5 free keyword tools for blog writing ideas

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Search engines rank your site based on the relevance of the content. They do this by examining the site pages and comparing them to the search phrase typed in by the searcher. They then examine how many inbound links the most relevant page on the website has and, crucially, the quality of those links. In Search Engine Optimisation as in life, quality trumps quantity every time.

At the heart of it all is good content that will attract links to the site and, ultimately, buyers. Each blog entry or page should be about one keyword or keyphrase. But how do you come up with these keywords and, therefore, the blog entries? I’m in the process of optimising my candle-making blog and one of the challenges is knowing what to write about.

Most people will be familiar with the Google Adwords Keyword tool but there are many other ways of finding inspiration. Here are five of my favourites:

(more…)

Anglian Windows gets more than it bargained for on Bing

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

By now I expect everyone is familiar with the idea of buying keywords in search engines. Identify a keyword you like, stake your claim to it, and you get a featured listing whenever someone puts that term in the search box.

On Bing, Microsoft’s very handy and super-relevant search engine, it would seem that Anglian Windows has bought a featured spot that pops up to tell you about the new Government scrappage scheme – not the one that applies to cars, the one that applies to double glazing.

Except that “Windows” has to be one of the most frequently searched terms on the web  -  I put it in almost every search because I’m always looking for Network error messages and their fixes, and if I leave “Windows” out then I get five times as many hits about Linux, which I don’t need to see. I am very unlikely to go from my “Windows” search to Anglian for some new double-glazing, so quite why Anglian’s ad appears when I type terms such as “windows trust failure vmware” into Bing is a mystery.

Thank God they only pay when people click on the ad, or the Government may be bailing out another company.

Your Privacy Policy policy

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Does your website have a privacy policy?

It’s very easy for a small site to decide that this is something that only applies to the big boys who are dealing with credit card details and have an in-house legal team ready to draft the required policy.

However this is a mistake on a number of fronts…

(more…)

The Guiding Principles of SEO 2.0

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

I recently posted an item highlighting how the nature of search engine optimization (SEO) has changed out of all recognition over recent years. Once SEO was a questionable practice largely conducted in secret and actively discouraged by Google who would ban your site if it thought you were trying to game the system. Nowadays SEO, or rather an amended version of it (SEO 2.0), has come out into the open and is even actively encouraged by Google.

This change from SEO 1.0 to SEO 2.0 is perhaps most apparent when it comes to the use of meta tags…

(more…)

The new Search Engine Optimization – SEO 2.0

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Recently I decided to brush up on my knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO) to see what the current view of best practice is. I was amazed at how things have changed…

(more…)