With the recent demise of the Overture keyword tool from Yahoo, many people who weren’t directly involved in the search engine optimization or internet marketing industry full time have been left with few free, effective options for accurate keyword research. While there are multiple keyword research services available, the ones that are worthwhile all require a monthly fee. This usually is only viable for companies that handle search engine optimization and internet marketing for a number of clients because they need to access this type of data so frequently.

As much as I hate to say it, Google has stepped up to the plate by adding quantative search data to their AdWords keyword tool, which previously only displayed relative search data. Check it out!

Here is a powerpoint presentation of the keynote Matt Cutts recently gave about “What Google Knows About Spam.”

What Google Knows About Spam

It’s not really. It’s more a matter of value. It can seem expensive for the same reason that good legal or accounting work seems expensive. There often is a fair amount of grunt work involved, even when software does much of the heavy lifting, but the real value comes from really understanding what will provide the greatest benefit and what will cause the greatest risk of harm. Just like an improperly worded contract can put your assets at risk in a lawsuit, a link building campaign executed without a complete understanding of all of the factors involved puts your website at risk of being banned by the search engines, resulting in zero organic traffic. For many businesses, this would be devastating.

An effective link building campaign takes into account a variety of factors, such as relevance, link age, rate of growth, churn, historical patterns and anchor text just to name a few. If you’re getting a bargain price, chances are that you’re just getting a brute-force link building campaign which is generally pretty easy for the search engines to spot and potentially ban your website. A quality link building campaign on the other hand will account for all of these factors and more, ensuring that you receive the best possible results while reducing your risk.

You get what you pay for.

Microsoft made a $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo! on Friday, which could make both companies a slightly more competitive against Google than they currently are. While combining the two companies in any capacity would certainly shake things up a bit, chances are that it wouldn’t have a significant impact initially, because collectively, they would still only hold a little less than 30% of the market share, while Google dominates with over 65%.

For many business owners, search engine optimization may seem like some sort of arcane magic. Some changes are made to the pages within your website and over time it begins to appear at the top of the results when someone searches for specific keyword phrases. To add to the apparent confusion, many of these changes may not even be visible to visitors since they occur only in the HTML code. When these factors are combined with the steep bell-curve associated with achieving organic SEO results and the abundance of misinformation out there, it can seem like the type of service that you should outsource to a firm that specializes in it, and in many instances, this is a good choice because it allows you to focus on your area of expertise. The challenge then is to choose the right company to handle your search engine optimization.

It’s tempting to favor one company over another based on some sort of guarantee; however it’s important to note that it is pretty much meaningless because no company has the ability to directly influence any of the major search engines. Anyone that says otherwise is simply lying and you should stay far away from them. Most often, a search engine optimization firm’s guarantee will cover non-sense keyword phrases. These phrases may be relevant to your industry, but will deliver little to no traffic to your website, and therefore are of no value to you. The guarantee will be worded stating that they will enable your website to rank for these keyword phrases, and they will because since the phrases drive little to no traffic, no one else is competing for them. The same goes for your company name. It is relatively easy to rank for your own company name in most cases, but it will usually do little to drive significant traffic to your website. You should also be wary of any guarantee that promises to drive a specific amount of traffic to your website as this can easily be manipulated to artificially boost the volume, and in the event that actual live visitors are driven to your website, they will usually be extremely untargeted, resulting in a poor return on investment.

So what is a business owner to do? Simply choose a search engine optimization firm based of the results that they’ve delivered for their previous and existing clients.

There has been a lot of controversy over Google’s recent statements that buying links is bad, or somehow unethical. Inbound links are a significant factor in causing one web site to rank higher than another for a particular keyword phrase, and for as long as this has been common knowledge, people have been buying, selling and trading links in an effort to improve their ranking. Google has always said to build your web site as if search engines don’t exist – i.e. build it for your visitors, and leave it up to Google to determine which sites are the most relevant to search engine users. As of late, Google’s engineers seem to be unable to eliminate the spam in their SERPs (search engine results pages) and they are now coming to the end user to do their job for them, by reporting paid links. They are also telling webmasters to include the nofollow tag (rel=”nofollow” ) on any paid links on their web sites (as well as telling advertisers to only purchase links that include the nofollow tag). Now, I could be wrong, but isn’t that contrary to Google’s advice to “design your web site as if search engines didn’t exist”?

So will your web site be penalized for buying or selling links? It might, but in a realistic world, probably not, and definitely not anytime soon. Think about how long it took before some of the older practices such as keyword stuffing and hidden text were penalized. You also need to consider risk versus reward. If you have a relatively new web with little to no traffic, then you really don’t need to worry because you have nothing to lose. Develop a powerful online presence and then deal with what may happen when the time comes. If you have an established web site with substantial traffic, chances are it is coming from multiple sources, not just the search engines anyway, so again, you have little to lose. Besides, do you really want to allow fear of what may or may not happen three to five years from now to diminish your revenue today? Business always involves a certain degree of calculated risk and people that aren’t willing to take risks never achieve great success.

My advice? Continue to buy links from quality web sites that are oriented to the same demographic you’re trying to reach so that you benefit both from live traffic and improved organic ranking. When you look at the big picture, there is no way for any search engine to effectively combat paid links, nor is there any reason for them to.

One of the many factors that can have a significant impact on your search engine optimization campaign is the structure of your URLs. It’s common knowledge in the SEO industry that keyword phrases within a URL can help to increase the effectiveness of the other aspects of your campaign, but this is a delicate balancing act that requires a good deal of polishing. For example, if you run a fishing supply store, www.mikesfishingsupplies.com would be a better choice than www.mikessupplies.com. On the other hand, don’t over do it by stuffing your URL full of keywords because it makes it more difficult for visitors (or potential visitors) to remember. It can also trip spam filters in the search engines algorithms, resulting in lower ranking and less traffic. Like everything else, keywords in your URL are best when used in moderation.

You should also ensure that your database driven applications, such as shopping carts, blogs and content management systems create optimized URLs. By default, many of these database driven applications produce URLs filled with variables as in this example:

www.website.com/cart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=1

An optimized URL would look like this:

www.wildfiremarketinggroup.com/blog/2007/04/26/8-tips-for-powerful-sales-calls-during-slow-times/

Note the simplicity of the URL and the fact that it contains the page title while not going overboard with keywords.

During the early days of business on the Internet, visitors would arrive on your home page 99 times out of 100. Today, most of your visitors skip your front door completely and go directly to the content that they’re looking for, usually through a search engine or an in-bound link. When they arrive there, do they still have everything they need to take the action you want them to take? They should be able to do anything that they can do on your home page and navigate to any other page in your web site from every single page in your web site. If not, you’ll lose a lot of potential business.

Google recently updated their toolbar PR, and as usual, web site owners everywhere are making a wide range of speculations as to what it means. So what does the latest PR update indicate and what does it mean to your search engine optimization campaign?

Not much really.

Google has been trying for some time now to actively combat the practice of web site owners buying and selling text links, both through their algorithm, and manually, with little success. Their latest PR update was a result of attempting to achieve that goal by devaluing what they deemed to be paid links, as well as irrelevant links (links from web sites unrelated to the target web site).

So what was the end result? Many suffered varying degrees of toolbar PR decrease, however their ranking and traffic remained the about same, so other than a slightly bruised ego, most web site owners were not affected. On the other hand, this is definitely a sign of things to come. Google is serious about cleaning up the spam in their results and they have the resources and brains to do it, and if the updates over the last few years tell us anything, it’s that they don’t mind hurting a few hundred thousand small businesses to do it. After all, if you lose all of your traffic overnight, the only way to regain even a portion of it is to begin a PPC campaign, which benefits them.

You may be asking yourself “How do I avoid all of this?” The short answer is you can’t, at least not with absolute certainty. You can however, minimize your risk by not relying on any one source of traffic. Utilize a search engine optimization campaign along with an online advertising campaign and traditional media, such as print advertising or direct mail. In regards to your SEO, keep it relevant. Don’t be afraid to buy or trade links, but be sure that they are relevant to your web site. Also, don’t try to trick the search engines with black hat techniques. Most no longer work, and when you get caught, your web site will get banned.

There once was a time that simply adding relevant content to your web site would ensure high-ranking for applicable keyword phrases. The battle cry for SEO specialists and internet marketing gurus everywhere became “Content is king!” As more and more people rushed to add relevant content to their web sites to earn that coveted search engine traffic, content began to hold less importance in the algorithms that search engines use to rank a web page. Today, on-site content is just a factor, one that in and of itself carries little weight. But when taken into account with a host of other factors, such as the age of the domain and the number and relevance of inbound links, content is an important factor.

Unfortunately, like anything else, more than a few people have attempted to use this to promote their own web sites without actually doing any real work. Every single day, we find articles written by our staff posted on spam blogs by ill-informed SEO specialists who are attempting to promote their own pharmacy or gambling related web sites. They apparently have the idea that by simply copying content from our web site and other web sites, that they will earn tons of traffic overnight and their pockets will be stuffed with cash. In reality, it doesn’t work that way. The search engines are smarter than that.

Fresh, relevant content is a valuable asset because it encourages your visitors to stay longer and come back more frequently, and often, even link to your web site. It also encourages the search engines to rank your web site higher for relevant terms. The key here is fresh, relevant content. Simply copying someone else’s content is not going to help you improve your ranking, nor is adding large amounts of irrelevant content. Your focus should be on producing quality content on a regular basis, and over time your web site will begin to reap the rewards of your hard work.