The question is, what do you do with your keyword lists once you’ve compiled them?

Just as there is no shortage of good keyword tools, there is also no shortage of metrics that you can use to determine the value of any given keyword. A few that tend to top our keyword selections lists are:

• Search volume: How many searches per day or month are being performed for each phrase. The higher the volume, the greater the opportunity to drive traffic to your site.

• Search competition: How many sites are displayed when performing a search using a keyword.

• Title competition: How many sites are displayed when performing a search for the keyword only in title tags.

• Direct Competition: Whether a specific competitor ranks for any particular keyword.

• KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index): A score based on how often a keyword is searched balanced against keyword competition.

Each of these metrics provides valuable insight, but they ultimately should not be used in selecting keywords. Stats like these can tell us what is happening with the keywords, but it can’t tell us why. And unless you know why something is, it’s impossible to make a smart decision about it.

Here is what the stats don’t tell us:

• Search volume: How many of these searches are actually relevant? Will the searcher find what their search intended on your site?

• Search competition: Are the sites ranking for these keywords legitimate competition? Are they truly optimized sites?

• Title competition: Are these competitors that cannot be defeated? How many of them will be easy to topple?

• Direct Competition: Do you know if your competitors are getting any value from ranking for these keywords?

• KEI: Does a competitive score mean you shouldn’t try to rank for the keyword? Is there long-term value in trying?

Looking at keywords in terms of volume or difficulty is a good measure for setting expectations in terms of time and budget it will take to get your site ranked. Looking at whether your competitors rank for that phrase only tells you whether your competitors rank for a phrase. For all you know they have performed zero keyword research, or went after a phrase because someone else did. That’s not a good signal by itself.

The problem with looking at any of the signals and data above is it does not tell you anything about searcher intent or whether you can convert those keywords into sales. It’s good data to have, but not the data you need to make good keyword selection decisions.

To do that, you need to apply this simple three-rule test for keyword selection:

1. Is the keyword relevant to your target audience? There are a lot of keywords that are seemingly relevant, but when you look closer at visitor intent, you find that the searcher is looking for something different entirely. Not even all “industry relevant” keywords will be relevant to your products or services in particular. Be sure to analyze visitor intent for each of your keywords. Unfortunately, the only tool that can do that is your brain.
2. Will the keyword deliver traffic? This question cannot be answered until the question above is. Not all traffic is the same, so you need to make sure it’s targeted traffic. Don’t let high search volume bias you. Even low volume keywords can deliver a fantastic amount of targeted traffic when combined with other long-tail phrases.
3. Will the traffic sent by the keyword convert? You can take your best guess here, but only time and analytics will tell. Every keyword you invest any significant amount of time in optimizing for SEO or PPC should be able to convert your visitors into customers. Spend more time investing in keywords with higher conversion rates.

The simplified version of this three-rule test is: Relevancy, Traffic and Conversions. Every good keyword should be able to satisfy each of these satisfactorily. If they are lacking anywhere, then the value of the keyword will also be lacking.

You can select relevant keywords that drive traffic, but if you can’t convert them, maybe it’s not as relevant as you thought. You can select relevant traffic that converts, but if the traffic isn’t there. Conversions will be sparse. If you select high-volume keywords that occasionally convert, but without the relevance, the conversion rates will be low and your effort will be high. Not a good mix for productivity!

There may be some wiggle-room between each keyword, but ultimately, you only want to select keywords that will deliver performance on all three levels. If not, then you may just be wasting your time! The best keywords are keywords that you have determined to be relevant and have tested to get results. Nothing else really matters.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

There are a lot of ways to measure the success of an SEO campaign and rankings can be a relevant factor, but that should not be the only factor. Heck, I’m not even sure it’s one of the top 5 most important measures of success! But instead of just yelling, “ranking reports suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck” at the top of my lungs, let’s look at how we can accurately measure the value of any particular keyword ranking. I think you’ll find a lot more here than meets the eye.

The Value of the Search Engine

Assessing the value from one search engine to the next isn’t always as easy as just looking at the popularity of any particular engine. Each engine has a different audience with varying degrees of interaction and conversion.

If you spend any amount of time looking at your site analytics, you’ll find that what gets huge click-throughs on Bing may not work so well over at Google. Similarly, what converts well on Yahoo may not convert at all on Bing.

Each engine has varying degrees of searcher interaction, search quality and searcher intensity. This ensures that the value of a top ranking on Google is very different from one on Bing or Yahoo, and not always for the reasons you think.

Market Share

Google is the clear leader in search engine market share department, currently getting more than 3x the search traffic over Yahoo and double that of Yahoo and Bing combined. This generally makes Google the primary search engine most people care about. If someone wants top search engine rankings, what they generally mean is they want top Google rankings.

But one would be wise not to ignore the “lesser” the bottom rungs of the big 3 engines. Collectively, they bring in over 95% of all search traffic. After that, it’s all small-time stuff, with Ask and AOl usually fighting it out for 1-3 percent.

Search Quality

A significant number of Google’s searchers are business owners, executives, employees and SEOs performing vanity searches and ranking reports. These are people that just want to see where they rank or where a competitor ranks for their keyword phrases. This skews the market share data. While many SEOs perform the same vanity searches on Bing and Yahoo as they do Google, it’s not to the same degree.

This means that Google may actually have a lower search quality than the other engines, as a larger percentage of searches on Bing and Yahoo are from people looking for actual information. But, Google still delivers more traffic for similarly ranked keywords on Bing and Yahoo. It may be a smaller percentage than the market share data suggests, but it’s still a significant piece of the pie.

Search Intensity

Each engine has different users with different levels of searcher intensity. Demographics can play a role in this, as do the type of searches peformed. Some searchers use different search engines depending on what they are looking for. Other engines attract users that are shoppers more than researchers, or are favored in one industry over another. This intensity can make the difference between a quality hit to your site or someone just doing some window shopping.

If you’re an e-tailer, you want ready-to-buy traffic. If you are an informational site, you want info seekers. Both of these can be intense searchers, but the intensity is focused in a different area. Look at the conversion rates from each engine and see where you prosper the most. That might help you determine where to focus more of your efforts.

The value of the keyword

Not every keyword is equal to the next, even if they are close in similarity. Keyword research and selection is no small task, nor is it unimportant. Taking the time to thoroughly research and understand the value of each of your keywords can be paramount to your SEO success and determining the value of that success.

Search Volume

There is a tendency for business owners to want to go after keywords based on search volume alone. If Keyword A gets searched 10x more often than Keyword B, Keyword A is seen as a “must get ranked” phrase. SEOs, on the other hand, often want to go after the “low hanging fruit” first. These are the lesser-searched-but-easier-to-rank phrases.

Neither of these are bad keywords, as long as there are expectations as to what value each top ranked keyword will provide. Sometimes it’s best to start with the lower-volume phrases as you build a foundation for the more difficult high-volume phrases that take more time.

What many find is the low-volume phrases can collectively outperform the high-volume, both in terms of traffic and conversions. Basing the value on a keyword on search volume alone can cause you to miss out on this important traffic.

Relevance and Conversions

If the keyword you’re ranking for doesn’t give the visitors the information they want, or the conversions you want, it doesn’t matter how much traffic it’s generating; it’s a poor keyword choice.

This can be difficult for many people to truly grasp. They just see how much traffic they are getting. But more traffic doesn’t mean more sales. Look for the keywords that are most relevant to what you have to offer and then check the conversion rates. If conversion rates are low, you may not want to place such a high value on this keyword.

The Value of Your Industry

Some industries are more popular than others. It’s easy to see some phrases for a particular industry get thousands of searches a day, where other phrases in another industry may only get a few dozen. When looking at keyword popularity, you can only compare the keywords within your particular field.

It doesn’t matter if thousands of people are searching for products or services that you don’t offer. What does matter is that there is enough searcher interest in what you do offer, and that you are able to build a successful business in that niche.

Unfortunately, there are some niche industries that simply do not have enough searcher interest to build a sustainable business model. They can get rankings for all their keywords, but the ROI isn’t there.

But don’t let low search volume scare you out of a successful model. Many niche industries thrive by ranking for hundreds of lower volume phrases that produce enough conversions to keep them profitable.

The Value of Your Profit Margin

Profit margins are a significant factor in the value of your search engine rankings. Low search but high profit keywords can be a goldmine by allowing you to get more money for less marketing investment. Many keywords – even those with very little traffic – can often be worth a premium if the profit that keyword brings in is significant enough.

In any industry, and with any marketing efforts, you need to be aware of what your profit margins are for each keyword related to any given product or service. Some products undoubtedly have a higher profit margin than others, which makes rankings for these keywords more valuable to you regardless of search volume.

The Value of a Keyword Ranking

The ranking your site or page gets for any given keywords does factor in to the amount of traffic you’re able to bring to your site. Statistically very few people click past the third page of search results, and no small number of people don’t scroll down to the end of the page. This means you have a greater chance of getting noticed the higher rankings you have.

That’s why everyone wants to be #1!

Unfortunately, as Highlander taught us long before there was SEO, there can only be one. Only one person can be #1 out of the dozens, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of others competing for that keyword. The chances of you obtaining that position is pretty slim, even with the best SEOs working for you.

Simply put, your commercial site may never overcome the highly popular informational site which is considered the de facto authority on the topic. It can happen, but its a long hard road!

But it helps to keep in mind that a well optimized site can actually do better in lower positions than the sites in higher positions. Carefully crafted title and description tags can make your site much more compelling to the searcher, especially when searcher intent is vague.

A #1 ranking isn’t always necessary, but it sure helps the ego!

The Value of Localization and Personalization

Search engines are working hard to personalize results for every searcher based on history, preferences and locality. As localized and personalized results become more prominent, search results can vary from searcher to searcher. That site you see in the top spot is not what someone else sees.

What you think is a valuable top ranking may only be showing up for you. Or what you see at the bottom of the SERPs may be much higher for the next person. This means there really is no reliable search engine ranking report.

So what is the value of measuring keyword rankings? Not a whole lot. Should you stop obsessing over search engine rankings? I recommend it.

But whether you look at rankings or not, it’s important realize that rankings are merely a single measure of your SEO success. It is not the measure of success. You can gain a lot more advantage by focusing on other more traditional marketing aspects of your site such as usability and conversion improvement than by focusing on top search engine rankings alone.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Keywords that bring users to the site via search engines can help, but visitors are prone to being vague when they use search engines.  But, there’s one place to go for insights into why visitors are on your site that gets overlooked.  It’s a place where your site visitors become much more precise about their browsing intent.  It’s your site search data.  No, not the keywords they used in search engines to find your site.  It’s the phrases they used to search ON your site after they arrived.

You don’t have a site search box on your site?  That’s a BIG no-no.  Around 80% of Web use starts with a search. Web users even type full URLs into search boxes instead of directly into the browser address bar.  The bottom line is that people are programmed to use search on the web whether it’s a search engine or business website.  They don’t want to look around.  They don’t want to think about how to find what they’re looking for.  They want it delivered to them.  That little box on your site is MUCH more important than you think it is, as it can be a very helpful tool for growing your business outcomes.  Why?  Because it’s about the best place you can go online to learn what your users want in their own words.

Most analytics vendors now provide a feature that collects and delivers your site search data to you in a report, making it easier than ever to get your hands on this golden data.  The sad thing is that most analytics profile owners are so unaware of site search analytics that they don’t even have data collection turned on (Google Analytics).  But if you are undertaking any kind of site optimization from content development to information architecture to linking structure, site search analytics can help immensely in making your website a better customer service tool to improve your bottom line.

So, make sure you jump into your profile and keep reading along with future posts about how to take advantage of this valuable data.

But, here’s the problem with your keyword research.  It’s static. You get a number and you compare it to other numbers at a single point in time.  That’s great for that day, that month, or even that year.  But as you know, your industry changes.  There’s new advances, new challenges, new demands, etc.;  and part of winning is staying ahead of your competition.

Well, how are you going to do that if you’re not understanding the ecosystem of your industry online RIGHT NOW and what’s forecasted for the future?  Those keywords you optimized for last year might still be great, but what’s old news?, what’s new?, where is there opportunity to get ahead of the competition?  Can you create content about a pressing question that searchers have that will help drive brand awareness?  The only way to see that is by looking at keyword search interest in trends and not static numbers.  It’s DYNAMIC keyword research. The trends give another dimension to the numbers that help tell a different story of what’s going on.

Are there popular keyword searches for our industry RIGHT NOW that aren’t currently on our keyword list?  If they are on our keyword list, are we currently ranking for them?  How does their search interest compare to phrases that we have targeted in the past and/or we do rank for? Has this changed since we last did keyword research? Why has it changed? Has it changed worldwide or just in specific countries? If search interest has gone up, have the visits to our website kept pace? Why or why not?

Not only can you look at trend volumes, but you can look at them by geography as well.  How does this lead to insights?  For example, you may look at your #1 targeted keyword and find that it’s very popular in the United States, but Canada is a close 2nd.  But, when you compare your brand name to your top 5 competitors in Canada, you’re nowhere to be found and your analytics data confirms it because you’re getting very little brand keyword visits to your site from Canada.  So, your product or service is very popular, but you aren’t.  Why?  How have you failed and how can you fix it?

If you’re Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft; you may notice how video games exploded in popularity around 2009 in India…

but wonder why your brand did not…

Now, I have no idea if there’s any legs to it, there may be a great reason why.  But, if there isn’t a great reason, then this would be good to know right?  Absolutely.

So, it’s simple tool but also a digging tool.  The more questions you ask of the data, questions your competitors aren’t asking; the more insights will pop out at you with market intelligence that can put you a step ahead.  You will know why the word “insights” is in the name (although I think a better name might have been “Insights from Search” because these insights aren’t just FOR search, they’re for every marketing channel).

Good marketing is a continuous endeavor of adjusting to the ebbs and flows of your industry’s ecosystem and looking for areas where you can get out in front of the competition by giving your prospects what they are telling you they’re looking for.  Get to know how to use this tool really well and you can do just that.  Stay tuned for more on this…

One of the best parts about the Internet is that whenever you think of a tool that could improve your site it’s likely that tool has already been created by somebody else in the form of a plugin.

Why waste time building a script or hiring somebody to build one when you can download a plugin from WordPress and have it up and running on your site in a matter of minutes?

Plugins can solve many of your website functionality issues, particularly when it comes to on-site SEO improvement, be it through helping you set up your title tags and descriptions or sending your XML sitemaps to Google.

As a WordPress evangelist and Internet marketing services company employee, here are the top plugins that I have found to be useful:

Akismet – With all the spammers running wild on the Internet, it’s vitally important to install Akismet or a similar spam-catching service on your site. The occasional spammy comment still comes through, but all in all Akismet can keep your blog spam-free.

All in One SEO Pack – This is one of my favorite plugins. Not only can you set your home title tags, description and keywords, you can also update said tags on every post. It’s the easiest way to keep every post on your blog optimized for the search engines.

Broken Link Checker – This plugin does exactly what it says, alerting you of broken links so you can either fix them or take out the hyperlink.

Contact Form 7 – I had been using a different contact form for months, but it broke and I switched to this one. It possesses a fairly simple interface, but it gets the job done.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin redirects the site’s main feed to Feedburner.com, so you want to install this if you are using Feedburner for your RSS feed needs.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates a sitemap that makes it easier for Google to crawl your site. I also use a mobile sitemap plugin and a Google News sitemap plugin so my content can be easily submitted to those places as well.

Multi-level Navigation Plugin – This plugin is great if you plan on using a dropdown menu on your home page, as you can easily denote the link and anchor text you want in each column.

podPress – This one makes adding a podcast to a post as simple as copying the URL where the file is hosted. It also features an automatic feed that can send your podcast right to iTunes.

Redirection – This allows you to redirect any of your pages, while providing full logs on all of them. Most importantly it logs all of your 404 errors and allows you to easily redirect those pages.

WP-Polls – This is a neat one for anybody who wants to host a poll on their site. You specify the number of answers allowed as well as whether readers can vote multiple times.

WP-Table Reloaded – I use this poll in a number of different ways on my basketball blog. I have used it to create roster, schedule and salary tables as well as tables of individual player statistics. This one is useful for any situation that requires a table.

WP Keyword Link – You can perpetually link any particular keyword on your site to whatever page you want with this plugin. It’s great for internal linking with a specified anchor text.

WPtouch – This transforms your site into an iPhone app-style theme when mobile users access your site. Mobile is becoming so important for SEO purposes that it’s essential that your site is mobile friendly.

If there is an issue, there probably is a plugin for it, and really this list only scrapes the barrel of the kind of plugins available on WordPress. If you aren’t using any of the plugins on this list, I would highly recommend investigating how they can improve your site.

So you know I had to be interested when I got an email about trackur, a new reputation monitoring tool from Andy Beal.

Here is what I like about trackur:

Trackur goes beyond just Google content. It tracks images, videos, Digg, del.icio.us, Twitter, as well as the usual news and blog stuff. Users can view their results using a cool AJAX enabled interface and get updates via email or RSS. You can save multiple searches, add filter keywords, save discovered items, and sort the results the way you want.

Ok, that’s quite a bit. I especially like the part about getting your info via RSS. That’s pretty cool.

So I gave it a test run on a search for my name and my company name. “Stoney deGeyter” only produced 22 search results using trackur dating all the way back to March of 2007. A Google search for my name produces about 35,000 results. Similarly, a trackur search for “Pole Position Marketing” produced 26 results going all the way back to December of 2006 while a Google search gives me over 21,000.

Doing some more comparisons, for “Pole Position Marketing” Google produces 230 image results and 17 blog results. My own name produced over 1,200 blog results, a few video results (thanks Sage!) and another 300 images.

Ultimately, trackur didn’t give me anything I didn’t already know about. Reading the FAQ page they believe trackur will discover 99% of the information out there. Google does a pretty good job of finding stuff too.

But unlike Google, trackur comes with a price tag that is, well, pretty steep.

To monitor a single search you’re going to pay $88 per month. That’s about what I might expect to pay for a full year subscription, and the option of tracking at least five keywords. trackur has two other pricing options, $188 per month for five searches and $388 for 15 searches.

If trackur will be able to find more information than I can get from Google Alerts and substantially quicker then I can see the value in the service for larger corporations. But on the individual/small business level I just don’t see the value or return in paying the rather substantial monthly fee. I’m open to be convinced, but I wasn’t during the 14-day trial.

As always, please submit any bug reports or upgrade requests to help us continue to make this tool better.

What Does CodeMonitor do?

For those of you who don’t know what the CodeMonitor tool is or does… well it’s pretty cool, if you ask me.

Simply put, it notifies you when any web page that you are monitoring changes. Now this isn’t a substitute for an RSS feed, this is something entirely different. CodeMonitor allows you to monitor select pages of a website and will email you whenever that page changes. Once you get that email you can login to see the new changes highlighted against to the previously “saved” version of the page.

Here, let me show you…

Let’s say that I wanted to keep tabs on what a competitor is doing whenever they make changes to their pages for SEO purposes (or any other reason). After creating my CodeMonitor account (yes, an account is needed so we can store your monitored pages for a daily comparison) I then set up all my monitored pages. Each time I login now I get a screen that looks like this:

Now let’s say that several of my monitored pages change. The next morning I find an email that tells me what pages changed and prompts me to login:

I quickly see which pages have changed and I can click on the little compare icon which will let me see the old version side by side with the new version of the page:

This view shows me the on-page text (with Title and Metas) of the last “saved” version on the right and the most recent version on the left. The green highlights show me exactly what has changed between the two versions. I’m able to scroll each side independently so I can see the differences all the way down the document. Once I’ve done my analysis of the changes I can then hit the save icon and the new version becomes the master version from which all daily comparisons are made.

I also have the option of switching to two other views, one allows me to compare the HTML code of the page and the other is to compare the page as it looks in a browser. Here is a shot of the same page above in code compare view:

The browser view still has bugs and isn’t comparing properly so I won’t show you a screenshot, but you get the gist.

How else can I use it?

Not only does CodeMonitor let me keep up on what my competitors are doing but I can also use it to monitor pages that are not set up for RSS. I currently use it for wikipedia pages, Google webmaster pages, etc.

But I also have one more use for it for which it is extremely helpful, and that is to monitor client pages that we have optimized. Yeah, that’s right, we monitor our client’s too.

Why? Well you know how it is, you spend a lot of time editing page content, title tags, etc. and then a week later the client goes and makes changes from an old version of the page. Poof, all your SEO is gone. But most times we wouldn’t know it until we got back in to analyze the site, but with CodeMonitor we know the very next day. This then allows us to go in and see what changes the client made. Sometimes they are not significant but sometimes they are. Either way, we know.

And here is where we get to a couple of other cool features of CodeMonitor. If you have editing access to a page you are monitoring (such as a client page) you can control which pieces of code get monitored and which don’t. This is especially handy when changes are made to global headers or footers or when there are revolving elements on a page. You can simply insert some snippets of code to tell CodeMonitor to ignore those portions of the code. When changes are made to the code marked for ignore you won’t bother with it or have to go in and save a dozen site pages because of it.

Other Features

Another couple of handy features is that you can tell CodeMonitor to ignore comment tag changes or to notify you only when changes are to the text are made. The latter ignores all coding changes and only focuses on textual elements and the title and metas.

So there you have it. Check out CodeMonitor and start monitoring and spying today!

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is the greatest open-source browser available. Firefox offers users complete control over the browser featuring tabs, pop-up blocking, useful toolbars, and many themes. Firefox is W3C compliant which means developers will not have to slave to make sure CSS is rendering correctly like IE. In addition, the browser has thousands of extensions that will aid developers and SEOs alike.

Google Docs

Google Docs has made document creation and sharing simple through an easy-to-use web document interface. Google Docs offers users an alternative to Microsoft Office with tools for word processing, spreadsheets, and more recently presentations. Google Docs allows users to share documents with other users ensuring easy collaboration. For more info, check out the Google Docs Blog and WebWare’s Five Google Docs Hints.

Adium

Adium is a Mac-based application that allows users to connect to multiple instant messenger accounts at the same time while using a single application. It works with AOL, MSN, Google Talk and more. Looking for a close PC cousin? Try Pidgin.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar makes keeping track of important dates easy. The web-based software easily integrates with Gmail and all other Google products. Check out Lifehacker’s guide to using GCal and all the tricks that are possible.

Programmers Notepad

Programmer’s Notepad is a very easy to use HTML editor similar to Notepad. Unlike Notepad, however, PN is a text editor with several extra features such as syntax highlighting, quick search, docking tools, and code outlining. The program is very easy to use and a straightforward solution for SEO’s and developers alike.

Handbrake

Open source program Handbrake is an easy to use DVD to MPEG 4 ripper. This tool allows users to make backup copies of DVDs as well as import movies into iTunes or iPods. This isn’t exactly an “seo tool” but everyone needs to have some time to relax, right?

7-Zip

7-Zip is an easy to use file archiver to pack / unpack all types of files such as zip, tar, gzip, etc. 7-Zip is a much faster alternative to the zip programs installed on Windows XP and Vista.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer isn’t just another Microsoft program. Although I’ve already bashed the company twice in this post alone, I can’t say that there wasn’t any decent program to come out of the MS developer warehouse. Live Writer is a tool aimed at making blogging easier. It allows users to publish directly to most blogs like Blogger, Typepad, etc., in a very easy to use interface. The program allows users to preview their posts and compose entries while offline.

Gmail

What need I say about Gmail, quite possibly the greatest email program in the world. For starters, Gmail offers users up to nearly 6GB of storage, tagging, email conversations, and more recently IMAP. Gmail easily integrates into programs like Mail and Thunderbird, as well as iPhones and other mobile devices. Plus Gmail continually strives to make improvements aimed at bettering the user’s experience. Web-based mail is here to stay.

Google Analytics

At this point it’s safe to assume Google is taking over the world since three of my ten faves all come from the search engine monster. But in any event, Google has gotten analytics right. Google Analytics is a free web-based program designed to improving your site’s marketing and results. The program features a very easy interface and provides web owners a variety of features ranging from search trends, site trends, geography reach, and much more. Every SEO ought to at least try out this program to see what it can do for you and your site. Check out the Official Analytics Blog for more info.

Like many of you, I use a social bookmarking site to keep my blogs nice and neat and clean for me. I go to one site and am able to read all 18 blogs without having to go the actual blog site unless necessary. Pretty convenient, right?

Well, I thought so too, until I realized just how many social bookmarking sites there are. And it seems to me that, like the blogs I read, these social bookmarking sites seem to double in a week’s time.

Here are some non-niche-specific bookmarking sites (and I’m not even including some of the major players):

del.icio.us: A social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too.

Digg: A place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, …

reddit: reddit is a source for what’s new and popular online. reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing links or
submit your own! …

StumbleUpon: The best way to discover great websites, videos, photos, blogs and more. Channel surf the internet and get personalized recommendations …

Technorati: The recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now.

Twitter: Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.

While many of the above are rather general, many of the below are specifically targeting those in marketing and/or marketing-related fields:

Marketing Lens: Love internet marketing? Each day, Marketing Lens identifies the top 15 online marketing stories and blogs of the day.

Small Business Brief: Serving those in small business by providing resources, informative articles, current news, software directory and small business ideas forum.

Sphinn: The place for web, online, search, interactive and internet marketers to share news stories, talk within subject-specific discussion forums.

I can’t tell you how many times I get emails asking to “sphinn” this or “fetch” that, to “digg” this or “reddit” that. It’s almost too much to handle sometimes. Then again, I do understand the want of gaining a level of notoriety through this relatively new media frenzy of social bookmarking. Who doesn’t want to be popular?

It’s a lot like high school, where you have the different cliques. Except in regard to social bookmarking and networking, rather than having the cheerleaders and the band geeks and the rebels, you have the tech geeks, the media companies, and the marketers.

This is a popularity contest.

The more friends/fans/followers you have, the more likely you are to get on the front page and be the next hot topic.

The first session of the last day was site clinic, hosted by Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey. In this session, audience members’ web sites were reviewed from a usability and SEO standpoint. The site clinic brought about many good tips and ideas:

• Always have call to actions above the fold
• Keep higher ranking word links above the fold
• Stay away from blue text unless using it for links
• Give users a sense of place on every page by using breadcrumbs
• Use benefit-oriented copy to show users what your products would do for them
• Utilize a context rewrite module for long URL’s
• Check your site using Yahoo! Site Explorer to discover link structure

Meet The Crawlers

This session was moderated by Danny Sullivan and featured representatives from four major search engines to answer attendee questions. I think we were all hoping that each engine would give away their secret algorithm, but that didn’t happen. Instead, the representatives answered questions from the audience similar to that of a politician at a debate. They wouldn’t give straight answers to questions ranging from link baiting and paid links to site structure. I found this session more of a headache than anything else.

Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price Of One

This session was the last session of the conference. It was hosted by Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey. In this session, the two speakers presented ways to not only build a search engine friendly site, but how to fix site usability. There’s no point of having a number one ranking in Google if your site doesn’t get any conversions. The session discussed the importance of having proper information architecture, using clear, visible links, and keeping important information above the fold.

Overall, the conference has given me a greater understanding of the SEM world. I also met some neat people along the way. I would recommend SES to any search marketer wanting to learn more about their field.

And, really, it wasn’t how she looked that she was trying to figure out anyway. Any mirror can tell you that. She wanted to know what people thought of her- beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all.

So what do people think about you? What do they think about your business? Do you know? Do you know how to track it? There’s a few tricks to monitoring these things via the web, and thats what I’d like to show you today…

How Do You Figure Out What The Internet Thinks About You?

We all would like to find out other’s opinions of us- as scary as it might turn out, we like to keep an eye on our public image. And when you take that concept to the internet, it can be a really scary prospect. It’s a huge place- if you’re going to stare into that abyss searching for an answer you better have a plan.

And this brings us to this week’s installment of Info Addict: 3 Easy Steps to Managing Your Online Reputation.

Step 1: Get Access to a Feedreader

If you don’t have a feedreader- online or offline- go get one. You have 2 choices for the bulk of this: (1) spend a half hour every day searching the web for information about yourself or (2) let the web do it for you via a feedreader. If you need any help, visit my last Info Addict post.

Step 2: Try out a few Vanity Searches

What you’re going to do is perform a “Vanity Search,” and then you’re going to subscribe to this search in your feed reader. Vanity searches are just searches for your name or the name of your business. It can be helpful to experiment with alternate spellings, abbreviations and misspellings so that you capture everything being said about your or your brand on the internet.

Step 3: Add feeds of your searches to your feedreader

“What’s that,” you ask, “you can subscribe to more than just blogs and news?” Yes. many sites will allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds of searches, and many search engines are adding this feature as well. Now this step can vary from engine to engine, so I’ll explain how to do it with 2 of my favorite sources, Bloglines and Google.

How to subscribe to a bloglines search:
Once you know have a list of the different variations of your name you want to monitor on the net, you can go to bloglines.com and subscribe to them. Once you hit bloglines, in the top right of the page you’ll see the search feature. There’s lots of options listed but for now ignore them- just do the default search for “posts.” Once you’ve completed the search, you’ll see just below it a couple links to subscribe to the search. Add it to your feedreader and off you go. Rinse and repeat for all your searches.

How to subscribe to a Google search:
The catch with Google is that not every search is available for subscription yet. As of now, it’s available for Blogs and Video- so we’ll highlight the blog search. Just do the same thing- perform a search for each of your variations and you’ll find the option to subscribe on the left hand side, below a few other options.

Bonus Step 4: Do Your Best to Go To Sleep Tonight, Instead of Endlessly Refreshing Your Feedreader

As a company, as well as an individual, it’s more important than ever to monitor your online reputation. There’s so much value there- from learning unexpected lessons about how your customers feel about or use your product, to protecting your brand from slander or misrepresentation.

Now that you’ve mastered the Vanity Search, you’ll probably want to subcribe to a few other searches like the names of your competition, your suppliers, your favorite sports team, your 5th grade crush…

“…represent the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization”

which:

“… is a resource of incredible value”

and futhermore:

“…that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google’s algorithm is contained…”

I am both embarrassed and encouraged:

Embarrassed that the “industry leaders”, have made so little progress towards a practical understanding of modern search engine mechanics, thereby giving a degree of merit to detractors of search optimization who openly voice their skepticism.

Encouraged by the idea that here in Reno, Nevada we are doing things in our little corner of the SEO world that are light years beyond what the “SEO Elite” are doing (I’ll go ahead and pat myself on the back and extend the same to Stoney as soon as I see him.)

I’d like to point out what I feel are the most noteworthy points of interest and expert comments within the “Ranking Factors V2″. The following points are noteworthy because of the nonsensical nature, wildly contradictory “expert opinion” or outright comedic value which they offer.

Most Entertaining Expert Comments on the Ranking Factors V2:

According to one expert almost everything: “May hurt your rankings if it is too well aligned with the page title and anchor text. “

So if your: (insert ranking factor of choice:

• Primary on-page descriptor, the H1 Tag
• Keyword Use in H2, H3, H(x) Tags
• Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag
• etc., etc.)

and your Title element and your anchor text all accurately describe the topic of your page; it may hurt your rankings?
Huh, maybe an anti-relevancy sorting algorithm is in use?

“Being a fairly new SEO’er, I’d say that from all the stories I’ve heard compared to my actual experimentations, I’d say this has little value if you try to do white-hat, but could be more effective with massive link campaign / spamming (while getting you flagged!)”

How does a “fairly new SEO’er” armed with “stories” qualify as a “leader in the world of organic search engine optimization”?

Concerning the use of keywords in your body text: Once again, better to than not to, but hardly any value.

Better to use the words that define your topic when presenting your topic, than not to. Ummmmm…Sounds like good advice.
And while your at it make sure to call people by their own names and not other people’s names. And just in case you better use a phillips screwdriver on that phillips screw and use your car key to drive your car.

“The link populairty of the linking page and site is probably the most important factor when deciding on a link.”

If you have time to do only one SEO action on your site, take the time to create good titiles.

If you only have time to create good titles, you’re not an SEO.

Concerning the Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site: If it doesn’t I’ve wasted 14 years of my life.

I don’t think Google takes that into account, but I hear personalization is coming.

Most Entertaining “Ranking Factors”

Relevance of Site’s Primary Subject Matter to Query
I was unaware that whole websites are now being furnished as search results.

Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)
So if the text is about a certain topic that may help it rank for that topic. Awesome! Good Find Guys!

Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag
Is click-through important?

PageRank (as measured by the GG Toolbar) of Linking Page
The Google Toolbar shows PageRank?

HTML Validation of Document (to W3C Standards)
Validate Google’s HTML

My conclusion

If todays top SEO’s really are doing well for their clients, they don’t have a clue why. That is a professional liability.

As a quick aside, and along these lines, over at search engine guide I made an argument for website validation as an important part of the optimization process. I don’t believe 100% validation makes a difference for rankings, but I outlined there why it is worth taking the time to do. At the very least it helps you identify search engine unfriendly problems.

For this series I figured we’d start at the top: the domain name. Many argue about the value of using keywords in the domain name and whether that will make any difference at all in the ranking algorithms. My opinion is if it does make a difference, it’s not much. But I also believe that the full process of optimization is largely about doing a whole lot of “not much”.

The smartest thing to do is make sure your business name uses your keywords. And no, I don’t mean you should name your business No Doc Home Mortgage Loans Company. But if you sell mortgages it makes sense to use mortgages in your name, being sure you can secure the domain name as well.

Since there is really not a lot you can do to “optimize” your domain or even make it search engine friendly so I’ll leave you with links to series of articles I’ve written previously on Securing a Marketing Rich Domain Name. That’ll give you some food for thought.

Intro (see link above)
Build Your Brand
Secure a .com
Don’t Hyphenate
Spell Words Properly
Type-In Traffic
Mispellings
Hyphenated Versions
YourDomainSucks.com
Use Proper Redirects

I feel compelled to begin with a little disclaimer: in no way was today’s blogging activity here at PPM orchestrated to be a pick on Rand day. We openly praise and discuss much of Rand’s work here at the office and we are very much fans of SEOMoz.

With that said…

Today I was reading an interesting post over at SEOMoz in which Rand put forth the idea that perhaps submitting a Google sitemap could be detrimental as it may cause pages to be indexed which are unworthy of inclusion in the index (Google SpamMaps?) . The main point that I got from the post was that non-inclusion served as a pass/fail metric to indicate the strength of a given page.

I have a couple of problems with Rand’s position. Firstly I can state with a good deal of certainty that inclusion in a Google sitemap does not equal inclusion in Google’s index. I have experienced this first-hand and I’m quite certain that Google is still evaluating index worthiness of individual pages, even those crawled via sitemap.

Lastly (and most disappointingly), is the matter of relying on non-inclusion as a metric to determine a page’s index-worthiness. If SEO’s don’t have an independent grasp on determining whether or not a page should/will be indexed; then I think that is a big problem.

According to the post, non-inclusion is a good indicator of poor importance (“link juice”) and/or poor content. By submitting a sitemap one may cause these factors to be overlooked by the search engine. Again I can’t escape from the fact that if you need Google’s refusal of your work to let you know that it is no good, then perhaps it’s time to upgrade one’s skill-set.

The ability to simulate and analyze optimal link structures and site architecture is a fundamental SEO skill. A keen eye for sound, relevant content is at the top of the list as well, and these are just the basics.

I am a dedicated SEOMoz reader and I have great respect for Rand who frequently demonstrates great SEO acumen and experience. I do however think that maybe he ran with this one a little too quickly.

Today I will be sharing 2 of my favorite search tools. These are either search engines which furnish search results in a new and innovative way or search services which enhance or refine the search results of traditional search engines.

Service: Grokker
Description: Grokker is a cool visual clustering search engine with a unique way of presenting search results.
Use: Identification of logical concept ontologies especially in regards to how sub-topics relate to parent topics and the general level of granularity at which various sub-topics exist.
Screen Shot:
[image no longer available]

Service: Quintura Search
Description: A query submitted to Quintura produces a visual map of concepts related to the query. Placement in relation to the query terms reveals conceptual similitude. Quintura then allows you to interact with your query in various ways to refine your search results in real time. For example you can promote, demote, append and expand upon individual search terms to refine the entire query.
Use: Identification of concept spaces and even specialized industry vocabularies.
Screen Shot:
[image no longer available]

As you can imagine there are all sorts of treasures hidden within this massive data pile. The trick is formulating effective queries that will deliver the goods. I call this Google-Mining and below you will find some of my best tools for striking gold.

A Word of Caution: As well-intentioned as Googlebot is, sometimes it indexes information that was not intended for public perusal. Please respect other’s privacy and digital property! Don’t save or even view any data that is obviously intended to be private. This includes media objects, personal files, business data, etc.

Finding Applications

Use the following search syntax to locate applications:

“parent directory ” /appz/ -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums

inurl:[manufacturer ie.Sun] filetype:iso

Finding MP3′s

Use the following search syntax to locate MP3′s:

“parent directory ” MP3 -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums

?intitle:index.of? mp3

Finding Games

Use the following search syntax to locate games:

“parent directory ” Gamez -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums

Finding Movies

Use the following search syntax to locate movies:

“parent directory “Xvid -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums

According to NASA, the integrated solution named iEarth, will be available for use by anyone in April.

Text Analysis Tools:

• Web Vocabulary Profiler: An awesome text disambiguation suite.
• Textalyser: An old favorite for quick and easy text stats.

Search Tweaked:

• Search Mash: Google’s experiment with search result integration.
• GMBMG: Give me back my Google furnishes “pure” or non spammy versions of Google search results..

Technical Reference:

• MathWorld: The definitive math resource online.
• Soople: Online calculators.

more to come…

[quote]In the past, the only way to prevent this association was to routinely clear the cookies from your browser. Lost in the Crowd takes a different approach: automatically and over time placing a number of random queries through the search engines you use from your actual tracking cookie. What searches did you care about versus those that were just made up? There’s no way for the search engine, or anyone else, to tell.[/quote]

Now, get lost!

In the world of online marketing, tracking changes to competitor, client and industry related websites can not only help you stay current on important issues, but can also help you gather additional competitive intelligence data simply and easily. RSS is great, but its not everywhere. For tracking what you can’t with RSS, we have developed the CodeMonitor Page Tracking tool.

While your reasons for wanting to track pages may vary, here are a few common reasons that don’t always lend themselves to RSS.

Competitor Tracking
Tracking even minor changes to your competitor websites. You want to know whenever a competitor adds a new product, reduces prices, or even makes changes that are designed to improve their search engine rankings. Changes in their title and meta description tags as well as on-page content can all provide you important business intelligence.

Industry Updates
When respected web developers make new tools available to the public, you want to know about it. Or you want to keep updated when informational sites add industry relevant articles or links to other important industry related information. Infrequent monitoring can often put you at a competitive disadvantage.

Client Changes
If you are a firm that provides online marketing services you need to keep an eye on all your clients. Even the smallest changes made, without your knowledge, can be devastating to both rankings and conversion performance.

If you are the client, you want to know whenever your search marketing firm makes changes to your own site, no matter how small. You know that their changes can effect your public image so you need to stay on top of what changes are actually being made to your website.

Without sounding too much like a commercial, if you want to track pages for any of the reasons above, you really ought to give CodeMonitor a try. Here is a quick rundown of the benefits:

• Tracks page changes. This included code changes such as title and description tags as well as on page content. SEO changes, pricing changes, product additions would all be included
• Provides multiple comparison views. You can see the changes in html code view, text only view, or visible (browser) view.
• No hunting for the changes. In each view changes between the old and the new versions are highlighted for you.
• Track any and as many pages as you want.
• 24-hour updates. If any change is made to any page you are tracking you’ll receive an email first thing in the morning notifying you.

If you have a need for competitive tracking, give CodeMonitor a try. It’s completely web based so there is no program to install. Check out CodeMonitor today.

Shows knowledge of this subject
average: 5.0

OK, so at least I know what I’m talking about. Though I have to admit that it’s not often hard to convey superior knowledge to a group of people who know little to nothing about a particular topic. It’s more important that they actually learn something!

Is well-prepared
average: 3.75

Good marks, but I know I could have been better prepared. I think I relied too heavily on the book when I should have just let myself talk, instead of thinking about what to say. I know the information and wrote the book, so it’s not like I need that to tell me what to talk about.

Uses time effectively
average: 4.0

We were pressed for time from the beginning and really didn’t even get through all the materials. Because of this I know some students felt that the workshops were not the best use of time, but I still think those we did were useful. Next time the class will be 4 hours longer, but even still I suspect that will be too short. I’ll be approaching the material in a different way as well and hope to hit everything that is important.

Is professional
average: 4.75

I’m actually surprised at this because I actually felt a bit stiff, at lest for the first two classes. For the second half I was more relaxed and felt less like an “instructor” as I did someone simply helping a group of people take hold of some new information.

Encourages participation
average: 4.75

The workshops were all about participation and a lot of times I really allowed the students to use their own business sites as examples. With more time in the next session I hope to be able to expand on this aspect as well.

Answers questions effectively
average: 4.75

When I knew them!

Instructor Average: 4.5

That first section was all about me and my teaching capabilities, the next section shows my true worth as a teacher, or at the very least our ability to accurately represent what the course material will cover.

Course materials were useful
average: 4.50

Glad to hear that the book was of value. This was the hardest part to know before hand because you never know who’s going to sign up for the class and what skill level they bring with them. It looks like we nailed this one!

Your knowledge in this subject increases
average: 3.50

Everybody learned something. Maybe not what they thought they would learn or what they hopes, but at the very least we provided the students a real education.

You are very satisfied with this course
average: 4.50

I know for some the course wasn’t what they had expected and because of that we are working out a new course title and description. We are hoping this will clarify any miscommunications.

You would recommend this course to others
average: 4.25

Ah, the true measure of a course’s value. If you would recommend it to someone else then you know you didn’t have a dog on your hands!

This course was described accurately in the guide and/or web
average: 4.50

This one I’m surprised about because I heard very specifically from some that felt that this course wasn’t quite what they expected. We’ll do better next time, I hope.

General Average: 3.90

A few other comments added by the students can be summarized as: add more visuals, more examples, more time. We are correcting the time issues which hopefully will allow for more visuals and examples.

Total Average: 4.22

Overall, I would have to say the class is a success. There are definitely areas for improvement and we’ll be hitting on those next time around. I enjoyed the class and I got the impression that the students did to. I’d like to thank them all for their participation!

“Their first issue will hold about 40 pages, and would be the first magazine devoted solely to search marketing. Publisher Boris Mordkovich commented that, ‘The goal of the magazine is to bring all of the information that’s floating out there to end-users that need it to improve their advertising campaigns in a simple yet effective way.’ “

If you want to receive 4 free issues (a year’s subscription) of this (hopefully) awesome magazine, just go to the homepage at Searchmarketingstandard.com and fill out the short form.

E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building Optimizing and Marketing Your Website Online

Go beyond search engine optimization and learn how to get maximum performance from your website starting from the ground up. Search engine optimization, while important, is only one component to increasing your web site’s exposure on the Internet. Learn how to incorporate your SEO campaign into a much broader e-marketing campaign designed to transform your site into a high-performance marketing machine.

Buy the E-Marketing Performance E-Book for only $97 today.

E-Marketing Performance is filled with valuable and actionable online marketing information that will help you create a better optimized and more user-friendly website that not only will help you flood your site with new, highly-targeted traffic but also help you improve your sales conversion rate at the same time.

Want to know more? Take a look at the entire Table of Contents to see how chock full of valuable search engine marketing information this e-book is.

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• Improved HTML Code Comparison
  Previously CodeMonitor would highlight an entire line of code when a small edit in that line of code had been made. This made it difficult to pinpoint the change made in exceptionally long lines of code. The new version of CodeMonitor will now only highlight the actual code changed, rather than the full line of code, making spotting coding changes that much easier.
• New Comparison Views
  CodeMonitor now allows you to switch to two new comparison views, along with the standard “code” view.
1. Text Comparison
   Don’t want to sludge through all that code and only want to see changes made to textual content? Now you can switch to a text-only view which will display just the on-page text and highlight the changes made accordingly.
2. Web Page Comparison
   We have also added the ability to compare changes made through the eye of a browser. No code, and not just text, but view the page as you see it in your browser, with recent changes highlighted.

Have not yet tried CodeMonitor? You can read more about it or get a CodeMonitor account here.