SEO UPDATES

When you did the keyword research for your website, you probably found a lot of simple words you’re now incorporating into your website. These general terms are things that many people search for, and are not necessarily going to help your business or website to be number one in the search engine for, other than bragging rights.

What you need to find are the long tail keywords. Keywords that are searched for far less, but searched for by people interested in something specific enough you can be pretty sure they’ll buy if you are offering something that remedies the problem.

Are you wondering how to search for long tail keywords? There are a couple ways. The first way is to use a site like NicheBot to find the terms that people are searching for. Good long tail keywords can be three or even four words long. These keyword phrases are things people actually type into the search engine. Think about how you search on Google. Do you just type in one word or do you type in a full phrase? Some people even type in questions, complete with question marks on the end!

The second great way to find long tail keywords is ask people. Start with your friends and family – tell them your niche and then ask them what they would type into Google to search for your product, service, or site. The more people you ask, the closer you will get to understanding how other people (that aren’t as close to your subject as you are) look for what you have. No jargon, no buzzwords, just the real searches. You can use this information to add important keywords to your website.

Pay Per Click consultants and agencies are holding their collective breath…

Yahoo! Is going to use Google for paid search…to see how it’s going to go. According to Marketwatch.com - Microsoft and it’s increasingly aggressive acquisition deal is freaking out at Yahoo! using Google paid search. The head of legal is saying that will bring 90% of all paid search to Google, a possible antitrust problem.

But the ads Yahoo is planning on using will only total 3% of all paid search, and they’re only doing it temporarily.

This is fantastic for those of us doing PPC, because Yahoo needs to find a better way to run the backend of their PPC campaigns.

The Yahoo backend is clunky and confusing, while Google’s MyClientCenter is sleek and easy to use. Yahoo could take many lessons from Google and I hope they do during this possible try-before-you-buy time. If Yahoo could incorporate some of the Google strategies of backend usage as well as not making it darn near impossible to work with Yahoo if you haven’t already spent $1,000 with them would make my life as a PPC consultant so much easier.

Yahoo has the right idea. If your system is broken, look at someone else’s (preferably someone that has paid search in the bag, like Google does) and use the knowledge to improve your own systems.

Or just merge with Google PPC so those of us running campaigns don’t have to spend three times as much time to run the same campaign we do over at Google. It’s just silly.

It’s not good enough these days to simply get back links.  Back links to your site need to be from thematically related websites and more then that, thematically related PAGES and paragraphs and even sentences within pages.The modern search engine examines content surrounding outgoing links on a page to determine its value.  The content should be in a similar topical vector.  This means if your site is selling golf products you want links from other sports and recreation sites and pages that use sports related terms.  Google specifically uses something known as LSI or latent semantic indexing to determine if the content on a page is topically related to your site and if your anchor text makes sense.

The big question is how best to get these topical backlinks.

Well, article marketing is one of the most time tested methods for building quality thematically related backlinks… and fast.

BUT you do not want to simply write an article and submit it to every directory you can find.

Why?  The major search engines will not count all these versions of your article.  They’ll look at the first few and drop the rest because they’re duplicate content.

Well how do I get them to count?  You simply use multiple versions of sentences, words, paragraphs, and phrases within your article and use a content spinner like Jetspinner from Jetpacked to spin them into hundreds of versions of your article all ~30%-60% unique.

Then you can take automated submission software like Jetsubmitter and submit a unique version of the spun article to each of 400 directories.  Now instead of getting 1-2 backlinks from your article you’ll get much closer to the full 400.
These method alone is responsible for putting tens of thousands of dollars in my pocket and millions of visitors on my web sites.
Use it wisely!

Here’s a guide that every person wanting to learn about search engine optimization should keep under the hand. Compiled by Rand of SEOmoz, the Beginner’s Guide To Search Engine Optimization is a treasure chest waiting to be opened. Providing “a complete overview of many of the processes, techniques and strategies used by professional search engine optimization specialists”, it is available in a MS Word document, as well as in two HTML versions (single page or multi page). Even though the information in this guide may be fully known by SEO specialists, there’s no doubt that any newcomer in this fine art will find it a useful, not to say essential resource.

(Via blogSEO.)

SEO Links is a nifty little extension for Firefox that gives you “tooltips specially enhanced for SEOs”. Basically, once the extension is installed, you just have to hover any link which stats you wish to check, and Firefox will show you ranking data for the URL, as well as Google, Yahoo! and MSN link popularity. Cherry on top, if you want to disable it at times for more casual surfing, a simple click will toggle the activation of the extension on and off.

SEO Links is available for download at WebmasterBrain.

This nifty tool was recently built and put online by one of the developers at Search Engine Roundtable, and after a few tries with it, I’ve found that it can indeed be very useful when looking to craft good keyword phrases.

The Dynamic Keyword Phrase Generator enables you to plug in your primary, secondary and even tertiary keyword phrases. All you need to do is enter in these keyword phrases, separated by comma (,) into the appropriate fields and click generate below. The Dynamic Keyword Phrase Generator will develop a robust list that you can copy and paste into your program of choice.

If, like me, you tend to sometimes fall short of keyword phrases to insert in your pages, give it a try… Perhaps all the generated keywords won’t be exactly what you’re looking for, yet it’ll sure give you a good pool from which to choose.

Aaron Wall from SEO Book has released his free link analysis software. Going with the name of Back Link Analyzer, you can download it directly here.

What is this tool, may you ask? Aaron explains it all in the page linked hereabove. In a nutshell, however, Back Link Analyzer is a link analysis tool that shows what anchor text is linking into a page or website. It can grab backlink data from Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and analyze anchor text, Alexa data, IP addresses, number of outbound links on a page, and other information.

This tool is available for Windows only at the moment.

Ever wondered what Anchor Text your competitors are targetting?

Check out the Yahoo Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer.

Using this tool you can see what backlinks your competitors have and more importantly the anchor text.

How to Incorporate Meta-Tags Into Your Site
By Tom Baurley

Meta-tags seem to be an item of debate these days. I still recommend using them and will go the extra distance for my web site clients by including them. Meta Tags are those embedded tags within the Header of your html page script. These pages were created to help index your web site and web page information on search engines so that they can be found easily. Some coders say that today, many major search engines overlook the meta-tags. I disagree, because its still and edge that is built into search engine spiders, but certain parameters should be paid attention to such as # of keywords, particular words, and order of importance.

In HTML you don’t end the <meta> tags. In XHTML you have to. The <meta> tags go inbeween the <head> and </head> tags of your html script.

The keywords are a list of keywords you should list in order of importance, that your site should be found under. The description is a description of your site. Author is the author of the web page. A meta refresh is a meta tag you can use to automatically refresh or transfer your page to another page to load. Though be careful of meta refreshes, they are a quick way to get your page removed from a search engine listing.

Examples:

<HEAD>
<TITLE> SEO Updates </TITLE>
<Meta name=”author” content=”Tom Baurley”>
<Meta name=”description” content=”An article about Meta tags and coding them into your html document.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta name, metaname, meta tag, metatag, keywords, author, descriptions, search engine optimization, SEO, advertising, search engine, search engines, optimization”>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5″ /> <!— Refreshes page every 5 seconds —>
</HEAD>

Good luck!

A service that can be used to help limit the fraud that seems to be growing in the Pay-Per-Click world.

New Service Helps Stop Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Click Fraud

PPC Trax released to the general public to help track and stop PPC click fraud, improve PPC advertisers’ conversion rates and improve PPC Return-On-Investment (ROI).

[ClickPress, Mon Feb 21 2005] Chandler, AZ - February 21, 2005 - PPC Trax has announced the beta release of it’s highly anticipated Pay-Per-Click (PPC) tracking and auditing service at http://www.ppctrax.com/ .

With the billion dollar PPC industry still growing at 20% per year, new advertisers come into the market daily. New and long-time PPC advertisers with ad spend budgets from $200 to thousands
per day are being systematically defrauded of their marketing budgets.

Both groups of marketers and advertisers are clamoring for a solution to help prevent affiliates, publishers and competitors from stealing their ad budgets in the growing scheme.

PPC Trax is a monthly service that offers detailed click fraud tracking and reporting starting as low as $29.00 per month.

For a limited time, PPC Trax is offering free 30 day trial accounts to PPC advertisers.

“Clients and colleagues have been begging us to develop a simple to use but highly effective PPC tracking solution that can help detect and stop PPC click fraud as well as serve as the basis for
recovering refunds from pay-per-click search engines and media properties”, said Skip Pratt, General
Manager of PPC Trax.

“We decided to invest the capital and manpower realizing this gap in the market exists and there is a pent-up demand from marketers to make more effective use of their advertising budgets and to
cease fraud from occurring to them” Pratt continued.

Since the vendors who offer pay-per-click advertising have an inherent conflict of interest in preventing click fraud, advertisers are now turning to third party click auditors such as PPC Trax.

PPC marketers and advertisers benefit from using the PPC Trax service by:

- Improving website lead generation and PPC sales conversion rates
- Maximizing profitable PPC ads faster
- Eliminating costly, non-performing PPC advertising
- Developing the perfect advertising mix for their website
- Identifying the most profitable keywords for their PPC campaign
- Eliminating failed PPC ads faster
- Detecting and document PPC click fraud
- Recoup fraudulent PC expenses from PPC search engines
- Identifying PPC competitors who may be draining their PPC budget
- Identifying IP addresses that are frequent clickers or fraudsters
- Monitoring click spikes that indicate fraudsters are on the march

The service offers each subscriber, whether small home-based businesses or large corporations:

- Track any filetype - .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .cfm, .cgi, .pl,
- Generous transactions per URL
- Transactions can be aggregated among URL’s
- IP address capture
- IP address geographic location
- User Agent (browser, bot etc.)
- Date and Time stamp
- Referring URL
- Email alerts
- IP address history
- Custom reports

In addition, PPC Trax is offering “recovery based” click fraud services using it’s online and staff services. PPC Trax shoulders the risk of refunds from the PPC search engine and performs all the labor to prepare and submit refund requests. This service has certain requirements. Contact the company at the website below for more information.

PPC Trax is offering a limited-time, free 30 day PPC click fraud tracking account. The free trial offer is a full function account. There are no further commitments required.

To improve your PPC sales conversion ratios and improve PPC return-on-investment, visit www.ppctrax.com

About PPC Trax
PPC Trax provides real-time click fraud and web advertising tracking, auditing and recovery services for it’s small, medium and large corporate clients. For more information, see the company website at:
www.ppctrax.com