Keyword Research Blog

After going to the Future of Web Apps (FOWA), I have taken a very important decision. I am going to open my tools and make them publicly available. In return, I am asking you some help to build better, faster and smarter tools.

Google Analytics does a great job to analyze web traffic once visitors have landed to your site, however it doesn’t tell you anything about your competitors and how well they are doing. It says nothing about your page rank, nor suggests you better and more effective keywords or tracks your online presence.

Sorry to break this news to you, you stand no chance in improving your Google score if you just use an analytic tool! This is why many companies hire SEO agencies to have a hassle-free life.

I am not aware of any SEO companies or professionals that have opened their secret and black magic tools to the world. I believe most of the SEO agencies around, especially in the UK, have developed some in-house tools that allow them to charge clients a large amount of money for the usage of these tools. Most of the time, these SEO marketers have very little knowledge of the Search Engine market.

As I come from a technical background and naturally brought into Search Engine Optimization, as I wanted my sites to score higher on Google, I have developed and scoped tools to help me to do my job more efficiently and effectively. Most of the tools have been developed with the help of some fellow developers and have been inspired by understanding and great clients.

I am not kidding, drop me an email and I will be happy to zip my function.php file and send it to you.

APT will mainly serve display advertising, or ads placed on the websites of publishers who have previously joined the program and will earn from renting their space, much like the Google AdWords/Adsense platform: but, in addition, APT also features its own ad network linking publishers and advertisers directly, as well as an ad marketplace where advertisement space can be bought and sold to the best bidder.

Yahoo also hopes the new platform will help the ailing newspaper industry, by transforming poorly performing remnant advertising into higher performing revenue streams. "We touch more users around the world than any publisher could dream to do," says John Slade, Yahoo's Vice President of Product Management. "The new product hopes to help publishers garner more revenue for their ad placements by offering more targeted audiences."

You can decide for yourself by visiting the APT web site.

We hope APT prices would be less prices than Adwords.

If you are a book publisher or if you have written an ebook, like many SEO or Marketing expert, you can now benefit of the new Google Book Partner program.

https://books.google.com/partner/

The tool helps users discover your books by matching the content in your books with user searches.

Google Book Search connects your books with the users who are most interested in buying them.

Furthermore, google promise new ways of buying and accessing your books coming soon, let's watch the space.

Forget about the dmoz directory and submit your content directly to google.

http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=addurl

Please note that only the top-level page from a host is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual page.

One of the biggest mistakes SEO make is submitting their site to directories too soon. There is an excitement and urgency associated with getting your site out there for the world to see, that is understandable, but it simply doesn't work.

The solution is understanding the expectations these directories have when it comes to submissions. Once you understand how to submit correctly, you can obtain the best directory listings in the least amount of time possible.

Watch out this space for more tips on submission to Google and other search engines.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it's unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and -- worse yet -- linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.

Duplicate content is not an issue any more !

According to Google, duplicate content on a site is "not grounds for action (penalties) on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results." That’s a very clear statement. Since most SEOs are of the white hat variety, Google has made their position on duplicate content clear and outlined some best practices to clear up any issues.

Non-malicious duplication is quite common as many CMSs don't handle URL construction and organization very well by default. When Google identifies duplicate content, it is because variations appear in URL parameters (as provided in the example above.) When duplicate content happens, the URLs in question are grouped into a "cluster." From there, Google selects the one URL that best represents the cluster from that group, and then consolidates properties of the URLs in the cluster (such as link popularity) to the representative URL.

If you do spot a case that's particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and let google deal with it.

Google's advice?

Use sitemaps. If you want to tell Google which URL should appear in the SERPs, simply make the necessary modifications by including that preferred URL in your general sitemap. Should Google be unable to consolidate all of the duplicate pages, page strength might be diluted and your ranking may sink.

We’ve gathered 20+ sites that will help you with getting your press release out in the world for free.

24-7PressRelease.com - Free release distribution with ad-support

1888PressRelease.com - Free distribution, paid services gives you better placement and permanent archiving.

ClickPress.com - Distributs to sites like Google News and Topix.net, Gold level will also get you to sites like LexisNexis.

EcommWire.com - Focuses on ecommerece and requires you include an image, 3 keywords and links.

Express-Press-Release.com - Free distribution company with offices in 12 states.

Free-Press-Release.com - Easy press release distribution for free, more features for paid accounts.

Free-Press-Release-Center.info - Distributes your release, offers a web page with one keyword link to your site. Pro upgrade will give you three links, permanent archiving and more.

I-Newswire.com - Allows for free distribution to sites and search engines, premium membership differs only slightly in adding in graphics.

NewswireToday.com - All the usual free distribution tools, premium service includes logo, product picture and more.

PR.com - Not only will they distribute your press releases, but you can also set up a full company profile.

PR9.net - Ad supported press distribution site.

PR-Inside.com - European-based free press release distribution site.

PRBuzz.com - Completely free distribution to search engines, news sites, and blogs.

PRCompass.com - Distribute your press release with a free or paid version, others can vote it up ala Digg style.

PRUrgent.com - Not only distributes your release, but attempts to teach you how to write one, and even offers downloadbale samples for you to work with.

Press-Base.com - Submit your release for free and get on their front page and the category of your choice.

PressAbout.com - A free press release service formatted as a blog.

PressMethod.com - Free press release distribution no matter what, but extra services based on the size of your contribution.

PRLeap.com - Free distribution to search engines, newswires, and RSS feeds. Fee based bumps get you better placement.

PRLog.org - Free distribution to Google News and other other search engines.

TheOpenPress.com - Gives free distribution for plain formatted releases, fees for HTML-coded releases.

We are working on a tool to submitt your PR to all the sites ! It would be another free tool. Get in touch to find out more.

This post has been written by Stephen a dear SEO friend. He loves free press release dot com. I had good results with pressbox and promotionworld. Don't be put off by the quite horrible look of these sites. After all web 2.0 look and feel could be expensive !

www.free-press-release.com
www.e-xl.com
www.inthepress.ru
www.pressbox.co.uk
www.press-world.com/add
www.pr-inside.com
boingboing.net/suggest.html
www.sanepr.com/submitpressrelease.cfm
EzineArticles.com
searchenginewatch.com
www.seo-blog.com
www.promotionworld.com/submit/submitcontent.html

From Google :

I wouldn't really worry about spam sites hurting your ranking by linking to you, as we understand that you can't (for the most part) control who links to your sites. However, there is some action you can take if you come across spam in Google's index. The preferred method of reporting spam to us is by clicking on "Report spam in our index" while logged into Webmaster Tools.

If you don't have a Webmaster Tools account, you can use our non-authenticated spam report form: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Google Webmaster Tools is Google\'s free service for webmasters. See your site as Google sees it, find out any problems we had crawling your site, and share info with us that will help improve your site\'s visibility in Google\'s search results.

Your client application can use the Webmaster Tools Data API to view sites in your Webmaster Tools account, add and remove sites, verify site ownership, and submit and delete Sitemaps.

Link on how to integrate the webmaster with your CMS / application :

http://code.google.com/apis/webmastertools/docs/reference.html

Search in the last decade has moved from give me what I said to give me what I want. User expectations from search have rightly increased. Google works hard to fulfill the expectations of each and every user, and to do that we need to better understand the pages, the queries, and our users. Over the last decade Google has pushed the technologies for understanding these three components (of the search process) to completely new dimensions.

Understanding pages

Over years we have invested heavily in our crawl and indexing system. As a result we have a very large and very fresh index. In addition to size and freshness, we have improved our index in other ways. One of the key technologies we have developed to understand pages is associating important concepts to a page even when they are not obvious on the page. We find the official homepage for Sprovieri Gallery in London for the Italian query [galleria sprovieri londra], even though the official page does not have either London or Londra on it. In the U.S., a user searching for [cool tech pc vancouver, wa] finds the homepage www.cooltechpc.com even though the page does not mention anywhere that they are in Vancouver, WA.

Understanding queries

It is critical that we understand what our users are looking for (beyond just the few words in their query). We have made several notable advances in this area including a best-in-class spelling suggestion system, an advanced synonyms system, and a very strong concept analysis system.

Synonyms are the foundation of our query understanding work.

This is one of the hardest problems we are solving at Google. Though sometimes obvious to humans, it is an unsolved problem in automatic language processing. As a user, I don't want to think too much about what words I should use in my queries. Often I don't even know what the right words are. This is where our synonyms system comes into action.

Concept identification.

Identifying critical concepts in the query allows us to return much more relevant results. For example, google algorithms understand that in the query [new york times square church] the user is looking for the well-known church in Times Square and not for articles from the New York Times. We don\'t just stop at identifying concepts; we further enhance the query with the right concepts when, for instance, someone looking for [PC and its impact on people] is in fact looking for impact of computers on society, or someone who searches for [rainforest instructional activities for vocabulary] is really looking for rain forest lesson plans.

Understanding users

Our work on interpreting user intent is aimed at returning results people really want, not just what they said in their query. This work starts with a world class localization system, and adds to it our advanced personalization technology, and several other great strides we have made in interpreting user intent, e.g. Universal Search.

Since Facebook announced that the contents of your Facebook profile would become searchable in popular search engines like Google, Live and Yahoo, it’s given us all opportunities to market our profiles and make ourselves stand out in search results.

This site shows some simple ways of helping you optimise the information you have in Facebook for search engines. It brings together some common information about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and adds in a bit of flavour for making the information in your Facebook compete well in the major search engines.

Starting last week, you can serve XML sitemaps off apps.facebook.com domain, and notify search engines about changes on your pages. Naturally, this works better for pages that display content without requiring logins. (this goes back to an earlier post i did discussing how facebook wants apps to be visible without having to actually add the app).

The best way to SEO your Facebook applications for the major search engines is to register your site with appropriate services:

* Google Webmaster Central
* Yahoo! Search Site Explorer
* Live Search Webmaster Center
* Ask.com Help for Webmasters

News Feed Optimization, on the other hand, is a bit trickier:

• Like Google’s PageRank algorithms, Facebook’s proprietary “FeedRank” (my term) algorithms determine which Feed items are shown to whom and which items are not.
• Like Google’s undisclosed PageRank algorithm, the variables that contribute to your Feed item’s FeedRank are unknown to you (and everyone except Facebook).
• Like companies dependent on their SEO’d Google PageRank, companies dependent on their NFO’d Facebook FeedRank will experience similar trauma when the algorithm unpredictably or inexplicably changes.

Welcome to the new world of NFO–the new SEO for Facebook marketers. Optimizing your product’s News Feed items is the single most important thing you can do as a marketer on Facebook. Not only should Feed items be designed for optimal conversion, but they should also be invoked by your application in ways that will maximize their distribution.

There are some steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues, and ensure that visitors see the content you want them to.

• Consider blocking pages from indexing: Rather than letting Google's algorithms determine the "best" version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don't want us to index the printer versions of your site's articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.
• Use 301s: If you've restructured your site, use 301 redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)
• Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don't link to http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.
• Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We're more likely to know that www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than www.example.com/de or de.example.com.
• Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt.
• Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, www.example.com or http://example.com).
• Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details.
• Avoid publishing stubs: Users don't like seeing "empty" pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. For example, don't publish pages for which you don't yet have real content. If you do create placeholder pages, use robots.txt to block these from being crawled.
• Understand your content management system: Make sure you're familiar with how content is displayed on your web site. Blogs, forums, and related systems often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blog entry may appear on the home page of a blog, in an archive page, and in a page of other entries with the same label.
• Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

It's search popularity statistics time again, Google slips while Yahoo and Microsoft gain. Trouble for the Big G? Not really -- because in terms of raw number of searches, June 2008 was another record breaker for Google.