Mixing Blogging And SEO Effectively

Search engine optimization is a constantly changing and transforming subject that is controlled by Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines. Our best hope is to try and learn the secrets to there algorithms and do what we can to get our sites to the top of search engines.

Many people assume that there are some strategies that will work to optimize there site but in some cases these strategies will not count for as much as they used to.

For example, everyone thinks that getting back links is the greatest strategy for getting there site to the top of the search engine. Although this is a strategy that still works, there is some talk about this becoming a less important factor. This is bad news for people who mass build sites.

So what does this have to do with blogs. Blogs are very important because they will be around forever. Blogs have the special ability to be pinged. This is a huge advantage because search engines will better see the blog.

If this blog is attached to your site, you will gain one of the most important factors of having good search engine optimization which is quality original content. This will never change. Everyone who searches the net is looking for good content so that they can learn something. Search engines know this and keep trying to change there algorithm so that they can index the best sites on the top with the most quality content.

Blogs are not easy to write effectively. They have to be written with the keyword you want and they have to have good PR (just in case). This is very hard to do because you are advertising your own site. This is where An SEO and Blogging service comes in. They can help to do all the work so you don’t have to. Of course you will have to pay the nominal fee, but if your site is doing well, it will only get better.

Another new tip that is also out there is that search engines found a way to make ‘triangle linking′ more important. This means that you link to one site and the other site links to another site while that site links to you. This is what some blogging services do for you to help accomplish this complicated task.

Other will do something different. Some will network all there clients blogs so that all the blogs have traffic flowing through all to all the others. This will create a large network of traffic and PR artificially boosting all of the blogs.

This can all be done by yourself, but it is time consuming and will cost more money to pay writers because no person can write about so many different topics every day.

Search engine optimization changes all the time. It is very important that you keep ‘in the know′ about these new changes with what search engines expect from your site. You cant just expect that your site will be on the top of any search for too long if you do not keep up on the latest information.

About the Author :

Come To Internetbusiness-tips.com and learn more about our Search Engine Optimization Services and our blogging Services

Article Source: www.iSnare.com

MLM and SEO Bad Business No Business

MLM has been around way before the Internet. It is a few steps above a chain letter. Well, maybe more then a few steps. MLM has paved the way for people to have their own business. It can start out as side money and flourish into a very profitable business.

Now, you are probably saying to yourself “Joe, what do you know about MLM?” Well, folks in the early days I did MLM. Yes, I am a not proud of it. Not because it’s MLM but, because I wasn’t any good at it. Thank goodness though. I may not have found my calling in SEO if I did. What I am trying to say is…MLM is hard. Nowadays, they try to make it easier by offering you a cookie cutter site. What? A cookie cutter site? Isn’t that bad SEO? YES! MLM in their attempt to help their down-line are actually making it harder. You want to spend more time promoting your site by:

Writing content
Testimonials
Recommendations

Providing tips about the items or products

..and so on.

MLM companies force you to throw more of your hard earn money into advertising. If you know the name of a well established MLM company type it into Google. What you get is dozens of sites. Many of them are the same exact site dominating over the others. It is usually the companies own site. Generating leads that YOU will have to pay to get. While your cookie cutter site fights for spots on Google adwords. Which by the way YOUR MLM has the top 3 positions. So, how do you win?

Create your own web site. Find keywords related to what you sell and not the company name. If you cannot do that then create a blog. Place tips, recommendations, and testimonials and so on in your blog. Do your own Google campaign. Find message boards, blogs and websites that have interests in what you sell. You can even do a link exchange with other blogs.

Until MLM companies’ see how valuable SEO is to the success of their business and yours you can never be successful. They will always tell you about the successes and never the failures. It is true it takes money to make money. But, if the main company corners the market on leads how can you ever make it ahead? Go door to door?

Take matters into your own hands. Or, better yet. Demand your up-line provide you with a better way to achieve your goals. They are profiting from all your hard work. So, let them help you as much as possible. If that doesn’t work take matters into your own hands. The worst you can do is make things better.

Read more articles http://mr-seo.blogspot.com/ To learn more about Joe’s services visit http://www.mr-seo.com If you are interested in the latest SEO news read his blog http://mrseonewz.blogspot.com/

Monitor and Increase Your Search Engine Visibility with the DIY SEO Tools

Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

In this three part article, you’ll find many tools that any webmaster can use to monitor your site’s search engine position, and use to increase the visibility of your site in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

URL Trends
http://www.urltrends.com/

Most of the coverage I’ve seen focuses on the ability of UrlTrends to allow you to “View Any URLs Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Popular Search Terms and Incoming Links″.

And that’s a great thing, to be able to see all of that from one place. But one great thing missed about this tool are that you can subscribe to changes to the results via RSS -hands off monitoring of your site.

Fagan Finder’s URL Info
http://www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/

This online gadget is like the Swiss Army knife of site information, giving you one-page access to dozens of pertinent check-ups. But monitoring relevant search engine information like your backlinks, or the cached pages in a search engine are just the tip of the iceberg.

You can use URL Info to check that your HTML code is validated, translate your page, and if you’re a blogger, discover where your site is mentioned in the blogosphere.

Spannerwork’s Spider Simulator
http://www.spannerworks.com/spidersimulator.0.html

Ever wondered what your site looks like to the search engine spiders that crawl the web, looking for information to include in their databases? Go to this page to see what information is seen by the spider and what it skips over.

Spannerworks.com can also help you figure out how to troubleshoot content that seems like it should show up to a spider but doesn’t, with its HTTP viewer. They also have a tool that will analyze your keyword density.

GoRank.com’s Top Ten Comparison
http://www.gorank.com/seotools/

If you’ve been banging your head against the wall in an attempt to figure out why you haven’t hit the top ten results in Google, GoRank.com has a page that can give you important clues to help you figure it out. One of my favorites, the Top Ten comparison report, will scrub the raw data of the top ranking results for a given keyword.

In studying the results, you may find it easier to understand where your own optimization efforts are going wrong. Don’t forget to stop by Google for your API key at http://www.google.com/api as you’ll need it to create your free account.

Search Guild’s Keyword Difficulty Checker
http://searchguild.com/difficulty/

This one’s an old favorite of mine. When you find what you may think is an ideal keyword, before you start tweaking your pages, it’s a good idea to run it through this tester. Using the Google API, it analyzes whether or not a given phrase will be worth your efforts.

You’ll already have to be well-versed in how to find good keywords to plug into the tool, but once you have that nailed, it’s pretty reliable in telling you whether it’s worth your time to target that phrase. If you use flash on your site, check out the flash viewer on their utilities page as well.

In the next article in this series, you can read more about tools specific to Yahoo and Google that will help you track your rankings and study your site.

About the Author
You can find hundreds of pages of tips and news on traffic generation, search engines, blogs and RSS every day at www.freetraffictip.com .

Monitor Your Visibility in Google and Yahoo with these DIY SEO Tools

Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

This is the second part of an article series in which you’ll find many tools that you can use to monitor your site’s search engine position and see how your do-it-yourself search engine optimization efforts are coming along.

The following tools are for monitoring your search results in the three major search engines. It isn’t an all-inclusive list, but rather a highlight of some of the tools you can use. (I’ll point you to one of the master lists when we get into more general tools in part three.)

Using Your Google Site Information Page

I’ve covered this in an earlier article, but just in case you missed it, we’ll go over it again briefly here. (If you need more help following along, you can listen to one of my recent podcasts for a convenient audio walkthrough.)

Open up your browser and go to Google’s home page. Type in info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So if your site was ExactSeek.com you’d type info:exactseek.com. You can also use site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find out which pages have been indexed by Google’s search engine spider.

This search will tell you pages that Google considers similar to yours. It will also show sites that it considered linked to you, and show sites that carry your full url, hyperlinked or not. It’s not 100% accurate as far as telling you all the sites that are linked back to yours, but what you can learn from this is which backlinks matter.

From here you can also see the last day Google spidered your home page.

To see this in action, click on the first group of information links, “Show Google’s cache of yoursitename.com” If you look next to the word “cached” one the first line, the date is expressed also.

Sometimes it seems that the cached time for yoursitename.com and www.yoursitename.com are different, so be sure and check both.

Finding Information About Your Site In Yahoo
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/tips/tips-08.html

This document will tell you how to find out what sites are linking to you, give you the results for how many pages of your site are in Yahoo, and more. Once you get to the results page, you’ll be able to view your cached pages, etc.

Discovering Your Site’s Status on MSN
http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx

As the page in the help section states, you can use site:www.yoursitehere.com to find out if a document at your site has been indexed. The results page will also give you the date of last caching.

Google Rankings
http://www.googlerankings.com

You’ll need a free Google API key for this one, and the site has the direct link telling you where to get one. You’ll have to enter this key in order to query the site for information on Google.

With Google Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within the top 40-1000 results in Google for a given keyword. I recently noticed that it also displays results for MSN and Yahoo, with links to each search engine.

They also have some other tools that will track your keywords over time, as well as one they call the “Ultimate SEO Tool” that will measure your site’s keyword density.

Google Backlinks Checker
http://lilengine.com/tools/backlinks-tool.php

LilEngine.com’s Backlink Checker will measure the number of links you have pointing back to your site against competing sites. Handy if you just want a quick comparison of how many links you have versus others, though how much getting more links back will help varies, depending on other factors.

Yahoo Search Rankings
http://www.yahoosearchrankings.com/

From the same folks who brought you Google Rankings, using Yahoo Search Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within the top 1000 results in Yahoo for a given keyword. If you just want to see your Yahoo rankings, it’s quite helpful.

You can find more Yahoo tools that use the Yahoo Web API at their developer’s site : http://developer.yahoo.net/wiki/index.cgi?ApplicationList .

In the next part of the article, we’ll take a closer look at other tools that give you more specific information about the links pointing back to your site, keyword research, and more.

About the author:
Tinu is a website promotion specialist who can teach you many do-it-yourself ways to bring more traffic to your site in addition to DIY SEO. Subscribe to her ezine at http://www.freetraffictip.com/thebook/for more details.

Monitor Your Visibility in Google MSN and Yahoo with these DIY SEO Tools

This is the second part of an article series in which you’ll find many tools that you can use to monitor your site’s search engine position and see how your do-it-yourself search engine optimization efforts are coming along.

The following tools are for monitoring your search results in the three major search engines. It isn’t an all-inclusive list, but rather a highlight of some of the tools you can use. (I’ll point you to one of the master lists when we get into more general tools in part three.)

Using Your Google Site Information Page

I’ve covered this in an earlier article, but just in case you missed it, we’ll go over it again briefly here. (If you need more help following along, you can listen to one of my recent podcasts for a convenient audio walkthrough.)

Open up your browser and go to Google’s home page. Type in info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So if your site was ExactSeek.com you’d type info:exactseek.com. You can also use site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find out which pages have been indexed by Google’s search engine spider.

This search will tell you pages that Google considers similar to yours. It will also show sites that it considered linked to you, and show sites that carry your full url, hyperlinked or not. It’s not 100% accurate as far as telling you all the sites that are linked back to yours, but what you can learn from this is which backlinks matter.

From here you can also see the last day Google spidered your home page.

To see this in action, click on the first group of information links, “Show Google’s cache of yoursitename.com” If you look next to the word “cached” one the first line, the date is expressed also.

Sometimes it seems that the cached time for yoursitename.com and www.yoursitename.com are different, so be sure and check both.

Finding Information About Your Site In Yahoo
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/tips/tips-08.html

This document will tell you how to find out what sites are linking to you, give you the results for how many pages of your site are in Yahoo, and more. Once you get to the results page, you’ll be able to view your cached pages, etc.

Discovering Your Site’s Status on MSN
http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx

As the page in the help section states, you can use site:www.yoursitehere.com to find out if a document at your site has been indexed. The results page will also give you the date of last caching.

Google Rankings
http://www.googlerankings.com

You’ll need a free Google API key for this one, and the site has the direct link telling you where to get one. You’ll have to enter this key in order to query the site for information on Google.

With Google Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within the top 40-1000 results in Google for a given keyword. I recently noticed that it also displays results for MSN and Yahoo, with links to each search engine.

They also have some other tools that will track your keywords over time, as well as one they call the “Ultimate SEO Tool” that will measure your site’s keyword density.

Google Backlinks Checker
http://lilengine.com/tools/backlinks-tool.php

LilEngine.com’s Backlink Checker will measure the number of links you have pointing back to your site against competing sites. Handy if you just want a quick comparison of how many links you have versus others, though how much getting more links back will help varies, depending on other factors.

Yahoo Search Rankings
http://www.yahoosearchrankings.com/

From the same folks who brought you Google Rankings, using Yahoo Search Rankings, you’ll be able to see where you rank within the top 1000 results in Yahoo for a given keyword. If you just want to see your Yahoo rankings, it’s quite helpful.

You can find more Yahoo tools that use the Yahoo Web API at their developer’s site : http://developer.yahoo.net/wiki/index.cgi?ApplicationList .

In the next part of the article, we’ll take a closer look at other tools that give you more specific information about the links pointing back to your site, keyword research, and more.

About the Author
Tinu is a website promotion specialist who can teach you many do-it-yourself ways to bring more traffic to your site in addition to DIY SEO. Subscribe to her ezine at http://www.freetraffictip.com/thebook/ for more details.

More Than a Needle in the Hay Stack Good SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is gearing an article, or any piece of text, in such a way that a keyword or phrase triggers the web page whenever a particular search is done. What this means is that when someone types in a certain word to search on Yahoo or Google, or whatever search engine they use, an SEO article will be more likely to appear at the top of a search list than one that is not SEO based. Finding good SEO writers is how many online businesses manage to succeed, by making sure their web site appears to customers before any competition.

To really understand SEO and how SEO works, you need to understand how the entire search engine process works as well. For example, let′s pretend that you were looking for information online about dog medicine. “Dog medicine″ is now your keyword. After you type your keywords in and hit enter, the search engine you’re using (be it Yahoo, Google, Netscape, or any of the others—they all work the same way) will scan the internet for any documents that contain the words “dog medicine.” Once it finds all the possible websites that match those keywords, the search engine then has to sort through the results (and for a really generic keyword, there could literally be millions or tens of millions of websites that contain those words) for the ones deemed “most relevant.” That phrase holds the key. The only way for the search engine to decipher the more relevant articles from the less relevant ones is by the number of times that the words “dog medicine″ shows up in an article. An article that mentions those words ten times will always appear in front of an article that only mentions those words two or three times.

It’s that simple. An article that mentions a certain word a lot will be considered “more relevant” than one that doesn’t. That’s the reason why a page selling a particular product often times mentions that product’s name 10, 12, 15 times in a few paragraphs, because it is that type of SEO optimization that allows the web site to be at the top of any search. Employers who want their website to be more visible will hire SEO writers to “pepper” any article with a certain term. For example, this article would do well in a search on “SEO” since the phrase appears several times. It is that type of writing that allows your website or article to go from “needle in a haystack″ to “easy find.”

Dave is the owner of http://increase-website-traffic.info and http://search-engine-optimization-training.info websites providing information on search engine optimization.

Copyright Ted Belfour – http://increase-website-traffic.info

MovableType SEO

Alright I touched on Movabletype and SEO this last week in my best movable type plugins article with the intent to come back and provide some specific details. I will tell you that Movabletype is optimized quite well out of the box, but there are a few quick tricks to easily providing the spiders with some dynamic content.
For my main home page and category index pages I hardcode most of my meta data. Your meta tags will be at the top of the template within the tag. You can get fancy on your index pages but I cannot really see why. Optimize these two templates by hand for whatever keywords you are targeting site wide.
The important part of your main index template is telling Googlebot what the title of your blog and lead article are properly. This is accomplished with heading tags. For the title of your blog you can do this:

</a>
</h1>
And for your lead article do this:
“>
</a>
</h2>
This is pretty much essential as we know that all search engines give weight to heading tags. You should do this as well in your archive templates.
So let’s focus on the individual archive template as this is the page you want ranking well in the SERPS. From my testing the code I use on two separate blogs (this one and PlanetBangkok) the results show up very neat and tidy in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. By this I mean the title and description fields are what I am expecting them to be. Here is an example with Google from last weeks: Article Post Robot Review (hopefully I am still front page).
Ok back to you meta tags but this time go into your individual archive template. Take a look at the following from my own page:
ProfitPapers | : </title>
” />
” />
“>
“>
“>

Most of this is self explanatory. Notice the is being used to generate keywords from your entry page (you may need to turn this field on in the MT entry area). The meta description data is going to be the first 30 words from your entry body as I have done with – so you should see some nice descriptions in the search results pages. Finally I structure my title to contain both the category and entry title – we all know yahoo loves them tags mmm’kay.
Now one final caveat with meta data is the issue/non-issue of comment links. Personally I love comments, and I do not mind people adding a link to my articles as long as their comment has some meaningful input. Others disagree and feel that excessive comment links leak pagerank like a sieve. I′m not too concerned with this notion as the pagerank loss is minimal and Google has done its best discounting links from popular weblog software. So this is open to debate but for the record I do not bother.
If you want to stop Googlebot indexing your comment links you can simply place a robots meta tag in your comments template like so:

Finally page names are important to all search engines and URL’s like /archives/09/12/i_need_skillz_bec.html are about as useful as tits on a bull. I use the dashify plugin to structure my page names for SEO. It’s a 3 minute change – for details take a look at my best movable type plugins article.
And that is pretty much it. Of course how well you do in the actual search results pages depends on many factors outside the scope of this article, but doing your meta data properly is pretty much square one. Having said that it is also well known that Google ignores most of your meta tags. I was snooping through Matt Cutts page source the other day and noticed he uses no meta info at all. In fact you might notice that many large websites pay no attention to meta tags …Regardless these tags are still important for Yahoo, MSN and the rest of the stragglers and Google seems to always uses my descriptions properly for its results.
Although dated i still think Nicholas Carvine’s article on Movabletype SEO is one of the best online.
I hope someone finds this helpful. If I missed something cool and useful let the comments fly.
For a free copy of MovableType 3.2 please visit the Movabletype Homepage.

About The Author

Miles Evans provides indepth reviews on every SEO/marketing or killer app he can get his paws on. His reviews, essays, and tools on SEO/SEM, development, and other equally fascinating subjects are normally carried out at ProfitPapers.com – Stop by and check out the free backlinks page, and as always – Thanks for reading :)
profitpapers@gmail.com

Multilingual SEO for world markets Part 1

Multilingual keyword research
So you’ve translated your website into German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, French, Arabic, Portuguese and Chinese. Now what?
Now you have to draw traffic to the newly translated sites. There are many ways to draw traffic, but the search engines are just as important in German or Spanish as they are in English.
Surprisingly, SEO in Spanish, French, English, German…or any Roman alphabet language is not that different. In this article, we will be dealing only with Roman alphabet languages.
The main thing is to be able to move around in the language…and if you are not fluent, make sure a translator cleans up any text edits without undoing the changes key to your multilingual SEO efforts.
Let’s assume the original site is in English, the translation into French, for example, is already complete and you have a list of English search terms (keywords).
The first step is to identify equivalent French search terms. This might not give you the same number of search terms. For instance, if you start with the 10 search terms around the word “socks″ (buy socks, buy socks online, glow-in-the-dark socks, etc.), you will most likely end up with twice as many search terms in French, as there are two common words for socks in French (“bas″ and “chaussettes″). This might mean that you need to create additional landing pages for French search engine surfers.
Note: be wary of using official translations for keyword research. Your translator probably used the very best vocabulary and grammar possible, including words and conjugations that your target market might never even have heard of, let alone be searching for.
You can get ideas through free translation services – which absolutely butcher the language, so don′t use them for translation, please! – that can give you some quick ideas to work with. Two such services I use for just such a purpose are FreeTranslation.com and FreeTranslation.Paralink.com.
The next step, of course, is to find out which of the search terms are worth pursuing. Of course, you could try all of them, since it will take almost no effort to get top rankings for little searched French or Spanish terms. But you might also miss out on some related terms that are well-searched. Two pay-per-click search engines that offer search suggestion tools in a variety of languages are Overture and Miva (formerly Espotting).
The third step is to group the search terms together into natural groupings and assign each group to a page on the website, just as one would do in English, so that the terms that complement each other are grouped onto the same web page.
You see, it’s really not that different from English, but you do have to be able to move through the other language. Please note: fluency is not required, but being able to understand what you read and come up with related search terms is required.
In part 2, we will look at the on-page optimization.
About the Author
David Leonhardt is a multilingual website marketing consultant who offers French language SEO marketing services. Pick up a copy of his SEO strategies e-book.

Multilingual SEO for world markets Part 2

Multilingual on-page optimization
In part 1, we looked at keyword research in foreign languages, such as German, French, Spanish and Italian. In part 2, we will look at the on-page optimization…or what to do with that keyword research.
Actually, the on-page optimization is easy. Just place your search terms in all the right places. Of course, it is not quite that simple.
For instance, German nouns like to merge into incredible conglomerates. An example of where I ran into this was at this Netzwerk?berwachung site: Two major search terms were Netzwerk?berwachung and Netzwerk ?berwachung. The first, conglomerate word is actually correct, but people search in funny ways, and the search engines don′t generally recognize partial words. In English, a reference to “website monitoring service” would count as a reference for the search term “website monitoring”. But the German equivalent, ?berwachungsservice f?r Webseiten, would read literally in English as “monitoringservice for websites”.
In other words, you might have to make the translator dance some fancy language steps to deliver a readable message that does not interfere with your search terms.
Multilingual SEO also brings the question of accents. Use them. One well-respected SEO questioned the use of accents when it turned out that more people searched for Montreal than Montr?al. Don’t you believe it for a second. There simply were more English people searching without the accent, so leave the accents off your English site but keep them on your French, German, Italian or other sites.
There is one exception to the accents rule: if your market is very, um, shall we say “downscale”. I think you know what I mean. There is a certain market in English that refuses to capitalize words or use punctuation. The equivalent market in German is unlikely to use an umlaut – you might have to optimize both with and without the accent.
What about file names. Many companies keep the same filenames when they create a translated site. So http://www.rgb.com/en/Products/AudioVisual.asp becomes http://www.rgb.com/es/Products/AudioVisual.asp , a mouthful in any language, but of no SEO help in the Spanish version. On the other hand, keeping the same file name helps the webmaster keep track of what all these otherwise “unintelligible″ filenames are all about, without resorting to a wall covered in file name translation tables. This is not a simple decision to make.
One question that often comes up is where to house the translated site on a separate site, in a sub-domain or in a directory on the English site.
The general consensus is that it is preferable to give it its own domain with the appropriate country extension…which is easy for German or Italian, but which country do you choose for Spanish? Spain? Mexico? Argentina? The USA? And have you ever tried to apply for a .fr domain?
Second best is a sub-domain, which at least carries a semblance of being a separate site and allows some directories to consider it a home page for listing purposes (and you want those directory links).
Which brings me to my final point. Don′t forget to build the links that are so important in SEO. Good quality links. Relevant links, both in terms of topics and in terms of the search terms in the language of the site. There are fewer avenues to build links in French or Dutch than in English. Fortunately, you will need fewer links to get good French or Dutch search engine rankings.
Thinking about expanding your market into Europe, Latin America or the rest of Canada? Get your site translated and get it optimized for the multilingual search engine listings.
About the Author
David Leonhardt is a multilingual seo website marketing consultant who offers French language SEO marketing services. Pick up a copy of his SEO tips e-book.

My SEO Toolboox

Search Engine Optimization is my meal ticket these days. I have been doing it for about three years now and I have developed a system that uses freely available tools to determine my markets. I will try to outline some of the tools I use here in hopes that they may help others along the way.

1. Niche Tools – I first like to discover if the niche I am trying to go into is worthwhile or not. I will use NicheBot (http://www.nichebot.com) and Digitalpoint’s Keyword Suggestion (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/) to determine if the keyword is worth chasing.

2. Competition Analysis – Nothing beats using the big three to determine your competition. Typing in a search in the big three engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) will give you a pretty decent idea of what you are up against. I do both general and exact searches (search phrases inside quotes) to determine the competition of a keyword. If I find the keyword to still be worth the time, I will then gather a list of the top ten sites on each of the search engines and find which ones are common to all three. There are several tools that I use on my own sites that come in handy when determining what the correct “formula” for that keyword is. I will run their sites through Keyword Density Analyzer (http://www.seobench.com/keyword-density-analyzer/), Discover the number of backlinks they have by using the “link” command at Google (link:http://www.thiersite.com), Yahoo (linkdomain:http://www.thiersite.com), and MSN (link:http://www.thiersite.com). Though these are not always accurate they will give you a good starting point for your link building. I will then add their sites to my Google alerts for both the “link” and “site” commands and set it to, “web” and “as it happens”. This will allow you to keep tabs on your competitors site updates.

3. Site Optimization – When I begin optimizing my sites, I will compile the competition data and begin writing my copy. As I write, I keep in mind that I do not want to completely blow away the competition, this in my opinion makes the search engines think you are either spamming or inflating your keyword count. If your competition for keyword “FooBar” has a keyword density average of 5%, hit 5.1%, this is not the place to stand apart from the crowd to far. Once my copy is written, I will go back through it to determine whether I can link to internal pages from my copy. This helps spiders to find your internal pages faster and looks more natural. I will either build my own sitemap or use The Google Sitemap Generator (http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp) to generate my Google Sitemap. This has helped me in the past get my sites crawled and indexed much quicker then normal. I am currently looking for a tool to optimize my navigation structure. I may just end up building this one myself.

4. Continued Optimization – As time progresses and I build my backlink base. I will use the Tools at Marketleap (http://www.marketleap.com) which include Keyword Verification, Search Engine Saturation, and Link Popularity to keep track of what is going on with my site. As I add new content I am always mindful to determine the keyword density of the page.

These tools are by no stretch of the imagination a complete list. These are the tools I use on a daily basis. I will list a few more at the end of this article that I use quite a bit as well.

Google Trends – http://www.google.com/trends

TouchGraph – http://touchgraph.com/

Google Keyword Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google ZeitGeist – http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/weeks-ju⨶.html

Jason Lewis is a Search Marketing Manager for a Medium Sized E-Commerce company and the webmaster of http://www.seo-wiki.com, a blog about the changing lanscape of Search Marketing