If you are not driving traffic to your blog – you are getting traffic through organic search engine results.  Using keyword tools can improve you ranking in the results.   Here are a few of my favorites – including my personal most favorite – Scribe.   Not all of these four are free – and yet for me – I have found them easy to use – which makes them useful.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool because Google’s contextual targeting technology can automatically match your keywords (ads) to web pages in Google’s  Display Network that are most relevant to your business – Google Adwords can help you do so may things.  Including finding JV partners – and learning how others are using the keywords to their advantage.

I give my a huge thumbs up to Scribe. I have been using it since February – and it has made a tremendous different to how I set up my own blog.  It’s simple and it’s actually fun to use.  It’s like a learning tool for best SEO practices.   Scribe is a plug in for word press (and it works for Joomla and Dropul).   It’s not free – but – for a coach who doesn’t have a lot of extra time – provides huge value.  In addition to the integrated keyword assistance – it has the additional benefits of helping you to do things like advance keyword research and linking in sites and social media.   Scribe’s semantic analysis, also saves me time – because I can get useful takes in seconds – instead of needing to spend time deciding on tags. I actually am at the point now that I can’t think of being without this tool.

WordTracker is excellent for helping you to find  and dig deep into the ‘long tail’ of keywords.  Which of course makes it easier for you to rank closer to the top of the page for that keyword string.  Wordtracker has a free trial that is worth the taking.

SPyfu subscribers and free-access visitors start at the same point.  Go to http://spyfu.com and start with the search box.  Enter your domain or keyword.  Your free access to the site opens a bunch of results :

• Stats of the domain’s spending, clicks per day and organic value from their content
• Ten Best Paid Keywords during each month
• First 10 paid keywords
• Top ad competitors
• First 10 organic keywords from the most recent month
• Top organic competitors

• Stats of the keyword’s cost per click, clicks per day, search volume and search results

• This can be lovely information for keyword research because when you know how much a keyword costs, you can take that into account when you are writing search optimized content for your website. If a keyword is cheap and gets very little traffic, all things being equal, you probably don’t need to include it in your content. On the other hand if it would be expensive to buy the traffic on the keyword, you should definitely consider trying to get that traffic organically and include it in you content.

• Ads run on this keyword
• Top 50 organic results on this keyword
• Categories to lead you to related keywords
• View the cached page of the results page we used to capture this data.

With a paid  subscription, you can see how different changes reveal the advertiser’s strategy.

If in the end you have way more time on your hands  – and you are looking for a more expansive list of keyword tools;you could always check out this Gigantic List of keyword tools.

Happy Keywording!

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I am in a learning curve right now. It’s about twittering.  – the water is warm in the world of twittering – and the benefits are visible.  Finding people to serve who are in alignment with what you offer the world – seems so immediate on Twitter.

I am looking for ways to balance the time I have reading the writings of those Twitter Folks I am following and getting to see how things work.

Here are a few things I have picked up so far:

1. You need a twitter account – firstly go to Twitter.com and sign up for an account.

2. Put up your image in your twitter account – Twitter is all about authentic relationships – Put on your face.

3. Use Your creativity to design a profile that shares both Keywords (so others can find you) as well as represents who you are as an individual.  If your intention is to use Twitter to aid in your relationship building around your business – keep your branding in mind as you design your background image.    Twitterbacks.com has some nice templates to use to help create your back ground image – all the sizing is done for you.

You can have a look at my twitter profile – to see how I took a twitter background from Twitterbacks – and then modified to more closely fit my own personal brand.

4. Decide how you will keep up with the “tweets”. There are a number of platforms available.  You can update from the web at Twitter.com,  Use a downloadable platform like Tweetdeck.com or Twhirl.com.  There are also Twitter applications to help you you do research or find things like what feeling words people are using today.

5. Save yourself time if you involved with other Social Media sites: If you use WordPress or Facebook there are plug ins and tools to help your Twitter messages appear in your blog or on your Facebook page.

A twitter tool for wordpress

6. Be effective with your tweets. If you have something you want to appear at a specific time – when you won’t be available to tweet it, you can use a service called TweetLater.  And here is a big one – spend only an assigned amount of time per day using twitter.

7. Find out the Twitter best practices:I am noticing an every evolving list of best practices with regards to using twitter.  Of course it all depends on how you intend to use this social media platform.    One of the best ways to find out about best practices is to first have a look at some of the handbooks for Twitter that have been developed by some Twitter users.

Have a look at these three:

• www.Twitterhandbook.com – a handbook developed via social media tweets by Deb Micek and Warren Witlock.  In addition to the handbook they also have a blog where you can keep up on twitter related stuff.
• A Geek’s Guide to Promoting Yourself and Your Online Business in 140 Characters or Less with Twitter  is a free 48page twitter handbook from the gues at GeekPreneur.com

• TwitterSecrets by Joel Comm is a 30page report that shows you how to use twitter – and how to use it for your goals.

8. Be on the look out for Twitter Traps. These are the things than get get you side-tracked from your other effective actions in the day.

• Doing nothing else but reading other peoples tweets and thinking about what you can next tweet about
• Spending time reading your twitter stats daily

9. Decide how YOU will use Twitter. Here are some ideas:

• Share information you are learning (Others might want to learn too)
• Share your own blog posts and articles
• Share great posts and articles writing by other people
• Follow key people in align in your target market to find out what they think is important
• To follow media coverage

10.  Have Fun. Aftercall – if you can do it with joy – is it really something you want to be doing?

Two really cool benefits of using Twitter for me personally:

• I love the time line that twitter creates. It creates a story for me – look back on the path I took for the week. What I focused on and what was pulling my attention.  I am loving the story telling effect that Twitter provides
• I am also appreciating the value of having access to other tweeters who can give me research information, feedback,and access to the pattern language that people use to describe problems.  I am finding it very useful as I fine-tune my own marketing messages about the services I provide.

In the end you have to decide for yourself if Twitter is something you want to use – and if you are aligned with the benefits in the effort of participating with all the souls you will come in contact with.

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