Google AdWords

If you currently use AdWords advertising, you already know all about this keyword tool. Use the AdWords tool to generate a “hit list” of terms that you want to try to optimize against. Once you’ve generated an informed list of terms, you can start using those terms throughout your website with a higher frequency.

SEOBook.com’s SEO for Firefox Extension

After setting up a free account at SEOBook.com, and you will get this tool + 2 other SEO tools valued at over $300 for free. This tool pulls useful market research data right into Google’s and Yahoo!’s search results.

SEOBook.com’s Rank Checker

After setting up a free account at SEOBook.com, and you will get this tool + 2 other SEO tools valued at over $300 for free. This tool is designed to be quick and easy to use, but to also give you the opportunity to gain the level of insight needed to compete with other SEOs at the professional level.

URL-Info

An enhancement of Michael Fagan’s original URLinfo tool, this neat tool gives a ton of useful statistics about a specific page. Statistics includes header, link, and image information.It goes into detail and shows external links, internal links, link distribution and more.

WordtrackerLabs: Keyword Questions

One of my personal favorites. People often type questions into search engines. This tool helps in finding these questions. Once you find the popular questions relative to your keyword, you can start to answer them appropriately and drive more traffic to your website.

I hope that you find these Free SEO Tools (software) helpful. I know that there are a lot of other free tools available in the market, but with all due respect, these ones fall on our top list.

In order for us to post more free seo related valuable content on this site, please show your support by following SEOBizNiche on Twitter.

(Yes, others can do this for less, but youre taking a few risks:

• Unreliable people vanishing with your money
• Getting crap code and being unable to evaluate that
• Getting an ugly, non-functional design)

And thats just the first landing page – you need alternatives so you can test! A simple A/B/C split test (eg with three variations) could thus run you $1,200 - $1,800 for graphics and code. (Assuming you start with completely different designs; if you just split test headlines or hero shots or calls to action, youll probably be able to do it for just $400.)

Oh, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. You still need to buy traffic to send to those pages to test! All of a sudden, youre paying $300 for the graphics, $100 for the code, maybe another $50 for finagling stuff and creating simple variations, plus traffic! This test is starting to sound like itll cost $1000, just to do a decent job of it!

Well, not necessarily. Here are some ideas and commentary on recent SMB landing pages Ive seen.

1) Affiliate Theme – This is a Wordpress theme that comes pre loaded with various layout and graphical options, such that you can mix and match to customize your design.

The idea is excellent. I was partly happy and partly disappointed when I saw this, because my friend Tyler Shears and I came up with roughly the same idea on our trip back from SMX West, and it was a potential business / revenue stream. Now Id rather not be second to market, but I am glad that this is available, affordably.

A single Affiliate Theme license goes for $97, says my friend Dev Basu in his Affiliate Theme review (which I wish were a little more review and a little less description ), while the top line one goes for $197.

The catch with Affiliate Theme, unfortunately, is that its Affiliate Theme.

Google hates affiliates (unless theyre Google Money affiliates or Eric Schmidts buddies). Google is quicker to penalize affiliates in the organic results, and is more inclined to slap them in PPC.

Blackhats know that if their networks of sites show a footprint (a common pattern in the code), theyll get banned more quickly.

If you want to use the same code as hundreds or thousands of other affiliates for serious projects do yourself a favor and test things first. See how much of a leash Google gives you. Im speaking theoretically, but this is a risk to be aware of.

2) You can use the following process.

1. Buy these three books: (i) Dont Make Me Think, by Steve Krug; (ii) Web Design For ROI, by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus; (iii) The Elements of User Experience Design, by Jesse James Garrett
2. Read the books, and understand how to make usable sites that make money.
3. Draw up a detailed wireframe for your site, based on 2).
4. Get the graphics done cheap ($50 – $100) via a freelance site. With a wireframe, 99Designs is less valuable, because the graphic artists are just painting by numbers. Its pretty hard to miscommunicate paint-by-numbers, even if your freelancer is a non-native English speaker imho.
5. Go to the pros to have the graphics coded.

As a member of the Jewish community, Im usually critical of my communitys associations for not making more use of testing and advanced landing page ideas and knowledge. Yet I saw an ad on Facebook that lead me to this very impressive page. Im guessing something similar could be done with the above process.

• No distracting navigation,
• Clear call to action,
• The form fits entirely above the fold,
• The features are explained in terms of the benefit provided (career, personal development)
• Pictures act as a sample of the experience you can have
• The only obvious issue is that their button is inconsistent with the form headline. Im willing to bet the text Get More Info or some variant on that would beat Submit Now, in a split test.

3) If you do have a few hundred bucks for the design and then a few hundred more bucks for the traffic, you can do really impressive stuff.

An ad I recently saw on my favourite salsa site (which has some nice social media elements, especially for an SMB site) lead me to a landing page for my salsa school, San Tropez.

• Headline targets needs / desires
• Strong scent with logo, repeated latin dance school in Montreal phrasing etc.
• Video parallels offline live demos, which make people want to learn and become great dancers
• Video comes from national TV, and acts as social proof
• Additional social proof in Why Choose
• Bullets, headlines and short paragraphs for easy scanning.
• Clear call to action
• Simple form
• Multiple ways to contact them

Even though San Tropezs agency is a competitor in my city, I have to give props to Amauta Marketing for the sweet ass job theyve done both with San Tropezs SEO and PPC (assuming they didnt only do the landing page). I actually signed up for the school back in January after finding them via Google a few times.

In short, making landing pages is getting a lot cheaper, with numerous options available. And for those with slightly larger budgets, you can do really impressive things. Thats one less excuse not to test!

Gab Goldenberg shares advanced seo tips on his seo blog.

[The opinions of SEJ Guest Bloggers are not necessarily those of Search Engine Journal or Search & Social.]

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

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Next lets talk about pagerank sculpting, unless you have seen a noticeable drop in traffic that you can only attribute to pagerank sculpting, I dont think you need to be rushing out and making any changes. Whats a better course, and one Im doing, is setting up a few tests on a few different sites trying different combinations and seeing what works for you. If there is any difference in the sculpted vs non sculpted implementations, then its time to re-act. Remember using test results from only one site is a dangerous thing. Why did Google make this change, IMHO there are two reasons, first the nofollow was probably cutting them off from content they felt they wanted access to. Secondly I dont think they were all that keen on you artificially forcing the pagerank around where you wanted it on your website. In my opinion google saw this pagerank sculpting like an actress in a pair of spanx and wearing a push up bra, objects appeared larger than they really were.

That said its probably a good idea to brush up on your understanding of Siloing as a natural form of limiting pagerank distribution.

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Quoting official Google statement, Media Decoder reports:

Were always experimenting with ways to make Google News more useful, occasionally, this means we have to re-evaluate our efforts to be sure we focus on features that make the most sense for our users.

What could have gone wrong with this feature? If Google wanted to elicit comments, it should have elicited comments from the users instead of the personalities featured in the news. If you were featured in a news items that runs on Google News, would you even bother commenting on the news item on the site itself?

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In the case of this latest lawsuit, the publishers claim that all three companies may have licensed the copyrights on the recordings, but didnt license the copyright on the compositions.There are a whole lot of details out yet explaining the legalities and issues at hand in the case, but it is assumedthese music services struck deals with record labels, but somehow the publishers and labels are separate entities and the rights are separate.

In many cases we assume that the publishing rights were also covered by the major record labels. But in some cases the publishing rights were owned by independent companies, and the claim looks to be that the publishing rights were never cleared with them.

What this means is that Microsoft, Yahoo and Real were all streaming music that they only had partial rights too. And since the publishers consider each instance a song is played to be an infringement yikes! They could be looking at some pretty hefty fines if the court agrees.

If youre interested in reading the entire court filing, which I will warn you is a massive 104 pages long, here you go. Have at it. In the meantime, well definitely be following this closely. Any ruling in favor of the music publishers could potentially have major ramifications for all three companies. I imagine that Google right now is pretty darn happy that theyve stayed out the music game, and that their search engine competitors are being tested.

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It would have been great if Bing (or the other search engines for that matter) will start indexing the Twitter stream and display Tweets along with the other web data that they crawl and display as search results. Thats more like a real-time search, right?

Anyway, this could be a good start though. As the Bing community blog explained via a post:

Were not indexing all of Twitter at this time just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitters public API to surface Tweets in people search. Wed love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

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As to the search results itself, these are now indented but the most significant change was the removal of the page size indicator. This indicator gives you an idea of how long it will take for the page to load. Google also removed the word pages from the previous similar pages link.

Was there any improvement in the loading speed? We have no way of telling now. But ii could be faster or slower. Perhaps if youre a keen observer whenever you use Google search, maybe you can easily tell whether there was any change in the speed of loading the search results or none at all.

So, any idea on why Google did these changes? Is it for aesthetic purposes? Revenue generation or what? Do you like the new look of Google search results page? Personally, I prefer the old one or maybe perhaps I could learn to like this new look once I get used to it.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

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From:Jane@WellKnownDomain.com
Subject: Purchasing Direct Advertising

Hi this is Jane from from WellKnownDomain.com we see that you run a website in the widget area and are very interested in purchasing a direct text link from you. We would like the link to be placed directly in the content area of one or more of your posts.

Hoping to hear back from you.

Jane

There are several things wrong with this type of approach:

• If I reply to the email and it doesnt bounce back, as long as the headers dont look forged its very hard to deny its real.
• If I look at your backlink profile and see some suspicious behavior like really targeted anchor text, its hard to deny you arent doing this as a regular practice.
• Mentioning things like direct link and in the content area make it very hard to deny that someone with SEO knowledge or SEO guidance isnt involved (the search engines call this intent).

If you are aware of the risks involved with these types of tactic, and still want to try them, at the very least put a layer of protection between yourself and the website. Try something like this:

From:Janet@gmail.com
Subject: Advertising Inquiry

Hi this is Janet I see that you run a website in the widget area. I have a client and would be interested in knowing if you accept advertising and what types of placements are available.

Hoping to hear back from you.

Janet

If you get a response and it looks promising then follow up with a SECOND email inquiring about placement within posts and if they offer on-site tracking or if you can use your own direct tracking URLs. You really dont want to give away the domain until as late as possible, and you are comfortable the person on the other end isnt going to NARC on you. Until you give away the domain theres no direct connection between you and the target domain and deniability is still an option. I understand that this way takes much, much longer to do, but IMHO giving up your domain and signaling your intent to buy links with an SEO mindset in a first contact email is a kamikaze move. If you use your noodle there are other ways you can put barriers between the website you are buying links from, but dont ask cause Im not telling.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Now, when you view Followers or Following, youre presented with a lot more information, almost eliminating the need to click over to the persons page to get the full scoop on them. Now youll see not only their avatar and username, but also their real name, latest tweet and location. On the righthand side where the Follow button used to be, theres now a new button. Click on it and youre presented with several action options: @ Mention xxxx, Direct Message xxxx, Follow xxxx, and Unfollow xxxx. So its nice in that theres a lot more information available in one place and theres less clicking involved.

Heres a quick peek at my Followers page so you can see the changes (click to view full size):

Whats this mean for search engine optimization? Well, we all know by now that SEO is far more than just link building. Its also a lot of marketing, and if youre on Twitter its an excellent way to market your website. I was a little late in the game getting my site involved with Twitter, but not too late, and it is definitely paying off in terms of gaining new traffic, new loyal readers, new readers, and even some advertisers. It also helps us to connect with our readers in a way thats just not possible through comment forms on our site alone. This UI update really helps to save time in checking out potential followers, or people you want to follow, especially if youre constantly bombarded with new followers or manually hunt for new ones to follow yourself.

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So, anyway its something that is yet to happen so we might as well talk about the new feature of Google Book Search that we mentioned.

If you would recall, during the early part of May Google introduced searching inside books wherein the context of search results can be viewed, sorted by relevancy as well as flipped through while users are viewing books.

The new feature adds a cool feature via a scrollbar that appears when users search inside a book. Hints will be displayed if you hover on the scrollbar located at the right side of the search results page. These hints will enable you to preview where in the book the search term is located. You can then click on this annotation go to that part of the book.