Tip 10 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is Meta Keywords and the last in this series.

Meta keywords

On the web, a keyword is a reference to the content and/or the type of meta element included in a given web page’s HTML code to aid in the page’s indexing. A keyword meta element may include several comma-separated keywords (or keyword phrases, each of which may contain several individual words) as follows

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword, another keyword, one more keyword” />

Looking back in the 90′s, the search engine crawlers were relatively poor in terms of analysis capabilities, and, thus, the meta keywords were a simple way to detect the topics of a page. Historically, it has been the first way to optimize for search engines, however, no major search engine today claims to read the keywords which has raised the question of whether they are still needed at all.

While the meta keyword debate rages on … Are they really of value? Should I use them? My position is that I use them, qualified by, “if you are going to use meta keywords you might as well use them right.” Search engines may not give them much value but if you use meta keywords in your tags that you don’t use on the page you might be penalized.

What does this look like? Well first and foremost DO NOT use too many meta keywords. How many actual topics will you use on a web page? My goal is to shoot for 5 to 7 actual keyword phrases. Make sure the keyword phrases are actually used on the page in which they are entered into meta keyword tags.

I have actually seen sites that had more keywords than they had words on the page. Don’t let this happen to you. Be practical, use the keyword or keyword phrases you are using on the page, make them relevant. Search engines like relevancy. If search engines like what you do you will get search love from the them.

Here is an example of a Golf site that has 30 meta keywords on their front page.

Earlier in this project you actually did your keyword research and selected your keywords and keyword phrases. You built your text outline using the keyword and keyword phrases. You probably already have the basis for your meta keyword tags.

Now you have done it all:

1. Keyword Research
2. Keyword Selection
3. Theme Selection
4. URL Selection
5. Site Architecture
6. Text Structure (outline)
7. Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
8. Submitting to Search Engines (or not)
9. Submitting to Directories (free and paid)
10. Meta Keywords

So now you are done. You can set back and let the visitors and dollars roll in right.

No you are just beginning. Remember SEO is not a one time thing that you do and forget. It is a process that needs to be continually checked and updated. What you have done is establish a good foundation for the SEO process.

The PDF version will be available soon on Search Engine Optimization Portland.

late,
gary pool

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | Meta Keywords Tip 10 is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician

Tip 9 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is Submitting to Directories (free and paid).

A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links.

A web directory is not a search engine, and does not display lists of web pages based on keywords, instead it lists web sites by category and subcategory. The categorization is usually based on the whole web site, rather than one page or a set of keywords, and sites are often limited to inclusion in only one or two categories. Web directories often allow site owners to directly submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness.

While it isn’t recommended that you submit to the search engines directories are a horse of a different color. It is a GOOD thing to submit to directories both paid and free.

A Google search shows 1,620,000,000 results for the search term “directory”.

Paid directories are the ones that charge you a fee to post to their directory. Some directories charge a yearly fee, some charge a one time fee, and others charge a one time fee for as many listings as you would like to post.

The top of the list for the paid directories is the Yahoo Directory . The Yahoo Directory is the most desirable paid directory to have your website listed in. The fees for the Yahoo Directory are as follows:

For web sites that do not feature adult content or services, the Yahoo! Directory Submit service costs US$299 (nonrefundable) for each Directory listing that is submitted. Furthermore, for each listing accepted into the Directory, there is a recurring annual fee of US$299 to maintain the listing in the Directory for the subsequent year.

This may seem like a paid link but that is not how Google considers a paid directory listings. They (Google) see it as part of a viable business like the phone book yellow page listings used to be.

The top of the list for the FREE directories is the DMOZ. The DMOZ has been around for a long time (according to their site 1998). The only trouble getting listed with dmoz.org is that all the work is done by volunteers. If the category you choose either does not have an editor or a very slow one it can take forever to get listed there.

The Open Directory Project is a web directory of Internet resources. A web directory is something akin to a huge reference library. The directory is hierarchically arranged by subject – from broad to specific. The ODP is maintained by community editors who evaluate sites for inclusion in the directory. They are our experts, and all submissions are subject to editor evaluation.

We care a great deal about the quality of the ODP. We aren’t a search engine and pride ourselves on being highly selective. We don’t accept all sites, so please don’t take it personally should your site not be accepted. Our goal is to make the directory as useful as possible for our users, not to have the directory include all (or even most) of the sites that could possibly be listed or serve as a promotional tool for the entities listed.

When you are submitting your website the most important factor is relevance. Choose your category carefully and intentionally. One way to find relevant directories for your content is to put your sites most important keyword or keyword phrase together with the term/s submit site or submit URL into the search engine of your choice and work your way down the list.

The most important thing to remember when submitting to directories is don’t get in a hurry. Make all your actions deliberate. Don’t use the exact same description text for every listing. Vary your anchor text if possible. It is OK to use the same site and business name.

Now that you have submitted your site to all the relevant directories you can get ready for the final tip of this series SEO Tip 10 Meta Keywords.

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | Submitting to Directories (free and paid) Tip 9 is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician

Tip 8 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is Submitting to Search Engines (or not).

Search engine submission is how a webmaster submits a web site directly to a search engine. While Search Engine Submission is often seen as a way to promote a web site, it generally is not necessary. Because the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use crawlers, bots, and spiders that eventually would find all by themselves most web sites on the Internet.

There are two basic reasons to submit a web site or web page to a search engine. The first reason would be to add an entirely new web site because the site operators would rather not wait for a search engine to discover them. The second reason is to have a web page or web site updated in the respective search engine.

When I entered search engine submission in to Google I get 10,600,000 results.

You would think with over 10 million results submitting your site to the search engines would be a positive thing. Years ago you would have been right thinking that. Search engines don’t live in the past, at least the ones we care about don’t.

The top search engines tweak their algorithms almost daily and adjust them weekly. If your site is found by the major search engines (the big three are Google, Yahoo, and Live or MSN) the rest will find it also. This is what SEO is all about staying up with the search engines and trying to stay a half step ahead of them.

If the major search engine finds your site on their own it (your website) receives more value than it would if you have to tell them about it. For the sake of clarity let’s say the search engine can assign a maximum value of 100 search love points to a site. All together now “the search engine can assign a maximum value of 100 search love points to a site”. If they find your site on their own you can receive a maximum of 100 search love points. If you have to bring it to their front door you can only receive 80 search love points maximum.

Let’s just take a look at the search engines position…
If this website is really of value wouldn’t I be able to find it without it being brought to my door step? If this site had real value wouldn’t there be a link from another site I have already visited to it?

Doesn’t this argument make sense? This is why it is better to NOT submit your site to search engines through the front door. You need to find ways to have it brought to their attention without waving a flag and yelling “HERE I AM, OVER HERE, I AM RIGHT HERE!”

Are you thinking “Is getting another site to give me a link the only way to get my site found without submitting it to the search engines?” Actually no! You can submit your site to directories which we will deal with next time or now with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer you can have Google and Yahoo bring it in the back door.

Both Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer allow you to add a meta tag or page to the root of your site which they verify. This verification process will also get your site on their radar. Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer give you access to some very good tools for your websites SEO.

Give it some thought and I’ll bet you can come up with other ways to get your site on the search engines radar without delivering it your self. Most blog comments allow a link back to your site. Maybe if you can find a blog that deals with the same subject and post a comment you could get a very relative link back to your new site?

Still want to submit your site to search engines? There are plenty of outdated tools and software out there that would be more than glad to take your money to help you do so. Make sure if you are resubmitting your website you have also changed your sites content too.

Now that you have chosen whether or not to submit your site to the search engines you are ready to move to Tip 9 Submitting to Directories (free and paid).

late,
gary pool

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | Submitting to Search Engines (or not) Tip 8 is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician

Tip 7 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is Meta Description and Title Tag.

Differences Between HTML and XHTML

In HTML the <meta> tag has no end tag.

In XHTML the <meta> tag must be properly closed.

The Meta description tag is a HTML code snippet that resides inside the head(<head> </head>) section of a web page. It usually is placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag, although the order is not important.

The correct syntax for the Meta description XHTML tag is: <meta name="description" content="The well thought out of your page in a sentence or two goes here." />

The Title tag is the element defines the title of the document.

The correct syntax for the Title XHTML tag is:<title>Page Title goes here.</title>

Why does Google care about meta descriptions?
We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it’s worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t affect your ranking within search results.

…Use quality descriptions
Finally, make sure your descriptions are… descriptive. It’s easy to become lax on the quality of the meta descriptions, since they’re not directly visible in the UI for your site’s visitors. But meta descriptions might be displayed in Google search results — if the description is high enough quality. A little extra work on your meta descriptions can go a long way towards showing a relevant snippet in search results. That’s likely to improve the quality and quantity of your user traffic.

The Meta Description Tag

The Meta Description Tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations this description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results. The Meta Description Tag should be your best Marketing foot forward. In the case where the search engine uses your Meta Description Tag for the text in the search results, this description must convince the searcher to click on your link.

<title>Discount Golf Clubs and Custom Golf Club Sets at Golfclubs.com</title>
<meta name="description" content="Discount golf clubs and unique custom golf clubs designs are available at Golfclubs.com."></meta>

Meta Description Tags must be unique and relevant to each page and should contain at the minimum the two or three most important keywords or keyword phrases on that page. Remember you are writing your Meta Description Tag for your readers not the search engines.

The Title Tag
While technically not a meta tag, this tag is frequently used in conjunction with the "Meta Description Tag." The contents of this tag are generally shown as the title in search results (and in the user’s browser when visiting the page or viewing bookmarks). Title Tags must be unique to each page and should contain at the minimum the most important keyword or keyword phrase on that page.

Now you have a handle on the Meta Description Tags and Title Tags you are planning to use on each page. will deal with that with the next time with Tip 8 Submitting to Search Engines (or not).

late,
gary pool

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | Meta Description and Title Tag Tip 7 is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician

Tip 6 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is Text Structure (building and outline).

The text structure of a website is the outline you create for each page from the research you have done gathering all the keywords and keyword phrases. You will use this/these outline/s to create the text for your website.

Now that you have all the keywords and keyword phrases for your chosen theme selected you will build the text structure of your site by using outlines in the form of your pyramid theme. You will use this outline to build your search engine optimized website. This outline is the key element to building your website so take your time.

You will actually have to build many second level outlines that are part of the main outline. These second level outlines will be the text structure for each of the subsequent web pages you will build. The first out line will actually be the navigation structure of your site. This first or mail outline is the most important because it is the actual text structure for the theme of your entire site.

We will go back to the golf example for a short version of the actual theme outline. The example I used was is “golf”. Golf is the highest level for use on a this test site. With “golf” as the top level the supporting the four main categories (the second level) golf clubs, golf equipment, golf tips, and golf courses.. This will be the beginning of our theme text structure outline.

A) Golf
1.) Golf Clubs
2.) Golf Equipment
3.) Golf Tips
4.) Golf Courses

You will now add the rest of the topics and information needed to the second level of your outline to create the text structure you will need to complete your web pages. We will use “golf clubs” as the topic for our example for the second level and “golf clubs clone” for our third level.

A) Golf

1.) Golf Clubs
_ a.) golf clubs clone
_ b.) best clone golf clubs
_ c.) callaway clone golf clubs
_ d.) clone driver golf clubs

You will do this for every topic and every page you intend to use on your website. As you can see you can take this outline as deep as you’d like. The deeper you take it the easier it will be when you begin to write your actual website text.

As you can see by the pictures and examples I have used here just how important the keyword and keyword phrase research is.

Once you are happy with your outline for your text structure all you have to do is create the text from your outlines. As you write the pages of your site you will naturally use words that also occur on the pages around it, the pages it links to, and the pages it gets links from, this text structure will strengthen the theme for those sections and for the site as a whole.

Now that you have finished with Tip 6 you have an actual website. What do you do now? I will deal with that with the next time with Meta Descriptions and Title Tags.

late,
gary pool

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | Text Structure Tip 6 is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician

Tip 5 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is Site Architecture.

Site Architecture is not only the way the site is presented but the underlying code structure that allows the website to be navigated, read, searched, and viewed. In this tip we will concentrate on the underlying code (HTML xhtml …).

Now you have done your Keyword Research, Keyword Selection, Theme Selection, and URL Selection. This research and selection will be used later on during the Text Structure Tip 6. We will start at the bottom level and focus on the code that makes your website work on the World Wide Web. (consider this the frame work of your website house)

The way in which your code is written will determine how your site is displayed to both your human visitors as well as the search engine spiders or bots. For this tip we will focus on the search engine spiders and bots. This brings up a chicken of egg comparison. If your site is written just for your visitors, how will they find you? If your site is written just for the search engines, what good is bringing people to your site and have them leave immediately?

Your site should be written for your customers or clients with the search engines in mind.

Now on to the CODE. The site’s code should be structured so that the main focus of each page is actually at the top of the code. This is called the linear view of your website. When a search engine visits your site they will read your site’s code from the top to the bottom. They figure the most important information is on the top of the page.

If your navigation is listed in the code before the main section of the page it will get more value than the topic of the page. As the search engine views more pages and this structure is persistent through out the site they will figure the pages are very similar and you will not get much value for the subjects of each of the pages. [see image on the right] This image is what the search engines see on this particular site before they even get to the main product on each page.

If you are using table less structure you can lay out the visual elements of the site with CSS placement. If you are using tables you can force proper linear alignment by adding a blank cell above the navigation. Either one of these solutions are acceptable to the search engines. You are not trying to put any thing over on the search engines just creating the proper liner alignment for the subject of each page.

Now that you have the subject value of your web pages taken care of you will need the help of the W3C. Matt Cutts even gives us a hint to the value of the value of valid code in his video Optimize for Search Engines. He slips it in towards the end of the video so if you watch it pay close attention. The argument for validation is, since the spiders and bots built by the search engines use the W3C rules as their foundation, it is easier for them to search your site if your code validates. If it is easier for them the will most likely reward you in some small way. My thoughts on the subject are if everything else is equal the site with the valid code will get the nod in the rankings.

The W3C will also help you check your code validation. Using the “show source” and “verbose output” together the W3C will walk you through your code errors and give you information valuable for fixing them. I would not recommend the use of the “clean up markup with HTML Tidy” option. The object of valid code isn’t just validation but valid clean code.

Now that you have an understanding of Site Code Architecture we can move on to the next in the series, the Text Structure and how it relates to the Site Architecture.

late,
gary pool

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | Site Architecture Tip 5 is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician

Tip 4 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is URL Selection.

URL Selection is exactly what it sounds like. It is the selection of the URL that will be used for your website. Why wait until tip number 4 to choose a URL? Don’t we want to choose an address first? No we really want to have a handle on the keyword and keyword phrases we will be dealing with before we choose the address the search engines will see as the first portal to your website.

The short and direct URLs are probably already taken. If you are willing to spend the money you can probably purchase the one you want. This is not necessary. Let’s continue to use the example we have been using “golf”. Now golf.com is probably already taken but with a little thinking outside the box we can come up with a very worthwhile one.

Why not just use the name of your company? If the name of your company has the top keyword or keyword phrase in even better. If your company name is, let’s say, Lalapalooza and your site deals with golf you may not want to use lalapalooza.com for your actual URL. If you have enough money to be able to market your company name “Lalapalooza” to the public as the authority on golf this will work. Then why are you trying to SEO your own website? Just hire me and I will take care of it for you.

As you can see from the screen shot above with the search “golf” three out of the top six sites listed actually have golf in their URLs. Two of the other three are PGA sites and the third is Wikipedia. Do you see a pattern here? If the top of your pyramid theme is golf you will have to have golf in your URL.

You will want a dot com ending if at all possible. Please check out my earlier blog post The Power of Suggestion, Subliminal Marketing, and the dot com. People are so used to using dot com for an URL it is a good idea to use one. Now you ask about dashes in the URL. Dashes are fine for the search engines but are not very user friendly. People are not used to typing dashes into URLs. So you can’t find the URL you want without dashes and with a dot com ending. There is a work around. It’s called the 301 redirect.

The 301 redirect is one of the best friends of the SEO. With the 301 redirect you can use one URL for the search engines and another to market your site to actual people. You could use all-about-golf.com as your actual URL and lalapalooza.com as the URL you advertise in print and in your emails. Your email address could be me@lalapalooza.com. If used correctly the 301 redirect makes the whole thing work seamlessly under the hood. Potential customers and or clients could enter lalapalooza.com into their browser and be transfered automatically to all-about-golf.com. The best part about a 301 redirect is that it is search engine legal. You will not be penalized for using a 301 redirect and you will still get the search engine juice from all-about-golf.com. There is a javascript redirect but it is not very search engine friendly.

Now that you have chosen your URL or URLs you can set this all aside and get ready for one of the most over looked parts of SEO Tip 5 Site Architecture.

late,
gary pool

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | URL Selection Tip 4 is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician

Tip 3 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is Theme Selection.

Keyword themes, or theme pyramids as they are occasionally referred to, is really straight forward. View your site as a hierarchal structure. Your home (or landing) page sits at the top and beneath your home page are let’s say, four main categories that comprise the second level of your site. Each of your main categories has several subcategories on the third level and possibly these subcategories have a fourth level of pages beneath them.

If you have done your Keyword Selection completely you will have about every thing you need and won’t have too much more Keyword Research ahead of you. Remember Keyword research is the backbone of SEO and is never a waste of your time.

Your sites content will then be comprised of keyword or keyword phrases that develop a theme. The more general terms at the top and the more defined terms or phrases underneath the main general topics. If we were to start with “golf” as the top of the pyramid theme the supporting the four main categories (the second level) golf clubs, golf equipment, golf tips, and golf courses.

Lets choose “golf clubs” as the topic for our example for the second level. Now we will need third level topics for our pyramid. Let’s say we will use four topics for the third level. We will choose used golf clubs, golf clubs clone, discount golf clubs, and cheap golf clubs.

For the next level we will choose “golf clubs clone” as the example of level three. Level four under golf clubs clone will consist of clone golf clubs, best clone golf clubs, callaway clone golf clubs, and clone driver golf clubs.

Now this is really overly simplified but you should be able to get the idea from the examples I have given. The key to your pyramid theme is the Main over topic of your website. You will want to choose the most general term that is offered by your website. If you are selling golf accessories on your website you won’t want to start with golf.

The Case for Themes

Most importantly themes can help your visitors find things on your site. If you use thematic organization for your site your navigation should also follow the theme. Since visitors to a site might be interested in more than one topic, the more specific links could help them find their way around easier. Since people are searching for keywords and or keyword phrases, organizing your site around those keywords could help your visitors navigate the site quicker and easier.

Now that you have a handle on website themes you set that aside. So next time we will deal with tip 4 URL Selection.

late,
gary pool

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | Theme Selection Tip 3 is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician

Tip 2 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is Keyword Selection.

Keyword Selection is the process of selecting the best keyword or keyword phrases from a list that has already been researched to used to bring the most valuable visitors to a website.

Now you have compiled this large list of relevant keywords. You have used some of the great keyword research tools to find out how many people search on these terms. You’ve discovered how many sites contain these keyword. Now what?

You will need to group your keyword/keyword phrases into like categories. Group like keywords and keyword phrases into chunks of like information. These groups should be spot on for the topic/s for your website.

Choose the highest level keyword/s for the main topic of each page. The highest level keyword is most likely the ones with the highest amount of searches. Add the correlating keywords and keyword phrases under each topic. The example I will use is “golf”. Golf is the highest level for use on a this test site. If you are going to only carry golf clubs you probably wouldn’t want to use golf.

Now you will need to do some more keyword research to make sure you have the full lists of relevant keywords and or phrases to use on your site. You search under each term or phrase you have chosen and create many lists for each page you are planning to create. From the main golf list I have chosen “golf club” as one of my topics I will use.

Now I searched on golf clubs and have chosen another phrase “golf clubs clone”. You are going to want 2-5 sub topics on each page. This is where your second round of keyword or phrase research comes in. You will need to do this for every page you plan on creating.

The value of a keyword or keyword phrase is first and foremost the relevance to your products or services offered by your website. The next factor as to the keyword value is the number of times the keyword or phrase has ben used in a search. The number of competitors the particular keyword or keyword phrase has is a key to how hard it will be to rank in the search results for that term.

Once you have a handle on the keyword or keyword phrases you are planning to use on each page it is time to consider your next step. So next time we will deal with Theme Selection.

By the way, I use NicheBot for all of my keyword research. Check it out if you’d like.

late,
gary pool

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | Keyword Selection Tip 2 is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician

Tip 1 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is thorough Keyword Research.

Keyword Research is the process of using keyword research tools to determine the value of a particular keyword or keyword phrase.

Keyword research is critical to the SEO process. Without keyword research all your efforts to optimize your site to rank high in the major search engines may be directed to the wrong terms and phrases. This will result in rankings for words that no one searches on.

The process of keyword research involves several steps.

The first thing you are going to want to do for keyword research is brainstorm the word or words potential customers might use to find the site you are planning to build. This list will include both individual words and 2 to 4 word phrases. You will need enough keywords and keyword phrases to cover all the services or product areas you are going to promote on the site.

If you are having trouble coming up with enough keywords or keyword phrases use past customers, your friends, colleagues, or even your competitors. You can check the “meta keywords” used by your competitors. Most browsers will let you do this by right clicking on the page and choosing “view page source”.

Now the work begins. You need to begin the process of qualifying your keyword list.

By checking your proposed keywords with a keyword research tool, you can easily learn how many users are conducting searches for that particular term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other important analytical information. You may also discover words that are different than your keywords that searchers are using instead of yours or even synonyms you weren’t even aware of.

There are plenty of good tools out there to help you determine how valuable your keywords are to your site. Here’s a few of my favorites.

SEO Keyword Research Tool A free research tool on SEO Portland and powered by Arron Wall. This is a good tool to begin with.

Wordtracker: Wordtracker is a subscription tool that lets you look up popular keyword phrases to determine their activity and popularity among competitors. Their top 1000 report lists the most frequently searched for terms, while their Competition Search option provides valuable information to determine the competitiveness of each phrase. They also have a free trial version but be prepaired to spend some time using it.

Overture Keyword Selector Tool: Overture now Yahoo!’s Keyword Selector tools shows you how many searches have been conducted over the last month for a particular phrase and lists alternative search terms you may have forgotten about. The only problem with Yahoo!/Overture is that singular and plural word forms are considered one phrase. For example, "widgets" and "widget" would appear as the same word "widget".

Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Google’s keyword Pay-Per-Click tool doesn’t provide actual search numbers for keywords. Instead, it displays a graph like, colored bar, giving users an approximation.

Keyword Discovery tool: This is a fee-based tool where users can see how many users search for it daily, identify common spellings and misspellings, and determine the market share value for a given search word or phrase.

Google Suggest: Google Suggest is a great way to find synonyms and related word suggestions that may be helpful to expand your original list.

Thesaurus.com: A good way to discover synonyms you may not have remembered.

NicheBot is the best keyword tool I have been able to find it includes results from Wordtracker, Google, Keyword Discovery, and Yahoo!/Overture. This tool saves me alot of time and effort. Their tagline is, "Search The Major Keyword Services All in One Place to Easily Locate the Highest Traffic/Lowest Competition Keywords Like a Laser-Guided Missile!". They even have a 2 week test drive for a buck. NicheBOT Tour Page for $1 Trial Offer.

Remember that you’re not only checking to see if enough people are searching for a particular word or phrase, you’re also trying to determine how many of your competitors are using that keyword or phrase on their sites.

The next edition will be tip 2 Keyword Selection. I will go into detail about what to do with the list you have it compiled and researched.

late,
gary pool

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | Keyword Research Tip 1 is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician

My top 10 tips and tricks for building a search engine optimized website from the ground up. I guess you might call this series a view inside the mind of an obsessed Web Maestro and Search Engine Optimizician.

You will also be able to use this valuable information to help the SERPs of sites that are already up and running.

Over the next few weeks iI will be explaining in detail the individual topics in this list. This list isn’t in order of importance it is in the chronological order of my methodology.

Not only will I be giving you the details of my processes, I will also be giving you insight into the SEO tools I use for research and development of the sites I create and optimize.

When I am working with a client here are the categories for the first steps I take in building a search engine friendly site that has been SEO’d.

1. Keyword Research
2. Keyword Selection
3. Theme Selection
4. URL Selection
5. Site Architecture
6. Text Structure (outline)
7. Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
8. Submitting to Search Engines (or not)
9. Submitting to Directories (free and paid)
10. Meta Keywords

SEO is not a one time thing that you do and forget. It is a process that needs to be continually checked and updated. These top ten tips and tricks are considered to be a good foundation for the SEO process.

When this series is complete it will be available in PDF format for download at my newly launched Search Engine Optimization site SEO Portland.

Questions are always appreciated.

late,
gary pool

Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks for Building a Website is a post stolen from the Search Engine Optimizician