A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

Whether you’re researching keywords for a PPC campaign or you’re looking for long tail keywords to optimize your site or blog, keyword research and keyword suggestion tools are essential to your work. Using a solitary tool to do the work might be fine for most applications, however, if you’re serious about your business, you’ll want to use more than one tool in your efforts. I’ve taken the time to review several keyword tools using the search terms Best Affiliate Programs and provided screenshots of the various tools in action.

Please note: This article is not a “Top Ten” list and the tools reviewed here are not listed in any particular order. Each keyword tool offers a unique perspective and this review is solely for the purpose of comparison.

WordTracker Keyword Suggestion Tool - http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

Wordtracker offers a free keyword suggestion tool that allows you to search their database of over 330 million search terms. The keywords in the database are collected from Dogpile and Metacrawler and are updated on a weekly basis. The free tool will return the first 100 keyword suggestions which should be sufficient for most SEO and PPC needs. Here’s a screenshot of a sample Wordtracker search for the terms “Best Affiliate Programs”

As you can see, Wordtracker gives you the most popular keywords related to your search terms as well as the number of times per month the keywords were searched for. Wordtracker offers a paid subscription service that allows you to go deeper and retrieve complete lists of keywords. They offer a 7 day free trial to the subscription service if you’re interested in taking Wordtracker for a test drive.

KeyCompete - http://www.keycompete.com

KeyCompete is an online tool that lets you identify and analyze keywords your competition is using in their PPC campaigns. When you use the KeyCompete tool, you can not only type in keywords to search for, you can type in a competitors url to search for the terms they’re bidding on with Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Here’s a screenshot of a sample KeyCompete search for the terms “Best Affiliate Programs”

Given the results of the search shown above, you can click on a domain name and see exactly what terms the site is bidding on in Adwords. The advantage to KeyCompete is that you can quickly discover what keywords your competitor is using to drive PPC traffic to their site. The disadvantage is that if your competitor is not using PPC advertising, you will not be able to see their terms. KeyCompete offers only limited functionality for free, to get full access, you can either subscribe to their service or buy lists of specific searches for $10 a pop. Either way, KeyCompete is an essential tool for serious PPC marketers and SEOs.

Keyword Discovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

Keyword Discovery utilizes over 180 search engines world wide to compile keyword statistics into one of the most powerful Keyword Research tools available. Using this tool it is possible to generate huge lists of head and tail keyword terms for whatever niche you’re trying to market or optimize for. The reports generated by this tool are organized by search volume and start with the top head terms down to huge lists of relative tail terms. Below you can see a screenshot of a sample Keyword Discovery search for the terms “Best Affiliate Programs”.

The screenshot above is from the free search tool and you can see there is a great deal of information returned using it. The subscription tool is availabe for a monthly of yearly fee and in my opinion, Keyword Discovery is an essential expenditure for anybody looking to maximize their SEO or PPC efforts.

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool - http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

Aaron Wall and his SEO Book franchise are an industry standard. The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool is no exception in that it certainly delivers word class data for keyword mining. First off, the tool will suggest the most popular keywords and it also show you how many searches are being made per month across the major search engines. Below you can see a screenshot of the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool for search terms “Best Affiliate Programs”.

As you can see, this tool is quite useful if you are setting up PPC campaigns for not only Google Adwords but it can benefit Yahoo search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter campaigns as well. Of course, this tool is also fantasatic if you are just mining keyword for organic SEO purposes. The tool is free and it provides a wealth of information at your fingertips.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

No keyword mining effort could be considered complete without a trip to Google’s own Adwords Keyword Tool. If you’re doing any type of SEO work or PPC marketing, Google’s tool is the alpha and the omega of a successful keyword search. Below you can see a screenshot of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for the search terms “Best Affiliate Programs”.

As you can see above, Google’s tool returns related head and tail keywords as well as the average number of searches per month. The tool also shows volume trends per month which can be very useful if you’re planning seasonal PPC campaigns or if you want to optimize a site for holidays, seasons or specific times of year. The tool also tells you the month in which the highest number of searches has occurred. Google’s keyword tool is completely free of charge and is one of the most important tools for keyword research and analysis.

I’m sure there are many other keyword research and keyword suggestion tools available on the internet but the ones mentioned here are the ones I’ve used time and again when researching keywords for PPC or SEO. If you know of any other tools, please feel free to leave a comment here to share them with us.

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Happy Publishing,
Dave

         

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It appears Google is in the process of it’s Q1-2008 Pagerank update. There’s quite a few threads on the webmaster and SEO forums indicating the changes in this update are nearing completion. I have mixed emotions with this update as my Pagerank on this blog just dropped to 3 from 4 and since the last update I’ve only added numerous quality backlinks. I’m not sure exactly what Google has up it’s sleeve but it seems the majority of webmasters are itching for a new website rating system and to get away from Google pagerank as a rating system for a sites advertising value. Alexa ranking doesn’t seem to be a viable option because Alexa is anything but dynamic, however two services to look at are Quantcast and Compete. Although the afformationed entities are not search engines, they are extremely accurate traffic measurment services.

So, how did your sites fare in this latest Google pagerank update? Please leave a comment with your details and remember, this is a “dofollow” blog so you’re comments will be not only appreciated, they will get some “link love”.

         

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If you’re just starting out in the publishing and webmastering business of if you’re a seasoned professional, two of the hardest things to accomplish are building solid backlinks to your website and getting more traffic to your website. Many experienced professionals will all agree on one particular activity that will not only accomplish both of the aformentioned necessities, but it will provide you with wealth of information and can be a really fun way to promote your websites. The activity I’m talking about is posting and being active on public discussion forums. While there are numerous forums out there and there are new ones popping up everyday, the purpose of this article is to highlight the best forums for webmasters in regards to building solid backlinks and driving traffic to your site. Below are listed, in my opinion, the top 10 forums for webmasters because they all offer signatures that do not have the “nofollow” tag on the links and they all pass “link juice” because they are well indexed by the search engines. Please note, part of getting a good response from forums includes being a constructive member of the community, so before I list the forums, I’ll give a short list of do’s and don’t regarding behaviour in these online communities.

The Do’s

• Do be friendly, remember the old adage “You can attract more flies with honey”
• Do be helpful and share your knowledge, you’ll be suprised how people take to helpful posters
• Be positive. If you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything at all.
• Stay on topic with discussions and don’t lead them astray.
• Make friends with people and answer all non-spam PM’s (private messages)

The Dont’s

• Don’t join a forum and immediately start posting links to your site.
• Don’t spam forums with junk posts only to get your links in
• Don’t be negative and/or take things personal
• Don’t send spam PM’s (private messages)
• Don’t offend the moderators or owners of a forum you’re on

Now that we’ve gone through some of the basic Do’s and Dont’s of forum ettiquite, on to the list of my top 10 favorite forums.

Top 10 Discussion Forums

• #1 DigitalPoint - Hands down, DigitalPoint is the best Webmaster Forum out there.
• #2 SitePoint - Sitepoint is another great Webmaster Forum.
• #3 V7 Networks - V7 is a fantastic resource and fun place to post.
• #4 Code4Gold Forums - Allows the biggest signatures.
• #5 Webmaster-Talk - Another new forum but growwing rapidly.
• #6 BloggerTalk - For bloggers, passes “link juice”.
• #7 5StarAffiliatePrograms - One of my personal favorites.
• #8 Warrior Forum - A top notch marketing forum.
• #9 Webmasters Help - Another new forum that shows potential.
• #10 Searchen Forums - This one throws nice “link juice”.

If you’re not taking full advantage of Discussion Forums, you’re missing out on one of the greatest tools for promotion. There’s not a successful webmaster out there who hasn’t, at one time or another, utilized forums as a tool for promotion. If you’re the shy type, the great thing about forums is that nobody really knows who you are, so there’s nothing to be worried about, you don’t have to be Britney Spears to get attention, all you have to do is be yourself and get involved in the discussions. Take the plunge and you’ll be glad you did !!!

Cheers,
Dave

         

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One of the simplest things most webmasters and novice SEO’s aren’t aware of is that search engine bots don’t like 404 Error (Page not Found) . if you’re using the Google Webmaster Tools, you might see 404 errors for pages that don’t exist on your site. This can happen for a variety of reasons including somebody linking to you incorrectly or if you bought a domain that had been previously owned and the former owner had links going into pages that no longer exist on your site. Regardless of the how’s or why’s here’s a quick and simple remedy to redirect all of your error pages to a desired landing page and not suffer any search engine indexing consequences. It can also help you retain any existing backlinks that are incorrectly linked.

First, you will need to create a custom 404 error page and tell your website that it exists. To do this you will need to edit your .htaccess file and insert the following line of code:

This will redirect all 404 errors to a page in your website root directory called “404.php”. You can name it anything you want but *do not* just simply point it at an existing page such as your index.html or index.php file. The reason why is that it will be seen as “duplicate content” if you do not redirect it properly. Once you have that done, you will need to create your 404.php error file and insert the following code:

You can redirect the errors to any page you want and using the “301 redirect” will assure you will not be subject to duplicate content penalties. This simple solution is one of the first things I do when I bring up a new site. I highly recommend all webmasters learn to use this trick and enjoy !!

         

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