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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

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%

Oct 13, 2008 at 5:28pm Eastern by Vanessa Fox Google Webmaster Tools Now Provide Source Data For Broken Links Ever since Google Webmaster Tools started reporting on broken links to a site, webmasters have been asking for the sources of those links. Today, Google has delivered. From Webmaster Tools you can now see the page that each broken link is coming from. This information should be of great help for webmasters in ensuring the visitors find their sites and that their links are properly credited. The value of the 404 error report Why does Google report broken links in the first place? As Googlebot crawls the web, it stores a list of all the links it finds. It then uses that list for a couple of things: * As the source list to crawl more pages on the web * To help calculate PageRank If your site has a page with the URL www.example.com/mypage.html and someone links to it using the URL www.example.com/mpage.html, then a few things can happen: * Visitors who click on that link arrive at the 404 page for your site and aren't able to get to the content they were looking for * Googlebot follows that link and instead of finding a valid page of your site to crawl, receives a 404 page * Google can't use that link to give a specific page on your site link credit (because it has no page to credit) Clearly, knowing about broken links to your site is valuable. The best solution in these situations generally is to implement a 301 redirect from the incorrect URL to the one. If you see a 404 error for www.example.com/mpage.html, then you can be pretty sure they meant to link to www.example.com/mypage.html. By implementing the redirect, visitors who click the link find the right content, Googlebot finds the content, and mypage.html gets credit for the link. In addition, you can scan your site to see if any of the broken links are internal, and fix them. But finding broken links on your site can be tedious (although it's valuable to run a broken l

Local Search Tools For the SMB and Professional Category: Local Search - Mike - 6:00 am I have been using two "new" local search tools of late and have been impressed with both of them. The Local Search Toolkit from seOverflow has recently been released from beta and upgraded to work with the many changes that occurred recently in Google Places. The tool provides competitive information for a range of information for the top 7 listings in a given geo search. It will provide both URLs and totals for each of the following: Site Title Tag, Categories, Citations, Reviews , Number of Photos, Number of Videos, whether the listing is Owner Verified and the listings Distance to City Center. It's free and provides a wealth of information. It's useful for determining which reviews sites are most prevalent in which industries and which citations sources are the most prominent. Another tool that I often use is the Whitespark Local Citation Finder. The free version has been around for a while and is also useful in finding citations for either keyword phrases, your own site or those of a competitor. They just released the Local Citation Finder Pro version. The Pro Version is $20/mo and normally I do not write about products that charge a fee but it has a new feature that I am finding incredibly useful (they provided me with a free subscription). Local Citations Pro now offers the ability compare the specific citations between any number of  searches and or business listings. So for example you can examine your business listing and the citations for the listing that is tops in your category and against the citations for a series of search pharse. The information is offered up both visually and via a spread sheet file: Pro users also get these other features: Compare Citations Easily determine which citations your competitors have that you're missing. Sort by Value Sort your results by SEOmoz Domain Authority and Majestic SEO ACRank. Get Results in Minutes

Oct 6, 2008 at 8:06am Eastern by Barry Schwartz SEOmoz Crawls Web To Expand SEO Toolset Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz announced they have been working for about a year on building out an index of the web, in order to be able to provide SEOs and SEMs with a toolset they have never had before. SEOmoz has crawled and built a 30 billion page index of the web. Rand explains this index is still growing and is refreshed monthly. The purpose, "to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape." Part of the indexing was to build out a new tool named Linkscape. Linkscape gives SEOs "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," said Rand. I hope to play with it more after the SMX East conference, but with a quick trial, it seems pretty comprehensive. SEOmoz also launched a new design and has given PRO members more options and features. To read all about these features and the tools, see Rand's post.

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

This Blog Google Blogs Web Blog News This Blog Google Blogs Web Blog News Make your 404 pages more useful Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 10:13 AM Your visitors may stumble into a 404 "Not found" page on your website for a variety of reasons: * A mistyped URL, or a copy-and-paste mistake * Broken or truncated links on web pages or in an email message * Moved or deleted content Confronted by a 404 page, they may then attempt to manually correct the URL, click the back button, or even navigate away from your site. As hinted in an earlier post for "404 week at Webmaster Central", there are various ways to help your visitors get out of the dead-end situation. In our quest to make 404 pages more useful, we've just added a section in Webmaster Tools called "Enhance 404 pages". If you've created a custom 404 page this allows you to embed a widget in your 404 page that helps your visitors find what they're looking for by providing suggestions based on the incorrect URL. Example: Jamie receives the link www.example.com/activities/adventurecruise.html in an email message. Because of formatting due to a bad email client, the URL is truncated to www.example.com/activities/adventur. As a result it returns a 404 page. With the 404 widget added, however, she could instead see the following: In addition to attempting to correct the URL, the 404 widget also suggests the following, if available: * a link to the parent subdirectory * a sitemap webpage * site search query suggestions and search box How do you add the widget? Visit the "Enhance 404 pages" section in Webmaster Tools, which allows you to generate a JavaScript snippet. You can then copy and paste this into your custom 404 page's code. As always, don't forget to return a proper 404 code. Can you change the way it looks? Sure. We leave the HTML unstyled initially, but you can edit the CSS block that we've included. For more information, check out our gu

"Find Out How Much Traffic a Website Gets: 3 Ways Compared"

"Although permanently redirecting your URLs using 301 redirects is sufficient for Bing to understand that you want the new URLs to be indexed instead of the old ones and this normally happens automatically, the Site Move tool can help expedite this process."

KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker are both top quality keyword research tools. I actually believe that they are complementary as they draw their keyword data from different sources and present it differently. This is why I personally use both keyword research tools. I usually start my initial research with KeywordDiscovery as, due to their large database, they have a good variety of well trafficked keyword terms that originate of your seed keywords. Once I have these subsidiary terms I then fire up Wordtracker to do the real deep long tail keyword mining on these subsidiary terms. As you probably know, these long tail keyword phrases are gold!