Search Engine Optimization simply can’t exist without proper keyword research. Period. But no matter how much we know about it – doing the proper keyword research is time intensive and too often we simply skip it all together!

Well, here is the tool that will make that process EXTREMELY simple for you, although not a foolproof. A Firefox extension provided by the guys at Wordtracker and designed to help you create more targeted content.

Let’s look at what is a seo blogger and just how simple it is to use it..

Using SEO Blogger your content simply has better chance of getting additional traffic from search engines without too much of the extra effort on your part. Guys at Wordtracker provide a great tutorial and I have no intentions to duplicate it.

But here is a screenshot of me using SEO Blogger while creating this post:

Easy, although in this case I’m not sure how much traffic it will actually bring me But hey – main goal of this blog post is to share with you a cool tool and if you like it – you can download SEO Blogger extension here.

Let me know what you think!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Learn How To Do SEO (ronmedlin.com)
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• Optimize a Single Post On Your Blog for SEO (problogger.net)

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If you’re fairly new to blogging, it can sometimes feel like you’re not getting anywhere with your blog.  You’ve got very little traffic, almost zero interaction, and not much hope it will get any better any time soon.

I started my latest blog roughly around October/November of 2009. (I think!) So around about six months ago.  Today it’s currently a PR 3, with an Alexa ranking of 478,175 and climbing.  In the last six months I’ve had roughly 22,165 visits and 57,129 page views.

Now that is fairly modest in comparison to many more established blogs, but I’m pretty proud of the traction I’ve gained so far and am excited about its continued growth.   And I feel there are a handful of simple things I did that really helped to propel that growth fairly quickly.

1.  Killer unique content. I’m a freelance ghostwriter by trade, and writing is a bit fun for me, so it might be a little easier for me than perhaps others.  But killer unique content is vitally important if you really want your blog to shine, to gain readers and interaction, and please Google.

Experiment with your content, take risks, and see what kind of response you get.  Also, pay attention to post length… it depends on the niche, but sometimes longer posts are more suitable and sometimes shorter posts.  Sometimes a nice blend is preferred by your target market.

2.  Take advantage of social media. I’m fortunate in that I have quite a large Twitter following that I make a point to interact with regularly.  So when I post something new, I automatically Tweet about it, sometimes several times throughout the first day and the next.

I also pull my content directly to my Facebook FanPage, as well as often post new content to my wall for my other FB friends.  If you cultivate those relationships, you’ll find your content gets ReTweeted and shared if it’s good… which means more eyes and traffic for you.

3. Schedule your own ReTweets. I primarily use Su.Pr to schedule these.  I do an initial Retweet, and then I schedule a few more throughout the day and into the next day.  I also make sure that if it’s a really good post (IMO) to Stumble it through the Su.Pr interface as well.

I firmly believe this has been a really large part in my blog gaining more traction.  I also schedule a few ReTweets here and there using Hootsuite as well.  Just be sure to mix it up and make the times a bit random.  ReTweeting the same stuff at the same times every day won’t win you any favors with your followers.

4. Post frequently and on a schedule if possible. The most successful blogs usually post every day and sometimes several times a day.  However that’s not always possible for some, so just simply choosing to post on a regular weekly schedule, such as 1-3 times a week could work equally as well for your blog.

I’d recommend starting off with posting at least 5 days a week to start, and then if you want to taper off as you gain a readership, you can.  I’d also recommend that if you only post 1-3 times per week, really make those posts quality with a lot of shine and sparkle, as well as slightly longer than the typical 500 word article.

5. Finally? Guest post. This is actually only my third guest post, my first was on ProBlogger and the second on a paid forum, but I’ve seen a huge increase in readership, interaction, and traffic just from those two things.

So I’ve decided to make guest posting a regular part of my schedule for awhile, and this makes my third.  Guest posting can be a huge benefit to your own blog’s traffic and readership, and it’s a win-win because you get to give the blog owner you are guest posting for a nice day off from posting themselves.  Not to mention you are building a quality relationship with a fellow blog owner, which is an excellent way to network in my book.

There you have it!  5 simple ways you can improve your blog and it’s traction on the web, and see a marked increase in your traffic and readership.  It might not be a perfect strategy, and it does involve work on your part, but it’s working well for me and could potentially work well for you too.  Now get to blogging!

Cori is a freelance ‘ghost’(as in writer/blogger) and the creative brains and dubious brawn behind her own blog Big Girl Branding. She’d also like to note that ‘big’ does not mean what you think it means. It was meant to indicate being a grown up.  Sigh… Of course you probably didn’t get that, and it totally loses its effect when she has to explain it. So I guess she’ll just have to put on her ‘big girl’ panties and deal with it. She’ll feel better about the whole misunderstanding though if you stop by and say hi.

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Ladies and Gentleman, today you life and your blogging habits, as you know them will change forever! And not necessary to the best as I’m about to show you how to get MORE information about your blog, how your visitors interact with your content and where they are coming from than most bloggers need to know!

In Fact – Stats Tracking is One Of The Most Addictive And Time Wasting Activities You, As A Blogger Can Participate In!

I highly recommend you stop reading RIGHT NOW and don’t click that “Read More..” link to save your sanity and time!

OK, so I see you are determined to know! Well, this could be a GREAT thing as well as BAD thing for you. You have to exercise the discipline and limit time you dedicate to stat tracking to avoid waste of time and if you manage to do so – you are going to be a MUCH MORE INFORMED blogger.

5 Stats Tracking Plugins

…presented in this post will allow you to see more details about your blog traffic, its source and how your visitors interact with your content than you ever thought possible!

1. WordPress.com Stats

Along with Google Analytic’s this plugin might be that is needed for the majority of bloggers as it allows you to re-use same WordPress.com API you are already using for Akismet and presents you with most of the useful statistics you need:

• Top Pages and posts for different time frames with default being today
• Your referrers, to help you see who sends you traffic
• What key phrases lead from Search Engines to your blog posts
• What links were clicked in your blog content
• List of incoming links, mentions of your blog url on other blogs

Because it is a plugin maintained by WordPress core team, it is always timely updated and you can be sure it will continue to be compatible with all the latest upgrades.

2. Google Analytic’s Integration Plugins

Instead of picking and choosing any specific plugin, I simply give you URL to search results in WordPress.org plugin repository. You choose which one gives you the options you need as this breed of plugins integrates Google Analytics into your blog.

I do believe that you MUST have Google Analytics on your blog for stats tracking and comprehensive reporting but I choose NOT to use plugins but simply manually insert code into fotter.php right before the </body> closing tag. Just inspect the source code of this blog and you see what I mean.

I like to use as few plugins as possible and by doing this manually I save on page load by not having an extra plugin for the task that can be easily accomplished by hand. But if you are not into modifying theme files or like to switch themes often – these plugins will make sure that you blog will be tracked no matter what you do!

3. Visitor Maps and Who’s Online

In my testing this plugin added to the page load speed and I eventually disabled it but if you want to know EXACTLY who is visiting your blog, what OS, Browser they are using, where they are coming from and what is it they are reading – this plugin will be a God sent!

I promise you that you can get more information than you ever bargained for by using this one but do pay attention if it impacts you blog loading speed, as implementation of this one might actually cause people to click away instead of waiting for your content to load and all you will see is How Many People Left Your Blog without reading it!

4. Lijit Statistics

This plugin allows you to integrate your WordPress blog with free Lijit account. Great option to enhance your blog search as well as to get a LOT of information about your blog. It does help you get more traffic as your blog becomes part of their searched network and presented on other blogs

Anytime I can get free traffic – I’m game, especially when it is integrated with my favorite time wasting exercise – Traffic Stats Checking!

Couple of the most important statistics I look for from this one is Last Searches Performed on My Blog and Last Searches That Returned No Results!

It opens up an opportunity for me to create content my readers and visitors are looking for and one that doesn’t exist yet. Obviously that the younger your blog – more opportunities you will have as with age it seems sometimes that we cover pretty much most of the important ideas

5. Feed Stats

Yeah, when we are talking about stats – your RSS readers information is VERY important. Number of RSS readers on the blog is in fact one of the aspects many bloggers, including myself always put forth as it shows Stable Readership Base that can be used when selling advertisement space on your blog among the few other things

This plugin give you easy access to see:

• Subscribers
• Hits
• Reach (see the FAQ section for more information about this)
• Item click-through
• Item Views

Pretty nice but it does require that you burn your feed through FeedBurner as it uses its data to provide you with stats.

Conclusion

5 plugins I have just shared with you can make you a lot more informed blogger and help you determine what works and what doesn’t in your promotional efforts but I recommend you use these plugins in moderation!

Just because something is available to you – doesn’t mean all of it have to be used. If you attempt to utilize all plugins at same time – more than likely your blog load speed will be impacted!

Choose what stats are important to you – use appropriate plugin to get it! Enjoy and as always – comment on this post and share it using options provided!

Related WordPress Plugins Articles

• Analytics 101 – Traditional Service Overview (piosocialmediatraining.com)
• My 45 must have WordPress plugins. Any to add to the list? (trishussey.com)

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2009 was the year many individuals and businesses dipped their toes in social media. 2010 will be the year where people look for ways to measure social media. Social media measurement however can be a little tricky.

Where do I start?

The best place to begin would be to figure out what you are looking to accomplish from using social media as an online marketing vehicle. Are you looking to build your network, broadcast messages, create community around your brand, drive traffic to your website or blog, or perhaps you just dove in with little thought or strategy? Having these questions answered will greatly help you determine what success in social media is and how you can measure it.

Below is a list of ten tools you can use to measure social media.

Web Traffic

This is a basic but important way to measure social media if one of your goals is to increase traffic to your website or blog. Social media traffic referrals can be quickly measured using your favorite web analytics tool. Figure out which sites send the most traffic and also what type of content is successful.

Advanced Segments

Google Analytics has a pretty powerful feature called Advanced Segments. This allows you to group certain types of visits together in your data. This can come in handy when you are measuring traffic and conversions from social media. For example, you can create a custom segment for Twitter and Facebook. This will enable you to bring in these segments when you are analyzing your data so you can better determine various things like amount and quality of traffic from social media. Digg might send the most traffic but visitors from Twitter may convert better. Advanced segments can help you determine all this.

Leads, Conversions and Sales

This ties into some of the other mentions I made in regards to using your analytics for social media measurement. Track referring sites all the way through your funnel to see which networks are sending traffic that generates leads that convert to sales. Use this data to influence where you spend your time and efforts online.

Facebook Insight

Facebook pages come with an insightful (pun intended, I know, bad, right?) panel called Insight. This panel shares data on fans, interactions and quality of your posts. Graphs make viewing this data a breeze. Graphs display information such as total number of fans, unsubscribed fans and how they grow over time. Facebook is also kind enough to share demographic data of your fans.

Links Clicked

Another simple way of measurement is to look at the data url shorteners provide. There are many of them but my two favorite are Hootsuite’s ow.ly and bit.ly. Both tools shorten your urls and keep up with how many clicks your links receive as well as information on location of the people clicking on your links. This information is good because it can quickly uncover useful information such as which content people are interested in and what times of the day people are most likely to click on your messages.

Blog Subscribers

You can quickly keep an eye on your growth of your blog’s subscribers. Pay attention to subscription spikes in relation to your social media activity.

Facebook Insight

Facebook pages come with an insightful (pun intended, I know, bad, right?) panel called Insight. This panel shares data on fans, interactions and quality of your posts.

Graphs make viewing this data a breeze. Graphs display information such as total number of fans, unsubscribed fans and how they grow over time. Facebook is also kind enough to share demographic data of your fans.

Links Clicked

Another simple way of measurement is to look at the data url shorteners provide. There are many of them but my two favorite are Hootsuite’s ow.ly and bit.ly. Both tools shorten your urls and keep up with how many clicks your links receive as well as information on location of the people clicking on your links. This information is good because it can quickly uncover useful information such as which content people are interested in and what times of the day people are most likely to click on your messages.

Klout

Klout is a tool that measures your reputation and influence on Twitter. What I like about Klout is it measures your TRUE REACH, not just the number of followers you have. True reach is defined as “the size of your engaged audience.” They subtract out bots and those accounts that you have nothing in common and no interaction with. Another cool feature is knowing your “amplification ability.” Amplification ability is defined by Klout as “This is the likelihood that your message will generate retweets or spark a conversation. “ This is good stuff here. 20,000 followers are no good if you have no influence or engagement. Twitter gives you the opportunity to amplify your message beyond your direct network, thus enabling your messages to go viral. Measuring your Twitter success by these metrics can prove valuable.

Twitter Analyzer

Twitter Analyzer is another robust tool used for measure your Twitter profile. Like Klout, it can help you get a better handle on your influence and reach and much more. What is cool about this tool is it gets very detailed down to the day and individual followers which provides great insight if you spend a little time looking through it.

Socialseek

Socialseek is a desktop application that enables you to quickly and easily track your brands mentions through various channels in social media. It checks tweets, blogs, videos, photos, and events on any topic, in your city as well as hot topics, news, stars and even your brand – all in real-time! They have a mobile app as well. This tool can help businesses stay on top of what people are saying about their brand and better react to negative chatter. Reputation management is important, especially for brands. Social media can help or hurt you and knowing what is being said and who is saying it is valuable information.

Followers, Fans and Popular Front Page Stories

Another way to measure social media is by simply looking at the number of your network. Monitor the growth of your network across each social media profile as well as any of your content that becomes popular on these sites as well. Be sure to track the quantity and quality of your network.

There are many tools available now to help you measure social media and look for many more to pop-up through the course of the year. What tools and methods do you use?

About the Author: Zack Hanebrink is an online marketing professional and publisher of Online Marketing Mashup, a blog that provides tips and resources for all aspects of online marketing.

FREE DVD! Ultimate Video Guide to a Complete WordPress Security as my gift to you! Secure Your WordPress Blog Now! Absolutely FREE!.

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Love Blogging but need a vacation? Perhaps your blog hasn’t become the *HOTTEST* spot on the net with hundreds of bloggers begging to allow them submit content to it? Or perhaps you are just suffering from brain freeze and need a bit of time to re-evaluate your options all the while making sure you don’t lose your readers?

• What Do You Do?

• How Do You Find Quality Content For Your Blog?

Obviously you can use an option provided to you by WordPress to schedule a bunch of posts for the future publishing, you can get some PLR content and re-write it, you can hire someone to create content for you or…

You can install and take advantage of the options provided to your by

Guest Blogger WordPress Plugin

I love the idea so nicely implemented by this plugin. It simply allows you to search for quality content on one of the leading Article Directories (eZineArticles.com) using your designated keywords and then post them as Guest Blog Posts on your blog!

Some of the important highlights:

1. TOS Compliant – this plugin allows you to be fully compliant with main requirement that eZineArticles.com sets – no more than 25 articles from their directory can be used on your site or blog (single domain) and it also retains all the links and properties of the links, as set in original article! Plugin simply counts and once 25 articles posted – it stops and while it does give you option to reset the counter – I don’t recommend it! You get FULLY LEGAL content, so please stay true to the “light side of force”
2. Automated – process can be completely automated and every imported article can be set to be either in Draft or Published mode. I love automation!
3. Quality Content – while not unique in this case, it will be a generally high quality content as people who submit to that directory do their best to keep content quality high and articles engaging to readers.

It does create a new user with same privileges as you have set under General Settings under “New User Default Role” – normally “Subscriber”. Just be aware of it so you don’t get alarmed when you see 25 new users created on your blog If you are a mindful of security – you might want to try using a =Current User= or =admin= as article author. See image below, as plugin used on one of my Niche Blogs:

You can download Guest Blogger plugin and see more details here or simply install it from the Add New Plugin interface, just do a search for “Guest Blogger” term.

Enjoy Your Well Deserved Vacation!

…and please let me know what you think and share this post if you liked it!

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Niche Marketing 2.0 Webinar I hosted for my readers and subscribers last Thursday with a special guest Adam Short was a great success and people loved it! While your own impression and comments to this post are greatly appreciated – here is how you can access the Video Replay:

Also…

I’m interested to know if these type of webinars are actually useful to you and if I should continue to do my best to attract great speakers and share their tricks with you?

Should I Continue Doing These Webinars?

Obviously people who speak will be expected to make you an offer to their product (their time is valuable) but I always insist that content be delivered first!

Please comment and let me know what you think!

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There has been a lot of buzz for lack of a better word about Google Buzz. Sorry for the play on words but I could not resist . Why as a blogger should you care and is it worth dealing with a new learning curve?

After all there are numerous ways to get blog traffic and build readership is this worth the effort?

Here are 3 reasons why you should take the time and effort to add Google Buzz to your arsenal.

• Connect your content easily
• Build stronger relationships
• Take advantage of Google Social Search

Lets start with connecting your content.

It is easy to have your content such as blog posts, new videos, podcasts or articles added to your Buzz page automatically. Any extra way to get people involved in your content is a big plus. When you can do it automatically it is even better.

Buzz allows you to comment, mark items you like which makes it easy to interact with others. It allows you to get to know, like and trust others which will lead to much stronger relationships.

Finally the most important reason to use Buzz is the new Google Social Search. Now this is only shown to those that are logged in to Gmail but as more people get involved with Buzz that will be more common.

Here it shows on the first page of any search two items from those that you follow on the topic of that search. This allows your appropriate content to show on the first page of Google no matter how tough the competition is.

Now currently it is showing at the bottom of the first page but if Google follows past patterns and moves this to mid page like it has with news and videos this can become a powerful traffic generator.

The downside is it will only show for those that follow you but that makes it even more important for you to spend some time and effort using Buzz especially if you are dealing in any high competition keyword areas.

So there are 3 reasons to start using and taking advantage of the power of Buzz today. You can find out more about using Buzz in my free report “Quickly And Easily Get More From Google Buzz“.

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy and you can keep up to date with him at his blog WordPress Made Easy

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Here I go again! Talking about Fighting Comment SPAM on the blog and how to deal with never-ending stream of attempts to sneak one in! But this time I want to discuss something that I have seen increase lately, maybe just on my blog but still quite annoying:

Foreign Language Comment Spam

Because of the plugins I have already implemented on my blog – automated comment spam is non-existent but I still get a few comments, manually submitted that need my attention, evaluation and finally determination if they should be approved.

WORD OF WARNING TO SPAMMERS: I can click “SPAM” button a lot faster than you can type your comment!

But I have to admit, when a comment comes from someone not native English Speaking and links back to a NON-English site – it is sometimes not very obvious if it is spam or valid comment by someone who doesn’t have a solid grasp of English.

Here is latest example…

First of all – I want to be fair to all commenters on my blog! I want to approve your comment and give you benefit of a backlink, even if your language is not perfect (god knows my own English desires improvements too). And I even approve some comments by accident, since it looks like a VALID comment and even calls me by name – see below:

And quite frankly that Name got me confused at first because it IS NOT a site name, which is often used by these type of spammers. In most cases it would have probably made it through, since on first glance it seems like valid comment but unfortunately for that person I had a bit of time to investigate and eventually send this comment to SPAM!

And here is why…

When I visited the URL provided by commenter – nothing obvious jumped at me and only my curiosity forced me to look a bit more. Interestingly, even without understanding the word, I found that it is one keyword that site is optimized for – see image below:

Hello Mister Spammer! Click Goes The “SPAM” Button!

Was it worth the time I spent on it? To me it was, but I would appreciate your thoughts and ideas on this topic!

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This is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh. Stacey is from the UK and works in online marketing for Tecmark: SEO London

Earning from your blog will always depend on getting people to that blog and then getting those people to take the action required – whether that is to click on an affiliate link or an ad or something else completely. But it all starts with generating traffic. So where you can market your blog online for free?

Technorati

At one point, Technorati was pretty much the only decent blog search engine, of sorts. Of course we now have the comprehensive Google Blog Search, but Technorati.com remains an excellent blog directory and one you should definitely be listed in.

Twitter

How could we mention traffic generation for blogs without talking Twitter? The micro-blogging platform has huge traffic generation potential for bloggers. However, it’s not all about just registering and posting links. You need followers and you will only get those by posting relevant material, by networking with people in similar areas and with similar niches and by learning about the platform. Don’t assume you can just register and paste links. You should really take time to see what other people in a similar niche are doing on Twitter and begin to network.

On Blogs Belonging to Others

Guest posting! This is a great way not only to get some of you written material exposed to a different audience, but also to drive traffic to your own site. Guest posting isn’t as simple as just sending any old article through to a blogger though. Successful guest posting comes from learning more about your target blog. Read it! Read the comments from the other readers to get an idea of the material they are interested in reading and write up a UNIQUE article tailored just to that blog. Why should a blogger run your material if you cannot be bothered to spend the time making sure it’s relevant?

Getting this right is a great way of driving traffic and again of networking with other bloggers in a similar area.

These are just three ways of almost countless means of marketing a blog online. Social Media is hugely important in traffic generation to blogs now. But generating traffic is only the beginning. There’s little point in getting traffic if the content on your blog isn’t of a high enough quality to keep them coming back! So, before you begin marketing, it’s worth making sure that everything on your blog is in exactly the shape you want it to be and offers something of quality to your readers.

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I’ve been guest blogging as long as I’ve been blogging: for about 3 years now. All my self-branding achievements as well as all my most notable career ups would not have been possible without guest posting.

Throughout my guest blogging career, I have been wondering if that would be a smart idea to attempt to create such a place where guest bloggers might get connected to the blog owners who look for good free content for their sites.

In the end, I thought that would be a a useful tool actually because such a service would be a place where everyone wins and quality plays a decisive role: guest bloggers get links and exposure, blog owners get free content (which means extra traffic, more search referrals, more social media shares, etc) and poor quality posts get rejected.

This is why, a bit more than 3 months ago I launched: My Blog Guest: the forum that targets guest bloggers and aim to connect them to the blog owners.

It’s been a long way to that site. I had no idea which form it should take. Many of my contacts who I had shared my plans with thought it should be a market place (ala text-link-ads.com) where a blogger comes, chooses his category and adds the best blogs “to cart”. I thought this would diminish the most important role of the project (and guest blogging in general).

The main goal of the site is not to help users build free links with content: it is to connect people to bloggers in the target niche for more benefits in the long run.

Except for the basic forum features, I added just a few more options to help the members find each other:

• Tag-based system: one can add as many tags as he or she wants. Tags reflect the areas of the user’s expertise and his/her interests (for guest bloggers) or the topics the user’s blog focuses on (for blog owners). Tags are integrated in the user search.
• Alert system: users can subscribe to email alerts to get notified of the new sites added to the category they are interested in (there are currently Health, Finance, Technology, Entertainment, LifeStyle, Creativity and General. The latter one is for those blogs that fall under more than one category or just are about something else.
• Rating system. Blogs are rated based on their Google PR, domain and content age and backlinks. This should be a bit of help to those who need to quickly evaluate the blog power. Users are rated based on their social media activity. This metric should reflect the estimated ability of the user to help promote the posted content.

The service is still in beta, I am constantly looking for feedback to try to improve it; so more features might be added soon!

I do hope the place will turn useful for those who are interested in guest posting and I am going to keep it free and free of any self-promotion.

This is a guest post by Ann Smarty. Ann is an Expert SEO blogger who manages http://www.searchenginejournal.com/

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