How Do I Manually Optimize my Blog Posts?

Usually when I start writing post, I use Google Keyword Tool to figure out the search volume of a 2-3 word long tail keyword that I plan to use in the HTML Title tag. I usually choose 2-3 keywords that has a moderate amount of search volume and less competition in the Google Search Engine. (To check the competition, I simply do a search for those keyword in Google with “double quotes” and also with allintitle: tag).

Once I find the best keywords (the ones with high/moderate search volume and low competition), I use them in my title tag and also in the “meta description” of that particular post. If you are using a wordpress plugin like All-in-one-SEO, it should be relatively easy for you to change the title and the other meta tags of any individual post. I also use a lot of variations and semantically related keywords of my primary keyword on the sub headers (h2, h3 tags) and the body of the post. Usually my posts always contains images or screen shots illustrating the subject of my post, thus I also use some of the keywords in the alt and title tag of the images as well. These are some of the basic optimization strategy that I have been using to optimize each and every blog post that I write here. It is often a bit time consuming, but it really worth the effort when you see all the traffic coming in from many long tail keywords.

Optimizing your Blog Posts – The WordTracker Way!

Last week, Wordtracker, a major player in the keyword research industry launched an awesome free SEO tool for bloggers called – SEO Blogger.

SEO Blogger is a plugin for Firefox which allows you to carry out keyword research, when you are writing your blog post. It is very simple to use, you just install this add-on and a small Wordtracker button will appear at the bottom of your browser and whenever you click that their keyword search tool will load within your browser. So if you are writing a blog post you can load it easily alongside your screen and it can really help you to do some fantastic keyword research for your blog post.

Basically you type in a word you would like to research, and it will give you back related keywords with search volumes alongside it. So you can then choose which ones to target by adding them to your chosen keywords list. Once you do that it will automatically keep a count of how many times you have mentioned that particular key phrase on your post to give you some rough idea about your keyword density for that particular keyphrase.

Even though I’m not the biggest fan of WordTracker, I’m still really happy that I have a tool that is very easily accessible within my browser. Will this make me stop using other keyword tools? Absolutely not! But this will definitely save me some time!

Download it Free – SEO Blogger (Wordtracker Firefox Addon for Keyword Research)

If you haven’t heard already, Aaron wall of SEObook.com has recently launched a great SEO Toolbar. Aaron has previously launched a lot of popular tools & plugins that every search marketer loved and now this time he has created yet another awesome tool that brings everything together in a simple toolbar that you can easily install in your Firefox browser.

He writes:

What would happen if you smooshed together many of the best parts of Rank Checker, SEO for Firefox, the best keyword research tools across the web, a feed reader (pre-populated with many SEO feeds), a ton of competitive research tools, the ability to compare up to 5 competing sites against each other, easy data export, and boatloads of other features into 1 handy Firefox extension? Well, you would have the SEO Toolbar.

The toolbar shows a lot of useful data:

And that’s not all! The toolbar comes together with a lot of awesome features that I’m yet to explore. Aaron’s tools are always very useful and Interesting – So download the SEO Toolbar today and get your hands dirty!

The site settings that have been added to the new Webmaster Tools Settings page are:

1. Geographic Target - Lets you set your site’s Target Geographic Location. So you run a small local business based on United Kingdom, you can simply set your Target location as “United Kingdom” . This way your site will have higher chance of ranking for your keywords when a user performs a search from UK.

2. Preferred domain control - This lets you choose whether you would prefer to display “www” in your domain or not. This basically changes how your URL is displayed in the Google search results.

3. Opting in to enhanced image search - If you want your site’s images to be found via Google Image Search, you should opt-in for this feature.

4. Crawl rate control - Now Google gives you the ability to set your site’s crawl rate. So if you feel that Google is crawing your site too fast, you can reduce the speed or if you update your content too frequently and you want Google Crawler to come to your site more frequently then you can adjust your crawl rate according to your need. (SEOmoz recently did a test and concluded that changing the crawl rate doesn’t makes any substantial difference to a site.)

Google Webmaster Tools Team will continue to add more options in this dedicated settings page.

How Does Google Search-Based Keyword Tool Works

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land has already done a more detailed review of Google Search-Based Keyword Tool.

What it does is, basically it looks at your pages and finds out keyword that people are searching for in the Google Search engine but you are not targeting them in your Adwords Campaign. Baris Gultekin who is the Business Product Manager of Google Search-Based Keyword Tool told SEL that the value in this unique tool is that it gives advertisers a look at keywords that they are currently not targeting, that might bring in a positive ROI to the campaign. For example, a site that sells watches can use this tool to find a popular model or brand that they are currently not advertising for but has a lot of positive amount of searches in the search engine.

Trevor Claiborne at Inside AdWords Blog explains:

….you know that the Google search engine starts with searches conducted by users and helps them find relevant pages. But for keyword targeting, what you want is a tool that goes in the opposite direction by starting with your pages and identifying keywords that potential customers are searching on to find your products or services. The Search-based Keyword Tool does exactly this, leveraging search query data relevant to your website’s content. In other words, this new tool gives you keywords that are highly relevant to your site but are not part of your AdWords campaigns. This helps you take advantage of missed opportunities.

The Search-based Keyword Tool is currently available to advertisers of only US and UK. Google will be expanding to additional languages and more countries in the near future. You are welcome to try this tool out at http://www.google.com/sktool, and give the Adwords team your useful feedback.

My Two Cents

This is an excellent addition to the Google Adwords Tool family. I think this tool can also be used for competitive analysis. So if you have a strong competitor on your niche who spends a lot of money in adwords and sort of kills the whole market, you can easily run this tool on that domain and find out which keywords are they missing out and thus you can bid on those (at a low bid cost) and get all the traffic.

What is Adwords Editor?

AdWords Editor is simply a FREE downloadable software from Google that you can use to manage your AdWords campaigns instead of going to the adwords website to make your changes. Its biggest advantage over the Web based version adwords page is that it’s a lot faster. That’s a must have software for people who needs to manage large campaigns with a ton of keywords and lots of ads, landing pages, etc.

If you’re an existing Adwords editor user, you will be prompted to with an auto-update (all your campaigns, ad groups, settings, etc will be retained). If you are user of Google AdWords but never used AdWords Editor before, you can download the AdWords Editor 6.5 here (17 Mb).

Major Highlight of The Adwords Editor 6.5 – Keyword Opportunities tool

Keyword Opportunities tool basically helps you generate ideas for search keywords that you can target in your PPC campaign.

You can use the simply use expansion feature to generate keyword ideas.You’ll get a list of potentially related keywords with a 0-5 score for search volume and advertiser competition. You can also use the multiplier feature to combine 2-3 sets of lists to create new key phrases.

My Two Cents

I personally use Google Adwords Editor and find it pretty useful. However there so called new feature “Keyword Opportunities” isn’t really something new. It works exactly like the Google Keyword Tool (Web based), and in fact the web based tool is more detailed and should be used for extensive research. The only thing new in keyword opportunities tool is probably the multiplier feature; currently they don’t have it in the web based version. But overall i think its a good software to have, so if you haven’t tried it yet – Download Google Adwords Editor 6.5 now! Remember, its a 100% Free software from Google to manage your Adwords Account. Let me know how you find the software in the comments.