For the last three months I have been hard at work learning SEO by optimizing a local small business website. The business is called Giggly Wiggly Preschool and is located in the Seattle suburb Issaquah, Washington. This Issaquah Preschool was the preschool I attended many years ago so I am happy I was given the chance to give bac...
Rather than trying to make this post go through all the tactics and specifics of Rebecca's already comprehensive KW Research article, I figured I'd instead provide a solid list of every which way you can look at a keyword to get an idea of metrics, value and potential from the engines themselves (rather than services like AdWords, YSM, Wortracker or KW Discovery). This is more of an "exper...
Today I'd like to take a deep look inside the minds of the billion worldwide search engine users and share a more comprehensive understanding of their motivations. This pseudo-psychological perspective can help us gain perspective on targeting, click-through rates, ad-serving and even relative value. First off, we need to realize that search engines are a tool - a resource driven by int...
Matt McGee (who I owe a link to for winning the SEO group NCAA tournament bracket back in March...damn you, Florida) wrote a fantastic post over at Small Business SEM called "I Have My Keywords...Now What?" It's concise, it's to the point, it's magical. Read it. Seriously. Click over to it and read it. ...
Last week I chatted with Levi from Wordze about the keyword research tool he built. Levi, who's chummy with SEOmoz's resident black hat blogger G-Man, is a programmer who tinkered around with various keyword research sites and decided to build his own. ...
Keyword cannibalization isn't an issue that's in the SEO forums much, nor is it something that many SEOs feature prominently in site reviews (at least, from my experience), but it can be detrimental to potential rankings for several different reasons. First, I'll illustrate how keyword cannibalization happens. It typically starts when a website's information architecture calls for the t...
I've spent this week putting the finishing touches on our keyword research guide (which will most likely be available--both to purchase and for Premium Members--on Monday). This afternoon I had the pleasure of speaking with Bill Tancer from Hitwise. Bill took me on a walkthrough of Hitwise's Competitive Intelligence tools, which he referred to as their "f...
In the stock market, analysts and traders buy, sell and trade shares in companies based on the speculation of future earnings or declines. Stock pickers attempt to determine which investments will rise and fall based on publicly available information. Slate magazine recently pointed out that even the best stock pickers, however, are generally terrible ...
An astute reader emailed me (Preston, you're a genius) to suggest that rather than attempt to collect PPC stats on our own, why not tap into the vast resource of the Internet marketing community - surely, together, we will be far stronger than we would be as just one firm. Here's the goa...
...fury meaning me, of course :)Yesterday Rand and I were checking out KeyCompete, a fairly new keyword research site. What is KeyCompete? Well, in the site's own words:"KeyCompe...
I worked out a $20 discount with WordZe for SEOMoz readers. This is reduced from the normal price of $45. It only lasts two days, so take advantage of it quickly before the price goes up. Just to refresh your memory, if you're wondering what WordZe is, it's a new keyword research tool. ...
For a long time, the SEO world has revolved around the idea that KW volume prediction tools could only give relative levels of accuracy, i.e. term X is more popular than term Y. These tools have never been good at fulfilling their true claim - predicting search volume. I set up a campaign to test the predictions of KW research tools like KeywordDiscovery, Overture, Wordtracker, MSN, etc...
One of the fun things about being a black hat that's somewhat well known is that I get to try out various bits of software before they're actually released to the public. In some cases I put my input into it and get a few things coded that I'm too lazy to do right now... For the past couple of months I've been working with Levi on a new keyword research tool. Of course, it d...
Aaron Wall wrote a good blog post a couple days ago titled Why Do Keyword Tool Search Estimates Vary So Much? It's a question that Rand and I have grumbled about many times. Actually, I'm pretty convinced that it's like a rite of passage--you're not a tried and true SEO professional until you've played with at least four different keyword ...