Sean Platt recently wrote about the power of keywords for Copyblogger. When he first started his business blog, he ignored keywords and just focused on developing a unique writing style. He got a lot of compliments for his writing but his blog was not making much money.

He switched his focus from “clever” writing to SEO writing by including keywords in his posts. The result was huge. He got more traffic and links and he made a lot of money. read more

One of the things SEO specialists often talk about is the power of long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are the search terms with 3 or more words that don’t have high search volume. The shorter keywords have higher search volume but in aggregate, the long tail keywords provide the bulk of a site’s search traffic.

For example, you can have a Europe travel site that ranks well for europe travel but the majority of your traffic will come from terms like:

• europe travel deals
• europe travel guide
• europe travel packages
• europe travel books
• cheap europe travel

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Like the title of my column implies, I do a lot of SEO work – both for clients and my own sites.  However, I’ve recently started getting into PPC, or pay per click, marketing.  This has been a great education.

One of the things that I’ve learned is the importance of testing.  The fundamental principle in PPC seems to be to test every variable you can think of so your campaign is as efficient as it can be.  PPC is the fastest way to drive targeted traffic to your site.  However, if you’re not constantly testing in order to improve your campaign, you can quickly lose a lot of money.  We as humans are not perfect, so your first ads and keywords will have to tweaked as you gain data from your testing.

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In my last post, I talked about the importance of inserting keywords in the title tags of your blog posts. The title tag is by far the most powerful onpage SEO factor. But what about catchy titles that don’t have many keywords? Is there a place for them in SEO?

The answer is yes and here’s how you can combine catchy and keyword rich titles to improve your rankings. read more

Ian had a great question in a comment on my previous post. He asked:

How do you judge the balance between lots of people will be looking for that [popular keyword] against there are lots of results for that [popular keyword]?

Using your example, for “nba all star game 2009″ you’d be one of 500,000 results so how do you decide if that’s a worthwhile keyword to use?

There are couple things to consider when picking keywords to target. read more

Hi, welcome to Sunday Morning SEO. This is a new guide about search engine optimisation, or SEO for short. If you want to improve your rankings and increase your search engine traffic, tune in on Sunday mornings. My name is Dee Barizo and I’ve had experience as a full-time search marketer. This morning we’ll look at keyword research.

Keyword research is one of the fundamental activities in SEO. Many bloggers consider this activity to be tedious, but here are two quick and easy ways to find traffic generating keywords for your posts.

To illustrate these methods, let’s pretend you’re a sports blogger. With the NBA All-Star Game coming up in one week, you plan on publishing a couple posts about it this week. You expect a lot of basketball fans to be searching Google for information about the game. Therefore, you want to figure out the keywords that they might use and insert those keywords in your content. read more