Tips on Keyword Optimization

1.      Google penalizes sites that stuff keywords, not because of promoting immortality device like that of Alex Chiu. Don’t obviously stuff your posts with SEO keywords make it look as natural. There are natural ways to make them appear into your post. Use this knowledge only for good, never for evil.

2.      Use the words that users are typing in the search engine boxes in your blog posts. For example, type in lol cats in Google’s free Keyword Tool and it will show you synonyms for lol cats, like cat pictures, L.O.L, funny pics cats, funny pictures cats and LOL kittens.

3.      Use also the plural forms, not just singular.

4.      Don’t use common keyword misspellings, leave it to your readers in a very natural way. There are people who don’t care about the correct spelling of the words they type.

5.      Use categories that are good keywords like gadgets, hacks, how-to weblog, blog. This promotes usability and search engine optimization as well. But, don’t use irrelevant categories as it will not only harm usability but also your Google standing.

6.      Google don’t rely as much on meta description tag as they’re not seen by the users. Instead, it gives more weight on categories, sidebars, navigation menus on the side, the whole content of the page.

7.      It is advisable to use the keywords somewhere in the post.

8.      Do not repeat the same keywords within a line but you may use slight keyword variants or synonyms. Do not alter the content you send to googlebot. It’s cloaking and you will be kicked out of the Google index for a long long time. Write with the users and search engines in mind

Things and Tools to Consider When Analyzing Competitors

1. Identify Your Competitors

First thing to do is to identify your competitors. I find SimilarSites.com accurate and one of the most simplest tool to use.

It has a voting system for every result if it is similar or not and Similar Sites also gives you a view of what your competitors are good at: www.example.com is rank 1 in Word Press tutorial, 13 in Photoshop tutorial, 2 in web resources, etc.

2. Search Engine Ranking

It is important that you know Page Rank. Google ranks websites according to their popularity, and obviously it gives you an idea on how competitors use their resources effectively.

An alternative to Google Page Rank is SEOmoz.com. Free registration and you are good to go with their Trifecta Tool Report. They have their own ranking system which I fancy, reading “44% – Somewhat Important”. Better to top all rankings instead of just one, right? However, regular members can only run one report per day.

3. Traffic is good for business

Analyzing your competitors’ traffic gives you an idea on the number of visitors they get. Google Trends, Alexa, GetClicky are good tools to compare statistics, they let you see on what regions the website is doing great as well as what search terms prospect visitors might search for. It is also good to note competitors that are not doing well in order to avoid being like them, more like a grave example.

The next thing to know, after learning what websites have good traffic, is how effective their keywords and link building is.

4. Importance of Keywords

It all comes down to keywords, it tells search engines the content of your site. Wrong keyword means no traffic. A successful competitor knows full well what keywords to use to harvest visitors to their site.

A tool to see good keywords in your niche is SEOdigger.com.

It provides a list of domains with common keywords and shows the position of the site for the search query in Google and what among them brings more traffic. It gives you enough facility to compare several competitors’ performance in SEO.

There are many instances when a higher PR website is outmatched by those with lower PRs, this is due to careful manipulation and good use of keywords. Thankfully you can see what keywords your competitors are using and which of them has the biggest impact. That’s what I call handy.

I almost forgot to mention Google Wonder Wheel. It provides relevant terms of your search query of what is gaining popularity among searchers.

5. Backlinks

Backlinks do two things to help promote your site if done correctly. First it serves as a tunnel from a website to yours, if the referring website is of high standing the better. Second it boosts your keywords. Have I not said that it’s all about keywords?

Knowing who the promoters are of sites within your niche is like learning some of the enemy’s strategies. This may serve you well in terms of knowing what direction your link building should go. It will be a good thing if the website that links to your competitor will take interest in you as well. Remember that good competitors have good backlinks.

6. Social Networks

Facebook is aiming to be the web’s standard for everything you do online. With its Open Graph, websites will customize themselves based on their users’ interests through the Like button. Imagine logging in to Amazon and finding all of the things that interests you neatly arranged on their home page without even having to search for it. Just thinking about it makes me shiver! It is predicted that in the very near future, Facebook will be the one to drive more traffic on websites, the blood of e-commerce! And most likely other major networking sites will follow this lead.

Consider following your competitors on Twitter and subscribe to their newsletter and blog. You may also want to search Twitter and see what people are posting about your search query and know how they’re feeling about it.

Internet Marketing Tools

1. Header Checker Tool

This tool will check any web page's header tags. Use our header checker to find any page's status code to ensure that your URLs are returning the appropriate status codes and re-directs are working properly. A surprising number of indexing and ranking problems come from erroneous re-directs, so it's crucial to be sure all of the HTTP status codes are correct.

2. Search Combination Tool

This tool will generate all possible combinations of two separate lists of search phrases. Find new ways to promote your website and reach your audience, when you broaden your keyword horizons. Use these phrases to modify and create new content, as well as to optimize title tags, URL's and internal linking structure. For a new insight into your keyword prospects generate some new combinations to kick start the brainstorming process.

3. Keyword Density Analysis Tool

Enter in a page URL and this tool will tell you the keyword density of all the phrases on the page. Find out how strong of a keyword message your content is sending with the Keyword Density Analysis Tool. Get hard numbers on your content ratios to find out if you need more or have too much. Use this tool to ensure a solid balance of keywords within your content, and to match the right keywords to the right pages.

4. Spider Viewer

See your site how the spider sees it. This one stop glimpse of your site's most basic information can give you insight into minor adjustments which can have a major impact. Use this tool to evaluate your internal links, meta information and page content. By using precision in regards to these elements you can structure your site to reach its maximum potential.