Here’s a cool video from Webpronews. It features Ken Jurina and Curtis Dueck of Epiar, a Canadian SEO company. The video is all about the non-SEO insights being found in Keyword research. They make the point that what we key into our favorite search engines is relevant to what’s really going on in the world. Taking say a years worth of search data is really like conducting a huge focus group (one that’s completely unbiased because the group doesn’t even know it’s being watched), that can yield trends that go much deeper then just finding a few keyphrases to target.
Fascinating stuff, Watch the video, it’s about 11 minutes long. Then have a look at this post from Epiar:
Looking for the Best of the web - well it just got easier.
BOTW.org just purchased the domain bestoftheweb.com, the site is now accessible from either url. The site is a comprehensive, searchable directory that promotes a better online experience by recognizing and categorizing the best of what the Internet has to offer, Best of the Web generates more than 2 million page views every month. By focusing on quality sites, BOTW can repeatedly deliver relevant information to users, free of the spam found on so many other search platforms. All sites listed in the directory are selected by human editors and must meet certain criteria.
Best of the web is an excellent directory to have your site listed in. They have a good page rank, and the directory is frequently spidered by the search engines. If you’re have a website, l recommend looking into having your site listed.
Social bookmarking is the practice of saving your bookmarks to a public Web site and then “tagging” them with keywords related to the content. Some of the biggest social bookmarking sites are, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, blogmarks. Social bookmarking is fun, easy to do and it’s free.
To begin with, you have to register with a social bookmarking site to be able to create a collection of social bookmarks. These sites will let you store bookmarks, you can then add tags of your choice and designate individual bookmarks for everybody to see (there’s usually also an option to keep your bookmarks private). If you are a visitor to a social bookmarking site, you can search for resources by keyword, person or popularity and you can see public bookmarks, tags and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved. It is a way of networking and sharing information.
Social bookmarking only goes back a couple of years. It is particularly useful if you are collecting a set of resources that are to be shared with others – and it is something that anyone can do.
Social bookmarking tends to open doors to new ways of organizing information as well as categorizing resources. The person who creates a specific bookmark will give tags (a sort of defining phrase or keyword) to each resource, which then results in a user-directed, “amateur” method of classifying information – in the same way as libraries use the Dewey system of classification. Social bookmarking services let you know who has created each bookmark and provide access to that particular person’s other bookmarked resources. Users can then easily make social connections with other individuals that are interested in just about any topic. As a user, you will also be able to see how many people have used a particular resource. You can then search for all resources that have been assigned to that tag. In this way, all of the users over a period of time will be able to develop a unique structure of keywords to define resources. This is something that is now known as a “folksonomy”.
Social bookmarking gives users the opportunity to express their own opinions and understanding of information and resources through informal organizational structures. This allows people with similar interests to find one another and create a new community of users. Whenever this happens it influences the ongoing evolution of folksonomies and common tags for resources. By using a folksonomy based tool for research, you can take advantage of what other users have done to find information that relates to the topic that you are researching. This practice is also good for site owners as it encourages users to come back to the site as the resources are constantly changing.
Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor
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In the two previous “Long Tail” articles, I wrote about how the principals of Chris Anderson’ book “The Long Tail” can be applied to SEO. In this installment I’ll go into some the tactics that are actually working today –these are the things I’m using to get free targeted traffic to my sites.
1. All of my sites are now blog based. Blogs are cheap, very simple to deploy and once they’re configured with the appropriate plug-ins, very user-friendly to post content to. Blogs are also inherently spider-able, the search engines love to see organized content, and this is very easy to create with a blog.
2. I take full advantage of the Social Bookmarking sites. Sites like Technorati and ice-rocket will pick up “tags” from your pages. These tags will then become links to your site. This helps in getting spiders to your site and to help categorize what your pages are about —plus, many of these sites pass page rank. On the flip site, I use a plugin that gives readers easy access to several of these bookmarking sites —from an end-user point of view, posting any of my articles to some of the most popular bookmarking sites is as simple as clicking an icon below the post.
3. I post frequently. I try to post five or six days per week, often I post several times per day. This “teaches” the search engines that my site has fresh content – engines love fresh content.
4. I post mostly original content. This is the big one. Too many webmasters feel that if they simply buy a product and have tons of content auto-published to their sites, they’ll rank high in the engines. A few years ago this worked, but not any longer. The search engines want fresh, original content – those canned content solutions simply recycle old articles that are available elsewhere. The search engines don’t want to keep indexing the same content over and over again.
5. I post a variety of content. I don’t just post original articles. For example, I post a lot of YouTube videos (videos that I’ve actually watched). I post these videos along with a brief review, so that you’ll have an idea what to expect before you start watching. This allows me to get new content, in less time then it would take to write a full article.
6. I take full advantage of standard blog features like Trackbacks and comments. Yep, so many webmasters either turn these features off or simply don’t use them (maybe they don’t know how) –but they’re a great way to generate traffic to your site. How, well I allow both of these features on all of my Blogs. Find something on my site that interests you or something you disagree with, post a comment and let me know – you’ll get a link back to your site! Better yet, post a rebuttal on your own site with a trackback to my post, we’ll both benefit with added traffic and the trackbacks will be opening up new paths for the spiders to find us.
7. Find other Blogs within your niche to post comments on and/or create posts about (with trackbacks). The most important thing is make sure your posts are well thought out. In other words, make sure you actually have something to add to the post. A few well written trackbacks can open your site up to a whole new audience.
8. Write (or have written) rich, well rounded content. The days of focusing on a specific keyphrase for an entire webpage are gone (thankfully!). Today, the engines reward content that’s not so tightly focused. You don’t have to worry about keyword density, just worry that your articles make sense and are compelling to a human readers. Once again, as we saw in the Long Tail, you won’t get any “blockbuster keyphrases” this way, what you’ll get is the low hanging fruit that you didn’t even know existed.
In conclusion, follow this plan in your own niche for several months and you’ll start to see high quality traffic. The traffic will be coming not just from the search engines but also from the trackbacks, comments and social bookmarking you’ve been doing. Remember, what they’ve been saying for years… Content Is King – well now it’s finally true.
Here’s a nine minute video that will help you use Wordtracker to find Niche Keyphrases. It’s informative but the video was recorded in small window and the author has to keep sliding the picture around to demonstrate what he’s talking about (you’ll understand what I mean as soon as you play the video). Anyway, the video does an excellent job of showing you how to find some profitable keywords. Have a look
Posted by David Olsen - Owner/Editor
Don't forget to get your SEO Success Guide! My FREE Ecourse that Will Show you how to beat your competition on Google and the rest... CLICK HERE!
