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Tool time Lastly, augment all of that good data with professional keyword research tools. Microsoft offers a tool called adCenter Excel Add-in Keyword Research Tool for versions 2003 and 2007. (Note: You'll need to set up an adCenter account before you can use the tool. Luckily, unlike most other online ad vendors, adCenter offers customer support over the phone with a real person - at no cost to you! - to help you get your account set up and running.) Both Google and Yahoo! offer their own keyword research tools. In addition, there are many third-party keyword research tools available, some for free, others for a fee. The adCenter Excel Add-in Keyword Research Tool can do the following: * Scan your current website and extract the keywords that offer the highest confidence levels based on their current usage * Suggest new keywords based on user behavior or your existing keyword list * Provide: o Research data on top performing keywords o Performance data on the keywords you specify o Information on keyword usage based on geographic and demographic data Note that the keyword tool is primarily designed to help users figure out which keywords to use with their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns. However, the tool's output is also extremely relevant to developing or revising a keyword list for your website as part of an SEO update. We'll talk about the process of creating a PPC campaign in later posts. To use the tool, I recommend adding your keywords (one word per line) to an empty Excel spreadsheet, listing them in column A. Select the words for which you want to see adCenter's confidence level rating, click the Ad Intelligence tab, and then click the lower half of the Keyword Suggestion button on the toolbar, using both the Contained and Similarity tasks. You'll get a list of additional suggested keywords and phrases that correspond to each of the keywords you selected. Use the ones that are relevant

Google Maps: relative value of a OneBox vs top organic results Category: Google Maps (Google Local) - Mike - 5:50 am Steve Espinosa has some interesting preliminary research on the relative click thru rates of a #1 listing in the Local 10-Pack and a simultaneous #1 listing in organic. The organic listing showed 1.6x the click thru of the the Local 10 Pack listing. As it is preliminary research and only looked at click thru not call in or other measures of action, it is an important piece of research but doesn't speak to ultimate customer action. According to TMP's Local Search Usage Study : Following online local searches, consumers most often contact a business over the telephone (39%), visit the business in-person (32%) or contact the business online (12%). If one works out the combined math of the two studies (a not very reliable number I assure you), in the end the top local ranking would still provide more client contacts either via phone or in person than the organic ranking. At the end of the day, Steve's research can not be viewed as a reason to not focus on local but rather as a call to action on the organic side. I think he would agree that, in the excitement around local, you can't forget organic's power and that in an ideal world a business would use every tool available to them. However, many times, due to the nature of a business, a business may not be able to legitimately play in the Local space and their only recourse is to optimize their website for local phrases. Another interesting outcome of Steve's initial research was "the fact is that the majority of the users who got to the site via the natural link had resolution above 1024×768 and the majority of users who visited via the Onebox result had resoultion of 1024×768 or under." As Steve pointed out, this could be do the greater real estate visible to those with larger screens and thus greater visibility of organic listings above the fold. It could also, however, be

After 12 long months of brainstorming, testing, developing, and analyzing, the wait is finally over. Today, I'm ecstatic to announce some very big developments here at SEOmoz. They include: * An Index of the World Wide Web - 30 billion pages (and growing!), refreshed monthly, built to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape * Linkscape - a tool enabling online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value. * A Fresh Design - that gives SEOmoz a more usable, enjoyable, and consistent browsing experience * New Features for PRO Membership - including more membership options, credits to run advanced Linkscape reports (for all PRO members), and more. Since there's an incredible amount of material, I'll do my best to explain things clearly and concisely, covering each of the big changes. If you're feeling more visual, you can also check out our Linkscape comic, which introduces the web index and tool in a more humorous fashion: Check out the Linkscape Comic SEOmoz's Index of the Web For too long, data that is essential to the practice of search engine optimization has been inaccessible to all but a handful of search engineers. The connections between pages (links) and the relationship between links, URLs, and the web as a whole (link metrics) play a critical role in how search engines analyze the web and judge individual sites and pages. Professional SEOs and site owners of all kinds deserve to know more about how their properties are being referenced in such a system. We believe there are thousands of valuable applications for this data and have already put some effort into retrieving a few fascinating statistics: * Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site. * 1.83%

Well - the result is clear. From these 4 pages Google managed to pick the page with valid css and valid html as the preffered page to include in it's index! Ok, it might be a bit early to see if the four pages in the test eventually appear in Google but on first glance it appears Google spidered the pages, examined them, applied duplicate content filters as expected, and selected one to include in search engine results. It just happens that Google seems to prefer the page with valid code as laid down by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The W3C was started in 1994 to lead the Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. What is the W3C? * W3C Stands for the World Wide Web Consortium * W3C was created in October 1994 * W3C was created by Tim Berners-Lee * W3C was created by the Inventor of the Web * W3C is organized as a Member Organization * W3C is working to Standardize the Web * W3C creates and maintains WWW Standards * W3C Standards are called W3C Recommendations How The W3C Started The World Wide Web (WWW) began as a project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where Tim Berners-Lee developed a vision of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee - the inventor of the World Wide Web - is now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C was created in 1994 as a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), with support from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and the European Commission. W3C Standardising the Web W3C is working to make the Web accessible to all users (despite differences in culture, education, ability, resources, and physical limitations). W3C also coordinates its work with many other standards organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Wireless Application Protocols (WAP) Forum an

* Twitter's Overhyped A number of people commented on Twitter hype growing: * Come on, this is ridiculous. Yes, a large proportion of getting-edge tech geeks use Twitter, but this is still less than 1% of the population as a whole. I'm a tech geek, I work in search and research, but I have never used Twitter in my life and have yet to see a purpose for it. * Have done some research for a couple of companies on where they're showing up in the Web 2.0 space. My feeling is Twitter is a very long way from replacing certain review sites let alone search engines. * Honestly, I believe Twitter will fade rather than become an alternative to search. More people are joining Twitter because others are, but few realize the real value - and that real value has yet to truly reveal itself. * I admit that Twitter will become a great knowledge sharing tool, but it doesn't have the scale to be useful outside of the state of California…yet. * I don't see Twitter overtaking search engines in any way shape or form. For quick contact with friends or very specific advice that's better handled with some quick back and forth, sure, but Twitter lacks the depth, specificity and authority of search engines for 99% of anything I need to look for. * I think Twitter at the moment is over-hyped. Period. * I'm more likely to trust a reliable website that specializes on the topic at hand over a friend or random person who follows me. I also wouldn't have to wait for a response if I just searched for the answer myself. I do like the concept of getting answers to real time issues, but I can accomplish that on facebook (which I have far more connections on). In Summary Made it to the end? Here's a summary of the findings: * Half ask a question on Twitter at least once per week * Nearly 40% are "usually" satisfied with the answers they get * Half "sometimes" or "often" turn to Twitter for questions rather than a traditiona

"22% of consumers won't buy a product if they find a negative article while researching a brand"

The value of "long-form journalism" has been tested on websites such as Salon and shown to be quite viable. It also attracts a better caliber of writer. With this in mind, over a year ago I was working with an online magazine that was already publishing longer, in-depth articles, in the area of many thousands of words. The SEO challenge we had was that page 2 and beyond for most articles were not getting any search traffic - even though there was plenty of awesome content there. The approach we decided on is labor intensive for the content creators. But after some education, the writers were all interested in trying to increase the audience size. Here are the steps we took: Page 1 naturally enough uses the overall title of the article for both its title tag and header, and has a unique meta-description. Every internal page then has its own unique title and header tag . These are based on the first SUB-head for that section of the article. This means more keyword research and writing of subheads than would normally be the case. If the article is considered as a whole, then an tag would seem more accurate semantically. But Google looks at the semantic structure one URL at a time, not for the overall multi-URL article. Most pages also include internal subheads, and these are style as On each internal page, there is also a "pre-head" that does use the article title from page 1 in a small font. This pre-head does not use a header tag of any kind, just a CSS style. This pre-head article title is at the top as a navigation cue for the user. An additional navigation cue is that the unique page titles each begin with the numeral "2." or "3." Each internal page also has a unique meta description, one that summarizes that page specifically, rather than summarizing the overall article. Every page of the article links to every other page at the top and the bottom. None of this anemic "Back | Next" junk. There's a complete page choice shown on everywhe

Top 10 Industry Search Terms - September, 2008 By Hitwise US The terms listed below are ranked by volume of searches that successfully drove traffic to websites in the Hitwise All Categories category for the 4 weeks ending September 27, 2008, based on US Internet usage. 1. myspace - .78% 2. craigslist - .47% 3. ebay - .34% 4. youtube - .26% 5. myspace.com - .26% 6. facebook - .20% 7. yahoo - .19% 8. mapquest - .16% 9. www.myspace.com - .10% 10. craigs list - .09% Top 10 Fast Moving Search Terms - September, 2008 by Hitwise This list features the search terms for the industry All Categories, ranked by largest relative increase for the week ending September 27, 2008, compared with the week ending September 20, 2008. 1. dancing with the stars 2. paul newman 3. david blaine 4. clay aiken 5. britney spears 6. 2009 ford mustang concept car 7. hooters 8. criss angel 9. heroes 10. presidential debate Some of the terms that are off the top ten list from August: sarah palin, hurricane gustav, how to get a tax refund, palin, democratic convention Average Search CPC Data by Category for September 2008 Reported by ClickZ based on an Efficient Frontier study A look at the average CPC (define) in search by vertical in the U.S. for September 2008, compared to the prior month. Data and research are provided by Efficient Frontier. "Total finance" includes auto finance, banking, credit, financial information, insurance, lending, and mortgage. Each vertical contains data from multiple advertisers. The percentage of change from the previous month is indicated in parenthesis. Total Finance - $2.06 (-22.6%) Mortgage - $2.89 (7.8%) Insurance - $12.65 (4.3%) Travel - $0.69 (-4.2%) Automotive - $0.54 (-5.3%) Retail - $0.50 (13.6%) Dating - $0.44 (2.3%) The biggest change came in the Finance category which dropped from $2.66 in August to $2.06 in September. Paid Search Spending Pops: Very few cuts planned, most plan to splurge From eMarketer

Review of three top social bookmarking sites by educators, researchers, and librarians.

Only 61% of consumers rely on traditional search engines to find web sites today, compared with 83% in 2004. That means marketers need to become well versed in multiple types of online media-not just search engines-to help consumers find products. A new Forrester Research report, "The Forrester Wave: US Search Marketing Agencies,

"Rich snippets can provide a 26% lift in clicks on the second search listing, says a Blue Nile Research study."