In Search Engine Optimization: An Hour A Day, we listed some of our favorite SEO blogs and tools. Here are the links from the book, and some updates.

SEO Blogs we Love

• Search Engine Land- search news by Danny Sullivan and his team of SEO experts
• SEOMoz Blog with Rand Fishkin
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Blog
• Matt Cutts’ Blog (for Google information)
• Matt McGee’s Small Business SEM
• Problogger.net (for those with blogs)
• Occam’s Razor - web analytics blog by Avinash Kaushik
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Fun Tools for Site Assessment

• Link validators: elsop.com
• Slow page load checker: WebPagetest, Webmaster Tools
• Accessibility check: cynthiasays.com, w3.org (for more links to accessibility evaluation tools)
• Backlink Checker: backlinkwatch.com, Yahoo! Site Explorer, OpenSiteExplorer
• Social Media Search: Socialmention.com, Wiki of Social Search Tools
• Firefox/Chrome Extensions:  SeoQuake, YSlow, Firebug

More SEO Tools We Recommend

• Wordtracker Keyword Tool for researching keyword search popularity. Wordtracker also offers a limited free keyword research tool. (This is an affiliate link so if you purchase access through this link, Wordtracker will show us a little love, too!)
• Keyword Discovery – this fee-based keyword research tool has garnered many positive reviews – free trial available
• Google AdWords’s Keyword Tool - free, you can get keyword ideas & search popularity numbers here
• SEOMoz Page Strength Tool (or see their other SEO Tools)
• A truly fabulous spider emulator at seo-browser.com
• MSN’s set of SEO tools includes finding similar keywords, clustering keywords, and several others.
• Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer is a handy way to check if your 301 redirects are sending the right server message.
• TouchGraph Google Browser a cool way to visualize your website neighborhood
• Socializer – links to social bookmarking sites

Q: I am stuck on a problem that I hope you can help me overcome. I understand that almost everything hangs on the choice of keywords. I have subscribed to Wordtracker but can’t find a useful keyword that isn’t WAY OVERUSED already. See example below.

We are a non-profit organization that helps teachers and students learn more about business and entrepreneurship. We try to help teenagers start their own business and become successful entrepreneur. Each year we conduct a Business Plan Competition and a Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. We also provide curriculum and teaching aids for educators.

Unfortunately, each of the words underlined above scores a KEI (keyword effectiveness index) of .0004. How can I build a successful SEO strategy if I can’t find appropriate keywords that aren’t incredibly overhyped?

A: We just love your methodology for telling us your keyword choices. It really helps to put things in context.

It looks like you’re using Wordtracker’s KEI as a primary indicator of your keywords’ possible success. KEI is only one measurement. It’s at best controversial, and at worst, unloved by lots of SEOs. (For fun, you can Google “KEI is worthless” to get various opinions.) Our advice is to ignore KEI as it’s not really a prime indicator of the actual competitive climate of a given keyword, and it certainly doesn’t tell you anything about the suitability of a keyword for your website. In our SEO book we recommend assessing keywords differently, by doing things such as reviewing allintitle data (See our search engine shortcuts page for a how-to) and snooping on websites that are similar to yours in focus, among other tasks.

You note a bad KEI score for “each of the words” you underlined in your paragraph. Taken individually, of course, your keywords are awfully generic. Trying to rank for single words like “teacher” or “business” would be an exercise in futility, so if that was your line of thinking, it’s no wonder that you’re finding your keyword choices problematic.

Even if you find a few gems by combining the keywords in your paragraph, we wonder if you might be barking up the wrong tree. We say this, of course, with zero knowledge of your campaign, but we’ll go by our hunch here. Since your business offers an unusual service, you are probably in a situation where most people aren’t actively searching for exactly what you provide. If nobody’s looking for your service, then you need to think about what they are looking for, and how your business fulfills this need.

One way to do this is to rewrite your paragraph from a user’s perspective and see what keywords emerge when you think this way. Off the top of our heads there might be some tie-in to summer jobs (i.e. you provide and alternative solution to them) or college preparedness (surely what you do helps beef up a college application), and it looks like you might offer specific tools for teachers – not just “curriculum” – like, say lesson plans. And, by all means, don’t forget to consider adding location-specific keywords to the mix. If you’re having trouble finding these kinds of keywords, it’s time to call up some of your teachers, students, and volunteers, and ask how they would describe your business to others. You might be surprised – and enlightened – by what they tell you.

Q: The question I wanted to pose to you is regarding third party software tools such as IBP and Arelis, that on the surface seem to provide a number of features that could be useful in analysing competitors and improve your own site accordingly. I am very wary of such programmes as I am cautious of the sales hype that surround them.

If there is any other software that you could recommend that might make the task a little easier then I’d appreciate some advice.

A: We generally lean strongly toward a manual process of SEO, and you’ll see this mentioned at various points in our book. While there are many automated tools for SEO tasks, we find that taking the “slow road” provides many insights that using automated tools do not allow. For example, checking ranks manually can allow you to get a better sense of what the competition’s doing, and see changes in the search engine results (only today, I noticed that Google was showing image results for one of our client’s top keywords – that’s the kind of thing you could easily miss by using automated software).

One scary thing about automated software is that it sometimes can point newbie users down the wrong paths. For example, one that you mentioned in your email includes this quote: “[Our Software] also finds web sites with link exchange forms and it automatically fills out the forms for you. That allows you to get hundreds of backlinks in no time. It is a unique software program for the success of your business. Don’t wait any longer and download it now!” Now, this probably wasn’t the best advice even in the late 90s when having hundreds of backlinks was temporarily helpful – today, links like this could be downright damaging to your search engine rankings. The emphasis on finding the “perfect” keyword density is also not the greatest advice.

So, use tools like ARELIS and IBP with a grain of salt and only in conjunction with a more holistic SEO plan or some good advice from an SEO professional. For example, you can use them to mine the web for potential linking sites, and then mail your link request emails manually.

Of course, we are not totally averse to getting a little help with some of the more tedious tasks in SEO. We often use on-line tools, and many of these are discussed in our book or can be found on our SEO Blogs and Tools page. You may find enough time-saving (and free!) tools there that you won’t feel the need to pay for more.

Q: How do you feel about using Google Trends as a tool for search term relevance and popularity?

A: Google Trends is a tool that allows you to compare the popularity for up to five keywords or phrases over a period of time. I think it’s a great idea, and I have played around with it during keyword reseach, but I haven’t yet found a way to make it useful in that way. There’s nothing wrong with Google Trends – it just isn’t trying to be a keyword research tool. It might seem premature to pick apart something that’s in early beta, because it may change at any time. But Google Trends is free, so I’m guessing that if you and I have thought of using it as a keyword research tool, then other folks are considering the same thing. Let’s see how it measures up.

The first thing to note is that, at this time, Google is only using a portion of its search results in the calculation of its trend data. So, it’s important not to put too much stock in the results you get.

Now, let’s look at some sample results. Here, I looked for a correlation between the words “halloween” and “candy” by entering the query: “Halloween, candy”:

My first impression is that Google Trends keeps too much important data hidden to be meaningful in keyword research. A keyword research tool has to give you some hard data so that you can make an educated guess about what’s worth your time and energy to target on your site. Google Trends displays a vague timeline, and gives you no indication of the number of searches that you’re looking at. The lowest point is labeled “0″, but what’s the top? 100? 100,000? Without that information I can’t act on what I see.

This is most confusing when you’re looking at two words with significantly different search volumes.  In my “Halloween, Candy” example, I see the spike I expect around the same time of every year displayed for the word “Halloween” but not for “candy.”  So I searched both words separately. The graph for “Halloween” looked about the same, but the graph for “candy” looked much different when viewed by itself. It was much easier to see separate peaks and valleys, presumably because the scale had been altered when this term was displayed on its own.

Another strike against Google Trends as a serious keyword research tool is that it doesn’t offer any keyword suggestions. For example, I queried: “Halloween, horror DVD”. Again, the spike for “Halloween” was clearly seen. But there was no corresponding spike for “horror dvd.” Because I’d already done keyword research elsewhere, I knew that the term “horror movie” is more popular than “horror dvd,” so I changed my search to “Halloween, horror movie.” There, I saw a nice correlation. Without built-in help from Google Trends, I had to rely on my own knowledge and prior research to find the significant trend.

And one more problem: Google Trends isn’t clear enough about how it’s filtering the terms you enter. Is it looking for exact matches of your terms? Is it returning data on broader terms that contain the phrase you entered? I played around by refining my query, for example, searching for variations on “emmy, red carpet”, using various configurations of quotes and plurals, and I was able to get different results.  Google Trends also offers some helpful advice on advanced functionality, which includes some non-standard operators, such as the vertical bar. This is fun, but still I have the distinct feeling that I’m playing “guess the algorithm.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with that; it just isn’t great for serious keyword research!

It remains to be seen whether Google will continue its slow takeover of the world by making Google Trends into a robust free keyword research tool. But what can you use it for now? Well, Google Trends could be useful when you’re trying to nail down the timeframe of a seasonal word (i.e. should I start my Christmas promotion in October or December?). At this point in time, I think the best use of Google Trends for SEO purposes – other than fun – is to confirm a trend that you were pretty sure about in the first place.