PostRank is one of the most exciting research services available to bloggers and content publishers. PostRank can be used to find the top contents on the Internet, determine the level of social engagement per each post, and even track the performance of an RSS feed. The service does have a paid plan for those who want to add another layer of analytics to their existing platform. While I do suggest publishers giving this feature a try, you really do not have to come up with new content ideas.

There are plenty of lazy SEOs that complain about having to come up with fresh content all the time. Let’s face it. In a perfect world, you’d do what you want to do and Google will find your content and rank it high in the SERPs. In reality, you will have to come up with new ways to expand your target keyword list and produce content relevant to your new keywords. Thanks to PostRank, you’ll never be out of ideas.

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I don’t know about you, but there have been plenty of times that I have had to find ways to get around my mental blocks to expand my existing keyword lists. You play with those top keyword tools long enough, you start getting comfortable. Sometimes, one has to go outside-the-box to find new ways to expand a SEO keyword list. Primal is an innovative keyword tool that lets its users do just that. It’s a great tool to brainstorm and develop new ideas.

If you are planning a new SEO project or just want to come up with new ideas for your existing campaigns, Primal can give you some ideas. Under “Think” page, you can enter a group of keywords and let the tool dig up related keywords for you.

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A lot of newbies to SEO ignore their internal link structure and only focus on getting juicy links from other websites. While that can help you a lot over the long run, linking out to your own pages can help you too. At the very least, it can help flow your traffic to more of your pages. Internal links do allow you to redirect your link juice to the right locations on your website. If you have created a monster of a website with WordPress and did not pay too much attention to your internal link structure, you don’t want to go through each post and find places you can link to from it. That’s what Where did they go from here? plugin is useful for. It keeps track of the pages your visitors go through on your website and links out from referring URLs to referred URLs on your site. Its functionality is essentially similar to what Amazon does on its site.

This plugin is pretty easy to deploy. Just add it to your WordPress site, define what you want it to display as your headline, and you are all set. It keeps track of pages that people have visited and links to them from their referring locations. This is significant for two reasons. It not only automates the internal link building process for you, but it also help your visitors find out what other stories they may need to visit on your WordPress website.

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EzineArticles.com is still one of those article directories that is worth going after. While many article directories have seen their traffic go down, webmasters can still get a decent flow of traffic by writing magnetic content for EzineArticles. One way to add your content to EzineArticles without writing articles from scratch is re-purposing your old blog posts. Optimize them for a certain keyword, define the right keyword in your author box, and you should be good to go. If you decide to go in that route, EzineArticles WordPress plugin can save you time and make the process a whole lot easier.

In order to get the most out of EzineArticles, you need articles that have decent titles, tags, and summaries. This plugin lets you define those easily.You can choose how you want the plugin to behave and what it needs to pick up as for your article summary and keywords. (more…)

One of the best ways to preserve your blog rankings atop of the search engines is by creating fresh and powerful content for your blog on a consistent basis. Even the best blogs start losing out when the authors slack off and do not post as frequently as they should. Of course, that’s not all you have to worry about as a blogger. There are plenty of other factors that go into optimizing a blog for the search engines. Thanks to Blog Grader by Hubspot, you can find out more information about the things that you are doing on your blog and how you can improve certain aspects of your blogging strategy.

Blog Grader measures your blog content, features, and engagement level. This information can be very helpful if you are a newbie or have not taken time to optimize your blog. For instance, by looking at your SEO Authority score, you can figure out whether you need to do more link building. The same applies to blog engagement metrics. If your posts are too long or you posts once every month, then you may need to increase your post frequency to see some better results. (more…)

When it comes to researching keywords for your next big project, you shouldn’t just focus on tools such as WordTracker. Times have changed, you see. A few years ago, you’d have to work hard to find keywords and content people were searching for. Not anymore with sites such as Twitter and Facebook making it so easy. Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot of value in using those premium tools to get your SEO campaigns going. At the same time, you can rely on services such as Twitter to find out what people are talking about at the moment. It’s like getting instant feedback and seeing what people desire and need in real time.

There are plenty of Twitter tools that you can take advantage of to do all kinds of things with Twitter. At some point, you are better off picking and choosing a few tools and use them to improve the quality of your keyword lists. Considering that a lot of these tools are for free, they are well worth a try. In fact, here are 3 Twitter research tools that come handy for your SEO research:

Topsy: in the past few months, I have started moving away from Google search and use Topsy as my main research tool. If I want a story on let’s say “iPhone,” Topsy makes finding those hot juicy story easy. It also can help you find influential users on Twitter and track trends. (more…)

Search engine optimization is not about putting your heads in the sand and do things your way without looking at what others are doing in your niche. You are not competing against yourself. So if you want to get ahead in this business and get the rankings you feel you deserve, you’d better keep an eye out on what others are doing in your niche. That’s where keyword spy tools come in. They allow you to dig up your competitors keywords and even check their paid campaigns.

You certainly don’t want to copy everything your competitors are doing, but you’d be surprised how much you can learn from studying your competitors’ work. If you are looking to take your SEO game to the next level and beat your competitors in their own game, here are 4 powerful keyword spy SEO tools worth looking at:

SpyFu: one of the most underrated tools on the market. I have seen many talk about this tool, but most people focus on tools such as WordTracker and Keyword Discovery instead of spending some time with this tool. SpyFu gives you access to plenty of tools you can use to spy on your competitors’ organic or paid campaigns.

Compete: Compete is for power players. The information that you get from this service is top notch and can go a long way towards helping you respond to your competitors and match them move by move. Great way to compete your traffic metrics with those of your competitors.

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Search engine optimization is not rocket science. It’s true that there are some aspects of SE algorithms that are not known to us, but if you have been in this business for a while, you have somewhat of an idea what works and what doesn’t. What does work all the time is targeting the right keywords on your pages. You should always take time to expand your keyword list and target the right kind of keyword on your pages. By that I mean keywords that people are searching for and can help you meet your business goals.

There are plenty of places to look for new keywords. I have talked about top keyword tools that allow you to dig up keyword ideas fast. But you don’t have to spend money to dig up new keyword ideas. There are plenty of places you can look at to find out what people are searching for and how you can take advantage of that. Here are 5 places that are worth exploring:

Twitter: Twitter is a goldmine of data for those who know how to take advantage of it. Going through Twitter trends is just one way to figure out what people are searching for. TweetVolume and Twendz are both great tools to help you keep track of keywords on Twitter.

Facebook: there are plenty of people who spend hours on a daily basis on Facebook. That means more data to look at for you and I. Facebook Lexicon is a great place to tap into this goldmine. (more…)

If you have been doing SEO for a while, you are probably familiar with all the web-based SEO tools that help you conduct your keyword research and build more effective SEO campaigns. Keyword tool such as WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, and SpyFu have been used by SEO professionals around the globe to conduct keyword research and develop massive keyword lists. What all these services have in common? They all ask you to sign up for a monthly or annual plan to take advantage of their data. There is nothing wrong with that. Paying $30-50 a month for a data service with one of the above services is not much and well worth it. But what if you are a niche SEO marketer who doesn’t need those advanced features offered by the above packages? Maybe you are just looking for a package that provides you with the capability to find new niches to tackle and find more ways to promote your existing websites.

Market Samurai is one of the best desktop SEO applications around that helps you conduct your keyword research, analyze markets, find new niches to enter to, find content for your portals, and promote your existing websites. It helps you find Yes-Follow websites to get links from. The SEO analysis features offered with Market Samurai are very helpful as well as they allow you to analyze niches and find the ones that are worth taking advantage of. (more…)

If you have been involved in the SEO business, you have probably heard of Trellian software. These folks are responsible for some of the best SEO tools on the market. Does Keyword Discovery ring a bell? Keyword Discovery is certainly one of the best keyword research tools around. But there is more to Trellian software than Keyword Discovery. You can get a lot of useful information from Trellian’s Competitive Intelligence tools as well. Sometimes, it’s just not enough to have the right keywords. Knowing what your competitors are up to can help big time.

Unfortunately, there are no tools that would give you 100% accurate competitive information. It’s just not going to happen (unless some insider spills the beans). At the same time, CI services such as that of Trellian’s allow you to find out what your competitors are putting their focus on. Trellian Competitive Intelligence offers you 6 services to help you find out what links are driving traffic to your competitor’s, what search terms your competitors are using to run advertisements on major search engines, and who their affiliate partners are.

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