The Wordtracker Academy > All Articles (Academy)

Do you remember the house that Jack built? No, I can’t remember much about the nursery rhyme either, other than it became less about Jack’s house as each of the inhabitants ate one another…

Since the initial launch of Google's Panda update in 2011, the "Q" word has become commonplace in SEO, copywriting and content marketing circles. We should have been paying attention to quality from the beginning (who wants to be known for publishing junk?). Now, more than ever, it appears Google is looking to our visitors to judge whether our site's pages are worthy of rankings. 

Although Facebook’s latest foray into the search game is still in beta and only available to around one million Facebook users, it's only a matter of time until it rolls out to the rest of Facebook’s one billion active monthly users. Marc Purtell explains what it's all about ...

Of course, you want to get links from your own industry. That’s a no-brainer. But links from your own industry aren’t the only links that are relevant. There are many more prospects that could be of interest. Read on to find out more ...

As of 24th Feb 2011, a major update by Google on how it ranks sites has affected 12% of search results and halved many sites’ visitor numbers. Named the Farmer or Panda Update it’s only affecting US Google results as I write but if you’re outside the US it is coming to you soon. Here’s how to find out if you have already been hit, are going to be and what to do about it.

Julie McNamee and Hal MacDermot were at SMX London 2013. Here are our 315 tips from the two-day search conference.

At Receptional (the digital marketing agency I work for), we offer a ‘Free PPC Health Check'. It's popular with prospective clients because it highlights where campaigns are performing profitably. And it identifies areas for improvement.

Duplicate content is a really bad thing.

If you have duplicate content on your site, Google doesn’t know which version of your page to rank.

Any links you get will be split between the different versions of the page. So, each of your duplicate pages is likely to rank badly.

And, as we know, badly ranking pages don’t attract traffic.

When Kevin Gibbons took to the stage at London SES, he was quick to remind delegates that links existed before Google. From the earliest days of the internet, people wanted to generate traffic, get leads and promote their websites. Here's a round-up of the link building tips that Kevin Gibbons, Blueglass.com and Paul Madden, Automica.com, provided.

A well structured site can improve your chances of ranking well with the search engines. Intelligent internal linking, can be crucial to your site's SEO success. Yet it's often overlooked. So, here are eight ways to improve your site's internal linking.

A well planned site structure improves your chances of ranking well in Google's results. So, today, we’re going to look at how to set up your site’s structure - so that the search engines find our best and most profitable content and your site's visitors have a great experience.

WordPress developers always have a list of WordPress plugins they wouldn't be without. Here's a selection that Julie McNamee keeps seeing in the developer forums (and many she's used herself). Have you used any of them? Do you agree? Have you any to add?

In April 2012, Google rolled out a change to its ranking algorithmic. Google Penguin, as it became known, hits sites where it hurts; in their rankings. One year on, many websites haven’t recovered their lost traffic. Yet rehabilitation is possible. James Newhouse, of digital marketing agency Receptional.com is one of the few people with experience of managing a full recovery. Here, he outlines his Penguin recovery strategy.

The Brighton SEO conference is a meeting of the UK's best online marketers. If you couldn't make it to the April 2013 event, we've collected 50 tasty tips and ingenious insights.

In webinars and emails, I increasingly get the question, “Isn’t link building dead?” The answer is that a certain type of link building is dead, and a new type of link building has taken its place ...

Can videos really be used to sell to the general public and clients? Well, Greg Jarboe of SEO PR and Phil Nottingham of Distilled certainly think so, and at London SES 2013 they shared some of their ideas.

Social media is everywhere, just everywhere. There are thousands of different social media channels.

Your business can’t be on all of them. And nor should it be.

In this 7-minute video, you'll discover how to find the best social media channels for your business.

For a long while very few businesses were making money from social media. Recently, though, that has started to change. Today, some online companies are really benefiting from their investment in social marketing. In this 5-minute video Justin Deaville looks at at why social media matters, and how to get a return on your investment.

Duplicate web pages can be a problem for many websites. Whether it occurs from re-using manufacturers' descriptions, CMS systems that publish accidental duplicate pages' site content, or even people stealing your content. Duplication can cause problems, and confuse Google.

Great content is the backbone of great SEO. But great content needs to be appreciated by search engines, not just humans. If your content is text-based, search engines can’t ‘read’ it, they can only match it to search queries. Luckily, there are things you can do to make your content just as readable and fun for users, but actually mean something for search engines. Those things are called 'rich snippets' and here’s how they work.

Driving organic traffic to a website can be a tough challenge. As a result, paid search has become an increasingly popular choice for many businesses. At this year’s London Search Engine Strategies conference, Arianne Donoghue of Premier Farnell and Sam Noble of Koozai spoke about Google’s paid search and where it's going next.

What if you could increase your prices by 20%, without losing sales? Or, what if you could increase the number of newsletter sign-ups you get by 20%? Does it sound too good to be true?

Gareth Davies was at SES London earlier in the year and got to speak to some of the best internet marketing experts while he was there. Here he reports on what Lee Odden had to say about creative content marketing.

Whether you’re running the simplest blog or an enormous international ecommerce site, you should be measuring how visitors interact with your website.

There are lots of analytics packages you can use. The most common - perhaps because it's free - is Google Analytics If you're new to analytics, this article will get you kick started. We'll help you install the software on your site. We’ll recommend some important business metrics you should be tracking. And we'll help you set up a keyword dashboard so you can track your traffic.

If you’re serious about attracting search engine traffic, you'll want to sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account. This guide shows you how.

Have you ever considered what frame of mind your audience is likely to be in when they come across your PPC ad? If not, then Karon Thackston explains why you should.

Link building can be a difficult business. And sometimes you can ask yourself if all the trouble is really worth it. In times like that, it’s great to read about what other businesses in your situation have done to win fantastic links. Their experiences - and the benefits they got from link building - can inspire us all.

Free online training is available to help you get the most from Wordtracker's Keywords tool. Click below to register for our next scheduled webinar, view a recent one, or read a transcript.

The SES London conference covers both basic and cutting edge SEO, PPC and online marketing. Julie McNamee, Gareth Davies and Justin Deaville collected the best top tips, takeaways and memorable quotes from SES London 2013. Here's what we picked up.

The ideas behind this article are not new. I have shamelessly stolen them and not only do I intend to get away with it scot free, but I hope over the course of the next 800 words or so, to persuade you to do the same and steal the very best ideas you can find.

In this video, you'll learn how to search engine optimize your web page, so you can rank for the keywords you choose and attract more traffic from Google.

Everything you'll see is practical and straight to the point, so sit back, press play and let's begin!

The most important thing for any business is to satisfy customer needs profitably. In doing so you build a unique knowledge of your customers, an understanding of the problems they face and a pretty good idea of the questions they ask. You answer these customer questions every day and tell people exactly what your products or services do to solve problems for you. This is rich content for link building.

Compiling lists of all kinds is integral to the work of a link builder. Not only do lists make the job easier, they save a lot of time and ensure you don’t miss easy opportunities. Both Garrett French (the co-author of this article) and I almost build our working lives around lists.

There has been a lot of buzz around responsive websites recently and a lot of sites are turning responsive, but what is it all about?

You know from your analytics data that customers are visiting your website: but they're not buying. Here's our list of 30 potential obstacles to that purchase (hopefully the first of many), along with suggestions on how blast the obstacles to pieces.

You probably don’t need me to remind you of the 6 major benefits of link building because we covered them last week when we talked about how link building is a marketing priority.

That's it! You're all set! You've got everything in place for your pay per click (PPC) campaign. You've decided which platform to use (AdWords, Facebook, etc.). You've researched all the bidding strategies. For days on end you've agonized over which segments to target your campaign to. Now, finally, you click the magic button to turn your campaign on and … nothing … crickets …

Link building is not just important for search engine optimization. In fact link building has multiple benefits that can boost your online profits, yet often get ignored.

In this article, Ken McGaffin describes the six major benefits of link building and give you some tips for each so that you can maximize your return on investment from all those lovely links you’re able to attract.

Google makes about 500 changes a year to its search algorithm. That’s a lot. And, as a result, SEO advice gets out of date very quickly. Many of the SEO tips you’ll read on the internet are either dated or, worse, just plain wrong. So, here are seven of the most recent, significant changes to Google’s search results and how they affect you.

If you’re looking to set up a new business in 2013, it’s essential that you choose an effective content management system, one that makes publishing simple. There are many online publishing platforms to choose from. But, if you’re intending to run a successful business, or create a blog that makes money, then WordPress is almost certainly your best solution.

Low quality links to your site can damage it and negatively affect your rankings.

Find out how to get rid of these links quickly and easily using Wordtracker's Link Builder and Bing and Google’s Disavow Links tools.

When you're writing copy for your web pages are you using words that doom you to failure right from the start?

Will your audience even be able to find them?

If you’re thinking of starting up online, or creating a new blog, finding a memorable name can be a great way of boosting your chances of success.

If you run a large corporation - Dell, McDonald’s or Coca Cola - social media must seem pretty easy. You have a ton of fans and followers who lap up everything you throw at them (good and bad). You could be a terrible marketer on a large brand and still benefit from social media. But what about those of us running small businesses, or who work on our own? How do we benefit from social media such as Twitter?

Why do some sites get a lot of traffic and others zero? The following article helps to show why this happens.

Don't underestimate the importance of SEO. Even in the era of disruptive Google algorithm updates it's still invaluable for getting traffic to your website. This ten minute video outlines six ways that SEO can boost your marketing. Just click to watch.

One of the highlights of London's LinkLove conference in 2012 was Mike King's talk on outreach email analysis (much of it manual) that had been carried out by his company iAcquire on 300,000 outreach emails. Here are some of the tips he passed on on what to incorporate into your link building requests ...

Unbounce have created a new landing page infographic. Follow these points when you create a new landing page and you'll not go far wrong.

Towards the end of the year, we like to remind you of all the free stuff we have on our website. Here's our list of free tools and guides on keyword research and the like, plus links to our videos and webinar recordings. Let Wordtracker inspire your 2013 web marketing campaigns.

Producing web videos can be a fantastic way of showcasing your business. But, you must also promote your videos properly (if you want them to be watched by a wide audience). In an extract from his VIDEOTASTIC! e-book, Gareth Davies outlines 17 ways to market your online videos.

It's important that you understand what the links going back to your site look like. We call this your backlink profile, and it helps you decide what kind of links to go after, where to get them from and what anchor text to use. This article is a step by step guide to using the Link Builder tool to find this information, and make the informed decisions your business needs.

Monitoring organic traffic is a key part of any SEO professional’s job. And with Google Analytics, doing this is easy, and free. Here’s a quick guide to help you explore some key metrics.

Keeping on top of the 'new' has never been as important as it is now. Thankfully, there are tools out there to help you to identify key trends and here are 20 of the best of them.

A decent position in the search results is a sure fire way of making more money online. But to do that, you need to make sure your site gets crawled. Here, I'll take you through the basics of how Google crawls the web and what you can do to help it. You might be surprised how easy it is.

Your home page is one of the most visited pages on your website. Few people will visit your site without seeing it. But a lot of home pages suck. Read this, and make sure yours doesn’t.

It's been a bumper year for actionable tips at Distilled's SearchLove London Conference 2012. We've gathered 220 takeaways and tactics on SEO, conversion rate optimization, content and much else besides. And there's a bonus pic at the end.

A sitemap is like a road map, except, y’know, for sites not roads. It tells Google where it should go, so it can crawl your site more quickly and get more of your great content into the search results. Having a sitemap is great for SEO, and it’s often great for users. But how to go about creating one? Luckily, it’s quite easy.

50% of local searches now take place on smartphones. Here are some thought-provoking statistics about search on mobile.

Facebook, now a billion users strong, is a key marketing channels for many businesses. But beyond the fans, likes and posts, how does it actually work? How and why do your posts appear in your customer’s news feeds? And how can you make sure they do?

In this 2-minute video, Gareth Davies outlines the factors you need to consider before you start filming your own online videos.

The Link Builder tool finds you sites to get links from. And with Custom Strategies in Link Builder, you can find relevant, quality sites that your competitors can't, in 6 easy steps.

Successful search engine optimization (SEO) requires inbound links from quality relevant websites. Using extracts from their book "The Definitive Guide to Link Building (2013 edition)", Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney here outline the definitive steps in a successful, long term link building campaign ...

The more often your site gets crawled, the sooner your new content can start appearing in the search results, and bringing in traffic and sales. So here's how, in just nine steps, you can keep Google coming back for more.

Link Builder allows you to quickly and easily find vast numbers of potential sites to link to you. With this guide you will learn to use powerful features to find, segment and generate contact details for potential sites. This article is an ideal first step into the world of Link Builder.

Pinterest is growing at a phenomenal rate. Why not harness it to expand your business's outreach? Andrew Tobert explains how ...

When a search engine, or indeed a user, clicks a link or types a URL into the browser, a message is sent to the server, where your site lives. How the server responds is crucial to how well your site is received by search engines.

How do you persuade someone to visit your web page? And how do you persuade them to purchase your product or sign up for your newsletter? Landing page optimization is the answer. We have some handy tips to follow and some examples of websites who already know the secrets.

The Brighton SEO conference is a meeting of the UK's best online marketers. If you couldn't make it the September 2012 event , we've collected 66 tasty tips and ingenious insights.

Choosing which keywords to target is the heart of SEO and PPC. Of the thousands you might target, some will make you more money than others. Now, with Wordtracker Strategizer, it takes minutes to sort through all available data to find the groups of keywords that are going to make you the most money, in the shortest possible time.

Welcome to the first in our seven day series on getting the most out of Wordtracker's Keywords tool.

Watch this video and you'll learn:

• How search engines work
  
• How to find relevant keywords quickly and easily
  
• How to prioritize those keywords and use them in your website copywriting
  
• How to make sure you're getting keywords in your inbound links (an SEO must)
  

Welcome to the second video in our seven day series on getting the most out of Wordtracker's Keywords tool.

Today, we'll investigate keyword research in more depth. We'll look at how to set up a keyword map that can either mirror an existing website, or help you set up the structure for a new site.

Welcome to the third video in our seven day series on getting the most out of Wordtracker's Keywords tool.

In this video we'll look at how to use Wordtracker's tools to help you write keyword-rich titles and descriptions for your web pages.

Welcome to the fourth video in our seven day series on getting the most out of Wordtracker's Keywords tool.

Every site has SEO errors. But finding and fixing them is easy - with Wordtracker's tools.

In this video you'll learn how to conduct a site audit on your own website to find errors and mistakes that could be interfering with your SEO efforts.

Welcome to the fifth video in our seven day series on getting the most out of Wordtracker's Keywords tool.

Monitoring - and improving - your online marketing efforts is essential. Watch this video and you'll learn how to set up (and interpret) a search engine ranking report in Wordtracker's tools.

You'll discover how to track your site's position in Google's results - and you'll learn how to monitor your competitors.

Welcome to the sixth in our seven-day series on getting the most out of Wordtracker's Keywords tool.

To attract traffic from Google, you'll need to include relevant keywords in your site's links.

Watch this video and you'll discover how to include keywords in your website's internal links.

The conclusion of our 7-day video training series.

You'll learn how to keep your keyword research up to date and get an edge on your competitors.

Search engines rely on links to tell them which sites are worth ranking and which are not. Simply put, the more links you have from a wide variety of quality sites, the higher your site will rank in Google's results.

Knowing this, it's easy to get carried away, building lots of links while forgetting that quality is much more important than quantity.

We’ve spent the past few months updating and changing Link Builder, so that it’s now easier to find and build quality links. In this post, we’re going to take you through the new features, and how they’ll help your link building.

If you don't think you have the skills to build links, you're probably wrong. Ken McGaffin explains why.

Gareth Davies runs through the different types of video you can use to attract more people to your website - and make more sales.

Usain Bolt may be fast, but in the world of web design, waiting for nine and a half seconds for a page to load puts you firmly in the ‘also ran’ category, and will cost you valuable business online. But how do you check your site speed? And what’s on your site that’s slowing you down?

In this free webinar link builders Ken McGaffin and Garrett French shared link building tactics you can start using right away to get the rankings (and the sales) your business deserves.

The Get Links! video training course - what it is, and why you need it.

In this second in a four part series on PPC and Google AdWords, Trace Ronning of WordWatch takes you through the process of setting up your first AdWords campaign.

This third article in our series on PPC basics looks at how to write ads that get more traffic to your site - and sell more of your products and services.

You’ve got the basics of pay per click advertising down now, but there’s so much more to experiment with in the process of maximizing your ROI. Trace Ronning in the fourth of his articles on PPC explains ...

People who work in search LOVE to talk about rankings. But that doesn’t mean they should. Or that you should listen. Looking at rankings gives you false insight and ruins your business. (I‘m exaggerating, but only slightly.) Here’s what you should look for instead ...

Getting quality links from quality sites can be a time consuming and frustrating process. This new video training course presented by link building experts Ken McGaffin and Garrett French will teach you everything you need to know to get links that will bring traffic to your website for years to come.

A common SEO problem is using the wrong type of redirect, the process of taking users from one page to another. Google will follow some types and not others, meaning some will pass the value of the old page to the new page and some will not. This can have a massive effect on your rankings. So to find out what the redirect types are and how to check which you are using then read on.

The canonical tag is a way to pass value from one page to another without using a redirect. ‘Duplicate content’ has become a widespread issue and is being increasingly targeted by search engines. Prevent the damage it can do to your site with the canonical tag. This article covers the basics on what it is and ways to successfully implement it.

At Wordtracker, we live or die by what our customers (you guys) think. That sounds a bit cliché and hack, but it’s also true. We’re a small company and we need to give you what you want and fast. You’ve been asking for better and quicker ways to find sites that might link to yours. So that’s what we’ve done. But why make changes if we don’t talk about them? This is a quick look at how you find the best sites you can blog for. We call this feature ‘Guest Post’ and here’s how it works in the recently updated Link Builder, our link building tool.

Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool is everything you need to make your link building as quick and efficient as possible. And it’s just got even better. In this article in a series of three highlighting how link building just got easier, I’ll be taking a look at ‘mentions’, what they are and how they can help you get some easy links.

Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool has had an upgrade of late – making it much much easier to find link prospects - the sites that might link back to you. In our third of three articles highlighting the new features of Link Builder, I’ll be looking at how you can easily collect more detailed information on your prospects and then sell your site more effectively. In short, our new feature called ‘tags’ makes getting links easier. Here’s how.

Once you have all of the basics down when it comes to getting started with Twitter, building an audience and engaging with them, your next task will be making your Twitter management as effective as possible. This is where Twitter management tools come into play.

Now that you know the basics about Twitter and have hopefully crafted a strong profile, we’re going to move into the next phase of your Twitter strategy. In order to share your message and see results, you have to have an audience to share it with. And not just any audience, but one that is going to really care enough to follow your updates!

If you’re just getting started with Twitter, or you created a Twitter account long ago and are just beginning to seriously use it for your business, then here is what you need to know to use Twitter today. In this first post in our Twitter series, we’re going to cover creating a strong Twitter profile and common Twitter terminology.

In the first of four articles about PPC and Google AdWords, Trace Ronning gives an easy introduction to pay per click advertising.

There are over 53 million WordPress blogs out there and that doesn't even include those not hosted on WordPress.com. So how do you make yours stand out from the rest and attract a greater share of the traffic? One way to do that is to optimize your blog. And even if you're not a coder, you can do this. Read on to find out how ...

Computing languages are just like real ones. As human needs change and evolve, so does the language we use to express them. It’s just the same online. There are now a range of languages to build your website with, depending on what you want to do and how fancy you want to be. But the lingua franca, the common language, is HTML and we give some starts in how to code it below ...

The role of freelance copywriter has always been tough, and with the economy in the doldrums, it’s triply so. Budgets are being squeezed so businesses are looking to cut back on their costs - such as hiring freelance copywriters.

Where to start with SEO'ing your brand new site? Here's a simple SEO process for planning that site and finding appropriate keyword niches to target.

Both search engines and people prefer websites to have consistent, easy-to-read URLs. Here, Mark Nunney explains how to optimize your website’s URLs for search engines and humans alike.

Your first technical job as an SEO is to make sure search engines find and index the pages you want them to. Mark Nunney explains how to optimize, getting the right pages indexed and then keeping them that way through inevitable URL changes and broken links.

You can’t see it but your pages’ coding determines how search engines index and rank them (with speed becoming an increasingly important factor). Mark Nunney shows you how to make sure your code helps your pages and all their content get indexed fast.

Whatever your site’s objectives, you need to measure its response rates if you want to know which keywords your SEO should target. Mark Nunney introduces how to use Google Analytics to monitor response and make sure you track response and get the best possible return on investment.

Here is a technical SEO check list – based on a series of articles taken from Wordtracker's best-selling e-book, SEO for Profit e-book - that will help you make sure your site is free from SEO gremlins.

When it comes to your business’ Facebook page, you will need to pull out all of the stops in order to really dazzle people. In this post, we’re going to look at five things you can do to make your brand shine on Facebook beyond just standard updates.

A frequent question for the Wordtracker support team when using the Keywords tool is “What is the minimum amount of traffic for a keyword I want to target?” or similarly “What is the maximum amount of competition for a keyword to be worth targeting?”. To find out how to work this out read on ...

Choosing which keywords you optimize your site for is a crucial business decision. You need to get the right data  and analyze it correctly and many businesses don't. We created Strategizer to do just that.

Building a website, and a business, is a hard thing to do. Often, businesses and webmasters plan their site, and even start creating it, then flounder. They panic about how the website is going to be received, does it look good or bad.

Running a site audit, the process of looking for, and correcting, SEO errors on your site, is something that every marketer should do. It keeps your site performing at its best, and it means that you can spot any issues (hopefully) before they start causing problems. But if you do site audits the old-fashioned way it’s a lot of work.

Writing a blog is a great way of attracting readers, building up brand loyalty and getting much-needed links to your site. But writing content that’s relevant and useful (and actually read) can be tricky and time-consuming. Luckily, our guest blogger, Hilary Pullen, explains how you can make your blog sizzle.

The key to success in SEO, as in life, is to watch what you’re doing. If it’s working, keep doing it and if it’s not, stop. It’s that simple, but with SEO, getting the right data to be able to make that decision is less easy. That’s why we’re here.

As with all ranking updates, when Google launched Penguin many previously well-regarded sites lost ranking. The reason? Because Google is now looking at the over-optimization of backlinks. But what does that mean, and what can do about it?

After Penguin, Google’s latest algorithm update, a lot of webmasters have been looking at their ‘backlink profile’. I‘ve written about what this is, and why it matters, in the first in this two-part guide, Checking your backlink profile

In this one, we’ll discuss how to look for potential problems within your backlinks, and what those problems might be. Whether or not you’ve been hit by Penguin this is something worth checking.

Don't you long for the days of SEO simplicity? Just a few short years ago, you would write a tag set (title tag and meta description tag) and they would actually be used by Google and other engines. Gone are the days of such certainty.

Guest posting is all the rage right now. From getting visibility to getting links everyone knows that guest posting can’t be beaten. But just jumping on the bandwagon will not get you the results you need. Because of the popularity of guest posting the bar has been raised … but I’m about to help you get over that bar. The following five tips will help you create a guest post that will dazzle any A-list blogger … and get you the attention and traffic you deserve.

Social media can play an important role in your online marketing as a way to engage your target audience, but it can also be used in your link building strategy if you know what you’re doing. Here are the main three ways that you can gain additional backlinks to your website and boost your rankings using social media.

With the recent wave of updates from Google, including Panda and Penguin there has never been a greater need to build trusted authoritative links to your websites. Google’s Penguin update hit sites with lots of low quality links. And, if we believe the value of low quality links has decreased we must also believe the value of high quality links has gone up.

If your site sells products, submitting them for review can be a great way to get links back to your site, therefore improving your search engine ranking and getting more traffic. Garrett French advises how you go about that.

One unique feature of Google+ is the ability to host hangouts. Kristi Hines explains how you can use it to your business' advantage.

Most of the information we provide in the academy probably sounds like it’s geared towards merchants – businesses that sell products and services. But it’s not. 95% of what you read here will be as relevant to media owners as it is to online retailers, but here is something that's just for you: a few tips especially for media owners, journalists and anyone else who sells space instead of products.

The web can be a daunting place. There are thousands, if not millions of sites selling what you’re selling. How do you stand out and compete with a limited budget?

Attend one of Wordtracker's link building webinars. Also view a recording or access the presentation.

If you’re new to search engine optimization, or SEO, and frankly, even if you aren't, there’s a lot to take in, a lot to remember. To make sure your bases are covered, here are ten things to check right now. (Start at the top of your web pages and work down.)

Mal Darwen, Julie McNamee and Andrew Tobert were at SMX London this year. We've gathered up 213 tips and takeaways. Read through, learn, and share these tips.

SEO (search engine optimization), the industry you’re trying to learn about, is full of impenetrable jargon. And I mean, really full. Even the name is jargon - search engine optimization? When do you ever use that word in real life? Why not just say "improving your search results (ISE)"? I mean, isn’t that what you’re doing?

If you’ve got to this article, you’ve probably heard of search engine optimization, SEO, and roughly what it is (and if you haven’t, don’t worry. This is a great place to learn).

Copywriting professional Nick Usborne says that writing social media content needs to be tackled in a particular way if it's to get noticed. Here he gives four tips on how to go about it.

In all the years since Google became a player in the search engine optimization arena, we have seen countless changes. Some have been minor algorithm tweaks while others caused a major upheaval. Still, one thing remained constant: we controlled our title tags. But no longer. Karon Thackston explains ...

Social media is huge. Just look at the stats. Below are 18 simple ways to get your social media marketing right.

Garrett French explains how he seeks out link prospects on a very grand scale ...

Whenever people write about LinkedIn, they mostly focus on the free features of the networks and say that those are all you need. And for most people, a free account will get you great results. But if you’re looking for more, then here are some things you will get with a LinkedIn Premium Account ...

Where do I start with keyword research? How do I go about SEO'ing a website? How can Wordtracker help? This webinar recording answers some of those questions.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be the single most cost effective way of attracting traffic and sales to your website. Yet, SEO is constantly changing. It’s difficult for most small businesses and entrepreneurs to keep up. That’s why, today, Wordtracker is making SEO simpler. We’re launching a new version of our Keywords tool that’s got loads of great new features, but is faster and easier to use.

Optimizing your website properly is crucial to getting your site seen, searched and approved by the search engines and the public. This article shows just how you can do that using Wordtracker's updated Keywords tool.

Wordtracker took a trip to beautiful Brighton on the south coast of England to report on the latest tips and tricks from the search marketing professionals speaking at BrightonSEO. Here's the best of that advice.

Four years ago, Chantelle Znideric made the decision to change careers and go from graphic designer to personal stylist over night. Lucky for her she had been exposed to Wordtracker's Keywords tool while she was a graphic designer.

When link building experts Patrick Altoft, Kristjan Hauksson and Mikel deMib Svendsen got together this year at London SES, the result was an insight into the world of advanced link building Here is what these experts had to say.

In recent years social media has become an advanced and at times complex field for business owners. From monitoring to automation, human interaction to buzz hijacking, staying on top of the game is crucial. At this year’s London SES Andrew Girdwood, Paul Madden and Marcus Tober set about demystifying what’s hot and what’s not.

Wordtracker was at LinkLove London last week, and we've put together a list of link building tips and tricks picked up from a very practical conference.

Keyword research is vital for effective and profitable PPC campaigns. Trace Ronning from WordWatch advises on the best ways to find keywords for your campaigns and how to use them.

In this last in our LinkedIn series, internet marketing blogger Kristi Hines shares some valuable advice on how to set up a company page on LinkedIn.

Use the site audit in Wordtracker's Keywords tool to find common errors which affect your search engine rankings. This video explains how to set up your first site audit:

CEO of ReelSEO answers Ken McGaffin's questions on how video has impacted on the world of SEO.

In the last article in this series, Kristi Hines mentioned the benefit of using LinkedIn Groups to connect with others to build your network. In this one, she discusses how to use LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers to build your authority, gain exposure, and increase traffic to your website.

Now that you have your LinkedIn profile set up and ready to impress, you will need to start making connections to grow your LinkedIn network. In this second article Kristi Hines shows you how to do that.

The first step on the road to success on LinkedIn is creating a well-optimized LinkedIn professional profile. Blog marketing expert Kristi Hines explains how to set one up.

An updated guide to working with Wordtracker's KEI metrics

If you own a website, or your boss does, you’ve probably heard of search engine optimization or SEO. But unless you want to spend a few hours searching on Google, it’s not always obvious what SEO is, why you want it, and how you do it. But now you can relax. Sit back and enjoy the most useful thing you’ve read since Dr Zeuss.

When Google ranks your site, it looks for two things - authority and relevancy (relevance for our UK readers). What does this mean? You’re about to find out.

Targeting news media should be part of everyone’s link building campaigns. You can do this on your own, or use Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool as the perfect starting point.

No matter what industry you’re in there will be bloggers that write about it. They’ll usually have a well-established audience and a good presence on search engines.

There’s a lot of link building opportunity in the big name social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so on. But there’s also a lot of link building opportunities on less well known niche social media sites.

Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool helps you easily find such sites and keeps them all in one place.

Getting authoritative websites to link to you is one of the most demanding tasks in SEO (search engine optimization). Our latest infographic is a great reminder of 11 creative ways you can get links without asking.

PPC can be a rather strange and potentially expensive world for newcomers if things go wrong, but with a bit of knowledge disasters can be averted and money saved.

Duncan Parry, Head of Paid Search at digital marketing agency STEAK Digital was on hand at SES London 2012 to run through the basics of PPC.

Mobile search is growing exponentially, and Trace Ronning of WordWatch passes on some tips on how to use PPC to capitalize on the boom in smartphone technology. Read on ...

We asked Eric Enge, co-author of 'The Art of SEO' to share his insights into the Panda update. Eric was happy to oblige with a video interview we're sure you'll enjoy.

Lisa D Myers of Verve Search and Patrick Altoft of Branded 3 look at link analysis, prospecting, linkbait and the things you want to avoid when undertaking what is arguably the most important activity in SEO … link building.

Landing page optimization can be crucial in determining the profitability of your SEO and PPC campaigns. At SES London this year, Wordtracker’s Gareth Davies was on hand to listen to what Nathan Richter from Monetate and Karl Blanks from Conversion Rate Experts had to say.

The team at ROI Media have put together an infographic that puts to bed any notion that digital advertising is a flash in the pan. The rise of social media, video and mobile are resulting in a massive increase in budgets for online advertising.

Trace Ronning of Wordwatch gives some valuable advice on how using the free (yes, free) Google AdWords Extensions can help increase clickthroughs and impressions for your PPC campaigns.

Now that you (hopefully) have had your Google+ personal profile and business page set up, you are probably wondering how you can track your Google+ success. Kristi Hines illustrates the ways you can track Google+ and Google+1 button activity in relation to your website.

Ken McGaffin in the third article in his Link Building Made Simple series describes how to survey the current situation in your particular market, by building campaigns in Link Builder

It is of course important to measure the success of your link building campaigns. In this second in a series of six articles in the Link Building Made Simple series, Ken McGaffin shows how you can measure not only your return on investment but also what works and what doesn’t work for your website in your particular market.

The SES London conference covers basic, advanced and cutting edge SEO, PPC and online marketing. Julie McNamee, Justin Deaville and Gareth Davies collected the best top tips, takeaways and memorable quotes from SES London 2012.

One of the most important considerations in a company's social media campaigns is to provide a consistent brand image across different platforms. Ben Norman, Managing Director of digital marketing agency, Koozai, gives advice on how to go about this.

With Google’s Panda update helping big brands, small businesses face the challenge of targeting the long tail with limited resources.

At the London Conversion Conference, Gareth Davies heard some suggestions from Patrick Altoft of Branded 3

Fact: $56.8 billion will be spent this year on generating website traffic, but only 2-3% of those visitors will actually convert. But why isn’t conversion going up? Gareth Davies listened to ecommerce conversion expert Bryan Eisenberg to find out how to increase those conversion rates.

Ken McGaffin, in the first of his Link Building Made Simple series of articles, explains how to form a simple strategy that will get your link building campaigns off to a great start.

Links bring your business multiple benefits that will repay your investment many times over and Ken McGaffin has written series of articles on how to build links the best way, very simply. Read his introduction to these articles, and links to the rest in series are at the bottom page.

Creating great content gives you tremendous ammunition for attracting links.

But content without active promotion is likely to turn into a very damp squib. So you must have mechanisms in place that will allow you to easily and repeatably get your message out to as many relevant people as possible.

Planning your content is crucial but it is not just something that you can churn out: it requires time, thought and effort. This fifth in the Link Building Made Simple series presents some ideas on how to produce lots of good content.

Link building has changed dramatically over the last dozen or so years that Ken McGaffin has been in the business. In this article he advises how the linking landscape has changed and how to target new prospects.

Aaron Wall is a master SEO, a talented SEO writer and an entertaining iconoclast. His Goldilocks SEO infographic below is a little masterpiece in communication containing more wisdom than most other SEO bloggers put together.

With the help of hundreds of eye-tracking study videos and a wealth of firsthand data, Michael Summers and Jim Hudson of Paypal have been able to identify a range of common ecommerce mistakes that can take place on websites.

In the new look Keywords tool we’ve included two ways of measuring competition.

For most keywords you’ll see a ‘Competition’ number listed next to the search volume. These work on a 1-100 scale - where 100 means you face lots of competition. If you’re new to keyword research, simply look for keywords with low competition scores.

And if you’re interested in more detail on how we calculate the numbers, Owen Powis explains ...

Having a good page title and description can benefit your rankings and increase the number of visitors to your site. Owen Powis explains how to get the most out your title and description by using the new Title and Description wizard.

This week sees the release of our SERPs ranking tool. If you're a Keywords tool subscriber you can now track up to 100 keywords in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) in Google. Wordtracker's Mal Darwen explains all about it.

Wordtracker’s new Site Audit tool (available at no extra cost within the Keywords tool) crawls your site like a search engine and relays back information about the different elements of the site which could be changed to make it more search engine-friendly.

Wordtracker's Site Audit tool allows you to quickly create detailed reports on a domain. This article looks at what to do with the information contained within the reports. It shows you how to prioritize the obstacles and lay out a framework for creating a strategy, for those sites with large numbers of obstacles.

In four short and clear videos, Ken McGaffin introduces link building for SEOs and all online marketers explaining why links are important, what a quality link is, what sites need links and what kind of sites you should try and get them from.

Before you jump into creating a Google+ page for your business, you will need a Google+ personal profile. Aside from the ability to create and administer Google+ pages, there are several other great reasons to have a Google+ personal profile. Kristi Hines explains what those reasons are.

Ready to get started with Google+? The following guide by blogging expert Kristi Hines will help you set up your Google+ personal profile.

After reading about all of the advantages of Google+ personal profiles, you might be asking yourself why you would need a Google+ page in addition to your personal profile. While much of the design and functionality of the Google+ page is similar to personal profiles, there are some additional benefits to having a Google+ page. Kristi Hines explains what they are.

Ready to get started with Google+ pages? The following guide by professional blogger Kristi Hines will help you set up a Google+ page for your business.

One of the most frequently asked questions from website owners is, "Why can't my site be found on Google?" They know it's important to appear in search engine results but they just don't know why it doesn't happen to them. Ken McGaffin gives this introduction to search engines in Part 1 of Wordtracker's Keyword Basics series

In the second of our Keyword Basics series, Mal Darwen gives a simple method for finding thousands of the keywords that your customers use when they search. He then shows how easy it is to use the Wordtracker Keywords tool to organize and save those keywords so you can easily manage your site's search engine optimization and pay per click advertising.

Keyword research allows you to find, assess and target the best possible keywords for your website. In this third article in the Keyword Basics series, Owen Powis explains that by understanding what a keyword is and how it is structured you can find better keywords more quickly and attract more traffic to your site.

Once you've started researching your keywords you’ll probably find thousands that you could use on your site. As you'll most likely not have the time to target all of them, you should have a method for choosing the best ones. Owen Powis outlines his method.

In this fifth in the Keyword Basics series of articles Owen Powis explains how to narrow down your list of up to 2,000 keywords gleaned from Wordtracker's Keywords tool to just a few per web page.

In this sixth article in the Keyword Basics, Mal Darwen explains how you can use Wordtracker’s Keywords tool mapping to help you plan and display a clear website structure that Google will love.

In this seventh article in the Keyword Basics series, Owen Powis explains how understanding keyword modifiers can help speed up your SEO campaigns.

Most of the links that come to your website will point to your home page and normally use your domain name as the ‘anchor text’ (also called ‘linking text’). Ken McGaffin in this eighth article in the Keyword Basics series advises how to turn that into keyword rich link text in order to attract more search engine traffic.

Use the following best articles (and videos) of 2011 to save time and money on SEO in 2012. You’ll learn about both the established basics of SEO like choosing the right target keywords, quality content and link building; and the visitor behavior-centered SEO of the future.

Towards the end of the year, we like to remind you of all the free stuff we have on our website. Here's a list of our free tools and guides on keyword research and the like, plus links to our videos and webinar recordings, all of which will give you new ideas for your 2012 SEO campaigns. Here's the top ten from 2011.

If you don’t have time to read Mark Nunney’s new book, SEO for Profit, then at least make sure you learn the rules.

We'd love to know what you thought of our free SEO guide, SEO Made Simple.

Over two days in London’s Business Design Center, some of the world’s foremost consultants and speakers on conversion rate optimization gathered for the first major event of its kind in the UK. Gareth Davies was on hand to cover the event and he took away 63 top conversion tips.

An expert SEO leaves set processes behind, works fast, intuitively, delivers great results and can reap great rewards. In an edited extract from his new book, SEO for Profit Mark Nunney explains how you can become an expert SEO.

No matter how good your content, if you want it read and shared then you need great headlines. Here, Ken McGaffin interviews Nick Usborne, expert headline writer and author of Killer Headlines for Web Content

How do you persuade busy bloggers to link to you? By using the craft of persuasion, explains Ken McGaffin.

Do you bury your best copy deep inside your writing? We all do it time and again because we take time to warm up when writing - like a heater in a cold room. Sean D'Souza, author of Client Attractors: How To Write Benefits, Features and Bullets That Speed Up Sales has a simple solution for the Heater Syndrome.

Conversion Rate Experts’ classic 'Google Website Optimizer 101 guide' will teach you how to sell more of anything online. Bookmark it and reread it once a month.

Although the use of keywords on website pages and in the anchor text of inbound links remains important for SEO, search engines are increasingly using a site’s branding, visitor behavior and social data. This is The New SEO, introduced here by Mark Nunney in an edited extract from his new book, SEO for Profit.

Sean D'Souza, author of Client Attractors: How To Write Benefits, Features and Bullets That Speed Up Sales talks about avoiding one-slice articles and sandwiches.

Standard practice for keyword research for SEO is to use Google Analytics to find a site’s most popular keywords, then optimize relevant pages for them. This can work well for small numbers of keywords. But Google Analytics gives you no way of seeing reports for short and long tail variations of multiple keywords. Mike Essex explains how his SEO agency uses Wordtracker Strategizer to solve this problem and find the best keywords to target.

Master copywriter and author of Client Attractors: How To Write Benefits, Features and Bullets That Speed Up Sales, Sean D'Souza shows you how to use disconnectors in your copy to give changes in pace or subject matter that jolt readers awake and keep them interested and paying attention to the end of your message.

One of the most common difficulties in link building is getting a response from link requests. Ken McGaffin gives 10 reasons why you might not be getting answers and how to fix each problem.

Copywriter and author of 101 Web Content Ideas, Tips and Resources Nick Usborne shows how properly optimized internal links can help you spread your link power around your site,

Sean D'Souza, author of Client Attractors: How To Write Benefits, Features and Bullets That Speed Up Sales recalls how one bullet point led to him attending a costly workshop, and how just one of these graphics in your copy can make up your customer's mind for them.

In his latest "Content ideas" article Nick Usborne explains how to get more interest in your articles by turning them into tutorials.

Tracking your site’s ranks on Google for your target keywords is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO). It allows you to report results, discover the cause of traffic gains and losses; and spot the seeds of future success. Mark Nunney explains why to do it and how.

Snow-forecast.com has achieved every link builder’s dream of getting powerful quality inbound links without asking.

Copywriting expert Nick Usborne recommends you find out what it is your followers want to see and share on social media.

With every search you make on Google, you are given suggestions for alternative related searches. Nick Usborne recommends using these related searches as ideas for new content on your site.

When you're link building, you want to find high quality link prospects.
Yet, you also want to find prospects where there's a good chance of actually getting a link.
Ken McGaffin shows how such prospects can be found in the 'magic middle' ...

For both planning the structure of the content of a new website and finding ideas for specific articles and posts, Nick Usborne recommends you buy some books, read and study.

The calendar is packed full of special days from Martin Luther King Day to, er, Talk Like A Pirate Day and Superman's birthday. Nick Usborne shows you how to use special days to make special content your readers will like and share.

In Effortless link building (part one), Ken McGaffin showed how finding a single quality news source allows us to quickly and effortlessly build a link building campaign of many thousands of link prospects. In this follow up article, he’ll take that one step further and show how both newbies and more experienced link builders can systematically turn these link prospects into valuable inbound links.

Nick Usborne recommends you use software to find out what subjects are hot, what's new and what gets shared most on social media. Then create a new page, focusing on a trending topic that is spreading fast.

Link Builder provides details of link prospects already sorted into strategy groups such as blogs, news media and trusted sites. Ken McGaffin explains in Video 3 in the series Getting Started with Link Builder how to take advantage of this to sort out your prospects into effective link building campaigns.

Entering up to 10 URLS into the Link Builder tool can deliver thousands of link prospects to help you with your link building campaigns. Ken McGaffin shows how this works in the second in his Getting Started with Link Builder videos.

Video 1 in Ken McGaffin's series Getting Started with Link Builder videos shows how to begin to build great link building campaigns using just one keyword.

Always be on the look out for new link building opportunities. And some of the best can emerge from your day-to-day business activities. Chatting to a restaurant owner about a bad review on TripAdvisor.com led Ken McGaffin to an interesting site on travel technology. The site was a good prospect in itself but from that single prospect, he quickly built a campaign of many thousands of link prospects.

Ever feel like you're in a rut when it comes to writing articles? No matter what you do, most of your material comes out in the same format with the same tone and the same style. How boring is that?! Karon Thackston (author of Wordtracker Masterclass book, Article Marketing: The Write Way to Build More Links) has 13 different answers to your problem.

Google’s Panda update is aimed at low quality sites like content farms. So why is it hurting so many established high quality content sites? Mark Nunney explains why he thinks this happening, what to do about it and what we can all learn from it.

Most business is as simple as trying to get the obvious done by people who’s job it is to do it. Yet it’s still difficult. SEO is more difficult still because you need to get the not-so-obvious done by people who have other jobs to do already. Mark Nunney considers the problem of implementation and has some suggestions to help you get things done in SEO.

From today you have a new opportunity to get more visits and response to your site from searches with your brand name. This is because Google has changed how ‘sitelinks’ are shown on its results pages. Mark Nunney explains and shows you how to optimize this opportunity.

Google’s Panda update has reminded us all that engaging quality content is essential for online success. Nick Usborne, author of Wordtracker’s new book 101 Web Content Ideas, Tips and Resources, shares three ways to make your content more valuable to readers and more shareable.

There’s a lot of great information available about PPC technique. But having great PPC technique is only half the puzzle. In order to make money using PPC, you need good business techniques, too.

Sites that link to more than one of your competitors are must-have links that should be easy to get. Ken McGaffin shows you to find them.

With Google's Panda update, the rules of creating web content have changed. Karon Thackston, author of "Wordtracker Masterclass: Ecommerce Copywriting - Proven Strategies for Boosting Sales & Search Rankings" gives three tips on how to fight the Panda.

A good link building campaign needs to be planned, managed, monitored and reported on. It will use a wide range of strategies with many link prospects for each.

This is a lot of work and Wordtracker's Link Builder tool has been rebuilt to do all these jobs for you. Can all this really be in one tool? Ken McGaffin says it can and here he shows you how.

In part one of SEO for editorial teams, journalists and writers, we looked at how quality editorial is at the heart of building the links SEO requires. In part two, Mark Nunney looks at how they can help promote their quality content to make sure it gets the precious links it deserves and needs for search engines success.

In the final part of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author Sean D’Souza explains how to use props to gain your audience’s attention, make your presentation more memorable and increase sales.

In part 11 of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author Sean D’Souza explains why most people get bored during presentations and how to make sure it doesn’t happen during yours.

Smart SEO can make your online business more successful by focusing your efforts on the searches (keywords) your buyers are making. This case study shows how Wordtracker Strategizer can save you days of research trying to find those keywords, planning the actions required to target them and reporting your results.

Would you like your audiences to be as animated and relaxed as a two-year old watching her favorite Barney video? In part ten of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author Sean D’Souza explains how to relax your audiences by asking easy questions with no wrong answers.

Guest blogging is receiving a lot of internet marketing buzz at the moment. Pro bloggers are regularly publishing new articles giving guest blogging advice. However this doesn't necessarily make the newbie's job easier as the information is scattered around the web. Worse, at least 80% of posts you read just share how great it is and why you need to try as well.

Ann Smarty promoted her own SEO career using guest posting, it’s the only link building technique she uses for her SEO clients and she built a community called MyBlogGuest to help guest bloggers. Here she talks to Ken McGaffin about (have you guessed?) guest blogging.

If you’re a trainer, you’re going to get asked questions you don’t know the answer to. In part nine of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author Sean D’Souza explains what to do.

What does Wordtracker do? Taking it at its simplest level, Wordtracker and its tools help you find the best keywords for your campaign. The tool is easy to work with and it takes the grind out of keyword research.

The tools give you an easy to read overview of how competitive each keyword is, so that you can make decisions about where your campaign is to go.

Before we go into that too deeply, a couple of basics.

Professional SEOs will tell you that different types of sites require different approaches to link building. Tailor your link building - and you’ll increase your chances of getting a link.

In the Link Builder tool, we’ve already filtered your prospects and organized them into strategies so you can tailor your link building - and increase your chances of getting a link.

Here is a list of the articles we've featured, based on these strategies, that will help you on your way to create effective, traffic-attracting link building campaigns:

Link building is about building relationships. And the daftest thing you can do is stop once you've got a link. So pay attention to people who already link to you and see what else you can do together.

Link building is not only good for search engine rankings, it’s essential. But not all links are equal - some links are excellent, and many others next to useless. It’s quality, not quantity of inbound links that make winners stand out. That’s why link building is the biggest challenge SEOs and website owners face.

Assessing the quality of link prospects and sorting them using tools like Link Builder is crucial at every stage of a link building campaign. Get it right and you’ll be way ahead of your competitors: spending time on link prospects will bring you the best business and SEO benefits. But how do you assess the quality of a link prospect? No more mystery in that - Ken McGaffin gives you 13 ways to assess a link prospect.

You need help and advice in carrying out your link building campaigns or on using the Wordtracker Link Builder tool? Read on to find advice on link building strategies, guides and tips and any other link building tidbits we can think of on this page.

In part seven of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author, Sean D’Souza shows how using the right example in your presentation helps explain a concept but the wrong example alienate your audience.

Why would anyone link to your site? Here are 25 reasons why another site will link to yours. With real world examples from Ken McGaffin.

Video is SEO friendly, Google-Panda friendly and on Google’s results pages to stay. Google is placing more value on long stays and visitors watching videos stay longer than others. So it's time to start taking video seriously and Gareth Davies details five ways video can seriously help your SEO.

Ben Hunt has been crafting websites professionally since 1994, has written two best selling books and now teaches students all over the world how to do better web design. He has put together the top five most common - and most costly - web design mistakes, and he's going to reveal them in a one-off webinar .

In part seven of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author Sean D’Souza shows how using the right example in your presentation helps explain a concept but the wrong example alienate your audience.

In part six of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author, Sean D’Souza, considers taking questions in presentations and explains why you shouldn’t do so.

In part five of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author Sean D’Souza explains how to get your audience to remember what you said by focusing your presentations on one concept only. Ride just one wave, to use Sean's analogy.

Social media and search marketing are becoming increasingly intertwined. A social media marketing program that fails to optimize content effectively is a waste of your time and effort.

So, how can social media and SEO work together? Join Wordtracker’s in-house SEO expert, Mal Darwen, and Sendible's marketing manager, Johnny Costello, for a powerful webinar looking at simple ways to combine and improve your online presence.

To make article marketing work for link building and SEO, you need to know the difference between quality articles and spam. Author of Wordtracker Masterclass e-book Article Marketing: The Write Way to Build More Links, Karon Thackston makes that distinction and shows you how to use it.

Trusted sites are usually defined as non-profit websites (.org), educational bodies (.edu) and government agencies (.gov). Contrary to popular belief, Google doesn’t treat links from trusted sites any differently from other links. However, just because Google doesn’t treat them any differently, that doesn’t mean that they’re not different.

Shopping on the web is of course a major activity so the number of sites retailing goods and the number of sites writing, advising and commenting on products and the companies who produce them is huge.

Online directories offer a source of easy links and remain a good first step for many link building campaigns. Yet, many links from directories offer little value. Ken McGaffin outlines his approach to link building with directories.

In part four of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author Sean D’Souza explains how to keep your audience coming back.

Since 1998 links have been the foundation of Google’s ranking algorithm. But too many people still don't realize that 90% of what they need to do is to get other sites to link to them. Gareth Davies summarizes Patrick Altoft’s recent SES presentation on some basics of link building, including brand v keyword-rich links, competitor analysis, content syndication and replicating competitors’ links.

SMX London is now consistently SMX Advanced and so worthy of our and your attention. Gareth Davies, Mal Darwen and Mark Nunney attended and were ably supported by Thomas Baugh manning the Twitter watchtower.

In part three of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author Sean D’Souza explains a quick method for attracting your customers' attention.

Variation in pace and volume is a crucial part of great art, entertainment, communication, marketing and presentations. In part two of his 12-part series on giving perfect presentations, Blackbelt Presentations author Sean D’Souza explains how to use variation and pace as your presentation’s ‘magical packaging’.

Ken McGaffin in this extract from Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building explains how online communities work and how to find and contact link building prospects within that community to help you build a profitable, traffic-attracting website:

SEO is about great content and great site architecture ... it’s certainly not about spam and trying to fool Google. From a Dave Naylor SES presentation, Gareth Davies provides 12 essential SEO tips for 2011.

@marknunney and @mald from the @wordtracker team will be at SMX London. To make sure he is spending his time wisely, Mark Nunney challenged show organizer, journalist and SEO practitioner Chris Sherman with the question: What use is a show for SEO? If you like his answers as much as we do then we'll see you at London SMX on 16-17 May.

Finding quality link prospects is easy. Making an approach and winning that link is not. And if you’ve got thousands of link prospects you’ll not have much success if you make the same blanket approach to each one.

Quality link building needs great ideas for content that others will want to link to. But ‘build it and they will come’ is not enough. You need to first find the sites you want to link to you and build relationships with them. Ken McGaffin shows us how to prepare for link building.

Giving a speech need not be intimidating. With the right structure, questions and timing, an audience will want you to upsell. Introducing his new Blackbelt Presentations series, Sean D’Souza provides a step-by-step guide to how its done.

Google Analytics (GA) has become an essential tool for many SEOs. Here Mark Nunney introduces some basics of using GA for SEO.

In this first of a two-part guide to SEO for editorial teams and journalists, Mark Nunney introduces editors to the basics of SEO and gives a step-by-step process that puts editorial at the heart of your SEO.

As Twitter passes its fifth birthday, if you haven’t yet decided to take it seriously for business then it’s time you did. Mark Shaw has just written Twitter Your Business, the perfect book to help you with the job. Here he gives us an introduction to how it’s possible to get one third of your new business from Twitter.

The latest Think Visibility conference organized by Dom Hodgson, was held this month at Alea Casino in Leeds. Around 150 practitioners of SEO, social media and affiliate marketing met for a one day powerhouse of a conference. With some big name speakers lined up as well as some big name attendees in the audience, Wordtracker sent Gareth Davies along to gather some of the top takeaways from the event.

Pay Per Click can be a little daunting, especially for small businesses who don't know the tactics to use in this type of advertising campaign. PPC expert, Ian Howie, takes us through the seven stages of Pay Per Click, including how to use keyword research to refine your strategy.

SES Conference & Expo covers basic, advanced and cutting edge SEO, PPC and online marketing. Mark Nunney, Thomas Baugh, Justin Deaville and Max Holloway have collected the best 301 top tips, takeaways and memorable quotes from SES London 2011.

Although keyword research is a wonderful thing, it’s not perfect. Mark Nunney looks at the limits of traditional keyword research and how you can go beyond those restrictions to a reliable scientific process.

Mark Nunney introduces us to the wonder of keyword research in an extract from his book, Wordtracker Masterclass: Keyword Research - How to deliver visits, response and profits to your website in which he gives a detailed step-by-step guide to a practical keyword research process for new and established sites.

Starting with the real life case of Douglas Twiddy, Ian Howie introduces Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising with a checklist for PPC success.

Link building is a creative process. At least the type of link building that can generate hundreds of editorial links is. Where does the inspiration for such powerful ideas come from? A breakdown on the London Underground gave Ken McGaffin the inspiration for this article – and an opportunity to summarize some of his thoughts on creativity.

If you are considering managing your own PPC campaigns, it is essential you get training and don’t just jump in blind with a budget and a prayer. With that in mind, I am reviewing PPCblog.com, one of the few PPC training resources that has impressed me.

It’s true - free links and media coverage await you at HARO (Help A Reporter Out), a brilliant free service that brings the world of online PR within the reach of any small business owner or website. In an extract from his brilliant The Link Publicity Book, Ken McGaffin explains how HARO can work for you.

Analyzing the links to top magazines in your market can be a great source of high quality link prospects. Here, Ken McGaffin shows you how to do it and what to do when you find them.

Here’s a collection of link building Q & As from Ken McGaffin’s weekly link building webinars. You can join Ken live at his next link building webinar on 1st March 2011

Short copy. Pages buried in your navigation. Constantly changing inventory. How do you successfully overcome these and other SEO challenges of ecommerce sites?

Google now integrates local results (Google Places) into ‘standard’ organic results and it’s going to push your site down and off the page. That means less traffic and response unless you do something about it. Mark Nunney investigates and shows you how to fight back.

Holiday season is a good time to remind you of all the lovely freebies we have on our website. Take a look at our free guides on keyword research, as well as our fantastic tools and videos, which should help you come up with some fresh ideas for your 2011 SEO strategy. Here's our top ten for you to enjoy.

Prepare your site for the opportunities of 2011 with these outstanding 17 articles from the Wordtracker Academy in 2010 ...

In his never-ending search for the best possible link prospects, Ken McGaffin talked to Neil Pharazyn, CEO of Newsknife to discover how to find the find the most influential targeted online news sources.

More traffic and response with really really really easy SEO (search engine optimization) works by building on your current success - the keywords that already bring response to your site. These keywords are your low-hanging fruit and getting more results from them is child’s play. Mark Nunney explains how to do it.

Analytics is “the science of analysis”. Website analytics tools like Google Analytics and Wordtracker Strategizer provide the ways and means to analyse your website data. However, somewhere along the line, some users and analytics vendors seem to have focused more on data and less on analysis. Ian Howie looks at some new Google Analytics features that are helping to re-address the balance.

It’s important to look for quality links to your website. A small number of links from quality sites will bring you much more benefit than thousands of links from poor quality sites. But how do you judge what a quality site is and the value of a link from it? Different link builders will have different priorities, but here Ken McGaffin shows us what he looks for when eyeing up a prospect.

In this article Ken McGaffin shows you how Link Builder gets your link building project off to a flying start by creating ready made campaigns for you. You’ll be starting to approach quality link prospects within minutes.

Download your FREE copy of SEO Made Simple, Wordtracker’s new ‘crash course’ on profitable search engine optimization.

Using keywords in the linking text (or anchor text) that points to a specific page on your site is one of the most powerful ways to boost your search engine rankings. Ken McGaffin shows you how a new feature on Wordtracker Link Builder helps you find more of these most sought after links.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become more than just a way to create additional revenue from the internet; it has become the primary source of affordable online marketing. Beyond best practices, businesses must now become creative to compete with SEO, and do so in a way that keeps costs low.

What’s the deal with nofollow links? Do they count? Can it hurt your site if you have lots of links from low quality directories? Do your links really have to come from relevant sites? Ken McGaffin answers some of the questions frequently asked in his link building seminars.

Wordtracker would like to introduce our very own expert in Search Engine Optimization, Mark Nunney. Journalist Rachelle Money kicks off a special interview series with Mark, in a Question and Answer article where she picks his brains on top tips for SEO work, emerging trends and advice.

Have you ever embarked on some SEO work and got that sinking feeling that you might be doing something wrong? You're not alone. Our expert Mark Nunney gives us the dirty dozen top mistakes he sees being made in SEO, as well as tips on how to negotiate the pitfalls.

Competitor link analysis is much more than finding out who’s linking to your competitors and getting them to link to you. There is a huge amount of useful information you can grab if you just take the time to research carefully.

In this article, the third in the series, Ken McGaffin shows you how to get the most from competitive link analysis and introduces two new features to the Link Builder tool – linking text analysis and linking domain categorization.

The SEO field is changing rapidly and it can be difficult to keep up with the latest thinking. Research firm MarketingSherpa has surveyed thousands of search marketers to discover today’s most effective SEO tactics. We got a sneaky preview, so we can tell you what's working in SEO - and what's not. By Wordtracker's own Justin Deaville.

In this 13-minute video, Mike Mindel shows you how to plan your site structure for maximum Google traffic.

When you organize your pages - using a structure of category and content pages - both readers and search engines are able to find what they want. As a result, your site looks authoritative, and the search engines will send you more traffic!

So sit back, press play - and find out how you can use keyword research to plan your own website.

In this video, Mike Mindel shows you how to find a profitable niche market for a new website. You’ll learn how to find that gap in the market where searchers' needs are not being met by enough suppliers, so your new product or service can fit right in and compete successfully.

Primarily aimed at those of you at the start of your research process, this time-tested way to find a profitable new niche market will be of use whatever your level of SEO knowledge.

Read the transcript of a recent recording of Ken McGaffin's link building webinar - "How to Build Links To Your Website" - here now:

The media is full of stories about businesses of all kinds – small, large, innovative, personal, family and multinational. This brings a lot of publicity and sales to the businesses that are featured.

But are you one of those businesses that don’t get any media coverage at all? Do you see your competitors grabbing headlines when you know you could do so much better?

In his book, Save The Pixel, Ben Hunt gives a clear step-by-step guide to making your website more effective.

He shares some of its secrets with you here.

How many keywords do each of your website’s pages target? One? Two? With the help of our old friend, the long tail of keywords, Mark Nunney shows how you can optimize a single page for over 10,000 keywords if you ‘target the head and exploit the tail’.

Keyword research can do more than find you profitable keywords to target. With Wordtracker's Keywords Tool you can also plan a site structure optimized for search engines. Mark Nunney explains how.

Google keyword research data is impressive, powerful and now available on Wordtracker Keywords Tool. But make sure you verify its search estimates with alternative sources like Wordtracker’s own. Most importantly, use a keyword research process that ensures you find your site’s most profitable keywords. Mark Nunney explains how Wordtracker can help you.

Andreas Kambanis of the London Cyclist blog didn’t start as a blogging or a cycling expert. But hard and smart work have turned his cycling blog into his main source of income. Andreas is the first subject of a new series of Link Building Heroes and Ken McGaffin, co-author of Wordtracker Masterclass: Link Building - How to build links to your website for SEO, traffic and response discovers how Andreas uses quality blog content to build links for SEO and an email list for marketing.

So you’ve found some great link prospects. And you’ve created some great reasons why someone should link to you. Now you want to make an approach and craft a great link request. But are your link requests missing the most vital ingredient? Ken McGaffin asks the question and gives the answers.

Some companies and websites can’t keep out of the news. Open up a newspaper, browse a news website, sit down in front of the television and you see the same companies featured time and again. How do they do that? Ken McGaffin explains and shows how to get link prospects from them.

We struggle to find link prospects for our websites. And that means we struggle to get the links we need to move us up the search engine rankings and bring more visitors to our sites.

Link building is one of the most difficult parts of search engine optimization and naturally we’re all delighted when we ‘crack it’ and get new links pointing to our site.

Job done. Good links. Let’s move on to the next job.

I don’t think so.

Karon Thackston explains how the pros write ecommerce product descriptions in an extract from her new book Wordtracker Masterclass: Ecommerce Copywriting: Proven Strategies for Boosting Sales & Search Ranking.

You don’t have to sacrifice the quality of your work in order to create content that is search engine optimized and will help improve your ranking with the major search engines, explains Pierre Zorkian.

By adding irresistible offers to unmissable positions on (almost) every page, ThinkingManagers.com more than doubled its response rate. Following his previous article Does your marketing stop when your content starts?, Mark Nunney here shows us how to make every page a marketing page.

This article is an edited version of a chapter of Wordtracker’s The Website Content Recipe Book – 21 irresistible content ideas to wow visitors and boost your search engine optimization.

Your website’s content will get noticed, get read and get customers if you use your headline and first paragraph to let readers know what is in it for them. Here I’ll introduce you to some techniques you can use to make that happen.

This article is an edited version of a chapter of Wordtracker’s The Website Content Recipe Book – 21 irresistible content ideas to wow visitors and boost your search engine optimization.

Mark Nunney shows how to start your keyword research for a new site by first finding and then prioritizing your target markets and the keywords associated with them.

Let me introduce you to a practical keyword research process you can use to make your search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising profitable.

Wordtracker Link Builder finds you prospects for your link building. Here Eric Enge, co-author of The Art of SEO Book, shows you how to use the filter function to quickly search thousands of links to find targets relevant for specific link building campaigns.

Companies are adding content to their websites at a faster rate than ever.

Someone told them it was a good thing to do.

Link building is not only good for search engine rankings, it’s essential. But not all links are equal - some links are excellent, and many others next to useless. It’s quality, not quantity of inbound links that make winners stand out. That’s why link building is the biggest challenge SEOs and website owners face.

Creating keyword rich content goes well beyond writing a few articles for your site. Search engine optimization is a discipline which can be used in every corner of your website, including inbound and outbound links. In this article we show you just how easy it is to boost your search engine rankings simply by building keyword rich links.

We all know that one-way links from authority websites are essential if your link building efforts are to be successful. But what does it take to get those authority sites to link to you? Well, you’ll probably guess that it is not easy - quality links don’t materialize from feeble or automated requests. To get those ever so valuable links you’ve got to adopt the right mindset - the principles that show link targets you mean business and that you’re worth linking to.

Here’s my baker’s dozen ...

Offline advertising has a proven effect on people’s search behavior and planning optimized web content around certain keywords to support the advertising campaign is a tactic growing in popularity.

To rank well in search engine results you need to score well on both ‘on the page’ and ‘off the page’ factors.

‘On the page’ factors are about what is on your own pages and therefore within your own control. ‘Off the page’ factors are the links from external websites to your own, and these are much more difficult to control.

When people consume news offline – in newspapers, magazines and broadcast media – their relationship with the material is usually transitory.

After the day of publication, a newspaper is thrown in the trash can while a broadcast story can fade from memory very quickly.

Inbound links are the single most important factor in determining your position on Google’s results pages.

PPC advertising now makes up a substantial share of search marketing spend. Paying for an advert when someone clicks on it reduces the up-front cost associated with traditional advertising and brings a powerful, revenue-generating machine within the grasp of any size of business.

The objective of a business website is to attract potential buyers and convert them into paying customers.

Keywords can help you fulfill this objective. Use appropriate keywords on your site and you’ll attract visitors who want to buy the types of products you have to offer.

If you’ve been finding out about how to improve your website ranking, then you'll have heard about the power of link building. Search engines like Google rely on inbound links to inform their algorithm of site popularity, authority, and interest. As a result, focusing on link building strategies that can position your site correctly are ideal for generating top rankings. SEO expert Michael Fleischner introduces the link building techniques that work for him.

SMX London 2010 was SMX Advanced so we thought we'd push ourselves too and offer you 111 takeaways and top tips from the conference. Wordtracker's top tweeter, Mal Darwen attended and was supported by Mark Nunney reporting the coverage.

And that brings us to the end of the Sean d'Souza's nine-part headline writing course. So let’s summarize: What did he cover?

Headlines don’t always sit at the top of your pages. Sometimes headlines sit right at the bottom of your emails. Email signatures are powerful attractors but what do you put in your signature? And where else can your signature appear? Find out why your signature isn’t quite working as hard as it should in part 8 of Sean D'Souza's headline writing course.

The Link Builder tool is designed to help you instantly identify your best link prospects - and build a linking campaign that exponentially grows your online presence. And here we explain the different parts of the Link Builder interface.

In an extract from his 50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies book, SEO legend Aaron Wall shows us how to get more visitors from image searches on search engines by using keywords to optimize your images. Aaron runs SEO Book site and helps his wife out with PPC Blog.

In part seven of his nine-part headline writing course, Sean D'Souza shows how using headlines in testimonials can make all the difference when it comes to making them stand out from all the rest.

And he doesn't just put testimonials into headlines. He gives them a twist that might transform the performance of your sales pages. Find the secret in part seven of Sean's nine-part headline writing course

You know how sometimes you make a list of say, three things and then by the time you get to the end of the list, you remember that there’s something you really must include and your list of three becomes a list of four? This is Part 3 of Ken McGaffin's Keyword Basics series.

You've done all your keyword research and you've found great keywords for your website. So, now your goal is to write your website text in such a way that you rank as highly as possible on the search engine results page.

A new feature on the Wordtracker Keywords Tool now allows you to find even more relevant keywords by excluding ‘negative keywords’ from broad and phrase match searches. Wordtracker developer, Rob Wickert, shows us how to use it.

Your headlines are the doorways to your site. But if you look at headlines, you’ll find that most websites have headlines that are weak, wimpy and uninviting - they are barriers to entry. In part six of his nine-part headline writing course, Sean D'Souza shows you how to make your headlines prominent, different and free from obstructions.

One headline may work 50 times better than the next. But how do you actually know which headline is really going to work? Shouldn’t you be testing? Oh golly, you should be testing, but what if you had just one shot at sending out a sales letter? How could you make that shot really count? Let’s find why most copywriters goof up, and goof up consistently.

The Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in London was once again a great success and I've collected no less than 99 tips, ideas, statistics and memorable quotes from various speakers, panelists and a man in the bar.

Sean d’Souza explains how to use the power of ‘new’ and ‘knew’ to write intensely powerful headlines. Hint: ‘new’ is including something new and intriguing; ‘knew’ is using the familiar so you’ll be understood. Read on to learn how to weave them together. (This is part three of an 9-part series on writing perfect headlines by the author of "The Secret Life of Testimonials". Find out more about the book and order "The Secret Life of Testimonials" now. Further 'lessons' will be published over the next seven weeks.)

So single keywords are for losers. And a shift in perspective to 'keyword niches' allows you to work at the scale required to maximize profit. In this article, Mark Nunney pins down the definition of a keyword niche with a look at some real life examples that show how single keywords miss the big picture and keyword niches reveal it.

So how do you confuse a reader? Hey, it’s really easy. You remember what we did in part 1? We put in a clear target, and then we added a specific, right? Well, two’s company. Three’s just chaos. You’re about to find out how to systematically create chaos. So that when you do you can chop, change and get yourself the headline that you really want.

To help you perfect your headline writing, we’re starting an 9-part headline writing course by Sean D’Souza - the legend behind psychotactics.com and The Brain Audit – a system that can increase sales from your website by helping you understand why your customers buy and why they don’t. He also advises how to get excellent testimonials and how to attract a better client in "The Secret Life of Testimonials". Find out more about Sean's book and order "The Secret Life of Testimonials" now.

Microformats offer your site the chance to get more visits and response by increasing your clickthrough from search engine results pages (SERPs). Richard Baxter, Director of SEOgadget, a niche UK-based SEO agency consulting company, looks at what exactly microformats are and how you can use them to improve the way your website is displayed on SERPs.

How can a small site with few resources benefit from targeting long tail keywords? And won't such strategies and subsequent tactics get in the way of response?

These questions were raised in comments following our investigation into the long tail of keyword research (and why single keywords are for losers) and I thought I’d use the comments to introduce some practical advice on how to target long tail keywords.

Ian Howie’s name and company appear on page one of Google’s search results for searches with Google, AdWords, PPC, Wordtracker, Google website optimizer, Yahoo and SEO. They are organic listings with wonderful copy and they’re free. Let’s find out how he does that...

In one month, a small website about management and leadership received 95,036 visits from search engines via 44,655 thousand different keywords. That’s a lot of keywords for a little site; and it’s a glimpse into the long tail of keyword research. For most websites, how to make a profit from the long tail is the same as how to make a profit.

Follow this link for a more up-to-date version of 'Hope to optimize a web page video'

In this video, you'll learn how to search engine optimize your web page, so you can rank for the keywords you choose and attract more traffic from Google.

Everything you'll see is practical and straight to the point, so sit back, press play and let's begin!

AdWords – Google’s powerful pay per click (PPC) marketing tool - can be a great way of attracting traffic to your website.

Can Bob Arden save his web design business? Will brother Mike's keyword strategy deliver results? Has 2nd in command Laura betrayed Bob? Will Bob, Carl and Larry finally confront their past?

Chances are you're paying too much for your Google AdWords pay per click advertising but you can start right now on the path to better response rates for less money.

Web analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, can teach you how to use data analysis to change the way you make decisions about your website. Ahead of Kaushik's keynote speeches at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conferences in London and New York, Mark Nunney looks at his vision for Web Analytics 2.0.

Sean D'Souza asks 'why customers buy?' and headline writing is a key part of his answer. Here, Sean tells you how to write specific, jargon-free headlines that will help you sell.

Unique visits to Marie and Greg Rippel's website, all-about-spelling.com, increased from five people a day to 4,000 after the couple used Wordtracker to find the right keywords to target. Jerome Smail of The Website Marketing Company and SEO site explains how they did it.

Karon Thackston, web copywriting superstar, busts some myths about SEO copywriting then explains how to optimize your text for search engines and still keep it great to read.

Web content is crucial for any business that wants to succeed online. Good content will engage your customers, attract search traffic and help build your business.

Bob Arden now realizes that he should have trusted Laura all along. It’s the day of the pitch, time to find out if he’s a winner or a loser.

Bob has followed Laura into Buck’s, his local restaurant, to confront her about her deception and found her with Carl Carter. It ended in a fight with Carl Carter.

The pitch is being run by Larry Mackay, an old buddy that he had fallen out with years ago, and the competing agency is run by a once mutual friend, Carl Carter. Now Mike, his opinionated younger brother, has told him that Laura, his deputy at the agency, is working against him, helping Carl Carter with the pitch.

After discovering that he's about to become a father for the first time Bob's determined to improve the business, starting with the latest new business pitch, a website re-design for Larry Mackay, an old buddy that he had fallen out with. He's listening to advice from Mike, his opinionated younger brother, particularly about how to bring keyword research into the heart of his web design process. Still, at the back of his mind, he's worrying about Laura, his deputy at the agency, and the secret she hasn't revealed yet.

Bob Arden has just met up with Laura, his deputy, in Buck's, his local restaurant, after being away on vacation. Both have something to tell each other.

Your Superman Pages are your most important for search engine optimization (SEO) - the ones you want to perform best on search engines. Get your site's navigation wrong and your Superman Pages will be trapped in a basement full of kryptonite. Here I show how to optimize your website's navigation for search engines and set Superman free.

Let us have your comments and questions on Wordtracker's new Google AdWords ebook

A blog can increase your sales and profit. In his new Wordtracker Masterclass book, Blogging for Business, Chris Garrett gives a detailed guide on how to run a successful blog. Here, Chris lists 13 reasons why your business needs a blog.

Let us have your comments and questions on Wordtracker's 'Link Publicity Book'

Keywords with a high search volume and a low level of competition can bring search marketers quick profits. Wordtracker now helps you find these moneymaking keywords quicker, easier and more effectively than ever before.

Here’s a quick look at ten of the best blogs for journalists about search engine optimization and writing online.

Getting coverage for your business in mainstream media can be hugely beneficial in bringing a swathe of new visitors to your site, and building inbound links from the media and from all the other people who comment on it. In this article, I want to give you guidelines on how you can use publicity in your own business.

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” Jonathan Swift

Opportunities for great free publicity and inbound links are all around us. They arise every day from a host of newspapers, magazines, blogs and online news sites… but we just don’t see them.

As your final call to action, your "Buy" button is crucial for response yet often generic and uninspiring. Nick Usborne, author of Wordtracker's Writing Kick-Ass Website Sales Copy, explains how to increase response by making your "Buy" button an extension of your headline.

Peter Brady's company, Orbital Media Network, built a social media marketing consultancy on the back of its successful blogs. Brady tells Rachelle Money how he finds blogs to create online PR for his clients and then gives us his big blogging mistakes to avoid.

The internet is changing the rules of public relations (PR). Now that anyone can break a story through Twitter or Facebook, how should the PR industry adapt? Has the old-fashioned press release become obsolete? Is the press embargo dead?

Let us have your comments on Wordtracker's new e-book, "Blogging for Business"

Wordtracker would love to hear your opinions. We've come up with a short survey that we're hoping will help us to help you.

Brent D Payne, as the Tribune Company’s in-house Director of Search Engine Optimization (and bald SEO legend), has managed a 20 million increase in monthly visits to its websites, including the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. Payne tells Rachelle Money how these spectacular results have been achieved, including using keyword research to help give readers “the news we know they want”.

In an extract from his 50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies book, SEO legend Aaron Wall who has a few SEO tools of his own, reminds us that keywords used by last minute shoppers should convert better, pay more and be easier to target than more popular keywords. Additional material from Mark Nunney shows you how to find those keywords with Wordtracker.

With permanent search engine optimization (SEO) you can secure and defend the keywords you are successful for and find new keyword niches to target. Mark Nunney explains why SEO never stops and how you can use this to beat the toughest of competition.

“After your advice I was able to cut my PPC spend while increasing the amount of clicks … we are getting three times as many enquiries as last year”, says Tony Brewin, MD of Wedding Caterers, SuperEvent.co.uk. That advice came from Ian Howie and here he shares it with you.

Ahead of his Keynote eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit speeches in Stockholm (12 October), and Washington DC (19 October), marketing guru Jim Sterne tells Rachelle Money about the problems and the merits of website analytics and how they can be used to face the new challenges confronting all website owners in the current global economic crisis.

To get results on social media sites you need great content with great headlines that will grab readers’ attention, make them want more and pass on a link to others. You will also need a significant network of friends and contacts or to be very nice to someone who has. Lyndon Antcliff is one such connector and here he gives 17 top tips to help you build your own social media network.

Social media marketing (SMM) on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon and Digg has exploded in the past year. But what exactly is it? And what’s in it for you? Let social media marketing expert and the man behind Magnetic Web Content, Lyndon Antcliff, gently introduce you to the subject and perhaps change your marketing life.

Caroline Blatchford's company SpottyGiftBoxes is barely a year old and yet Caroline is already reaping the rewards of building a search engine friendly site from the get-go. She shares her experience with Wordtracker's Rachelle Money.

As you know, Wordtracker doesn’t normally endorse another company’s products unless we feel it can truly benefit you. Our friends at Planet Ocean Communications are about to publish a new book and quite frankly they’ve outdone themselves. They’ve created the best, most incisive guide we’ve seen on how to optimize your site for local search:

Let us have your comments, thoughts and questions on Wordtracker's Keyword Research ebook

Whenever Ken McGaffin wants to create a new website or add content to an existing one, he begins with keyword research. He spells out the reasons why this is so important, and demonstrates how you can carry it out with the aid of Wordtracker's new Keywords tool.

Anyone who has tried search engine optimization knows how important keyword research is. Well, good news everyone; keyword research just got a whole lot quicker and easier with Wordtracker's new, free Firefox extension - SEO Blogger.

Calling all you bloggers! Wordtracker have launched a fantastic new tool that will see bloggers writing fully optimized posts without having to leave the page. Andy Mindel (picture left) talks to Rachelle Money about how he came up with SEO Blogger and how it will benefit the blogosphere.

In Wordtracker's last Online Journalism article I posed the question of whether readers would be prepared to pay for stories online and the response was a very loud NO! But the days of free are numbered and despite the seemingly reticent position of many readers, the momentum is beginning to build towards a variety of pay models such as subscriptions, micropayments or pay walls. We take a look at what newspapers and publishers are doing to get money from online content.

Let us have your comments and questions on Wordtracker's new Keyword Basics e-book.

Let us have your comments and questions on Wordtracker's new Online PR Basics e-book

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg are the authors of a bunch of books like Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? and Call to Action which got them on the New York Times, Business Week and the Wall Street Journal's best sellers lists. They started their company FutureNowInc.com more than a decade ago and have just launched a new program called OnTarget, a service which monitors your website 24/7, uncovers reasons as to why it's under-performing, and then gives you specific recommendations to help keep your revenue goals on target. The Eisenberg brothers spoke to Rachelle Money about how they came up with the idea.

The dashboard is the home of all your keyword research. It’s where you find saved Projects and start new work.

Find the right keywords for your SEO and PPC campaigns, for content ideas, product research, market research and offline marketing campaigns.

Assess the competition for any keyword and find the most promising targets for search engine optimization and your Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising

Filter Wordtracker search results to remove irrelevant keywords and then save your results.

Make lateral searches and find new keywords related to your seed word.

With any listed keyword, use ‘Search & Save’ for a quick ‘drill down’ search and to save the results to a List.

Quickly export your keywords for use outside Wordtracker.

Save and organize your keyword research in Lists & Projects.

Plan your SEO campaigns by organizing your keyword research to match the structure of your website.

Plan your Google Adwords PPC campaigns by organizing your keyword research to match the structure of your Campaigns and Ad Groups.

These videos refer to our older toolset. To get the most from our new tools, have a look at the new tool's videos

Some people think writing sales copy for the web is exactly the same as writing for print. Many make the simple mistake of copying and pasting their print-based marketing messages onto their websites, and then scratch their heads wondering why their conversion rates are poor. Wordtracker has teamed up with Nick Usborne, a leading authority on the subject of writing for the web, in a new e-book which shows you how to make the transition from writing print sales copy to online copy and stay one step ahead of your competitors.

How do you generate great online PR? How can keyword research benefit an online PR campaign and what are the things people should avoid? These are just some of the questions we put to Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization and online public relations firm. Greg has written numerous articles for Search Engine Watch and has contributed to Wordtracker's newsletter too, so who better to tell us how online PR really works?

Newspapers are struggling to find a new business model for their online editions. Some have folded at the challenge and packed up the printing presses while others have thrown up pay walls. The only question editors want the answer to is, are readers prepared to pay for online content?

Ahead of his keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies New York, Guy Kawasaki - the man who could have been king of Yahoo - talks with Mark Nunney about Twitter and his site, Alltop. Guy reveals he doesn't do keyword research (so Mark does some SEO and keyword research for Alltop).

How do journalists learn about SEO? Many of them will Google the term to find out what it's all about and how it will impact on their writing skills. When looking at the kind of advice there is for journalists online, it seems clear that many commentators from the journalistic side of the fence misconstrue what SEO is about, while SEOs themselves seem to be clueless about what journalists actually do, and about what writing responsibilities they have.

Lisa Ditlefsen, the original SEO Chick herself, speaks to Rachelle Money ahead of London's Search Engine Strategies Conference about what it's like to be a woman in SEO, and why she's decided to start up her very own search agency.

LinkedIn, 'facebook for business', with over 35 million users, is a serious networking tool for businesses and professionals alike. Here, start up guru, online marketing legend, Twitter superstar, and New York SES keynote speaker, Guy Kawasaki, introduces us to the power of LinkedIn by showing how to use it to find a job.

If you're attending the Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES) at London or New York then say hello to myself and Shahid Awan, Wordtracker's new search evangelist.

Let us have your comments, thoughts and questions on Wordtracker's Link Building ebook

Are you looking to grow a business? Do you want to break the demoralizing cycle of cold-call, pitch and knock-back, while attracting the custom, respect and recognition that you surely deserve?

Twitter is a powerful (micro)blogging site you can use to spread your message around the globe.

Since using the Wordtracker keyword research tool Dan Roberts says Hearst Publication's online traffic has grown 150%. Hearst publishes 15 of the world's most popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Oprah's O Magazine, and Good Housekeeping as well as five web-only magazines. We talked to Roberts, Senior SEO Analyst for Hearst Publications' Digital Media team. As a former print journalist he knows all too well the challenges of introducing SEO and keyword research to a traditional media platform. And thank goodness he did.

Search engine optimization (SEO) makes journalists groan. They bristle at the idea of ‘stuffing keywords’ into their copy while managers who often don’t understand SEO are desperate for the extra traffic good search rankings could bring. But the truth is that there are many parallels between SEO and journalistic writing and that SEO really can be a journalist’s best friend. Rachelle Money explains.

We're starting a new project to explore the role keyword research and search engine optimization can play in online journalism.

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should focus on achieving success for the keywords that will deliver the most profit. That seems obvious but how do you find and prioritize those keywords? SEO pro Mark Nunney introduces the process so you can apply it to your own site.

Optimize your Google AdWords campaigns to maximize your Return On Investment (ROI) by using the same keywords within the Trinity of PPC Success:

1) Keyword Bid
2) Ad Copy
3) Landing Pages

David Ogilvy was one of the advertising greats. Ogilvy believed that part of the process of developing great creative ideas was immersion in information about a product and its consumers. He even described himself as ‘helpless without research material.’

Wordtracker have enlisted the help of one of the most respected SEO experts on the planet, Aaron Wall, to write an exclusive e-book on 50 of the best keyword strategies to use in the quest for online success. Our very own journalist, Rachelle Money caught up with Aaron to ask him more about the book and get some hints about what readers can expect.

You need to actively build links if you want to improve your traffic and get high search engine rankings. But how do you do it? Eric Ward is a master link builder who counts the likes of Amazon, the Discovery Channel and Warner Bros among his list of clients. As a healthy obsessive, there is nothing Ward doesn't know about link building, making him the foremost expert in his field. In our exclusive interview Ward imparts some of his best pearls of wisdom on everything you ever wanted to know about link building.

Ken McCarthy made his debut on the last Wordtracker newsletter with an article on the rules of online marketing at a time of recession. He organized and sponsored the first conference ever held on web commerce back in 1994 and has since helped entrepreneurs harness the power of the web.

Use 'negative keywords' and your PPC profits can increase dramatically. This valuable technique tells Google which phrases your ad should not be displayed for. For example, if you're selling brand new 'apple laptops', you don't want your ad to appear when someone searches for 'refurbished apple laptops', so 'refurbished' should be a negative keyword for your campaign.

Neil Davidson is a marketing communications consultant and writer with fifteen years experience in advertising and direct marketing. He gives us the low-down on what keyword creativity is and how to use it to boost your advertising and marketing campaigns.

You know targeting keywords is important, but targeting single keywords with your SEO is unlikely to be profitable – SEO for profit must target groups of keywords. Here we’ll tell you why and explain how.

Wordtracker Academy asked me, as an experienced internet marketer, if I could offer some perspective on today's business and financial climate. They specifically wanted to know how it impacts internet marketers and others who use the internet to market online.

Journalists of all types are being asked to learn how to write for the web. I traveled to London in September for a two-day course 'Writing for the Web' run by the British Broadcasting Corporation. So just what are people being taught about the web?

As per usual we had a great response to our articles from our readers. Just to refresh your memories, Wordtracker featured the 7 Steps of a Pay Per Click campaign thanks to our PPC expert, Ian Howie.

Ken McGaffin, Chief Marketing Officer of Wordtracker, will address the ECMOD2008 Conference at Earls Court, London, on 1st October 2008. ECMOD is an annual conference and exhibition for executives engaged in the catalogue and home shopping sector.

Both Wordtracker's own link building guru Ken McGaffin and SEOBook writer Aaron Wall were recently interviewed on Business Technology Radio.

Blogging is not just an important way to connect with your audience, it's also a great way of including keyword rich content on your site. Online personal stylist service iStylista.com found that their sales had doubled in just a matter of months, after they had launched their blog. Wordtracker spoke to its co-founder Hayden Allen-Vercoe to find out how he did it.

This week we look at what our newsletter readers thought of Peter Kent's interview with Rachelle Money. The author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies caused a split between our readers over his comments that web designers were pretty clueless when it came to SEO.

Peter Kent is a renowned SEO expert responsible for a number of books and articles, as well as CEO of a successful consultancy firm. He talks of his frustrations at an industry he believes is now mostly scam, and of how small businesses can achieve great results without having to rely on expensive or time- consuming content.

Search Engine Optimization is beginning to creep into all sorts of industries, and the publishing sector is no different. At a major conference in London last month, publishers met SEO and Social Media Marketing specialists to learn more about creative opportunities online.

In our last newsletter we introduced you to In Good Company Workplaces in New York, a company who gained fantastic media attention by sheer perseverance and good fortune. This time, we want to show you how one company got great press attention after they spotted an opportunity to piggyback the hottest story of the year – the credit crunch.

Regular readers will know that in the past few newsletters we have published three different articles on our SEO expert Mark Nunney. Believe it or not, all of these articles came from one interview. In this article, I want to show you how you can get as much content for your site from one interview.

Keyword data could and should be one of the most important sources for account planners, argues Neil Davidson.

Google is now the ultimate brand for young people because it gives them the tools they need to make choices. Read how digital search will change the way brands advertise forever.

Once you’ve optimized your website copy, you’ll find that the most important part of the optimization process happens off the page – with links from external sites back to yours playing a vital role in telling Google and other search engines how important your site really is.

Branding campaigns aim to build positive associations in the consumer’s mind so that they will look favorably on a company or product in the future.

In 2002, AT&T made a major mistake. As part of the launch of its mobile initiative mLife, the company purchased television advertising during the Super Bowl coverage. Nothing wrong with that – along with the Oscars, it attracts one of the biggest audiences in American television and is seen as a creative showcase for the best in American advertising.

Wordtracker’s Ken McGaffin is hosting a training session in London for students of the IE Business School studying for their Masters Degree in Digital Advertising & Communication.

SEO is about the off page factors as well as the on page factors - small businesses usually neglect the former. Getting external sites to write about you, especially top news sites, can do wonders for your inbound links and as a result improve your search engine rankings. Here’s how one company got top rate media coverage.

Chris Garrett is a professional blogger and co-author of the recently published ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. Wordtracker's journalist Rachelle Money caught up with Garrett to pick his brains on how to crack the mini industry of blogging.

As our expert interview series begins to wind down, Rachelle Money spoke to Wordtracker's SEO expert Mark Nunney about what people should look out for when recruiting and working with an SEO agency who you want to work on your website.

Every day we make observations, basing important decisions and forming judgments as a result of them. The power of observation is another one of those off the page processes we go through which can determine the content we choose to put online. In the latest chapter of our Web Content Recipe Book we look at how active observational skills can enhance the direction and quality of your website's content. This is taken from Wordtracker's "Web Content Recipe Book"

The Web Digest for Marketers has been in existence online for 13 years. At first Larry Chase, founder and editor of the newsletter, had just one topic to cover – online marketing – but as the industry went forth and multiplied, online marketing expanded to cover 52 different niches. Chase's staying power comes from his ability to explore these niches and create great content for his subscribers. Here he tells us everything there is to know about creating longevity through long tail content for newsletters.

Inspirational quotes can come from just about anywhere – a book, a song, something your grandma used to say. As long as it gets the cogs in your brain turning, it probably has the potential to inspire an article. This is taken from Wordtracker's "Web Content Recipe Book"

Creating great content means you have to look beyond the norms of written articles and blogs. Extending the possibilities to video can be a valuable and rewarding platform (and it doesn’t have to be expensive either), as the phenomenal success of Blendtec’s Will It Blend? has proven.

Search Engine Optimization is never black or white, or is it? We talk to White Hat Media's Romain Romagnan about black hat and white hat SEO, and on how to avoid rogue traders.

Wordtracker has been busy cooking up a new Web Content Recipe book for our readers to glean ideas for content for their website. The second in our series is an article about where ideas come from and how to act on them. This is an extract from Wordtracker's "Web Content Recipe Book"

Wordtracker sent me on a two-day course called Search Engine Marketing Essentials. In this article I want to tell you how useful I found it from a journalist’s perspective and what I think newspapers should be doing online.

To help you get the most from Wordtracker's Link Builder tool, we run regular online seminars.

Rand Fishkin is a popular speaker at search engine optimization conferences – not so much for his trademark yellow sneakers – but for his direct and uncompromising advocacy of social media marketing. His strategy is to focus on the ‘linkerati’, the new breed of bloggers whose approval is often the first stage in launching a successful campaign, and he insists the quickest way to kill a viral campaign is by giving it to your public relations department. Fishkin explains his approach and gives top tips on social media marketing.

In journalism, the question of how print reconciles itself with the challenges online news has brought is a hotly debated topic. In our new blog on online journalism we will be joining the conversation and looking at what newspapers are doing to grab online readers, but first here's an introduction to what you can expect from the blog.

Generating good content for your website is key to search engine optimization. And writing a review of a book that your audience will find useful is a great strategy. In this article, our own journalist Rachelle Money explains her approach to writing the Microtrends review and gives you a step-by-step guide with some handy tips on how to write your own. This is an extract from Wordtracker's "Web Content Recipe Book"

A good keyword researcher spots emerging market trends before the rest of us. How do they do it? Not just by doing keyword research, but by keeping tabs on all sorts of published information. One such publication that caught our eye was Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark J Penn, the man who coined the phrase ‘soccer moms’ for Bill Clinton. In his book he draws on years of experience to describe over 240 emerging market trends. It contains enough inspiration and ideas to kick start any online marketing campaign.

The web has spawned many great ideas. But great ideas on their own do not create great online businesses. TravelIntelligence.com is a collective of some of the most popular travel writers in Europe and together they have created over 8000 pages of excellent travel writing. But not a single page was optimized and as a result, readership and the business returns it could create had fallen well short of potential. Enter a hard-nosed business brain and an experienced SEO, and things started to change.

If you want to build a thriving business, you must identify the niches within your market. Decide which ones you want to target, then tailor your message to the audience.

Vegetarianism continues to power a growing online business market. There are now estimated to be around 12 million vegetarians in the US, and 4 million in the United Kingdom where the total vegetarian food market has been put at £670m per year.

It’s moved from counter-culture to a mainstream way of living, which also means more people are searching for advice and nutritious vegetarian recipes on the web.

Rachelle Money talks to SavvyVegetarian.com, a content rich site that now appears on the first page of Google search results for over 50 keywords.

Local search is fast becoming the most exciting search vertical on the web. Recent research by the Kelsey Group reported that 70% of Americans consult the web before making local buying decisions, while 36% of search engine queries now request local results.

By exploring local search, small business owners and marketers can benefit from both direct lead generation and general brand awareness. Brushing up your local keyword research skills is the place to start.

Our reporter Rachelle Money managed to connect with Seth Godin - probably one of the most famous and prolific modern marketers - in a cab on the way to LA Airport at seven in the morning. Author of ‘Permission Marketing’ and ‘The Idea Virus’, Godin has just published his latest book, ‘Meatball Sundae’ and so he’s a pretty busy man.

Many keyword researchers and copywriters automatically assume that searchers type in a natural word order all of the time. Not so, according to SEO expert Shari Thurow who explains how accommodating different word orders can bring you a valuable traffic bonus.

As the ancient Chinese proverb says; “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.” Choosing an appropriate name for your company takes careful thought and picking a domain name for your website is just as important a decision, especially when taking into account how fiercely competitive the world wide web is. Joshua Sloan, director of online marketing for the world’s most popular web host company, 1and1.com explains...

People expect accuracy in your web writing. Getting things wrong not only damages your credibility, it may get you into hot water with some company’s legal department. Journalists in busy newsrooms have to face this problem every day. How do they cope and what can you learn from them? Our resident journalist explains...

We may all know that thorough keyword research underpins the whole foundation on which all online traffic generation is based. But how do we separate the wheat from the chaff – the keywords that deliver quality not just quantity, customers not just visitors?

Keyword research tells you what people are looking for online and therefore it is one of the best ways to find ideas for content on your website.

weather.com has over 300 million visitors monthly who want to know how the weather is going to affect them. Whether you want information on how to keep your pets cool in a heatwave, how to drive safely when the roads are icy, or even if you want marine forecasts they’ve got it covered.

There are 15 main content areas on the site, each with its own product manager who have essential keyword research at their fingertips. We talked to search marketing manager, Derek Fulford about his operation.

The majority of small businesses are not high flying tech companies or web savvy start ups. They’re largely traditional companies in low tech industries. And that’s the audience Brent Leary and Michael Thomas set out to reach when they launched their radio show, ‘Technology For Business Sake (TFBS)’. And how did they find their audience? Through keyword research, of course.

Keyword research tool Wordtracker has invited one of the smartest SEOs on the planet, Aaron Wall to create a powerful new e-book, “50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies” focused on simple, smart and speedy ways to use keywords to attract more customers online.

Keyword research often starts with a seed list - a quick brainstorm of keywords that might be important. The better your keyword seed list, the greater your opportunity to generate a comprehensive keyword portfolio. Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook.com shares his secrets for generating a fantastic seed list every time.

In 2004, Christopher Cummings had a big idea for a new website. Then he realized that success depended on much more than a big idea. And it was something very new to him, the intelligent use of keyword research data.

Park Seed is a multi-million dollar gardening business that had built its incredible success on print-based catalogs. So starting business on the internet seemed like a leap into the unknown. But there was a link between these different worlds...

People describe things in different ways. The words you use in your business may be very different from the words your customers use. For example, Gerry McGovern explains, “low fares” is an airline industry term (121 searches predicted at time of writing); “cheap flights” is a term potential customers will use (8,057 searches predicted per day). Use industry terms instead of customer terms and you will not be found. These three cartoons show what happens:

A website with ambitions to support even a modest business will need to plan for hundreds, soon thousands of pages, and all that content has to be organized for users and search engines or it might be lost to them both.

Google PageRank is a rough guide from Google to the popularity of your site's pages according to its inbound links. Although quick, it’s crude and often gives the wrong impression so use alongside other metrics. Here's how to find out your site's Google Page Ranks.

Use site statistics analysis software to monitor your site’s visitors, referrers, sales and other ‘wanted actions’ like newsletter sign-ups etc.

Alexa Rank ranks your site's popularity in visitor numbers as measured by those who have used Alexa’s toolbar. It's also great for spying on competitors' sites.

To get visitors from search engines, your website's pages need to be listed and seen on page one of Search Engines' Results Pages (SERPs). That means you need to track your sites' SERPs for target keywords. Here’s how.

Every site owner needs to know that Google has indexed all their site's pages. Here's how to find out.

Inbound links are links from other sites to yours, and they are crucial in all but the least competitive of markets (and even in those you need some links). You therefore need to know how many inbound links your site has.

Finding a niche business is often the key to online success. Andrew Smith thought that most of the competitors for his new online baby store seemed to ignore the needs of mothers. In this case study Smith focuses his keyword strategy on the needs of mums, not just babies.

The first quick win of doing keyword research should be to optimize your existing content. Do that before you go on to create new content. That means looking again at the content you’ve already created and seeing what improvements you can make that will increase search engine traffic - and sales - from those particular pages.

You’ve got to make sure that you’ve organized your content and that you’ve used important keywords in all the right places.

If your web pages are not focused on the right keyword phrases then you may find that other pages are much easier to find in the search results than yours.

SEO-PR has been offering optimized press release services since March 2003. But, the first time my online public relations firm recommends using top search keywords in headlines and at least the first 100 words of optimized press releases, I can't tell you how frequently new clients are surprised.

Many people mistakenly believe that search engine optimization and online public relations firms can magically optimize a press release - without modifying any release content - by adding invisible meta keywords tags. So, they are shocked, shocked to find that their top search keywords actually need to appear high up in very visible locations.

Keyword research insight is now being used by many entrepreneurs. Clarke Walton, the owner of several Internet-based businesses in Las Vegas, is one of these trailblazers, using it to help him in different ways every day.

Keyword density is one of the worst things to happen to search engine copywriting. Without any regard to flow or customer experience, website owners around the world began shoving keywords into their copy like wild men. Web copywriting training expert, Karon Thackston, explains the folly and how to avoid it.

James Henderson, an award-winning writer and an expert on the Caribbean is also the author of the Cadogan Guide to the Caribbean and The Bahamas, now in its sixth edition. He was in the perfect position to create a content rich.

Seasoned professionals in the arena of online marketing know it's clever to use keywords that target potential customers who are "late" in the buying cycle. So, how do you find out what these keywords are? ...and why are they so important?

The last thing Susan Webster wanted to do this morning was to go into the office.

Susan was in the habit of going in every Saturday to plan the week ahead. She liked the silence, and the atmosphere of her oak-paneled office helped her to think.

But after what she’d been through in the last seven days she just couldn’t face it. She was determined to have some time to herself and relax with the weekend papers and a cup – no, make that a large pot – of strong coffee.

Susan had given up her job on Wall Street to become the new CEO of the family firm, Virginia Veg.

Email

From: Bryan Eisenberg, Future Now, Inc

To: Susan Webster, Virginia Veg

Email

From: B. L. Ochman, What’s Next Online

To: Susan Webster, Virginia Veg

Email

From: Stephen Mahaney, Planet Ocean Communication

To: Susan Webster, Virginia Veg

Email

From: Kevin Lee, Did-it

To: Susan Webster, Virginia Veg

Email

From: Ken McGaffin, Linking Matters

To: Susan Webster, Virginia Veg

Email

From: Neil Davidson, Freelance Writer

To: Susan Webster, Virginia Veg

Email

From: Robin Good, Master New Media

To: Susan Webster, Virginia Veg

Email

From: Nick Usborne, Copywriter

To: Susan Webster, Virginia Veg

A beautiful website with no traffic or visibility can't survive in the business world. But a high ranking website that gets tons of traffic where no-one is compelled to make a purchase or take action, won't work for you either. Think "visibility PLUS a solid call to action."

If you have ever studied search engine optimization, then you'll know that most educators place tremendous importance on performing good keyword research. But for many website owners, their source of traffic is an after-thought.

This is a free chapter on keywords from the search engine optimization for dummies book.

The root of all success in search engine marketing begins with keywords. Period. Get them wrong and virtually everything about your online endeavor will fail. So do so many – professional and amateur alike – buy keywords based on highly skewed numbers?

You'll find most of your 'revelations' or 'insights' by using the Comprehensive Search feature of Wordtracker. Try entering one part of a search phrase and let the tool figure out the best 'full use' of the phrase.

Search engines get bombarded with automated queries from ranking monitors, popularity analyzers, bid optimizers and other tools. This deluge of non-human activity distorts keyword counts, and if it is not identified and eliminated will leave you with very poor keywords.

"Keyword Creativity" is the process of understanding customer behavior through keyword research and using the insights gained to drive the creative process.

Long before the days of researching phrases with the helpful online resources of today, keyword selection was often left to guesswork. However, guesswork is just not good enough in highly competitive standards.

If you've been working with keyword optimization for a while, you know there are times when some great keywords drive tons of traffic to your site, but the resulting conversion rate is terrible.

Every aspect of crafting a website-for-profit revolves delicately around carefully chosen and strategically placed keywords. Behind the scenes of every top-ranking sales page lies a company's systematic campaign to win dominance in an escalating battle over specifically targeted keywords. The stakes can be high. Billions of $$ have already been earned and billions more are in the queue waiting to be tapped.

Often simple things really matter. And the use of keywords in linking text is one of those simple things that turn out to be hugely important. Linking text, sometimes called anchor text, is the clickable text that takes people to another page or resource. You need to choose that text carefully.

Sending out link requests is a time-consuming business. So wouldn't it be wonderful if other sites linked to you without being asked?

Sound impossible? Well, it can be done and here are ten strategies to prove it.

Finding quality sites to target is at the heart of any effective linking strategy. ‘Quality sites’ are not the ones that are easiest to get links from but those that will drive most relevant traffic to your site. In our last newsletter, we looked at how to maximize your link value to make your site more attractive to link targets. In this issue we’ll explore how to find quality link targets.

If you’ve gone through all the hard work of a link building campaign, you expect to be rewarded with some impressive links. The reality is that many people are disappointed with the trickle of links and the trickle of traffic that their efforts produce.