Yikes! Your Competitor has Found Keyword Elite

I know it sucks. But you have no option preventing your competitors from getting a copy of Keyword Elite, the ultimate keyword research tool ever created. You thought you are the sole owner of the massive keyword list you have built over several months? After finding what this little piece of software can do, you will feel less comfortable.

This keyword research tool helps you build keyword lists of 100, 1000 or 10,000 keywords. Unlike several other keyword tools, KE returns key words that you have not originally entered into the tool. For example, if you enter the keyword term 'digital camera', it will return keywords for SLR cameras, compact cameras, Canon, Nikon, etc.

This is really a time saver. However, you will also be presented with a list of unwanted keywords, which you can filter out by selecting the appropriate options. For examples if you are not selling photo printers, you can ask KE to avoid 'printer' from the output list.

Those are relatively boring tasks. Anyway, nobody likes the process of tidying up. The cleaning tool is efficient and serious web marketers can easily build profit pulling keyword lists in a matter of a few minutes.

The most deadly thing about Keyword Elite is that it tells you everything about any keyword you choose. You will get a clear idea of the number of competitors bidding on a specific keyword, average CPC, number of searches, and number of Adwords clicks.

This is really an unfair advantage. Although you feel safer because Google doesn't make available these figures to your competitors, Keyword Elite does. You spend so much time building keyword lists and before long, the information of your keywords, the amount you bid and the number of clicks you get are available to your competitors.

The price of the tool when I first saw it was $ 97. Then it became $ 147. Then it was $ 167 and now it is $ 176. It is not that Brad Callen (the developer of this tool) is getting greedy, but satisfied users are willing to trade an arm and a leg for this little piece of software. The price was $ 176 when I last checked it. Don't blame me if the price is $ 227 when you finally reach there.

And, for this tool to be truly useful for all of its users, Keyword Elite has to remain an elite choice. I know not everyone will be interested in this tool. For those people who really want to create killer keyword lists that pull profits, Keyword Elite is the tool. If you choose not to use this tool, fine. Your competitors will use it.

If you choose to use this tool, click here in this link. You will be taken to a long page of sales copy. You don't have to read the sales pitch and go straight to the ordering link by dragging the vertical scrollbar to almost to the bottom. Click on the link that says 'Test Drive Keyword Elite Now'.

You will get the download link once you complete the payment of $ 176 (price not guaranteed).

Resist Google Bowling Attack: Five Basic, Simple Steps

It will be a disgrace to proper SEO practitioners to talk to them about preventive steps against a Google Bowling attack. However, it does not hurt to take some precautions, especially during the run up to major sales seasons.

• Step 1: Stick to basics


Stick to the basics of website design. Make sure the coding (scripts like HTML, PHP, etc) is clutter-free. Also, ensure easy navigation among all the pages.

If your website has less than 25 pages, make sure you link to each page from all other pages – possibly from a sidebar or footer.

If you have more than 25 pages, categorize the pages. Provide links to all pages in the category from all other pages in the same category.

If yours is an ecommerce site, make sure URLs do not have session ids (each page has a unique URL or URI).

No need to talk about keywords (relevant keywords only) in page title ("title"), meta-tags, headers ("h2"), and within the content (more than 300 words of text content is good for any page).


• Step 2: Get links from quality directories


Identify the specialized directories first and submit your website there. Then identify from the thousands of general directories, a few hundreds that will be of some use to you. Submit your website to the most relevant categories in such directories.


• Step 3: Get links from 'relevant' websites


Identify other websites in your industry, which do not compete directly with yours and ask for a link exchange. If you can make it mutually beneficial, there is higher chances of getting valuable links from topical websites.


• Step 4: Create a blog and update it at least five times a week


Blogs are unique in the sense the blog posts you publish will be visible in blog search engines like Google Blog Search ( http://blogsearch.google.com/), Technorati (http://technorati.com/), etc in less than a minute. This is because of the nature of the site feeds that are automatically published alongside blog posts.


• Step 5: Make your website bigger


Bigger websites with loads of content pages hardly get snubbed by a Google bowling attack. Having more content-pages also has another benefit. You get search engine traffic for keyword combinations you never knew existed (experience of hundreds of webmasters).

It may still possible for your competitions to snub you out in the short term. It is extremely difficult and in fact not worthy of the time, money or efforts they spend. Stay Cool.

Who is Afraid of Google Bowling

Are you afraid of a Google bowling attack? I read about such an attack only on Friday. Google bowling is a kind of attack, which paints a competitor website as a spam-site. It is a kind of negative SEO or the technique of purposefully degrading a website before search engines.

The term bowling aptly suits the theory. You are literally bowling your competitor website off with this kind of attack.

A few undercover SEO experts claim to do negative SEO, pushing competitor site off Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). However, the negative SEO experts have confidentiality agreements and we cannot immediately know which sites they have pushed off with their negative SEO techniques.

One of the techniques is purposefully creating loads of worthless pages under several spam domains like longest-keyword-domain.i-am-big-spammer.com and putting a link to competitor website from those pages. I think all the domains will be from a single IP address, alerting search engine bots.

Search Engine algorithms have evolved big time to avoid websites that use such techniques to boost inbound link count. The links, thousands of them from worthless pages, do not add value to the website, but can harm it. Negative SEO people purposefully create such a situation for competitor website.

In theory, it looks like end of competitor story. However, I think there is a lot to it. A well designed website, that has reasonable number of quality inbound links –general and specialist directories, article submission, blogs, etc - will not quickly affected by such ploys. Even if the negative SEO practice can down the site for a few days, the site can move back to SERP, quickly. This is because of the number of quality inbound links it has.

However, negative SEO can push a new website into Google sandbox and can keep it there for longer than normal.

The timing of a bowling attack is the only thing a legitimate website needs to watch out for. Christmas sales are what every business look forward to. A precision-targeted attack in mid December can spoil the party.

Is SEO Keyword Density Analysis Really Out?

Keyword density is out of SEO dictionary, say several SEOs. But is it really the case?

SEO has undergone tremendous changes over the past 10 years. At first search engine optimization was for Yahoo. Then entered Google in the horizon, which went on to lift the whole business of search to its stride.

Google’s search concepts involved extra page elements and keyword density of a page became lesser and lesser relevant. People started optimizing pages for specific keywords, without ever using those keywords in the page. SEO experts today believe they can optimize any page that way.

How much is too much when it comes to SEO Keyword Optimization? People still worry.

Keywords are necessary elements in a web page for SEO

Fixing keywords in user readable text still is important in SEO. An SEO pro can fix keywords without worrying about keyword density. There is no need today to ensure 5% of the words in a page is a keyword. Keyword density lower than 2% is enough, but more than 1% is necessary.

When you do all other things right, your page should also tell the SE spiders and more importantly the visitors, your page is related to what they have searched.

The Ideal location of Keywords in a page for SEO

The position for the keywords is titles or headers. Apart from the page title (in the 'head' area), the visible areas of the page too must have titles or headers and sub headers, in h1, h2 and h3 tags. Normally the paragraph that follows the sub header too has the keyword repeated and that makes enough keyword density.

Google Personalized Search, its Implications, Challenges and Opportunities

Google lately announced personalized search, the latest from their search armoury. The concept of personalized search is quite simple. A search user gets results based on his/her previous preferences of search results. That is, if a user has repeatedly clicked on a particular result from the search results page, that result will get preferential treatment in personalized search.

The user has to be signed into Google to enable personalized search. Personalized search in enabled by default. If the user wants to get usual results, he/she has to sign out or disable personalized search. The changes will not be quite noticeable very quickly. Over the long run, the effect will be overwhelming. A user will be given the results that he or she has favored in the past searches.

This also clears road for next update of Google algorithm. After analysing the personalized search of thousands of users around the world, Google can use yet another variable for ranking purposes - the preferential treatment of individual users. The pages that users quickly click to, bookmark (with Google Toolbar) and repeatedly visit will be given higher ranking than the sites to which users click to and quickly logs off without bookmarking.

Implications of Google Personalized Search on SEO Industry

SEO experts have to fine tune the tools they already possess. In addition to attracting inbound links from high PR pages, SEO-designers have to use in-page optimization techniques aimed at smooth user experience. It is nothing more than what SEO professionals have been raising voice for quite a long time. Help the visitors find what they seek as quickly as possible.

Highly visible categorized navigation linking so that the visitor can quickly find the resource at the site with little effort. E-commerce sites will have to accept almost all payment options, signup forms should be short and straight and most importantly the pages should load instantly. User-Friendliness-Centered website designing plays the biggest role here.

Websites that already rank high and has lot of daily traffic will have to make little changes to existing strategy. The websites continue to rank high as usual.

Google Personalized Search and New Websites

New websites will have to find ways to get the attention of end users while depending only partly on Google for initial traffic. It is better if your website doesn't go to sandbox and you get traffic via Google in three-five days of launching your website. It is just not a hard task, just stick to basic on-page optimization techniques. Though it doesn't give you highly competitive single-word keywords, you can take advantage of many overlooked, but potential keyword combinations.

Back to basics, get as much links as possible from high traffic pages - article directories, established websites, review sites etc, newsletters, etc. Creating a resourceful content section in the website also helps. Get the attention of bloggers so that a large number mention your site. The content section, if useful enough will also work to attract traffic via Digg and other social bookmark sites.

The traffic you get via social bookmark sites really are momentary. There is however considerable advantage to the traffic you get that way. All the users of such bookmark sites are internet savvy and a good portion of them will be using Google toolbar too. There are good chances they bookmark your site and possibly write something about your site in their blog. This is how you take advantage of social bookmark network traffic.

If implemented the right SEO tools, your site will only move upwards in ranking and attract steady increase in traffic. Take Google personalized search to your stride and take the maximum advantage of the same.

SEO and Marketing in Times of Social Networking and Social Book Marking

Social networking and social book marking are the new phenomena that re-define online communication and search. The popularity of social networking sites today forces us to suggest that email and IM are things for b2b communications only. Personal communication is through social networking sites like MySpace.com, Orkut.com, Hi5.com, and the likes.

Using search engines to find websites of choice also seems to be thing of past. The new trend is social book marking. When someone finds some interesting websites or a website of interest, he or she marks the site with some tags (keywords) and makes it known to the whole bookmark community that he or she has found a website in this area and she likes it or approves it for others. The main social bookmark sites are Digg.com, Reddit.com etc.

Regular visitors to book mark sites are more adept at identifying genuine book markers and fake book markers trying to push a website or two through the community.

Marketing in times of Social Networking and Social Bookmark Sites appears to be a hard thing, while giving the most efficient tool of promotion to business owners. It is not easy to cut into any social network community or to gain credibility at a social bookmark site.

Will it be an end to devising SEO strategies and marketing plans? No, in fact it will be the real beginning of SEO principles in full fledge. Usability is the main factor in SEO strategy. A website needs to be immediately usable to a visitor. Such websites quickly attract people and they are more likely to share the websites with their peers through social bookmark sites.

Can a website count on social bookmark sites on more search engine support? The answer is Yes AND No. Though a large number of bookmarks pointing your site can help in better ranking of your website, it is also possible that that the SE algorithms give zero ranking to social bookmark sites, just as Google did to Furl.com not so long ago. You can however count on an increase in traffic to your site through the bookmarks.

Getting traffic through social network sites is not going to be an easy task any time soon. Web marketers (forget the term SEO), can create user communities. A careful marketer can create social community for a product or a company. This creates some sort of personal interaction between the users of a specific product or the customers of a company.

This is a double edged sword. For some time it can get you credibility and positive feedback, while it also leaves room for slur and personal attack on company personnel, which is not going to be a good thing for your business. Companies can however use social book marking communities as simple marketing and PR tools.

Blatant self promotion will be the last thing that works with social networking and social book marking. The aim of the marketer should be to develop personal relationship with a few of the customers and use the small community as a good PR tool. Use self promoting copy and they have got you.

Word Press Blog

I have created a wordpress blog, which will serve me in two ways, one as a categorised archive and importantly as an SEO tool.


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