Using the right search engine optimization tools can make a huge difference in your site’s position in the search engines. They can make your life easier, that’s all there is to it! Using the right tools can be crucial.

Before I get into tools that are good for you to use, I am going to discuss tools that you should steer clear of. By the way, this article was given to me by SEO Product Reviews.

Auto Blog Commenting Software

The first of these is auto blog commenting software. Every blog owner knows how annoying it is to get comments that are obviously automated and don’t even make sense according to what the site is about! There is no sane marketer in the world who would approve a comment like this, which means that auto submission of comments are not worth your time at all.

Content Spinners

Other things you should stay away from (even if you think they will make your life easier) are content spinners. These are supposed to take one article and turn it into dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of different articles. While this sounds good, all it does is fill the Internet with junk. Half of the resulting articles don’t even make sense, which Google is well aware of! This might work to a certain degree in the short term, but don’t expect spun articles to last for the long haul.

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research tools are search engine optimization tools that are good to use. You can find Google’s own (free) tool by searching for “Google keyword tool”. Another great one (paid) is Market Samurai, which does a lot more than just keyword research. Nichebot is another great one, though it requires a monthly subscription. WordTracker is also very popular, and it requires a subscription payment as well. Read reviews on these different keyword tools to find the one that is right for you. By the way, I am using Micro Niche Finder.

RSS Feed Submission Software

Another tool that might be worth your time is RSS feed submission software. Blogs automatically have RSS feeds, but your static site might not. Even so, you can easily add an RSS feed to any website — this is something that few marketers know, which means you will be ahead of the game! By submitting your RSS feed to different directories, you will be getting more exposure and more backlinks to your website.

Social Bookmarking Tools

Social bookmarking tools have also been popular for a couple of years now. However, their effectiveness has declined a lot (in many SEO expert’s opinions). You can pick some of these up relatively cheaply, so you may want to give one a try in hopes that some of the bookmarks “stick” and result in more backlinks. Take a look at my list of top social bookmarking sites.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to search engine optimization tools. Do some research into the ones that are going to be beneficial for you, and you can build your collection of tools over time so you become a force to be reckoned with in the SEO world!

If you know of any other tools, please add them as comments. I am always eager to discover new tools.

This is an article from SEO Product Reviews.

Many people agree that if you want to make it online with your website, you need to understand search engine optimization “Google style.” The fact is that Google is the top search engine and controls most of the market share among all the search engines. The problem is that they do not disclose how their algorithm ranks websites, so it takes expert testing as well as your own trial and error to figure it out.

If you are just starting out marketing your website, it is important to focus on the things that we know to be true about ranking highly in Google. These are time-tested tips and techniques that people have discovered.

The honest truth is that there is no magic bullet that will make you rank highly for incredibly competitive terms. Factors that seem to be prevalent for websites that rank highly for those kinds of terms almost always have been:

- Quality content
- Consistent content
- A lot of backlinks and quality websites
- An “aged” domain

Any newbie marketer might be intimidated by this list. At the same time, all you have to realize is that Google’s main goal is to provide the best search engine experience to their visitors as they possibly can. It starts with quality content! Even if you are the newest of the new, this is something you can do. Make it your mission to create a website that will stand the test of time.

Google also tries to present up-to-the-minute information. You will get extra “points” from the algorithm if you update your site consistently. There is no known time that you need to update by, this is something you’ll need to test for yourself. Many popular bloggers, for instance, blog every day, or at least several times per week. There are other static or product-based websites that update less frequently and still rank highly. This may be specific to the type of website.

The other things are features that build up over time. Take a little time each day, or each week, to get as many back links to your website as possible. This will naturally occur if you have quality content, but you can also take steps to ensure backlinks come through. Comment on blogs, submit articles to article directories, and utilize other linking strategies to ensure these come in consistently.

Google also enjoys aged domains. This means domains that have been around for a few years or more. This might be because there is more chance of there being a lot of content there, but it also has to do with the fact that many people start and abandon websites within a short amount of time. If your website is still up and running, it shows authority in Google’s eyes and you’ll likely get a boost in the rankings because of that.

Following these search engine optimization, Google will certainly help you get started with your site. Focus on quality and the rewards will come.

You can drive a lot of traffic to your website or blog if you start using images and if you start optimizing your images for Google Image Search.

A lot of people are using Google Image Search and you can get a lot of free traffic if you just start doing some minor changes.

There are many ways to get traffic from Google Image Search; you could insert keywords into your Alt text and name your images with descriptive titles and of course you could use relevant text around your images.

I am going to concentrate on five creative ways. The reason that I am only focusing on five techniques, is that I believe that you probably already know the basic ways to get traffic to your images; like inserting keywords into your Alt text, and if you don’t know, you can always find a great article about how to get traffic from Google Image Search.

My first creative way to drive traffic to your website using Google Image Search is to use images about really hot topics. My best example is probably about Britney Spears. She is still a really hot topic, but a few months back, she was probably the hottest topic in the world. You didn’t need to write a blog post about Britney Spears, but you could have used her as an example and used an image of her in your blog post, and finally, you could have used an Alt text with a really hot keyword about Britney Spears.  

My second creative way is using Google Image Labeler. If you haven’t heard of Google Image Labeler, I will do a short introduction for you (well, I have borrowed the introduction from Google):

You’ll be randomly paired with a partner who’s online and using the feature. Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will:

• View the same set of images.
• Provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see.
• Receive points when your label matches your partner’s label. The number of points will depend on how specific your label is.
• See more images until time runs out.

After time expires, you can explore the images you’ve seen and the websites where those images were found. And we’ll show you the points you’ve earned throughout the session.

My third creative way is to include more than one keyword in your image title. It’s easy, just use hyphen in the name. For instance, if I wanted to use an image of google image search, I would have at least used the name google-image-search.jpg, but I could have also put another important keyword in there, maybe google-image-search-traffic.jpg?

My fourth creative way is to create an image site map. Create a page where you link to all your images. Site maps are great for SEO in general, maybe they are just as great when it comes to images?

My fifth creative way to drive traffic to your website using Google Image Search is to use images from topics/categories with few images, but many searches. Just do a search using Google Image Search and see if you can find a lot of images for your keywords, if you can’t, then great. You won’t have much competition then. You might have to guess when it comes to the amount of people who are actually searching for images with your keywords, because I don’t really know how to find out how many searches people do for images. Anyways. You are looking for keywords or categories with very few images, but with a lot of searches.

Finally.

Even though it might not help you at Google Image Search, you should always think about the best way to present your images. Remember that small images loads faster and unusual images are always the most interesting.

Thanks to Sergey at TechWeb Media I am looking at and testing the first human powered social search engine. And I really like what I have seen so far from Stumpedia.

It’s a search engine, but instead of the spider from Google, Yahoo or any of the other major search engines, this is powered by people, like you and me. We can all submit sites and recommend sites for specific keywords and phrases, and like web 2.0 sites (digg, reddit, propeller), we can rank the websites at Stumpedia.

I guess this means that instead of like Google uses their pagerank and all sorts of algorithms to give you the spot in their serp (search engine rank page), Stumpedia trust people to rank the sites.

But is that all there is to it?

I am not sure.

You have to sign up in order to submit links to Stumpedia, and you need to sign up in order to vote on websites. Only members will get access, non-members can use it as a search engine, that’s all.

I have been testing Stumpedia for searching, and for some keywords there are not much information. For instance, I searched for Facebook and I received one website, I searched for protein and it didn’t come up with anything.

At this very moment, Stumpedia has 3,127 links, 593 members and over 3,500 search terms.

Even though Stumpedia is not that big yet, it has the potential of becoming a major player among the search engines – the only question remains, do you trust your friends to vote for the most relevant websites?

We need to trust the community at Stumpedia to come up with the top websites, and that it won’t become just another web 2.0 site packed with spammers and golddiggers out to get their own websites to the top.

Personally, I think that the biggest problem for Stumpedia is how to sget the relevant and important websites with great content to the top, instead of entertaining websites with cool and funny content.

I can give you an example.

If you do a search for George Bush, you will get three results. The one at the top is a funny YouTube video, and the next two are facts about George Bush sr and jr at wikipedia. If you compare this to the identical search in Google, the top two are the pages from wikipedia, and the YouTube video is at number 8.

What happens when people starts to submit more funny videos of George Bush? There are a lot of funny videos about this guy, and suddenly, the facts and the important information regarding the President of the United States of America is nowhere to be found.

I am just guessing here, and I hope I am not right.

I will continue to use Stumpedia to see how well it develops, you never know what will happen, but one thing’s for sure – Look out for Stumpedia.

I am really not that interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), well, don’t get me wrong. I am very interested in traffic from search engines, but I have not been studying SEO at all. I know a few things, but that’s about all.

The reason why I have not studying Search Engine Optimization is that I have thought that it’s too time consuming and a very difficult task. And if I am going to be good at SEO I would have to work really hard at it, something I don’t have the time to do at the moment.

… but when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, I have a few things that I am aware of. I try to be strategic about them and I believe that they are very important and not that hard to understand.

One problem regarding SEO is that search engines are always trying to change, they are very dynamic, and they are always trying to “catch” cheaters. To be among the best, you need to keep reading, keeping studying, because you never know when a new update at Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL will come.

Now, to me, Search Engine Optimization is all about getting my site on the first few choices of a search engine result page, as a result of the keywords punched in. And of course, the keywords should be relevant to my content.

I am writing about Internet marketing and stuff related to that topic. It wouldn’t be that great for me to get to the top at Google for the keyword Opera singer. Well, I would probably get a lot of traffic, but my visitors from that keyword would probably be interested in reading more about Opera singers than Internet marketing. So, they would be at my site for 1 minute or less, and probably never come back.

Search Engines are a great way to get targeted traffic, and that’s the kind of traffic I really want. But it’s not that easy. A few years ago, it looked like all you needed to do was write the same keyword over and over again in the meta tags. If you did that enough times, you would get ranked in the top 10 (it wasn’t really that easy.. but to me it looked that way).

Search engines do not go through each and every site carefully and then put them up on the web. You might think that, but they don’t. They have algorithms which are programmed to rank pages according to the text relevance. If you have a flawed design or irrelevant coding then your site might appear for a totally different keyword or would appear at the bottom of the result page.

There are four things that are important to me when it comes to Search Engine Optimization:

1. On-Page Optimization
2. Off-Page Optimization
3. Reciprocal Linking

On-Page Optimization

This includes Keywords, link structures, text, images and other visible and invisible features. I believe that keywords are the most important feature on On-Page Optimization (I think that I read that somewhere). Keywords should be used in title, description and header tags, but should never be overused as this would result in keyword spamming. As I wrote earlier, the content should be in absolute relevance with the keywords, if not, you might get hits on the wrong keywords.

Off-Page Optimization

It’s all about the incoming links to your site. You would want it to be coming from relevant and high ranking websites on the same topics as yours. The more incoming links from high ranking sites matching your content, the higher ranking your website will have on the search engines.

Reciprocal Linking

This is a difficult word for a Norwegian like myself. The word reciprocal means complementary. It means that you exchange links with other webmasters with similar content as your website. This can prove to be very productive provided the quality of your content is relevant. Quality content is of uppermost priority in Search Engine Optimization.

I am trying to use all the three “techniques” when it comes to SEO. But it would probably help a lot to know which one of the three “techniques” that would give me the higher rankings. Because now, I almost never do anything regarding On-Page Optimization, because this is the difficult part, and I hardly ever do the reciprocal linking either. Well, when I come to think about it, it’s been a while since I done any off-page optimization as well.

… but it might all change once I buy and have the time to start using SEO Equalizer. I have still not decided what to do, but I guess I have to buy that software or something similar if I am going to get more traffic from Google and the other major search engines.

I have been looking at this brand new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool since the day it launched. This is probably the first time I have read the whole sales page of a product.

The reason why I have been so interested in SEO Equalizer from the beginning is probably beacuse the man behind it is Jeff Alderson, and I know that he usually overdelivers when it comes to his products. He is the man behind software like: Press Equalizer, Traffic Equalizer and AdWord Analyzer.

His reputation is one thing, but I think that SEO Equalizer sounds cheap. And of course, the software got so many interesting features that I would like to test at my blog.

I haven’t bought it yet, I am still thinking about it… but I guess I should probably just do it. The only reason why I haven’t bought it yet, is that I have bought so many e-books lately, and I just haven’t had time to read them all and use some of the software I have just bought.

Sometimes it seems that I am only buying stuff all the time, and that I never have the time to actually use them.

I discovered a few days ago that Affiliate Silver Bullet (ASB) has a landing page for SEO Equalizer. ASB provides five follow up messages that will explain the SEO Equalizer system. A great way to promote the software, but I am not actually trying to promote it, I am more trying to convince myself into buying it (or not).

Well, I am still not sure, but here are a few features that I like to use at SEO Equalizer:

• Keyword analysis that helps optimize my pages for certain keywords(keyword density) – just enter the URL to analyze and the keyword
• It will keep me out of trouble by allowing me to check whether or not my blog is pointing to a site that is banned by Google
• It helps me track my search engine position for various keywords and phrases

… and there are so many other interesting features, just take a look at the sales page and you will see why I am finding this SEO Equalizer so interesting.

I guess I just have to buy it now… I might have managed to convince myself this time

I have just been attending a conference. Eirik Newth a rather famous Norwegian blogger had an excellent lecture about web 2.0 and education.

When he was asked about his contact information, he just referred to Google. He is usually number 1 if you search for his first name Eirik. If you remember his first name and you use Google, that was enough to find his contact information.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to do the same with your name?

I guess he has an advantage with a rather uncommon name, well, it’s rather common in Norway, but it’s not common internationally. If you use Google and search for Eirik, you’ll get 2.3 million results.

If I do the same with Jens (my name) I get 36.5 million results. It seems to be really hard to reach the top 10, especially if you see that Jens Lehman the famous German football goalkeeper is at number 2 and that the prime minister of Norway is Jens Stoltenberg.

Anyway, I am going to try.

I started about 10 minutes ago. My first step was to edit my about page. Instead of just having the title, About me and slymarketing, the new title is: About Jens P. Berget and slymarketing.

I should probably also edit the url, now it’s /about, I guess it would be a lot better if I use /jens

I will wait and see what happens to my google rankings first.

I thought about writing a post about Google Pagerank, and I thought about doing it the easy way. Something like “Google Pagerank for dummies”, but as I was about to start writing I started to think;

why should I write about PageRank?

I bet thousands have already done it, and probably a lot better than I can ever write and explain it.

Now, here I am, still not sure whether I should have written the Google Pagerank for dummies or not. Well, I am sort of writing a post about it right now, but not the way I thought I would.

Sometimes, the reason I write a post, is actually to learn more about a certain topic. This Pagerank topic, was supposed to be a learning topic for me.

At one time, a while ago, I was very interested in looking at all sorts of results regarding how well my blog was ranking. I was spending time looking at Technorati, Alexa and Google Pagerank (and many others). I wanted better results on a daily basis, and sometimes I checked the stats every hour or so.

That was before I understood that they didn’t change that often.

Today, I am not using hardly any resources to check my stats. I know that I probably should, but with so little time to do what I really enjoy in life, I just have to stay away from stuff like that.

When I look back at the time when Google Pagerank actually mattered to me, I think that I would have explained Pagerank using just a few words, something like

PageRank is a numeric value that represents, according to Google, how important a page is on the web.

Ok, I must admit that I did borrow most of the words from WebWorkshop, but I think I would have used most of the words myself, they just beat me to it.

If you are interesting, like I used to be, you could be reading all sorts of more or less interesting articles explaining how to increase your Pagerank and how pagerank is calculated. You can even look to Google for the answer to Google PageRank explained, or why not read what a professional blogger wrote more than two years ago about the topic?

I am back at the beginning. Why have thousands of people tried to explain Google PageRank when Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page have already explained it?

Maybe the founding fathers didn’t do a good enough job explaining it

I am just wondering; would it be illegal if Google provided biased search results?

Let me give you an example.

Some of the top people at Google would like the democrats to win the presidential election in the United States. To help the democrats, they offer some undercover marketing. Every time someone used Google to search for republican or something related to the party, they would get negative information regarding the republicans. And every time someone searched for democrats or something related to the party, they would get very positive information.

Do you get the picture?

Who controls Google?

Can Google have any impact regarding the presidential election, even if they tried? And what if they did try, would anybody suspect it, or would they get caught?

Well, even if they wanted, I guess it would be kind of hard for them to do anyway. They got more than ten thousand employees around the world. A few people could probably not stage something like that. But sometimes you might stop and think, do you remember the google miserable failure search?

And there have been several so called Political Google bombs, but what if they were not bombs, but directed from Google headquarters? This is not a conspiracy theory, I am just asking, what if?

There are many things that I don´t know about Search Engine Optimization, but I am learning a few things now and then. Today I found a very informative video on You Tube about how to do a Google Search Engine Optimization. There are many interesting details in the video, and one of the most important to me was that I really need to focus on the contents and the titles, and to find other “good” sites (with high page rank) to link to my site. Well, nothing new really… but it seems that I need to focus more on it.

I am actually not sure what I should do with the title tags (the text that will appear at the very top of the page when you click on a post). For instance, if you compare two well-known blogs like Problogger by Darren Rowse and Entrepreneurs-Journey by Yaro Starak, you can see that they are using the title tags a little different. On the top of the page for every post at Problogger, you will only see the actual title of the post and only the title. But at Entrepreneurs-Journey you will see the title of the post, but after the title you will also see “Internet Business Blog – By Yaro Starak”.

I am not sure which one is the best, but I have been doing the same as Problogger for a while. Maybe it´s time to try something else?