You can find a million tools to do almost anything SEO on the net. Having said that, only a very low percentage of these tools actually work the way you expect them too. Let’s take a keyword rank checker. You would expect to get the latest SEO rankings with these tools, and that would be indeed the case if these tools actually worked. But you may want to be careful with these tools as some of them provide you with inaccurate and dated reports. That’s why I have researched for a while now to come up with a list of tools that actually do work. Most of them you probably know and use already, but just in case:

1. Google Keyword Tool: This tool which is tied with Google Adwords tells you about volume and competition for your keywords. You can then use these keywords with your adwords campaign. This tool is widely used in the SEO industry due to the fact that it is made by the best.
2. Microsoft Adcenter Labs: This is one of the best tools there is out there. Microsoft is playing catch up in the search industry, but they are trying to gain some momentum by providing tools such as this. This tool not only works for MSN ads, it also provides you with useful information such as Geographical reports and Intention reports.Very awesome tool if you ask me.
3. Digital Point Tools: Digital Point has a selection of very good SEO tools that you can use without any charge. Some of their tools will need you to sign up for an account, but overall their tools are very good. Worth trying out.
4. SEO Book Keyword Research Tool: Aaron Wall is one of the best SEOs there is out there, and he has dedicated a lot of time and money to bring you the best SEO tools available anywhere. In general, I like using Aaron’s tools as they aggregate information from multiple sources such as Google, MSN, and WordTracker. Having said that, the tools have crashed on me a couple of times, but the results have been fairly accurate. But more useful than the tool is his training book, SEOBook. You should definitely read it if you afford it.
5. SubmitExpress Keyword Tool: SubmitExpress is a little handy tool that shows side-by-side comparison between WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery results. Both these tools are great paid SEO tools, but if you don’t afford $400/$500 a year for these tools, then you can use the free results to get an estimate for the keywords that you are trying to target.

There are many other tools out there that may do the same job, but why waste time playing with so many different tools when you can use the above tools to actually do some search engine optimization. One thing about the Internet is that it’s a great tool for innovation and distraction. You can gain a lot from the Internet, but you can potentially lose a lot as well. Just go to remember that time is money!

The newest version of Wordpress, 2.5, is certainly shinier than anything I have seen from those guys. Best of all, SEO features such as tags, permalinks edit feature, and … are now accessible more than ever. If you haven’t downloaded Wordpress 2.5, do it now. It makes your day shinier, literally!

I am sure you have heard of the Earth Hour where people from all around the world turn the lights off in order to support to idea of conserving energy. Google just did their part today by making Google’s homepage all black.

The homepage of Google does look ugly in black for what it’s worth, but it is admirable that they are supporting this cause. But that’s what we have come to expect from Google. I didn’t see anything like that from Microsoft or Yahoo! for that matter.

That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? The fact of the matter is people are not comfortable discussing how much they are getting paid with their colleagues, but it is not difficult to find out how much some of the so called SEOs get paid for an hour of their time. What I have seen so far goes from reasonable $50 to ridiculous $1000 per hour. To be honest, some of the top SEO guys don’t tell you more than what you can read in a good SEO book, so sometimes it’s frustrating to be an in-house SEO expert who’s ditched in favor of one of these high-level SEO consultants. So how much would you find reasonable for someone’s SEO service?

If you are a SEO, you want to be at the top of things day in and day out and maser the latest techniques. Obviously you can do that with blogs and forums such as SEOChat, but it’s always nice to have a color magazine that offers you the best of your world in 100 or less pages. Well, there are two good magazines that you should probably consider. One is the Website Magazine. It’s very well written, and it’s free so you cna get some ideas from it. But Search Marketing Standard is definitely the one that I like the most. I had a chance to talk to the good people of Search Marketing Standard at SES, and they certainly were busy! They gave out free magazines to everyone, and after reading a couple of them, I am thoroughly impressed with them. Give them a try. It’s one of the better SEO sources out there.

What an event it was. Sure. There were a lot of sponsored sessions, which I didn’t particularly like, but man! The focus of course was mainly on Web 2.0 and Social Media (SMO), but there were some very good sessions on Ad optimization and landing page optimization. Quite frankly, didn’t pick up much from any of these sessions, but if you are  a newbie to search engine optimization and SEM in general, you’ve got to try SES, especially when it’s at NY. So who caught the Webmaster Radio’s event at MSG?

So today has been a really busy day for Google. I just noticed that they have added the search box to sites such as Amazon. Basically, if you search for the word Amazon on Google, you will see that little search box under Amazon.com’s listing. It’s pretty cool. For a second I thought I was seeing Google subscribed links, but this thing is for real. Very cool!

It may been out for a while but I just noticed that Google adsense ads now come with navigation. That’s pretty cool, though I can’t say it will be more effective. The fact of the matter is a lot of people ignore these adsense ads, so you don’t expect to get a lot of clicks on a single ad. That’s why I think adding these won’t help publishers wrong. At the same time, it gives the publishers more to work with, so we just have to wait and see how effective this will be.

You would expect a search engine to get ranked high on other search engines for its best pages, especially when you are talking about the 2nd player in the search industry. Well, it seems all those 999 pages that you and I have been receiving lately have caught up with Yahoo! as Google ranks that page second for the key term “Yahoo.” I think it’s utterly embarrassing for such a major player to have failed so many times that its error page is picked up by Google. I guess the thought of Yahoo! getting bought by Microsoft distracted Yahoo! employees, and they dropped the ball. Bad Yahoo! Bad Yahoo!

A few days ago, a story broke about the plans of Ask.com executives to go into a different direction, namely targeting their female audience. Now it seems that Ask.com will not necessarily go after women, but they will try to become a very niche player. Here is an interview with Ask.com VP that sheds some lights on Ask.com’s new strategy. (more…)