The Wordtracker Academy

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' ...

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.