Have you ever been looking for something but didn’t know where to find it? If that something is online, then your search is over (or just about to begin). The following are 40 advanced and alternative search engines that you can use to find just about anything on the Internet. Use them to follow discussions about your industry, monitor your online reputation, and much more!

General Search

To start off our search adventure, let’s look at some general search engines beyond the top three.

DuckDuckGo

Concerned about online privacy? DuckDuckGo prides themselves as being the search engine that does not track or personalize your searches and results. They even offer handy visual guides on Google tracking and filter bubbling.

Now Relevant

Tired of stale search results? NowRelevant attempts to give you only results from the last two weeks on your search query. I say attempts because my test searches seemed to be more from the last six months, but it’s still better than getting results from six years ago. Hopefully that will be worked out once they are out of beta.

Dogpile

If you want results from the top three search engines, but don’t want to go to them individually, try Dogpile. It’s results are pulled from the top three search engines “without all the mess.”

Blekko

Want spam free search results? Blekko‘s mission is to provide a differentiated, editorial voice in search. They look for quality over quantity, source based authority over link based, removes sites whose primary purpose is monetization over information, and uses human curating through the use of user tags.

WolframAlpha

Looking for a search engine based on computation and metrics? Try WolframAlpha. It will give you website data, historical information by date, unit conversions, stock data, sports statistics, and more. You can see examples by topic to learn more.

Joongel

Want to search ten sites at a time? Check out Joongel. While it doesn’t always get things right, it does give you some great ideas of sites to search under various categories including the ones shown above plus analytics, local, finance, and jobs.

Social Network Specific Advanced Search

Need to find something specific on one of the top social networks? Here are some great advanced search pages.

Facebook Search

Want to see a particular search across different areas of Facebook? Use Facebook Advanced Search. When you type in your query, click on the “see more results” link at bottom of the suggestions. Then use the filters on the left to see results within people, pages, places, groups, and more.

LinkedIn People Search

If you want to find some new connections on LinkedIn, use the Advanced People Search. This will let you narrow down your results by the above plus relationship and language. Premium members will have access to additional search filters including groups, company size, years of experience, and more.

LinkedIn Job Search

LinkedIn offers job seekers an Advanced Job Search to find jobs using the above information plus experience level and industry. Premium members can narrow their search down further by the salary offered.

LinkedIn Answers Search

LinkedIn Answers is a great way to gain exposure and build authority in your industry. Use the Answers Advanced Search to find the perfect questions to answer.

Twitter Search

Twitter’s Advanced Search is a great way to find better results on Twitter. It is especially great for businesses looking for a local audience by allowing them to filter their results using the Near this place field.

Social Search

The following search engines will allow you to search one or more social networks in one place and gain additional data about the results.

Topsy

Topsy allows you to see the latest tweets on your search query. You can see more about each tweet by clicking on the orange number of tweets, including what users tweeted it. Topsy also allows you to see Google+ results by switching to it under Network in the left sidebar.

Social Mention

Social Mention allow you to search across multiple types of networks including blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, and more.

Bing Social

If you’re looking for updates from Twitter and Facebook on a particular query, try Bing Social. Updates seem to be a day behind, but they will continue to trickle through when you click the play button at the top right of the results.

Addictomatic

Addictomatic creates a topic page for searches using results from Bing, Google Blog Search, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, and other search & social sources. Bookmark the page on your browser to check on the latest results regularly.

Who’s Talkin

Who’s Talkin is another social search engine that will let you filter results by various networks under blogs, news, videos, images, and more.

Forums

Want to participate on forums in your industry? Use this search engine to find results specifically on forums.

Boardreader

BoardReader allows you to search forums and narrow results down by date (last day through last year) and language.

Blogs

Find industry related blogs and posts using the following search engines.

PostRank

PostRank allows you to search for blogs by topic and sorts them by social engagement metrics. Bypass the login and use the search box to find topics or specific blogs to which ones have the most comments and social shares.

Technorati

Use the search box at the top of Technorati to find blogs or posts on your favorite topics.

Regator

Regator allows you to search for blogs and posts on any topic, then narrow down your results by posts with audio or video, date range, topic, and domain.

Documents, eBooks, and Presentations

If you’re looking for documents, eBooks, presentations, or other similar file types, try the following searches.

DocJax

DocJax allows you to search for free eBooks and other documents. Sort by file types for documents, spreadsheets, powerpoints, and PDF to narrow down your results.

Scribd

Scribd is the largest social reading and publishing network that allows you to discover original written content across the web. Sort results by category, language, length, file types, upload date, and cost (free or for sale).

SlideShare

SlideShare is the largest community for sharing presentations. If you missed a conference or webinar, there’s a good chance the slides from your favorite speakers are here.

Image Search

Looking for beautiful images? Try these image search engines – note that you must gain permission to use any images you find unless they are specifically marked as Creative Commons licensed.

Flickr

Flickr offers an advanced search screen that allows you to find photos, screenshots, illustrations, and videos on their network. You can also search within Creative Commons licensed content.

Bing

Bing offers an image search that starts out with the top trending images, then leads to images which can be filtered by size, layout, and other criteria. They also display tabs above the results with related search queries.

Google

Google Advanced Image Search allows you to get even more specific about the images you are looking for, including specifying whether they are faces, photos, clip arts, or line drawings. You can also search within images labeled for reuse commercially and with modifications.

Creative Commons Media

Need to find media created by others to use on your website? Try these Creative Commons searches.

Creative Commons

Looking for only images that you can repurpose, use for commercial purposes, or modify? Try the Creative Commons Search which will allow you to look through multiple sources including Flickr, Google Images, Wikimedia, and YouTube.

Wikimedia

Wikimedia Commons has over 12 million files in their database of freely usable images, sound bites, and videos. Use the search box or browse by categories for different types of media.

Video Search

Looking for video to embed on your website or simply entertain you? Try these video search engines that look across multiple sources to find what you need.

Yahoo

Yahoo Video Search allows you to search through video content from their own network, YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Myspace, Hulu, and other online video providers for videos on any topic.

Blinkx

Blinkx allows you to go beyond YouTube to find videos on any topic from hundreds of video partner sites including big names like YouTube and Hulu. If you’re looking for video, you’ll likely find it here.

Clipblast

Clipblast allows you to find professional video on topics discussed by news stations, newspapers, podcasting, and commercials. Top sources include CNN, ESPN, E, Sundance, BBC, and more.

VideoSurf

VideoSurf brings clips from Hulu, CNN, TMZ, Metacafe, Fancast, Dailymotion, and other sources to provide you with entertaining videos across the web.

Website Data & Statistics

Looking for information about your favorite brands and websites? Try out these search engines for data and statistics.

CrunchBase

CrunchBase offers insight into your favorite online brands and companies. Listings will tell you people who are associated with a company, contact information, related videos, screenshots, and more.

Quantcast

Quantcast allows you to search for website profiles based on topic or specific domains. Domains with a high volume of traffic will have data including total regional visitors per month, pageviews online vs. mobile, demographics, sites similar audiences like, and more.

DoubleClick Ad Planner

Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner lets you research domains and get the traffic statistics, daily unique visitors, and demographics such as age, gender, education, income, topics of interest, and more. This tool can be used with or without a Google account. You can also see a list of the top sites measured by Ad Planner and traffic stats in a glance.

BuiltWith

Curious to see what technology your favorite sites use and usage trends of that technology? BuiltWith allows you to search for domains and see the technology they use, including analytics, content management systems, coding, and widgets. You can also click on any of the products to see usage trends, industries using the technology, and more.

Advanced Google

Can’t get away from Google, but want to get more out of it than a simple Google.com search? Try these advanced Google search features.

Google Advanced Search

Looking for something specific? Try Google Advanced Search or use Advanced Operators in your search queries.

Google Scholar

If you are looking for articles, theses, books, abstracts, court opinions or other information provided by academic publishers, professional societies, and university, try Google Scholar Advanced Search. You can also use Advanced Operators to refine your search results even more.

Google Books

Google Advanced Book Search will help you find search queries in books. You can also find entire books published online that might be available to download via PDF (when in the public domain).

Google Search Features

Need to check stock quotes, the time in another city, sports scores, or other specific information? The Google Search Features page allows you to search for everyday essentials, local listings, health information, and much more.

What are your favorite advanced and alternative search engines? Please share them and how you use them in the comments, and happy searching!

About the Authors: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing for personal, professional, and business bloggers. You can follow her on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook.

User personas are fictional characters which are typically used in the user-centered design process to represent the different user types of a website.  They can, however, be useful in your online marketing campaigns and in this post I’m going to talk about how they can be applied to your SEO.  They can help you to find the right keywords for your target audience and create the right content, and they can also be a useful tool when identifying targets for building links.

Developing Personas

To give you an idea of what you are aiming for when you create user personas, here are a couple of examples:

Getting Started

Before starting a project to develop user personas, you should check whether or not they already exist within your organization – they might be archived with other documents produced the last time your site had a redesign, or they may sit with another team such as design or development.  Either way, this could be a great time saver.

But if you do decide to develop your own, you’re going to need to start by getting some information about your users.  You could do this by running a survey on your site or you might want to run interviews with a group of your users if possible.

You might also have existing data that will give you insights into the different user groups on your site – registration and login details, purchase history, email newsletter lists.

What To Look For

Once you have this information, you should be able create personas.  Generally 2-4 is a good amount.  You might also want to pick a primary persona if there is a specific user group that is particularly prominent in your research – this persona should be prioritized when applying personas to decision making.

Information that you might want to use as part of your user persona includes:

• Who – age, location, gender, education, job title
• Environment – when and where are they using your site?  What device are they using?
• Tasks – what tasks are they trying to complete on your site?
• Motivation – what is their broader desired outcome?
• Name or nickname
• A photo

Once you’ve created the multiple personas, it might be useful to create a document similar to those in the examples above so that they can easily be shared and referenced.

Keyword Research

If you aren’t familiar with keyword research, it’s the practice of using tools to find terms that users search for, along with associated information such as search demand and competitiveness.  From this, we select the most relevant and potentially rewarding terms to target on our site.

A typical keyword research process might looks something like this:

• Brainstorming: At the earliest stage you need to come up with some broad ideas of what users might search for within your niche.  Consider searches that might be used to reach pages at all levels of your site’s hierarchy.  This brainstorm should give you seed terms that you can enter into keyword research tools (such as the Google Keyword Tool) to generate further search terms.
• Gathering Data: As mentioned above, you’ll need to gather information from keyword research tools – as well as getting volumes and competitiveness from Google’s Keyword Tool, you might also export your own keywords from Google Analytics and combine the data in Excel using the VLOOKUP() function to see if you’re already getting traffic for any of the terms.  If you are, how much?  And is the quality of the traffic good?
• Filtering, Sorting: At this stage, I typically use Excel for a range of filtering, such as cutting out keywords that are too low in search volumes, too competitive, not relevant enough.  I might also use the likes of the FIND() function to look for themes in the keywords by which I can categorize them.
• Decision Making: Once you have all of the facts in front of you, it’s time to do some manual work and pick out the phrases that you want to target with the different pages on your site.
• Implementation: Finally, you need to implement your new keyword choices by writing them into the most important SEO elements on page (page title, meta description, H1, strong tags) and you might even think about rewriting the page’s content so that it is relevant to the target search term.

How Personas Can Be Applied To Keyword Research

User personas can be used at 3 of the points in this process – firstly, the brainstorm.  If you’re generating seed terms, it’s useful to keep your personas in your mind – do they reflect the need and intentions of all of the potential users of your site?

Take the personas from the Vodafone example – what sort of seed terms would you come up with for them?  How do their intentions differ?

When researching a new phone, Mike the Techie might be more interested in searching for the likes of “htc desire specification” or looking for the highest spec between two phones such as “htc desire camera vs iphone camera”.

Zoe the Socialite might be more interested in how many minutes she can get, how many texts, or which social apps are available, in which case she could be searching for the likes of “vodafone unlimited texts” or “facebook android app”.

Finally, Cost-Conscious Geoff would likely be more concerned with price comparison, such as “cheapest iphone contract” or “cheapest htc desire handset only”.

Once you’ve generated seed terms, personas don’t really come into it again until you’re making decisions about target keywords.  Again, when you’re creating your final list of keywords, do they reflect your user personas accurately?  Look back at the seed terms and consider whether the final terms you’ve selected indicate the same intention.

Personas might also be applied in the final stage of the keyword research process – Implementation.  This might be less important for on-page SEO elements, but think more about the tone and direction of the content on the landing page.  If you’re targeting Cost-Conscious Geoff with a “cheapest iphone contract” page, make sure you answer his query and offer a clear next step.

Considering your users at these 3 stages will help to give you a comprehensive set of target keywords which accurately represent the needs and intentions of your users.

Link Building

User personas can also be a useful tool when creating and implementing a link building strategy.  When link building, the basic goal is to create and promote content that you think your target audience would like to share.

Personas For Link Bait

They could be used as part of a link bait brainstorm.  Start by identifying some blogs that fit your user personas – Mike the Techie, for example, might be likely to own a gadget blog, or is at least highly likely to be a reader of similar sites.  What sort of content do gadget sites link out to?  Think both about the substance of the content, but also the format (videos, guides, infographics etc.)

You might also wish to use your personas as a test when you have a tighter brief for your piece of link bait – “Would Mike be interested in this?  Would he share it?”

When outreaching your link bait, or any other outreach for that matter, keep the persona in mind and consider what their interests are, and how you might be able to leverage those things to build a relationship.  Also consider what their goals are, and think about what you can provide that may help them to achieve those goals. Talk in their language!

Personas For Guest Posting

Finally, user personas are a great way to think of guest post topic ideas.  Think about what sort of sites your personas might use and what sort of content they might want to read when they get there.  Take Cost-Conscious Geoff for example – he might like to read money saving blogs.  In which case, try to identify targets by searching Google for the likes of money saving “guest post”|”guest blog”|”write for us”.

An obvious guest post to pitch might be “How to save money on your mobile phone contract” or “How to get the cheapest mobile phone deals”.  I’ve found that pitching specific guest post titles which are well thought out and relevant to the target blog and their readership results in a much higher rate of publishing.

Until Next Time…

I hope that gives you some idea about how this relatively quick and easy technique can be applied to your SEO efforts – I’m sure there are even more than I’ve mentioned above.  Next time round I’ll be focusing on how to use personas to get these visitors to convert into customers by looking at how you can integrate them into your CRO strategy.

Image Credit:

• Yell Marketing Blog
• Vodafone Developer Blog

About the Author: Rob Millard is an SEO Consultant for Distilled, a leading SEO agency based in London, New York and Seattle.

The meta description tag in HTML is the 160 character snippet used to summarize a web page’s content. Search engines sometimes use these snippets in search results to let visitors know what a page is about before they click on it. In this post, we will look at how search engines use meta descriptions, what the top SEO blogs say about meta descriptions & whether they still use them, and reasons why you should use them.

How Search Engines Use Meta Descriptions

The best examples of meta descriptions and how search engines use them come from search engines themselves. Let’s look at Google’s own meta description for starters.

<meta name=”description” content=”Search the world’s information, including web pages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.“>

It is exactly 159 characters, including spaces. Google’s meta description is displayed as follows in the top three search engines.

In Google…

In Yahoo…

In Bing…

Ironically, Google doesn’t list themselves in the results when you search “search engine” so you have to search for Google to see it. And they are the only ones that cut off their own description. Although they admit to not always using the meta description as a part of their rankings algorithm, they do still support meta descriptions and include them as snippets in search results.

What the Top SEO Blogs Say About Meta Descriptions

Regardless of whether they count for rankings, the top SEO blogs suggest using meta descriptions. In the Learn SEO series, SEOmoz says…

“Meta description tags, while not important to search engine rankings, are extremely important in gaining user click-through from search engine result pages (SERPs). These short paragraphs are webmasters opportunity to advertise content to searchers and let them know exactly what the given page has with regard to what they’re looking for.”

And in 21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques, Search Engine Land says…

“The meta description tag won’t help you rank, but it will often appear as the text snippet below your listing, so it should include the relevant keyword(s) and be written so as to encourage searchers to click on your listing.”

The next question you might ask is do the top SEO blogs actually use meta descriptions? The answer is yes and no.

• SEOmoz uses meta descriptions on their homepage and product pages, but not their blog posts.
• Search Engine Land uses a lengthy meta description on their homepage and sometimes uses them on their posts.
• Search Engine Watch uses a lengthy meta description on their homepage, but not on their posts.
• SEOBook doesn’t use a meta description on their homepage or blog posts, but does use it on the occasional internal page.
• Search Engine Journal uses a brief meta description on its homepage but not on its posts.

3 Reasons Why You Should Still Use Meta Descriptions

Most SEO’s might find themselves asking “If meta descriptions don’t count into the rankings algorithm, why should I use them?” The answer to that is simple. Stop thinking about them as a ranking factor, and start thinking about them as a conversion factor. Here are some great reasons to still keep your meta description in mind on your website including your homepage, internal pages, blog posts, and so on.

Reason 1: Bolded Keywords in Search Results

Even if the keyword you use in the meta description doesn’t help in search rankings, it still might help in getting a searchers attention. When someone searches for a particular keyword or phrase, it will be bolded in search results where ever it appears. So if you are targeting that keyword, you will want it to stand out. In this set of results for search engine, which results jump out to you?

It goes to show why your top keyword phrase should be in your SEO title and meta description! You wouldn’t want to be the one result in this list that had no bolded keywords for that search. So be sure your meta description uses the keywords you are targeting and is written in a way that will encourage searchers to click on that result.

Reason 2: Top Social Networks Use It

Whenever you share a page on social networks like Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn, each site will pull either the meta description or the first sentence or two of the post as the description to show in the share. The meta description will usually be shown in its entirety, while the first sentence or two of your post will end up cut off with ellipsis [...]. While you can edit the description for Facebook and LinkedIn, not everyone sharing your page will do so.

Google+, on the other hand, will only let you remove the description.

This means that if your first sentence or two on the page doesn’t sum it up well, people who see the share might miss the point. Hence, if you want your page’s shares to get the most clicks on social media, consider creating a strong meta description that will encourage clicks, just like you would for search results.

Reason 3: Social Bookmarking Networks Use It

Many social bookmarking networks will also use the meta description as a page’s description on their network.

A few examples of networks that do include meta descriptions are: Digg, BizSugar, and My SEO Community. Just about any social bookmarking / voting network built on the Pligg CMS system will also use the meta description first. While you can edit the descriptions on these networks, you can’t count on whether others who submit your pages will. Plus, if you don’t have to edit the descriptions, then you save a little work for yourself if you are submitting your own pages.

How to Include Meta Descriptions on Your Pages

If you are using WordPress on a self-hosted domain, you are in luck. Meta descriptions can be easily added to your content using simple (and free) plugins such as All in One SEO Pack. Just install it, and look on every page / post for the SEO Details box that will ask you for a custom SEO title, meta descriptions, and other information. Your homepage’s SEO details can be added in the plugin’s main settings section. Other themes and platforms may have SEO options built in – if not, do a search for your website’s platform and SEO plugin, add-on, or extension.

Tips for Improving Search Engine Result Click-Throughs

An often neglected value of meta descriptions is the fact that you can craft your descriptions to be calls to action. Here are some tips you can employ when writing your meta descriptions:

• The power is in the language. How you phrase your descriptions can make or break your search engine result. Add words that describe value in your description. Give searchers a good reason to click on your result.
• Write calls to action! Try adding language like “click here”, “learn more by clicking here” and “click on this result”. Obviously the context of the webpage will determine what wording you choose like: “download here”, “view video” etc.
• Test them! – If you have certain landing pages that receive a decent amount of organic traffic, consider testing different variations of meta descriptions to see if you can get a lift in click-throughs. Try different description lengths, phrasing and positioning of your keywords.

Do you still use meta descriptions on your website? If so, do you have any additional tips and tools people can use to make adding meta descriptions to their site easier and more beneficial? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

About the Authors: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing for personal, professional, and business bloggers. You can follow her on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook.

Sean Work is the Marketing Director at KISSmetrics.

If you have been blogging for a while, chances are you are familiar with content scrapers. Content scrapers are websites that steal your content for their own blogs without your permission. Some content scrapers will just copy the content off of your blog, but most use automated software that takes the content from your RSS feed and posts your content to their site like it is a new post.

In this post, we are going to look at some potential link building benefits to content scrapers, how to find out what sites are scraping your content, and what you can do if you want to either benefit from the linking standpoint or have them take it down.

Linking Benefits of Content Scrapers

Last week, I was happy to see that I was listed in ProBlogger’s 20 Bloggers to Watch in 2012. Within 24 hours, I received a notification in my WordPress dashboard that a page on my blog had been linked to in the post on ProBlogger’s site.

After receiving the original notification from the ProBlogger post, I also received another 18 trackbacks from sites that had stolen the content in their post verbatim. Trackbacks are WordPress’ way of letting you know that another website has linked to a post on your blog. In this case, these 18 sites had posted the content exactly like the original post – with the links back to my blog still intact.

It was then that I started contemplating the potential link building benefits of content scrapers. These are not by any means quality links – the highest Google PageRank was a PR 2 domain, many were stealing content in a variety of languages, and one even had the nerve to use some kind of redirection script to take away the link juice of outgoing links! So while these links didn’t have the same authority that the original post had, they still count as links.

How to Catch Content Scrapers

Unfortunately, unless you want to continuously search for your post titles in Google, you’ll only be able to easily track down sites that keep your in-content links active. If you want to know what websites are scraping your content, here are a few tips to sniff them out.

Copyscape

Copyscape is a simple search engine that allows you to enter the URL of your content to find out if there are duplicates of it on the Internet. You can get a few results using their free search, or you can pay for a premium account to check up to 10,000 pages on your site and more.

Trackbacks

The first way is through your trackbacks in WordPress (as shown in the image above). Many of these will show up in the spam folder if you use Akismet. The key to getting trackbacks to appear from content scrapers is to always include links to other posts in your content. Be sure those links have great anchor text too, if you’re going for a little extra link juice. And even if you are not, internal linking with strong anchor text is good for your on-site optimization too!

Webmaster Tools

The next way to catch them is in Webmaster Tools. Simply go to your site in Webmaster Tools, and look under Your Site on the Web > Links to Your Site. Then sort by the Linked Pages column.

Anyone thinking about link building benefits at this point is probably noting the sheer volume of links from these sites, some of which are content scrapers. Essentially any site that is linking to a lot of your posts that isn’t a social network, social bookmarking site, or a die-hard fan who just loves linking to you is potentially a content scraper. You’ll have to go to their website to be sure. To find your links on their site, click on one of the domains to see the details of what pages on your site they are linking to specifically.

Then, click on one of your links to see which pages on their site is linking to yours.

You can see here that they are just blatantly copying my posts titles. When I visited one of the links, sure enough, they are copying my entire posts in their full glory onto their site.

Google Alerts

If you don’t post often or want to keep up with any mentions of your top blog posts on other websites, you can create a Google Alert using the exact match for your post’s title by putting the title in quotation marks.

I deliver all of my Google Alerts to an RSS feed so I can manage them in Google Reader, but you can also have them delivered regularly by email. You’ll even get an instant preview of the types of results you will get.

How to Get Credit for Scraped Posts

If you use WordPress, then you definitely want to try out the RSS footer plugin. This plugin allows you to place a custom piece of text at the top or bottom of your RSS feed content.

The result is this simple line on my blog posts when viewed through a RSS feed.

As you can see, even if you aren’t using it for the purpose of getting credit back to your posts when content thieves steal it, you can still use it for a little extra bit of advertising with the possible benefit of people who subscribe to your RSS feed clicking through to your website or social profiles. And when someone does scrape your content from your RSS feed, it shows up there too.

So in the event that someone finds your scraped content, they will hopefully notice the credit before assuming it was created by the blog that stole it. If you don’t have WordPress, you can simply include a note at the top or bottom of your content that includes the same information.

How to Stop Content Scrapers

If you’re not interested in anyone copying your content, then you have a few options to choose from. You can start by contacting the site that is stealing your content and sending them a notice that you want all of your content removed immediately. You can do this through the site’s contact form, email address, or post it to any social accounts they list.

If there is no contact information on the website stealing your content, you can do a Whois Lookup to (hopefully) find out who owns the domain.

If it is not privately registered, you should find an administrative contact’s email address. If not, you should at least see the domain registrar which, in this case, is GoDaddy and/or the hosting company for the website which, in this case, is HostGator. You can try to contact both companies (HostGator has a DMCA form and GoDaddy has an email) and let them know that the domain in question is stealing copyrighted content in hopes that the website will be suspended or removed.

You can also visit the DMCA and use their takedown services to remove anyone who is copying your photos, video, audio, blog, or other content. They even offer a WordPress plugin to incorporate a DMCA protected badge on your site to warn potential thieves.

Have you ever dealt with content scrapers and thieves? Do you leave it alone for the link benefits, or do you fight back? What other tools, services, or other preventative tactics do you use to block content scrapers? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing for personal, professional, and business bloggers. You can follow her on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook.

Link building is one of the most important things you can do in terms of off-site search engine optimization. As you probably know by now, search engines like Google tend to rank pages higher in search results based on the number and quality of links to those pages. Essentially, the more links you have, the more likely you will be to rank well when someone searches for keywords related to your website. Some of the most common ways to build links to a website include the following:

• Link Requests – This is where you simply ask another website owner to link back to your website. These are really hit or miss and depend on how well you can convince the website owner that your link on their website is beneficial to both them and their visitors.
• Link Buying – This is the big no-no, yet it is still happening. Instead of politely requesting a link from a website owner, you approach them with a deal instead. Some consider it as advertising in the form of a link instead of a banner, but Google considers it a good reason to penalize a website.
• Directories – There are a ton of directories out there – general directories, local directories, and niche based directories. Some will allow you to create a listing for free while others will charge a fee. The latter doesn’t constitute “bad link buying” even though you are paying for the link.
• Content Links – There are a lot of ways to build links via content, from creating articles on article marketing networks to guest blogging with a link in your author bio.
• Social Links – I’m not just talking about links in your social profiles (although we will get to those). This refers to all of the ways getting social online (blog comments, forum posting, answering questions, and using social media) can lead to links.

For this post, we’re not going to focus on the first three (requests, buying, or directories) but rather, the last two – content and social. Why? Because chances are you are already doing most of these right now, or know you should be!

The reason these two are so important is that they are not just about creating links for SEO value (although some will have some SEO value anyway). They are about creating links that people will be likely to click on, so instead of waiting for clicks and conversions from higher rankings in search results, you could be getting both immediately from the link itself!

Linking with Content

Creating content is a great way to gain valuable backlinks to your website while also demonstrating expertise in your industry. There are three ways you can go about getting links from other websites besides your own blog where you should have great content as well.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a great way to get your name, company, and link in front of a new audience. Once you have some good content on your own blog to show as a sample of your writing, you can start reaching out to other blogs in your industry whose audience members could be potential clients. As you have success with smaller blogs in your industry (success being posts with a good amount of social engagement and comments), you can use these as examples to present to larger blogs in your industry.

Some link building tips for guest blogging include the following:

• Don’t think of guest blogging as solely a link building exercise. Think about it as a way to position yourself or your brand as an authority in your niche and a way to drive visitors back to your site. With that in mind, create awesome content that fits the blog and its audience.
• Read other guest posts on the blog first. Look at how they format their posts and follow accordingly.
• When it comes down to the links, you will most likely be adding them through an author bio. Look at other guest bloggers’ bios to see how many links you can have and what they should be to (your website, your blog, and/or your social networks).
• Make sure the keyword phrase and page you link to in your author bio is appealing to the blog’s audience to maximize the number of potential clicks.

Article Marketing

Many popular article marketing sites like EzineArticles took a huge hit when the Google Panda update came out. Since then, they have been working to update their networks to focus more on quality than letting everyone get away with quantity. Still, it is unsure how much real value comes through link building through article marketing on those sites.

My suggestion would be to look for article communities (not just directories, but real communities) whose audiences fit your target demographic. And when I say community, I mean sites like HubPages and Squidoo where members can connect with other members through private messaging, commenting on their profiles / articles, or even hanging out in forums. This way you can find other members in your industry or members who would make good potential clients, engage with them, and ultimately drive them to your articles and websites.

Also, on any article marketing network, be sure to take advantage of filling out your profile and (of course) including your links.

This way, if you are engaging with someone on the network, they can get to know you and click through to your website without even needing to get to one of your articles!

Videos

Another great type of content to build links with is video. Most video networks (YouTube and Vimeo are my favorites) will allow you to add a link in the description of your video.

This means that if someone comes across your videos through search or on YouTube itself, they will be able to go directly to your website. So your videos, like your written content, should be informative and geared to draw in the right type of audience for your business.

Remember that video doesn’t have to mean anything to crazy (or anything that even puts you behind the camera). You can turn PowerPoint presentations into movie files, you can upload previously recorded webinars, or you can use screencasting software to do a video tutorial with a recording of your voice and your computer screen. All of these options make for great video content!

Linking with Social Profiles

If you are participating in social media, then you are likely sitting on several properties that could hold anywhere from one or more links. Let’s look at which ones you can put your links in, where, and their impact.

Twitter

Twitter allows you two places to put links – the Web and Bio field of your profile. To edit your profile, go to Twitter and use the dropdown to find your Settings. Then edit your profile to include a link in the Web and Bio field. You will have two links in your profile like this.

How does this work towards link building? There are a lot of other sites that will pull your Twitter profile information and use either just your bio information or your bio and web link. Having a link in both means you are covered either way in getting more links to your websites.

Klout, for example, pulls your bio information and automatically hyperlinks any web links.

Listorious, on the other hand, pulls in your bio and web link, but only hyperlinks the web link.

Facebook

While Facebook doesn’t have so many sites pulling your user information, your Facebook page does have a lot of spots where you can sneak in a live hyperlink.

These will help visitors to your fan page see your other social properties, blogs, and websites. Try to use the shortest links possible, but at the same time, don’t go for just bit.ly or other shortened links as those are often used by social spammers to get unwilling visitors to click on shady links. Bit.ly does work well if you want to shorten a Facebook or LinkedIn profile as it will use their custom short domains, on.fb.me and linkd.in which only go to those sites.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows you to have three links in your profile, each with customized anchor text (although they don’t count for SEO value). Think of the anchor text as a way to entice visitors to click on the links. To edit your websites, click on Edit Profile under the Profile dropdown menu. Then click on the Edit link next to your website links. Be sure to use the Other option in each dropdown to get the customized anchor text.

This will give you three great links which visitors to your profile should want to click upon.

Google+ Personal Profile

Google+ gives you the opportunity to add a huge number of links. Try not to make it look spammy, but be sure to take advantage. To add links, go to your Google+ profile’s About tab and click the Edit Profile button. Then click on the Other profiles, Contributor to, Recommended link, and Introduction sections to edit them. In each of these, you can enter links to your websites (and pages within them) with custom anchor text.

Be sure to note that the following links should be of a specific type.

• Other profiles – These links should be to pages that are about you, such as your about page on a blog or website and other social profiles.
• Contributor to – These links should be to your own author pages for who write for, such as your own blogs, blogs you contribute to, or other major sites you contribute to.
• Recommended link – These links can be to any other website you choose.

You can create the same kinds of links on your Google+ pages as well, with the exception that you will only have the option for Recommended links in the right sidebar.

YouTube

Thanks to the new YouTube channel design, you can have more than one link to your other websites near the top of your channel profile. To edit the new channel design for adding links, click on the Edit button next to the About section. Then add the Title (custom anchor text) and URL for each link.

When finished, it should look like this.

While the downside is that these links are nofollow (or otherwise ignored by search engines), the upside is you can add more of them for visitors to click upon!

UTM Parameters

Want to check the number of clicks on these links? You can if you use UTM parameters for the links on LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube. I wouldn’t suggest them for Twitter and Facebook as both display the entire URL, and URL’s with UTM parameters can get ugly and lengthy.

Linking with Engagement

Engagement with communities in your niche / industry will help you build your personal, professional, and business brand. The following are ways to incorporate link building with your engagement in order to get the best of both worlds.

Blog Commenting

Whenever you start blog commenting, be sure that you are commenting on posts because you want to say something important, not just because you want to leave a link. If you do it because you have something to say, your comment will make an impression which will lead others to become curious about you. That curiosity will equal clicks on your link! Pointers for making people want to click on your link in blog comments (besides just filling in the Website / URL input box on the form) include the following.

• Get a Gravatar. Using the email that you most often comment with, sign up for an account and associate a photo with every email address you comment with. This will ensure that a photo comes up next to your comment on most blogs using WordPress, and will help blog owners tell the spam from the legit comments. Because as a blog owner, I almost never approve a comment without a Gravatar unless I recognize the person’s name.
• Always use your real name in the name field of comments. The only exception is WordPress blogs that use the KeywordLuv plugin. You will know these because somewhere near the comment form, there will be instructions to use Your Name@Your Keywords in the name field so your website is linked up to your specified anchor text. This means you still include your real name with your comment!
• Look for blogs with CommentLuv – search CommentLuv keyword on Google to find them. Whenever you comment on a blog with the CommentLuv plugin, you will get an additional link to your latest blog post beneath your comment when you enter a blog URL in the website field of the comment form.
• If a blog is using a third-party system like Disqus and Livefyre, sign up for a profile so you can include your website link and your photo with your comments. You’ll also receive a link from your profiles on those networks as well as a way to keep track of your commenting history (see my profiles on Disqus and Livefyre for examples).

Forums

Forums can be a bit tricky in terms of getting links. Some communities embrace it, while others will call out anyone adding a link back to their own site as a spammer. You can find great forums in your industry by searching BoardReader or “powered by vbulletin” keyword in Google. Once you’ve found these forums, go to a public post to see if the forum users are allowed signatures. They will be at the bottom of each post.

Unless you happen to know everyone in the forum (because it’s new or you are the owner of it), I would suggest making some posts within the forum before adding your signature links. Once you’ve had some recognition as a valuable member of the community (maybe 15 to 20 posts, preferably not in one day), then go into your forum profile and add your signature. If everyone else only seems to have one link in theirs, just include one in yours. If people have three, go with three. Once you’ve posted a bit in the community, you’ll get to know what works best.

Also, be sure (as with any other site) that you fill out your member profile completely. This will usually include at least one spot to put a link, and it will help other members get to know you.

Q&A Networks

Question and Answer networks are great places to build your authority and drop the occasional link as part of an answer to a question. The top Q&A networks – Quora, LinkedIn Answers, and Yahoo Answers – all have a resource box where you can add links as a reference to your answer, or a place to look for additional details. This is when it is handy to have a blog because your blog posts will make better answers than a product link. The latter will probably get you labeled as a spammer unless the question specifically says “Where can I buy…” and you happen to have it for sale on your website.

As far as profiles go on these networks, Yahoo Answers doesn’t offer one where you can add links. Quora, on the other hand, is one where you will want to make sure you fill it out as much as possible. You can have links in your main bio.

You can also have links as a part of the topics you follow. When you follow a topic, it will ask you to describe your experience with that topic. In that area, just add a short blurb with your link.

Whenever you answer a question within that topic, it will put your link with your answer as a part of your topic bio.

Unfortunately, it’s not hyperlinked, but it could still lead the way to people going to your website from your answer, even if it is by copying and pasting.

Bonus Tips

I decided to do a few bonus tips that are unrelated to content or social engagement, but are also easy ways to generate more links to your site naturally.

Link to Us Page

The first bonus tip is to simply add something to your website that helps others link to you easily. Call it your Link to Us page and be sure it includes the following.

Badges & banners are just simple images that people can use on their website. If possible, create them in a number of different sizes that are standard so people can find the right one to fit their site. 125×125, 468×80, and 300×250 are pretty standard banner sizes.

Along with your badges & banners, be sure to include the HTML code that people can use to put your link on their site as shown in the example above. The easier you make it, the most likely people will link to you.

Widgets

Can you think of a simple widget that fits with your website? If so, create a widget that people can place on their website. And make sure that widget has a link on it!

See WidgetBox for more examples and learn how to create your own.

Email Links

Do you send out a lot of emails? Do you use an online email service like Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo? If so, use WiseStamp to create visually appealing email signatures with links to your websites, or simply include links to your websites below your name.

I have had several people click on these links in my signature, then email me back saying they didn’t know I did freelance writing, blogging, or photography. After visiting my site, they wanted to inquire about services or prints of photos!

Statistics Checking Links

Want to see some interesting stats about your website (or someone else’s) while building some quick links to it? Try searching for your domain using the following sites. They will tell you some useful information as well as create a profile page for your domain with a link back to it.

• Alexa – This site will tell you how your domain ranks in traffic worldwide and within your own country. It also gives you additional details including the number of sites linking to yours, top queries for your website, and additional statistics.
• Built With Technology Profiles – This site will tell you what your domain is using on their website including content management systems, analytics, frameworks, server information, and more.
• Quarkbase – This site will give you the latest Twitter comments associated with your domain, traffic stats, and social stats. For blogs, it will even pull up the most recent and popular blog posts!
• About the Domain – This site will tell you basic SEO information of your domain like the title, meta description, headers, incoming links, and even the Google Analytics ID #.
• Similar Site Search – This site will tell you sites it thinks is similar to yours based on keywords and content.

Have you seen success in natural link building through content, social media, and engagement? What other natural link building activities would you suggest for websites looking to gain exposure?

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

In the first installment of the keyword research series here at KISSmetrics, we took a look at keyword discovery and how to use a combination of several tools to discover new keywords and phrases for your website and content. In the second installment, we took those same keywords and analyzed keyword difficulty and competitors to determine which keywords would be best to target.

Since keyword research can be done in a variety of different ways and everyone has to find the way that is easiest for them, the final installment of this series is dedicated to the 40 top posts on keyword research in 2011. This list will guide you to even more keyword research tools, strategies, and keyword optimization. Mix and match then for the best keyword discovery and analysis for your business and clients.

Keyword Research Process & Guides

• How To Optimize A Web Page For A Keyword – Too many times, people unfamiliar to SEO think it’s all about selecting a keyword that drives traffic and then plopping it all over a web page. First, you must research which keywords you can realistically rank for and then optimize your web pages accordingly.
• Smart Organic Keyword Research – How do you narrow down the keywords you want to target from potentially thousands of options? And how do you choose the ones that will convert? Wil Reynolds, Mark Barrera, Craig Paddock, and Carolyn Shelby are going to give you some tips.
• How To Do Keyword Research like a Pro [DIY] – DIY keyword research is not as hard as it may seem while reading an expert article. With a basic understanding you can compile a list of high converting keywords.
• Strategies for Multilingual Keyword Research – A brief post outlining strategies on how to conduct multilingual keyword research for an effective global SEO campaign.
• How To Take Your Keyword Research To A Higher Level – Good keyword research is laborious. So is it no wonder that once you understand the basics, you may be tempted to use whichever tool you have at hand and try to automate or speed up the process. Except, should you want to do this?
• Keyword Research: Dealing With Uncertainty – When selecting the keywords you would like to rank for, you must take several factors into account. Preferably you’re able to calculate its potential ROI by finding out what effort is required for a return in profit. There are, however, various uncertainties that you can choose to minimize.
• Maximizing Your Keyword Research For AdWords – The easiest way to remember how to do good keyword research for AdWords is too create a seed, then dig deep and go wide. The author explains what this all means with examples.
• Do You Make These 13 Common Keyword Research Mistakes – A list of 13 common keyword research mistakes and how to fix them.
• 6 Keyword Research Mistakes You Might be Making – Here are some of the more common mistakes that the author sees people make with their keyword research.
• Starting Keyword Research: How to Build Good Targeted Keyword Lists With Free Keyword Research Tools – How to use simple and familiar free tools (that you probably already know and use in other ways) to generate a huge list of related and highly relevant keyword list, as part of your keyword research for content or blog / website SEO.
• Keyword Research: The Ultimate Guide – Do you want to read the most definitive guide to keyword research that you’ll find online? If so, then it’s here, and it’s free.
• Keywords Forensics: Research Search Terms That Others Miss – While keyword research considers keywords and phrases and then gathers data to draw conclusions about which are the best to focus on, keyword forensics surveys key phrases as they have been input by users in an attempt to identify a user behavior.
• How to Analyze the Top 10 Google Competition for Your Keyword – How you can effectively analyze how difficult the top 10 results in Google are for your keyword.
• SEO 101 – Part 2: Keyword Research – How the author does my keyword research. It’s not difficult but it can be a time consuming. Just being real!
• 15 Ways to Brainstorm for Keyword Ideas (and Jumpstart Your Brain) – Think of this process as where to get those initial ideas that you can then branch out of and find those hidden gem keywords. Below are 15 ways that can give your brain a “jumpstart” when it just feels like you can’t come up with anything on your own.
• Keyword Research that Doesn’t Suck – How To – Keyword research is not about traffic volume. It’s about opportunity. So, before you go off chasing keyword unicorns, check out this process.
• Visual Guide to Keyword Research – Human mind learns quicker and retains information easier if it is presented in a visual way, rather than through reading or listening. For that reason the author has decided to write this short guide which will allow you to learn basic keyword research trough pictures.

Keyword Research Tools

• Can You Relate to My Keyword Research Habits – A look at grabbing a competitive edge with keyword research using Market Samurai.
• Do You Know About the YouTube Keyword Tool – A great resource to identify keywords for your online videos.
• 5 Keyword Research Alternatives for Mobile, News, Social, Image & Video Optimization – Here are a mix of keyword tools and ways to use them in order customize keyword research for the increasing diversity of content types and methods of search.
• Favourite Keyword Research Tools From #MozCon – A quick roundup of some of the tools demonstrated at SEOmoz’s annual MozCon conference.
• Market Samurai Boot Camp – Keyword Research Module – Tips & training including how to use the Keyword Research Module to find the most relevant keywords and why the Golden Rules Filter is far beyond perfect!
• 6 Ways to Use Google’s Keyword Tool – Google’s Keyword Tool is useful for people who are creating AdWords and for doing search engine optimization. But that’s not all it’s useful for. Here are 6 ways to use Google’s Keyword Tool for your business.
• Keyword Research Webinar Transcript – What does Wordtracker do? Taking it at its simplest level, Wordtracker and its tools help you find the best keywords for your campaign. It’s easy to work with and it leaves you with the business of implementing the work you need to do rather than struggling to organize all these words.
• The Google Keyword Tool – Power Research Tool or Poison Kool-Aid for Niche Marketers – The Google Keyword Tool is an estimation of keywords and search stats. The operative word here being “estimation.” Google is NEVER going to give you exact information about traffic. And even though they do match up some synonym-like phrases, it’s never a complete story.
• Keyword Research With Wikipedia – Wikipedia can help you with your keyword research. Learn how much traffic you can reasonably expect to get if you rank in the top 10 in Google for your target keyword phrase.
• Using Google’s Keyword Tool to Find a Profitable Niche – Using keyword research as a part of planning before executing a profitable niche website.
• Google Correlate: A New Way To Research Keyword Popularity & Trends – With Google Correlate, you can upload data charted over either time or space and Google will look for matching patterns in search volumes. If you don’t have data of your own to upload, you can simply specify search terms, and Google will calculate the trending pattern and show matching patterns.
• How to Use Google Organic Click-Through Rate (SEO CTR) in Your Keyword Research Process – Learn how average organic click-through rates (SEO) found in Google Webmaster Tools can guide your keyword research and help you determine the benefit of higher SEO rankings.
• How to Organize Keywords for SEO & Google AdWords/PPC – Let’s say you have a big list of keywords which is not well organized & you want a quick and dirty way to organize it. Here are a dozen different tips and tools to help you organize your keywords.
• Keyword Winner: Keyword Research is Back with a Vengeance – The upsides and downsides of Keyword Winner, a keyword research tool.

Keywords for Content & Product Development

• 6 Simple Keyword Tips for Successful Writing – Keywords are very important in article optimization. Easy as it seems, a little help doesn’t hurt when you’re not sure on how to search for those keywords.
• The New Content Marketing Keyword Strategy – Four steps to successful content marketing keyword strategy.
• How to Use Keyword Research for New Product Development – Have you ever thought about using keyword research to guide new product development? Learn how to find out what customers want using Google Suggest.
• Fixed & Dynamic Keyword Lists for Content Marketing: It’s NOT Either Or – Creating content alone isn’t enough to ensure intended audiences will read it, so researching search keywords and social topics related to your business is a helpful way to empathize with what customers are looking for and what they’re interested in.
• Five More Ways to Leverage Your Keyword List – Aside from the SEO and PPC basics, here are five creative ways to get marketing leverage from your keyword research.

Keyword Metrics and Ranking Reports

• Keyword Tracking Reports for Search Engine Success – Here are some reasons for running Google rank reports including reporting the results of your SEO work, discovering the reason for an increase or decrease in visits, and more.
• Keyword Metrics for SEO (And Driving Actions from Data) – Rand illustrates some ways to take the keyword metrics you’ve garnered and turn them into visits to your sites.

Free eBooks on Keyword Research

• Keyword Research & Competition Analysis Mastery: The eBook – If you are at all interested in keyword research, this guide is for you. The author has gone into a great deal of depth in explaining every single step of keyword research.
• Better Keywords, Better Customers: A Guide to Keyword Generation – This eBook features tips and ideas from top SEO and online marketing minds like Outspoken Media’s Lisa Barone and Cyrus Shepard of SEOmoz. Inside you’ll find details and how-tos for putting together the ultimate keyword generation project for your business.

I hope you have enjoyed this series on keyword research. Now it’s your turn – what is your favorite method of keyword research and the tools you use?

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

Keyword research is a vital part of any online marketing campaign. In the first part of this keyword research series, you were given a base spreadsheet to use to start entering data including estimated search volume and approximate CPC next to keyword ideas and phrases you generated using various tools including SEMRush, Google Suggest, and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Now we will look at getting even more data about each keyword to further narrow down the results.

The following is the second part of the keyword research series. It will help you continue to record important data into your keyword research spreadsheet which will help you narrow down the list of keyword ideas to the best keywords / phrases for both your main website’s search engine optimization and topics for content development.

Please note that this data will take a bit of time to compile, so you might want to run through the keyword list and remove any obvious ones that you don’t want. I usually go with no more than 100 keywords for this part of the process.

Spreadsheet Recap

The spreadsheet for this post is located at http://bit.ly/kwrgoogledoc. This document has columns for data using all tools mentioned in the first two parts of this series. You can add or delete columns as you wish in order to match your keyword research needs. The columns included are as follows.

• Keyword
• GAKT – Competition (Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
• GAKT – Global Monthly Searches (Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
• GAKT – Local Monthly Searches (Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
• GAKT – Approximate CPC (Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
• SEOmoz KA – Difficulty (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 DA (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 RDLRD (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 DA (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 RDLRD (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 DA (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 RDLRD (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)

Columns for keyword ideas and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool were discussed in the previous post.

Keyword Analysis with SEOmoz

If you have a Pro membership with SEOmoz (you can always get a 30 day free trial if you have just one keyword research project to do), then you have access to a very nice little tool called Keyword Difficulty & SERP Analysis.

This tool will show you the percentage of difficulty for each keyword, giving you an idea of how hard it will be to rank highly for it. You will also see the top ten sites ranked for each keyword, each site listed with its domain authority and the number of root domains linking to it. The latter is really the information that will help you decide which keywords to target.

You can put in five words at a time and choose which search engine to do the analysis for – Google, Bing, or Yahoo. You can also select a country.

Using a sampling of 5 keyword phrases from the ones previously discovered by the AdWords Keyword Tool, you can see the results of the difficulty assessment in conjunction with search volume.

SEOmoz tools discontinued pulling search volume data from Google Adwords as of November 11, 2011.

While this information is nice (you’ll want to enter the percentages into your spreadsheet), the real competitor information can be seen when you click on the full analysis for each keyword, such as these results for social media company. I like to open them in new tabs for convenience.

This is the part where you can learn a few things. First off, you can see who you will be trying to beat. If your website comes up in this list of the top ten, then congratulations – you’re on the first page for a keyword phrase with a highly competitive keyword difficulty of 66%.

If you’re not in these results, you can compare your own website’s domain authority and linking root domains to the stats of the sites ranking in the top ten. Domain authority is a score from 1 to 100. The higher a website’s domain authority, the more likely it is to rank for the keywords it is optimized for. The linking root domains is the number of unique domains linking to a website.

You can see that the site with the highest authority and linking root domains doesn’t necessarily win the top spot. But if you want to make #1, your site may need a domain authority of 28 or higher and hundreds of linking root domains to beat the competition.

Another thing you can learn from this is whether a keyword is drawing commercial or informational results. This means that you will learn whether your keyword is being searched for commercial purposes (meaning that someone wants to find a product or service) or whether it is being searched for informational purposes (meaning that people are looking for information, not a product or service).

For social media company, the results include six actual social media consulting companies and agencies. The other four results are about rankings and comparisons of social media companies.

Comparatively, if I do a full analysis of the keyword phrase what is social media, you will see that the first page of results are purely informational, and specifically the top five are from highly authoritative domains.

So if you are a social media company, you will probably want to target the phrase social media companies for your main business homepage. You will also want to create some content based around the phrase what is social media and place it on highly authoritative domains such as YouTube and SlideShare to see if you can get it into the rankings for a phrase searched potentially by a million people monthly.

Alternative to the Pro SEOmoz Tool

If you’re not interested in a premium tool, then what you can do is simply look up each keyword phrase and look at websites ranking in the first page of the results.

If you’re interested in the domain authority stats, you can get some using OpenSiteExplorer.org (a limited amount for free accounts) or the free version of the SEOmoz toolbar – just use that and compare it to your own website’s domain authority. You can grab overall backlink statistics from Yahoo Site Explorer (until it is retired) and use the Inlinks number for each domain.

At least with this information, you can still determine the commercial vs. informational usage of a keyword plus some basic stats to compare against your own website.

Putting It Together in the Spreadsheet

The final part of the process is taking the spreadsheet and interpreting the data. I like to use the Conditional Formatting in Excel to highlight cells a certain color based on the numerical value in the cell. You simply highlight the cell range you want to compare, then go to Conditional Formatting > New Rule.

Select the 3-Color Scale Format Style, and change the Lowest Value / Highest Value color when applicable. Certain fields in your spreadsheet will need to display the fact that a higher number is good whereas a lower number is bad. For those fields (global & local monthly searches), you will want to leave the color settings as default, as shown below.

Other fields in your spreadsheet will need to display the fact that a higher number is bad whereas a lower number is good. For those fields (GAKT – Competition, GAKT – Approximate CPC, SEOmoz KA – Difficulty, SEOmoz KA – Competitor DA, SEOmoz KA – Competitor RDLRD), you will want to change the lowest value color setting to green and the highest value color setting to red, as shown below.

Once you’re finished, you can highlight the top row and add a filter by applying the Sort & Filter > Filter option. I like to start with selecting the filter for the SEOmoz KA – Difficulty column and sorting it from smallest to largest. This way you get the following (click on the image below to see a larger view):

As you can imagine, having the highlighting and sorting options would be very valuable when looking at a spreadsheet with up to 100 keywords. You could quickly see which keywords have the most searches and least competition or the least competition but most searches. You could then move over and look at the actual competition for each keyword if you were shooting for #1 rankings.

Making the Final Keyword Choices

My suggestion when making the final choice on keywords is as follows.

• If your website is commercial (offering products or services), go with keywords that seem to have the most commercial intent based on the currently ranking websites. If your website is informational (blogs come to mind), go with keywords that have the most informational intent.
• Look for a “sweet spot” of high search volume in conjunction with low difficulty / competition.
• Look at keywords with high search volume with top competitors that have lower domain authority and backlinks.
• If your website is already ranking on the first page, but not in the top 5 spots (or beneath other search result areas such as images, local results, etc.) and the keyword has good search volume, focus on getting those keywords and phrases to move up.

Sometimes, it’s not the actual decision that is the most difficult – it is actually compiling the data that takes the most time! Also, don’t forget to take the keywords that are more informational and use them for content topic ideas!

This concludes our method of discovering keyword ideas, analyzing them, and then choosing the best for your website. We have noticed that there are many various ways to perform keyword research, and you have to try out different analysis methods to see which ones speak to you the best when deciding on keywords. With that in mind, part three of this series will be a compilation of the top posts on keyword research. Stay tuned!

Next Up: Part III – 40 Top Keyword Research Posts of 2011

Click here to read the third post in this series.

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

Keyword research should be the basis of any online marketing campaign. The simple goal of keyword research is to find out what your target audience is searching and what it will take to actually rank for those keywords and phrases. Without knowing what keywords you should be targeting, how will you effectively optimize your website, target phrases for link building, or know what content to develop for your audience?

The following is the first of a three part series to help you set up a spreadsheet for your keyword research and discover the best keywords / phrases for both your main website’s search engine optimization and topics for content development. The next posts in the series will cover what data will help you choose the best keywords to target and additional resources you can use to learn more about keyword research.

Spreadsheet Set Up

The first thing you will want to do is set up a spreadsheet to record your data within. I have set up a basic spreadsheet that you can access at http://bit.ly/kwrgoogledoc. This document has columns for data using all tools mentioned in the first two parts of this series. You can add or delete columns as you wish in order to match your keyword research needs. The columns included are as follows.

• Keyword
• GAKT – Competition (Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
• GAKT – Global Monthly Searches (Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
• GAKT – Local Monthly Searches (Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
• GAKT – Approximate CPC (Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
• SEOmoz KA – Difficulty (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 DA (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 RDLRD (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 DA (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 RDLRD (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 DA (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 RDLRD (SEOmoz Keyword Analysis)

In this post, we’ll cover filling up the columns with keyword and Google AdWords Keyword Tool data. In the following post, we’ll look at how to narrow down those keywords using the SEOmoz Keyword Analysis tool (or some alternative methods if you are not a Pro member).

Saving the Google Docs Version

If you are signed into your Google account, simply use the File > Save option to save it to your documents and start filling it in with your information.

Downloading Excel and Open Office Versions

If you don’t have Google Docs, or would prefer to save it on your local machine, go to the Google Docs version and use the File > Download As to save it as your desired file type. I’d suggest Excel for best possible functionality.

Keyword Discovery

The first phase of keyword research involves coming up with new keyword ideas. Sometimes this is the most difficult part of the process as many people unfamiliar with keyword competition will select very broad words to target such as pizza, hotel, or Los Angeles. Others will pick obscure phrases that no one will likely search such as SEO/Link Building/Social Media (yes, I’ve seen people trying to similarly over-punctuated phrases). So the first thing you will need to do is find suitable, related phrases for their business.

You can always start with some simple brainstorming. Look at what the main focuses are on the website and jotting down keywords. I would suggest doing so within Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet application. Then, whenever you are ready to expand on those ideas, continue on to some great keyword tools.

Keyword Discovery Tools

The following are a great collection of free and premium tools that will help you discover new keywords related to your website or business.

SEMrush

Your next option is to check out the keywords competitors are using. One great tool for this is SEMrush. Simply enter a domain to see the top organic and ads keywords the website is getting traffic from.

If you are not a PRO member (which costs $79.95 per month), you can only see the first ten keywords under organic keywords or ads keywords by clicking on the Full Report link under each.

This is a great way to go if you are absolute uncertain what keywords you or your client should be targeting. It can definitely point you in the right direction.

Google Search Suggestions

Once you have some basic ideas to start with, you can expand upon them by using the freely available suggested search. Simply visit Google.com and start typing in a keyword in the search box. You will then see ten phrases related to your keyword pop up below as more targeted, suggested searches.

You can continue typing to get more detailed suggestions. As you can see, this will help you with long-tail and, in some cases, even local keyword phrases.

Be sure if you are working with a local client that you change your Google settings to reflect results from their location as Google will assume you are looking in your location. This is when it is important to be signed out of your Google account for non-personalized recommendations. To change your location for local keyword suggestions, go to your search settings and add a city / state as your default location. Just be sure to change it back before doing some local searches for your own personal needs.

Alternative Search Suggestions

Looking for alternative suggested search boxes? The following search engines have similar suggested search options that appear below the search box when you start typing in keywords. Depending on your keyword, each search engine will offer different suggestions.

• Yahoo
• Bing
• Blekko
• Ask
• Dogpile

Most people stick with Google as that is the main search engine to target, but it still doesn’t hurt to get additional keyword ideas from elsewhere.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The next tool up is the commonly referenced Google AdWords Keyword Tool. If you have a Google account and, better yet, an AdWords account, I would suggest signing in to those once you arrive on the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to get better results. To give you an idea, I searched for social media when I was not logged into my account and received 100 keyword ideas. I searched for it again when logged in and received 800.

My suggestion is if you are looking for keywords just for your static website and not interested in the cost per click pricing (CPC), go with the results without logging into Google AdWords. If you are interested in the CPC pricing and also getting keyword ideas to help with content development, go with the results while logged into Google AdWords.

Here is what each of the columns displayed in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool will tell you about each of the keyword ideas displayed.

• Competition – “The Competition column gives you a sense of how many advertisers are bidding for a particular keyword. This data can help you determine how competitive the ad placement is.”
• Global Monthly Searches – “The approximate 12-month average of user queries for the keyword on Google search.”
• Local Monthly Searches – “If you specified a country or language for your search, this is the approximate 12-month average number of user queries for the keyword for those countries and languages.”
• Approximate CPC – “This is the approximate cost-per-click you might pay if you were to bid on the keyword. The CPC is averaged over all the ad positions.”

You can learn more about the search traffic statistics shown in this tool in Google AdWords Help.

You can also select specific Match Types in the left side of the screen to further narrow down your information. This will change the traffic volume for Global and Local Monthly Searches based on the approximation of traffic that a keyword gets on Google based on the following types.

• Broad – The sum of the search volumes for the keyword idea, related grammatical forms, synonyms and related words. If you were doing PPC and targeted the broad match for social media, ads would show with any searches including social or media. Organic results would include the same.
• [Exact] The search volume for that keyword idea. If you were doing PPC and targeted the exact match for social media, ads would only show if someone typed in social media but not any other variation of that phrase.
• “Phrase” – The sum of the search volumes for all terms that include that whole phrase. If you were doing PPC and targeted the phrase match for pizza dough, ads would show for anyone who typed in social media, with or without additional keywords such as social media marketing or about social media. Organic results would include only results including the exact phrase social media.

You can learn more about match types in AdWords Help. You can also see the difference in data based on the three match types using the phrase social media in order of broad, “phrase”, and [exact].

And if you were to use these match types in a search, you would get 419 million results for a broad match search for social media and only 304 million results for a phrase match search for “social media”.

Going back to the generic term social media, you might want to remove certain words from the keyword ideas. For example, you may not want to target anything about social media jobs, so you could add the word job under Exclude terms in the left side of the screen.

To export this data, use the Download button and export to your preferred format. You can then copy the data from the exported spreadsheet to your keyword research spreadsheet. You can also get this data for the keyword ideas you generated using SEMrush and suggested search by copying and pasting those keywords into the Word or phrase box and checking the box to only show ideas closely related to my search terms. Then export the data for those keywords and phrases by checking the boxes next to them under the Search Terms section.

At this point, you probably have a lot of great keyword ideas. In the next post, I will cover how to use the SEOmoz Keyword Analysis Tool (or an alternative method to get the same information if you are not a Pro member) to get additional data and then narrow down your keywords to the ones that you should most likely focus upon for your online marketing strategy.

Next Up: Part II – Analyzing and Choosing the Best Keywords

Click here to read the second post in this series.

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.