probably have a winner.

• Google’s Adwords Keyword External tool will show relative search volumes and advertiser competition between keyword phrases. This can be a good way to gauge weather or not one term is popular when compared to other keywords that you already know are popular by using other search tools.

• Microsoft offers a search funnel tool that shows incoming and outgoing keyword funnels. Incoming funnels are keywords people searched BEFORE they searched your keywords, while outgoing funnels are keywords people search AFTER they search your keywords. Another way to see how people think when searching broad keyword topics.

• Use Google’s allintitle command to find web pages that contains words from your search in the title tags. This is good for a few reasons: you can find pages that are actively optimizing for your keywords and see what other keywords they are using in their title tags, meta tags and page copy.

• Run a back link analysis to see what keywords a site uses in it’s link anchor text, this can be another good way to see what people actually target on the SEO campaigns.

You may also want to check out this article on how to find keywords from wordtracker’s website, written by Aaron Wall.

I was just checking analytics traffic for my special effects website and came across a startling number: today alone, as of 2:30pm, I’ve had 138 referral visits from lowcarbfriends.com. “What the hell?” I said to myself… I usually have a LOT less referral traffic to that site. It looks as if somebody liked the video I posted on the fat chick losing weight using adobe photoshop (I love that program by the way). I think from this particular incident I’ve learned a few things:

• Interesting/good ideas spread: not only did one person link to my blog site but there were other people commenting about that person’s link, creating more links to my site in the process.
• Obviously, referral traffic (if you can get it) is good. There are many other ways to gain referral traffic, just take a look at Digg or Del.icio.us
• “Filling the gaps” is key: If you want more referral traffic try playing on people’s interests or unfulfilled concerns. In this case, a weight loss support web site linked to my video about losing weight via photoshop. I wasn’t looking to get links from a weight loss site, but naturally people found what I posted and found it interesting. How about reading forums or blog comments and look to see what questions people pose… then fill the gaps with answers in the form of something newsworthy!

So all in all, I give referral traffic a big thumbs up. Thanks guys.

Big news in the search industry…Google has finally updated their PageRank system. It’s been a long time since the last update. There was a lot of speculation on when this was going to happen; many “experts” were banking on July and Aug 2007…that didn’t happen. Sep 2007 was a popular guess…nope. So, then comes late Oct and all of the sudden the PageRank changes.

Depending upon what kind of site you have and the activities that you have been conducting determines how you feel about the latest PageRank update. I’ve seen many sites that have dropped in PageRank as a result of this last update…I’m sure those sites are a little bummed. I’m happy to report that every single one of our client’s sites have experienced a significant increase in their PageRank (I’m now patting myself on the back).

Ok…I know what all you SEO’s are thinking right now…PageRank doesn’t mean a whole lot when it comes to search results, and I agree. PageRank can be a very misleading measure of a site…just because you have a good/bad PR doesn’t mean that it correlates with search results. However, as most of you know, webmasters are very hesitant to link out to a site with no PR. So, when a webmaster is considering linking to your site they will always do a cursory analysis of your site’s metrics; PR being one of those metrics they will inevitably look at. If your site has a PR0, then you probably won’t get any link-love from them. But, if your site has a PR2 or 3, they might be a little more willing to give you some lovin’.

There is also a perceived value in high PR…there are literally millions of people who evaluate pages based solely on PR. This method of evaluation should make any knowledgeable SEO shutter with disgust…but at the same time, we cannot ignore the power. PR is a useful marketing tool for anyone involved in Internet marketing. Not everyone that you deal with will know that PR is really an unreliable measure and you don’t have the time to explain it to them. So, why not embrace it and use it to your advantage.

So, get out there, puff up your feathers a little bit and tout that new PR.

Once in a while I read craig’s list to see who’s offering what seo service at what price. There will be advertisements for “seo link building services” and a lot of the time you will hear people use the term “PageRank” or “PR” as an indication of a web page’s importance. They will say they can get you lots of links from high page ranking sites. This may be true, but why is it that nobody uses the term “cache date” as a page’s value indicator? It would seem the more often a spider caches or indexes a page, the more importance a search engine is giving the page since it is always checking for new updates - and checking a page’s cache date is easy, just click on the link that says “Cached” in the search results and look near the top of the page.

Take the example a high page ranking directory: uncover the net. It appears it has been dropped from the Google index. Try running a search for “site:uncoverthenet.com“, you won’t get anything. Yet if you browse to their home page they still retain a high page rank. Uncover the net has a PR of 6! And since we know pages that are dropped from Google’s index don’t pass much link juice (or any) it would seem page rank is not a good indicator and these people advertising their link building services are either ignorant or just playing on the ignorance of people looking for “SEO” services.

I recently was given the chance to perform technical optimize on an e-commerce site that dealt with selling vacation packages and cruises… Regardless of what they were selling it’s always good to follow a few simple rules for best optimization practices:

Use descriptive URLs

It’s best to have descriptive, static looking URLs on your site. For example:

http://www.mysite.com/cruises-1.html

looks a heck of a lot better than:

http://www.mysite.com/index.php?product_id=1&
category_id=22&cart_session_variable=somelongstrangetexthere

and it’s easier for your customers to remember when and if they decide to return to your site. Search engines also like simple, descriptive page names that relate to what your page is about.

E-commerce URL Plugins

If you’re using the popular zen-cart or oscommerce shopping carts you may want to give Magic SEO URL a whirl as this was a fairly simple install for both carts, it works very well and their support staff is responsive. The only downside is that the $89 plugin license works with just one site at a time and the author places a non-removable link at the bottom of your site’s index page.

Use hyphens, not underscores

Try to use hyphens “-” and not underscores “_” when using spaces to separate keywords within your page names.

Keep your pages closer to your root directory

A page at http://mysite.com/pageA.html can be seen as more important under certain circumstances than a page such as http://mysite.com/directory1/directory2/pageA.html

If you must use page variables…

If you absolutely must use dynamic looking URLs, all is not lost. Try to keep the number of page variables at two or less and nothing too long or funky looking. DO NOT use the term “id” in your variables. Google has been known to disregard pages using this variable identifier.

Today I ran accross a nice little tip: use Google Webmaster Tools to view all your back links to your web site. By looking at your back links you can potentialy catch and prevent people from creating unwanted anchor text links to your site in an attemp to knock your pages out of the SERPS.

Google really hates SEO people, those who perform search engine optimization. But why? Well, at least that’s what the following video explains about people doing SEO work: essentially SEO’s have a “parasitic relationship” with Google in a way that not only feeds off of them but brings Google down.

Does this mean that Google tries to kill the SEO business?

No, they just want to kill spammers or anyone who tries to move search results away from what the majority of people actually are looking for (under a given keyword search), i.e. spammers trying to put Viagra affiliate web sites at the top of search results for quick and easy gain. Sadly, there is little distinction between good SEO people and spammers, since we all have to follow the same rules and guidelines set forth by the search engines. But there is hope.

Leveraging interest of the general population

As the major search engines increase their search engine A.I., SEO can be thought of as moving away from manual link building and into the realm of natural buzz and interest of public relations, i.e. the most talked about articles and pages will show up first, not necessarily the content that has been submitted to directories a million times over for SEO purposes.

How can we generate interest and or “buzz”?

It’s not that directory submission are bad, some of them are good, like the Yahoo! directory, DMOZ and Business.com, links created in these directories have been known to be syndicated else where, and there may even be other quality niche directories worth your time depending on what market you’re optimizing for - but submitting your site to hundreds of directories is losing it’s value as the search engines get smarter. A better idea would be to create Google alerts for your top keyword competition (and URLs) to see where they are getting their directory links from.

Online profile sites can also be a good place to generate buzz, places where you can write a page of fresh content about your web site and generate some value to the reader, search engines love this. Some good places to start are: Squidoo, City Search and Merchant Circle.

Social media sites are a great place to leverage interesting material such that you can generate back links & interest if your content is actually worth talking about. Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit are among a few of the worthy sites. Having an article on the front page of a social media site such as Digg can generate thousands of free back links, this can be an efficient use of your SEO time.

You want to create a blog, but you’re not sure if you should setup your blog on your current website (say, as a sub directory of your main site) or as a completely separate domain. There isn’t a “one-line” answer for this question so I will help explain the business implications behind both strategies.

“If you want to use the blog for something which complements the rest of your website, such as an FAQ section or an online media centre, then integrating it in the website is ideal, as it will re-inforce and support all your company’s activities. If, on the other hand, the blog needs to present you as an independent source of information and advice, then you would be better to distance it from your website, so that you can be seen as objective in this role rather than as part of the company which has interests in the area.”

Better Business Blogging has a great article on the subject and I encourage you to read up.

Page Rank or “PageRank“, is a term that describes a link analysis algorithm, created by the founders of Google (back in 1995 as part of a research project at Stanford, with a finished prototype in 1998), which helps to determine a web page’s search engine rankings for a particular keyword search. PageRank is just one of many factors that Google relies on to rank results in their index, but is worth noting as important because Google uses this as the basis for all their online search tools/offerings.

Essentially, PageRank (PR) is a number, anywhere from 0 to 10, assigned to and spread out among a set of web documents. For example, if you have a website with 5 pages, your index (home) web page might have a PageRank of 6, while your sub pages may have a lesser PR of 3 or 4 (being a little less popular / less in-bound links). Some documents on your site may not even have page rank at all. Again, PR is spread out amongst the pages on your web site to help Google’s search spiders and index know which pages are the most important pages (on your site) to show in their search results for key word searches. PR helps to show which pages are the most relevant and which ones are not.

How do I check my site’s PageRank? You can download the “Google Toolbar” and install it into either your Internet Explorer or Firefox web browser. The Google Toolbar has a PageRank meter that you can check whenever you browse to a particular URL, very handy.

How is PageRank assigned on your website? PageRank relies on the democratic nature of the world wide web in that links to a given web page count as “votes” for that webpage, the more votes you get, the higher the PageRank and the better your chances of ranking high. So if web pages “B” and “C” both link to page “A” then page”A” has 2 votes. Likewise if page “A” points to page “B” then page “B” now has a vote from page “A”. It is thought that links from other web sites pointing at your web page are generally weighted more than links from your own internal web pages pointing back at your web site. Again, the more links you have pointing to your web page, generally a higher PageRank number is assigned to that web page. Google also takes into account the quality of the incoming links to your pages (links that are coming from web sites /web pages that have similar content and or theme as your web page) and not just the quantity.

PageRank is also thought to be based on a logarithmic scale of somewhere between a base 5 or 6, so your PageRank goes up when you reach a certain link level/threshold. If you are not familiar with logs don’t worry, here is a tutorial, and I will try to spoon-feed this to you For example: if PR was using a logarithmic base of 5, your web page will reach a PageRank of 3 when you have X number of links at or greater than 125 and less than 625 (125 <= X < 625). In this case the lower limit of 125 comes from 5^3 = 125 links, while the upper limit 625 comes from 5^4 = 625 links. Do you see how having your X number of links between 125 and 625 will always result in a logarithmic value of no less than 3 but no greater than 3? Another example, if you had 300 back-links to your web page, then obviously 125 <= 300 < 625, so the log base 5 of 300 will give you a number of something like 3.5439 (rounded off), which is no less than 3 but no greater than 3. But what if your link count gets bumped up at equal to or greater than 625, say at 626? Then it is thought your PageRank will increase from 3 to 4, since the number 626 gives a logarithmic result of exactly 4.0009933414339, which is no less than 4 and no greater than 4 while using a base of 5

The NoFollow hyperlink tag attribute is a new industry standard recently adopted by all major search engines to help people redistribute PageRank within their websites, i.e. stoping PageRank leaks from important pages to less important pages. It was also created to combat spam within blogs to help stop PageRank from being injected into third party sites that aren’t relevant, such as spam blog commentators who leave their web site URLs on blog entries in hopes of creating instant back-links, and ultimatley higher PageRank, to their web sites.

Also of note: there are web pages that rank higher in search results than other web pages that have a much higher PageRank - so PR is not an end all solution to where your web page ranks on a particular key word query. Besides, it wouldn’t make sense to base search results on one factor or one majority factor alone, people could game the system with ease by creating many spam back-links, resulting in spam search results = no good. PR just happens to be a single factor in the grand ranking scheme that Google has laid out.

If you remember only one thing about this article, remember this: PR can be used to tell the search engines which pages on your site are more important than others, depending on the keyword search context given. Read up more about how to tweak your web site’s PageRank to your benefit.

What is the “NoFollow” concept that we’ve heard so much about and what does it mean for your website/business? Nofollow is a special HTML tag attribute that you can place inside of your hyper-links which will tell search engines spiders, once they come across your link, to not follow the link in question and subsequently to not give linking credit (PageRank) from the current page to the hyper-linked page.

So what? What does this mean? It means that if you have a website that contains what you would consider “non-landing” pages then those pages may be sucking PageRank from your “main-landing” pages. In this case, non-landing pages are pages that you wouldn’t normally want to show up in search engine listings, maybe something along the lings of a “terms and conditions page” or a “payment” page on your checkout process (that you link to via your main landing pages). Main landing pages are pages that you want to have show up in search engine listings, such as your home page or an FAQ page maybe. If you haven’t been using the Nofollow tag in the linking structure of your website (from your main landing pages to your non-landing pages), then those non-landing pages may have PageRank built up on them. Check your FireFox Google Toolbar and see your PageRank for your non-important or non-landing pages. If you were using Nofollow, you could prevent your main landing pages, i.e. your index page, from injecting PageRank to your less important pages (while still linking to them at the same time) - because when you inject PageRank from page A to page B, page A loses a bit of PageRank in the process - and so it would be beneficial to keep as much PageRank as possible on the pages that matter the most.

In an interview, as posted by Stone Temple Consulting, Google’s Adam Lasnik said:

“We realize we cannot turn the web back to when it was completely noncommercial and we don’t want to do that. Because, obviously as Google, we firmly believe that commerce has an important role on the Internet. But, we want to bring a bit of authenticity back to the linking structure of the web. And, Nofollow is one way in which that can be properly accomplished.”

Straight from the horses mouth, Nofollow is endorsed by Google.

To sum up, using Nofollow can be a great way to redistribute PageRank on your web site’s pages to help your main landing pages become stronger landing points (high PageRank) by blocking the PageRank “leak” to your less important pages on your website. Again, higher PageRank is thought to be one variable that increases a web page’s ability to show up in search results for a given set of keywords, and higher search rankings can mean more traffic = more business