Keyword Research - In Pictures

I've decided that this blog doesn't have enough illustrations, so I decided that I would talk about keyword research again, but from a graphic perspective. The following are from the Search Illustrated column at Search Engine Land.
And here's the second part of the post:

Email Zombies - Reviving Your Dead Email Subscribers

In a Halloween related theme, I wanted to share this article about how to determine which email addresses are truly dead.

New Tool to Show Historical Trends for Seasonal Keywords

This tool is very neat - it will show you (for instance) that people start searching for "santa claus" starting in October. It's only in beta, but worth playing with.

Exhaustive List of Keyword Research Tools

This blog post by Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com is amazing! What a thorough list and analysis of the free and paid keyword research tools out there. I had to share.

How Many Web 2.0 sites are out there?

Too many! Look at this graphic list of Web 2.0 sites.

Web Analytic Definitions

The Web Analytics Association has just released their standardized definitions of web analytic terms - finally a dictionary for those new to web analytics!

More Tips for Optimizing your Site for Yahoo or MSN

I found a great article about optimizing your site for MSN and Yahoo that I wanted to share. Here are highlights:

For Yahoo:
Likes older sites with quality inbound links
Likes sites that are W3C Compliant - so make sure that it gets the OK through Bobby (online compliance tool) and that you've filled out your alt tags!

For MSN/Live:
Website age is not as important
Likes large sites with lots of good, unique, relevant content
Doesn't require as many quality inbound links

Happy optimizing!

The most comprehensive list of Web 2.0 sites for link building

This is by far the most comprehensive "how to" guide I've seen for building links from Social Media/Web 2.0 sites.

This list will keep you busy for awhile if you've already incorporated all the tips on this blog and are asking "what's next"?

Online Tools Provided by Google and Yahoo

If you own a website, you should be aware and sign up for the webmaster tools provided by the Search Engines:

Yahoo Site Explorer will show you the links coming into any Web site URL. That allows you to see what sites contribute to a competitor’s current PageRank. The links listed below are from pages Yahoo! has indexed. Yahoo!'s links, of course, may differ slightly from the links in another search engine that has indexed different pages.

Google Webmaster Central provides many great tools for understanding the Google Index. One resource, Google's linking tool, shows only Google-indexed pages linking to your Web site. You can't use the tool, however, to check out another site.

Both will help you upload a sitemap, and monitor whether your site is experiencing technical issues that is causing issues for the search engine's spiders. Just a few more tools to bookmark and help you maintain your site performance!

Free Tools for Sophisticated Keyword Research

For all of you nonprofits out there who would like to do more sophisticated keyword research using free online tools, I've discovered a great article by our friends at SEOmoz.org.

The article outlines how you can use Google and Yahoo's search interfaces to determine how popular the keyword phrases are that you are thinking of using on your website.