Keyword research is one of the fundamentals of PPC. Keywords are the building blocks of nearly all search-based PPC campaigns. It’s one of the first tasks new PPC professionals learn – without good keyword research skills, one can’t build a good campaign.

There is a seemingly endless number of good keyword research tools out there. Some are free; some cost money. Some are more accurate than others.

But five free tools are often overlooked in the PPC keyword research process. These tools can help take your campaigns to the next level.

Google Trends

Google Trends isn’t a keyword research tool per se. It won’t give you thousands of keyword ideas on which to bid.

Instead, Google Trends provides data on search volume over time. It can tell you whether a keyword is gaining in popularity or falling out of favor among searchers.

Let’s look at an example: the term “Olympics.” Let’s say you’re in the travel business, and you have something to offer those who plan to attend the Games in London. You’re considering bidding on “Olympics” terms, but you want an idea of how much volume you might get.

This is where Google Trends comes in. While typical keyword research terms provide historical search volume data, Google Trends shows, well, how volume is trending – thereby helping predict future search volume. Here’s what the term “Olympics” looked like on July 25:

Not surprisingly, search volume skyrocketed over the last 4-5 weeks, as the Games drew closer. A detailed look at the graph reveals that search volume is 3-4 times what it was at the beginning of 2012.

As an advertiser, this means you can take the search volume estimate from your keyword tool and quadruple it.

It’s important to note that Google Trends works best for high-volume keywords; long-tail terms don’t have enough aggregate data to show trends.

Google Insights for Search

Google Insights for Search is like Google Trends on steroids. Not only does it provide trend data, it also shows top related search terms and rising searches:

Google Insights for Search essentially marries keyword research with trend data. Now you have the top keyword phrases related to your search term (“Olympics,” in this case), as well as rising searches: searches that have increased in volume recently.

This data can be used for keywords on which to bid – or, it can be used to research negative keywords that you might need to add to your account! If you’re promoting trips to London over the December holidays, for example, you’ll want to stay away from Olympic terms – and Google Insights can help you find those terms to negative out.

Google Contextual Tool

If you’ve been around search for a while, you might remember the Google Wonder Wheel: a fun tool that created visual maps of keyword sets and their relationship to one another. Not only was this a helpful tool for keyword research, it also assisted PPC managers in ad group creation – each keyword group in the Wonder Wheel could conceivably become an ad group in a PPC account.

Wonder Wheel went away about a year ago, but it’s been reincarnated as the Contextual Targeting Tool. I saw this link in my AdWords account, but its name led me to believe that it was a tool for the display network. Not so.

The Contextual Targeting Tool takes a single keyword, finds related terms, and groups them into ad groups. While not all of the keywords will be relevant, it’s now much easier to find those irrelevant terms and eliminate them.

For a detailed tutorial on using the Contextual Targeting Tool, check out this post.

Microsoft Ad Intelligence

By now you might be thinking that Google has a monopoly on cool and free keyword research tools. Not by a long shot! For a really different and insightful keyword research experience, download the free Microsoft Ad Intelligence tool. It’s an Excel plugin, so once you’ve installed it, it’ll be ready to use every time you open Excel.

This tool isn’t new, but it’s vastly improved over previous versions. Here’s a look at all the options the tool offers:

To use the tool, simply enter a keyword or group of keywords, select the cell(s), and then choose an option from the ribbon. Ad Intelligence will return your results as a new tab in the Excel spreadsheet, which is handy for uploading to your PPC accounts.

In fact, you can use the tool to directly post new keywords and ad groups to your adCenter account! How handy is that?

Facebook and LinkedIn

Social media channels probably aren’t the first things to come to mind when thinking about keyword research. But they can be incredibly useful for discovering what’s important to your target audience.

One quick and easy research trick is to log in to Facebook and/or LinkedIn and start typing your keyword into the search box. Even before you finish typing the word, you’ll start seeing a list of suggestions.

While the suggestions may not always translate into keywords, it gives you a great idea of what people are talking about and who the major players stakeholders are. You can also get negative keyword ideas here. In the Olympics example, if the Paralympics are not relevant to you, then you’ll want to add that as a negative keyword.

You can use the same technique in the ads interface in both Facebook and LinkedIn:

From this list, Greek locations such as Olympia, Greece would be likely candidates for negative keywords.

The next time you need to do some keyword research, give one of these tools a whirl. What other free keyword research tools do you like?

Join us for SES San Francisco 2012 from Aug. 13 to 17. Learn the latest tools, trends, and strategies in search engine optimization (SEO), paid search (PPC), analytics, social media, local, mobile, and much more. Hear presentations from Facebook and LinkedIn and checkout the new SES session formats, SES Talkback and Meet the Experts. Time is running out, so register before August 13 and save up to $200!

Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2195435/5-Overlooked-PPC-Keyword-Research-Tools

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by Michiel Van Kets
July 30, 2012

Michiel Van Kets writes for Luminous SEO Company. His many years of experimenting behind the scenes give him a unique inside in the world of seo. His SEO Company offers monthly link building packages. The Luminous team does all the time-consuming work as well as keyword searches and everything else connected to link building. Also professionals in directory submission, article writing submission service and do follow blog comments, the Luminous team are proficient at what they do with the skills and qualification to help a company realize its potential. The Luminous group provide the equal amount of care and attention to every part of their tasks, whether it’s basic jobs that take up time or deep link directories, and that’s why they are different and have an outstanding reputation. Constant research ensures satisfied customers when their Google URL found, and services are constantly improving, this is what presents the challenge and satisfaction that makes it a great job in a beautiful location.

Michiel Van Kets
has written 1 articles for PromotionWorld.
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When your potential clients include your location when searching for your keywords then google shows on top of the regular results also listings from google maps, that’s what we call local search.

If your site offers a local service, like gardening or local products, like a retail store, then it’s very important to make sure your site can be found in local search.

Below the most important and crucial steps you need to take to get it right, because google is very strict and without a proper business listing within google maps, your site will simply not show in the local search. It really is very important.

1.    Get Your Google Account

You need to tell google about your business. To do so the every first step is to get a google account and set up google plus. Then you can create your business listing in Google by adding it to google places, which works in associated with google maps, which is why it shows up in google local search.

2.    Read The Google Places Quality Guidelines

Be aware of what you’re doing; you’re asking google for a favor; don’t abuse it. they actually do manual checks, and if they don’t like how you filled in your business listing, as in; if you’re too much preoccupied with spewing promotional language and stuffing it with keywords, then you will be treated as such; a spammer. So read the google guidelines first, there just a few pages, it really doesn’t take too long to do it right from the first time, to make sure it actually pays off.

3.    Get Reviews

You can imagine just about anybody will try to cheat with those reviews, so google is really very strict. Still, as long you make sure you help your clients with the review and they simply give a genuine testimonial, then you’re done with setting it up. In other words; yes, do try to get a couple of genuine reviews, but be very careful, because a small mistake might get you in trouble. Obviously the very thing you need to do is to read the google review guidelines.

4.    Get Links

In theory it’s simple; get links from pages that make an association with your location. 2 most common types of places to get links from:

a)    Local directories

You need listings from directories that will also publish an address or categories according location, like the yellow pages, or Yahoo local.

To get started you need to have a good list of local directories, keep your credit card or paypal ready, because most of the good ones can only maintain their value by charging you for it. Prepare yourself and collect all the little snippets of information you will need, like a brief introduction to your company and descriptions of your services/products, use something like Roboform and open the directories 1 by 1, search for your place in the category tree and click the submit button.

b)    Local Content

Websites that are about your location, like the local newspaper or even tourist sites about your area.

But there are many different platforms, some might be blogs, so then a comment will already be enough, others you need to contact personally and start the conversation and basically ask for link exchange. Yes, I know link exchange is dead, but there’s a difference between hunting for anchor text links and those extra sets of links you need for 1 specific purpose, in this case; defining your location for google, and to do that link exchange will do just fine.

I hope the principle is clear; you need to get links from websites that are from the same location as your site; making associations, links in other words.

So, first you need to get a google account, and then set up your personal profile, then a business listing, then some reviews, and then links.

It can be a tedious and sometimes frustrating job, boring to say the least, but all and all it doesn’t really take that much work. If you were to spend 1 hour a day it shouldn’t take you more than 2 weeks to see some really good results. How much more is needed as always depends on the competition, but not showing up in local search is too much of a waste to skip the set up for a google business listing. It really pays off.

Article source: http://www.promotionworld.com/se/articles/article/120730-how-get-your-website-found-google-local-maps

I want to share with you just how accessible SEO is today to business owners, beginners, and anyone! I read so many articles online about advanced SEO techniques, or articles that assume that the reader knows anything about SEO. I’d like to start off from the beginning with some good old fashioned SEO basics, and share with you some things I have been doing.

You may or may not know, but Google has been making some pretty large waves recently in the SEO community with the Panda and Penguin updates. These updates are Google’s attempts to remove low quality content, bad links, and in general, manipulation of the Google formulas for how websites rank on the web. But we don’t need to worry about that now. What we are going to do is some good old fashioned SEO, that you should be able to measure results on within in 3-4 weeks, if not sooner.

Setup for the experiment

The first thing we need to do is to locate some keywords to work around. Open up your Google analytics account, and go to the Traffic Sources Search Engine Optimization Queries section. Set your date range for 2 months and you will see something like this:

Going beyond Google Analytics Standard Reporting for keyword ideas

Now we need to get some data, that while we can gather it via several reports in Google analytics. The best way to do that is to write a Google custom report. Don’t worry, I’ll give you a link so that you can quickly and easily import this into your own Google profile. That link is right here. Click the link, and accept the report, and you will now have a slick little Google Analytics report that will show you keywords and their landing pages. A great way to determine WHERE you want to do SEO work when you are working on a keyword group.

You now have a bunch of keywords ranked by the amount of traffic, and by the revenue generated – this should help you choose 3-5 keywords that you want to operate around. Go ahead and choose 5 of them, they should be somewhat similar, and in your mind, think about how you would talk about these 5 keywords or subjects in the same conversation. In other words, the 3 to 5 keywords that you chose should have a related product or theme to them. Look at the keywords and pick the one with the most visits which we will call the “primary keyword”. Now, you have chosen a good group of keywords for your 1^stattempt at SEO!

Take note of the landing pages, in your report, eventually you will be writing content for each of the 3-5 pages that you may find for each of the keywords.

Measuring SEO progress is key!

Before you start your work, it’s important to know where you currently are. The only value the work we’re about to perform is going to bring is in increased traffic, rank, and conversions. In my case, sales dollars. So it’s vitally critical that you understand if what you are doing actually is having an effect. Any kind of effect. As a user of BrightEdge, I can say that BrightEdge can make that task much easier.

Using BrightEdge to measure the impact

Log in to your BrightEdge account, go to your settings, and create a Keyword Group via Setup Keywords View and Edit my Keyword Groups.

Once there, create a group called “SEO Work – KEYWORD NAME”. Change keyword name to your primary keyword in your group of 3-5 keywords. Once that is done, enter into your group the 3-5 keywords that you just found, and don’t worry about entering a landing page. BrightEdge is so smart; it will find that for you in a few days! Amazing really, and just that simple!

Using other tools to measure results

You don’t have to be a BrightEdge customer to do this data collection, it’s just going to be much more time intensive, and involve regular tasks every day or week.  I don’t know about you but I am often so busy with many projects that I simply don’t have the time or forget to collect my data!  Anyway, what you will need to do if you are using Google Analytics (isn’t everyone?), is login to your GA account, and export all data around your search engine optimization – queries tab, and download it to an excel spreadsheet.  Then you’ll need to do that at least once a week, for the next 4-5 weeks. (preferably, every week going forward from now on).  Once you have done that, you will then need to pull the data into a chart, and graph the positioning of all the keywords you are interested in individually.  And, keep in mind, this data is for average position, and is not actual positions over time.  Once that is done, you will then need to manually pull traffic information for each keyword over time, and map that as well.  The impressions that GA reports is the number of impressions you were exposed to, not the potential max impressions you could experience. (subtle but important difference!).  See, you can still do it, but in my world, with hundreds or thousands of keywords, the task quickly becomes impossible to do, which forces me to focus in on just a few keywords!

Capturing other keyword ideas

Now, we’re not done, you are going to need to find a tool called “Google Keyword Tool”, and type in your 3-5 keywords that you have just choosing, and click go.

Scroll around, and look at all the keywords, some of them are going to jump out at you as not even related to the group you are working on, and others might be potential relations to what you are working on. Go ahead and add those to your keyword group tracking. It’s always good to know what keywords you might draw in to your web of SEO going forward.

Finally, you will want to navigate to the Content Site Content Landing pages page in Google Analytics, and filter on your primary keywords landing page, and add as a secondary dimension “Keyword” – you now have your final set of keywords to look at. Examine these, skip the insulting (not provided) keyword (more here), and add the more relevant ones to your monitoring group. You will need to wait a few days to collect data – as GA is generally 2 days behind on rank tracking.

Let’s write some great content!

Google is always saying it’s about the content. And Google’s Panda Update and Penguin update just reinforced this message in a very strong way. If you cut to the chase, both of these updates simply enforced for the 1^st time in a really, serious meaningful way that stance from Google. Panda hit spammy links and content, and Penguin definitely hit the spammy content.  So, if you write great content that your users would want to spend time reading (time on page), you’ll be accomplishing one of the goals of Google, which should, help you get more traffic.

What we want to do is write 3-5 articles of content around the keywords that we’re supporting. Each page is going to have 1 major keyword, and we’re going to put that keyword into the title, Meta description and in the text on the page itself. In every page, we’re going to use the other keywords we’re focused on to link out to the other landing pages that we’ve found above to generate a cross linking “web” or “SEO Web” as I refer to it. And, if I have other areas on my website, that happen to be related to the keywords that I am working on, I may also “salt” those pages, with a link to my main page, supporting or voting for that page.

Some link patterns I might use:

• A href=”landing page”{keyword}/A
• Find more about {keyword} A href=”landing page”here/A
• It’s amazing what a A href=”landing page”full complement of {keyword}/A can do for your day to day activities!
• b{keyword}/b is a basic item in any shooters bag.

As you can see, it’s not always about a link with the keyword as anchor text, but it is about having that keyword somewhere around the link, and in such a way that any human (and Google bot) would easily infer that the following link is 100% about that keyword.

In building those links, you’ll end up with a link pattern that looks something like this:

Using tools like BrightEdge can help!

Once BrightEdge pulls all of your keywords into its system, you can start looking at the recommendations tab, and look for the pages you have been working on. By looking at these recommendations, you can take action on what BrightEdge is recommending, to help improve positioning on each of those landing pages. If you do tie your keyword to a specific landing page, those recommendations for that page, will directly tie to your keyword, and will help you to easily improve your pages. And, BrightEdge has a great “assign task” system that will help you even more, by simply clicking and choosing who needs to act on the requested task.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that!

My Results : 4x traffic increase with basic SEO tactics

So what happened to my website, when I started this activity? We’ll, let’s take a look at the metrics, and see what we find for my keyword of “Peltor Headsets” – which lands on my websites page of Peltor Headsets. (Yep – I just did a link build there too!)

Here is what Google Analytics says about my keyword now:

I have moved from position 9, to position 5 in about 5 weeks. (I started my concentrated work in April/May). As you can see, I saw a big drop in June, which I could have got discouraged about, but I didn’t and I kept building by SEO Web around that keyword. As I continued my work of developing content, my keyword positioning rose to new highs, which is what we would expect with all that hard work.

But there is more that we need to check. We improved ranking, but did we improve traffic? Google analytics can tell us that, and here is that report:

In a little less than 5-6 weeks, we’ve taken our traffic and roughly increased it 4x. Add this up across many keywords, and you’ll get significant results in your SEO program, all through a little bit of hard work developing content, and through content that you can control directly!

How to become an even more efficient SEO Machine!

So, you pulled the traffic and ranking information from Google Analytics or your favorite analytics package, right?  Two reports, easy peasy!  Well, have I got news for you. BrightEdge really makes it even easier through its integration with Google Analytics.  Check out this BrightEdge chart showing your rank performance vs traffic:

It’s as easy as this – all in one spot with brightedge.

You’ll notice that the date range is slightly different here, and that’s because I ran the data a little bit later with the BrightEdge “Traffic Rank” report.  But the information is pretty close to the same.  Some really nice increases in traffic, and if I measure this really accurately, I actually drove my traffic 12x since April!  But my test really started in April early May – so we’ll stick to the 4x figure for now!

Hope you found this post useful – and that I have empowered you with a bit of SEO knowledge, and that you’ll write me and share with me the results of your very own experiments!

This article originally appeared on Enterprise SEO Blog | BrightEdge Blog and has been republished with permission.

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Article source: http://www.business2community.com/strategy/how-i-grew-traffic-4x-more-with-simple-seo-tactics-0233627

With the updates Google has released in the last two years, it’s more important now than ever to use your keyword phrases properly. It doesn’t matter what you are targeting; you need to make sure you follow the right guidelines for keyword optimization. The days of stuffing the phrase into your content as much as possible are over.

Google started by releasing the Panda update, which took away many of the content farms and websites with poor content. They moved from the Panda update to the more recent Penguin update, which targeted over-optimization of content. This caused many webmasters and bloggers to lose their coveted high ranking because they were not following the right keyword optimization strategy.

The Best Way to Use your Keyword Phrase

Many believe if you are working with a specific keyword phrase, it must be included within your title and the body of your content exactly how you found it. This is simply not true.

Google will find each individual word within your keyword phrase and their search spider is smart enough to figure out what your content is optimized for through these words.

For example, if your main keyword phrase is “carpet area rugs“, you need content that uses the words “carpet”, “area” and “rugs” naturally and often. You don’t want to over use these words, however.

Just write content that fits them in there naturally, and you will most likely find the right density for Google without even trying to.

Another thing you need to consider, which many bloggers and webmasters have forgotten about, is the overall density of the actual page. If you put content up that uses the words within your keyword phrase properly, but the page itself uses those words another 5-10 times each, your density may end up too high. Consider the sidebar menus, footer content, tags and anything else on the page.

The best way to figure out if you have over or under-used your words is to us the CTRL+F function on the actual page. Use this “find” feature to enter one of the words within your keyword phrase and select “highlight all”. You’ll quickly be able to see all the uses on the entire page. If it looks visual appealing and it doesn’t look like it is over or under-used, the density will be fine.

By using this strategy and writing natural content around the “theme” of your main keyword phrase, you can gain the Google love you deserve. No longer can you stuff the keyword phrase in every header and throughout the content over and over again. Switch to a better, more natural strategy that shows Google your main goal is to give your visitors what they are looking for.

This article is an original contribution by Shane Jones.

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Article source: http://www.business2community.com/seo/avoid-search-engine-penalties-how-to-use-keywords-the-right-way-0235801

Competitive keyword analysis should play in integral part in your paid and organic search optimization strategy. As paid search activity continues to grow, so will the number of businesses you compete against within the search landscape. Understanding who your competitors are and the keywords they’re optimizing for is critical to staying relevant, competitive and profitable in your pursuit to acquire more revenue. In this post, I’ll be walking through several quick and easy tips for conducting competitive keyword analysis and how to apply your findings to your own optimization strategies.

Meet Your “Neighbors”

If you don’t know who your competitors are, there are a couple simple tools you can use to find out who they are. The easiest way is to search on the keywords that best describe your product or service offering. Both the organic and paid search results will give you an initial list of the visible competitors in your space. You might be surprised as to who shows up.