Competitive Keyword Search Tool

Everybody knows this already. The "Keywords" or "key terms" is the first thing that you should know when promoting your site. It should always be relevant to your site because you don't want users to just leave your page because they got to the wrong site.

Selecting keywords shouldn't be really hard. More often than not, keywords are terms or words about our sites or just words that we want our site to be ranked for. I call them obvious (broad) keywords.

Nevertheless, we need to optimize those obvious keywords so we can come down to the most relevant, specific term that may rank our site. Remember that it's always about relevancy but it should also include strategy.

I listed my top 3 favorite keyword search tool (FREE) that I usually consult in finding the right and most competitive keywords to promote some of my client's site. =)

1. http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/

- I really love this tool as it includes cross reference results from Wordtracker and Google. It also suggests competitive keywords and search volumes and is always updated. =)

2. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

- I also love using this because I'm optimizing for Google. This is one of the best tools even if you're not doing any PPC.

3. http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

- This is actually a more limited tool but great for FREE. If you have budget, I suggest that you subscribe to Wordtracker's service. It's easy to use and understand and provides a more comprehensive result.

There are hundreds of keyword tools that you can use. You can explore each of them and try to narrow your list.

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Social Media News Sites

There are hundreds of social media sites available for you to use. I've been using social media to spread the news and interesting stories I write as well as in promoting some products. There are also niche social media sites that can cater specific needs.

So what is social media? According to Wikipedia,

"Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business."

There are actually different types of social media sites. My provided list here is categorized under the the social media news sites.These sites also involves human interaction - voting. The readers will be of judge to whether your story is helpful or not and likable or not. So, make sure that your story is interesting and truly helpful to others. =)

PR 8 - http://digg.com/
PR 8 - http://www.reddit.com/
PR 5 - http://shoutwire.com/
PR 8 - http://www.mixx.com/
PR 5 - http://www.indianpad.com
PR 7 - http://newsvine.com/
PR 5 - http://www.kirtsy.com/
PR 5 - http://searchles.com
PR 8 - http://www.stumbleupon.com/
PR 6 - http://www.dzone.com
PR 5 - http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com/
PR 3 - http://www.plugim.com
PR 4 - http://www.linkinn.com/

Some of the above sites have "nofollow" link attribute. For me, they are still considered as SE friendly. I also want traffic as well. =)

However, I also found an interesting list over the net from here... http://www.doshdosh.com/list-of-social-media-news-websites/
Note: Some of the sites there are not working anymore but it's truly worth to see.

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Happy Earth Day from your Favorite Search Engines

See their graphical greetings...

From Google

From Yahoo (I just used prntscrn, sorry!)

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Monitor Your Brand

It's nice to be back! After sometime, I realized that I have to feed this blog. While it has most of what you can find in the web, I would still want to share some SEO stuffs that I usually do.

For this post, I would like to share the list of free tools that you can use to monitor your brand or company name. Remember that you cannot please every body and so you can start expecting some degrading comments from selected individuals. You also have competitors and they might be doing some black propaganda on your reputation as well.

While you can never stop the spread of bad words about you, you can still monitor and take necessary action if you are on the loop. By monitoring your brand name on the web, you can compete and defend your brand with your eyes wide open. This is not more of a prevention but getting ready before such bad things take your site into a devastating state.

There are lots of tools that you can use but they're basically the same. I bet you don't want to be flooded with hundreds of tools and become paranoid of what you can find. Think about it. Not all bad publicity can harm your site - sometimes, it gives you a favor. You can also optimize other good posts about your site. That's about taking advantage of it.

So... here are my personal and top picks:

all you have to do is set these alerts on your email and start filtering.
google.com/alerts - for google
alerts.yahoo.com - for yahoo

http://boardtracker.com/ - for forums
http://keotag.com - for social media
http://search.twitter.com/ - twitter
http://www.backtype.com/ - comments

Keep in mind that brand monitoring is one of the most important means to be aware of what the rest of the web if telling about you. And I'm pretty sure that you don't want to be the last person to know about it.

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