For a long time, I simply gauged my efforts by typing in the search term that I was targeting and hoped against hope that I would at least be ranked within the top five pages (preferably the first).  Then, I would go into Google Analytics and determine my top incoming links, top keywords and so on. While this approach isn’t overly complicated, it isn’t entirely intuitive for non-tech folks who are interested in sprucing up the search engine rank of their personal website.

Here at MUO, we strive to bring you the best tools to help with your SEO efforts. I recently listed 10 SEO mistakes you need to avoid – both Part 1 and Part 2. Dean listed some excellent SEO tips for Blogger blogs, and of course Karl hit on 3 excellent WordPress SEO plug-ins.

In looking for a standalone app that could help with overall SEO analytics, I was pleased to discover Traffic Travis. In the highly competitive world of SEO, not much is free. Most services will analyze your site or provide monthly Search Engine ranking stats for a high monthly fee. At best, you may find a 7 day free trial somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, the premium version of Traffic Travis is fairly pricey commercial software – but the makers of this software figured out the secret to creating positive buzz for their product. That is, offer a truly free product that is useful and powerful.

Today I will review the free version of Traffic Travis and show you how you can use it to analyze your own website and significantly improve your search engine page rank.

A Feature Overview Of This Free SEO Management Tool

Once you download and install the app, you’ll discover an application that has a nice clean, easy to understand layout. The major navigational buttons are on the left and more details about each are on the right.

The general features the software offers includes:

• Keyword Tools – To conduct your keyword research, and very limited in this free addition (see below).
• Search Engine Tools – An extremely useful feature that shows you how your site ranks and where your top backlinks are coming from (very cool, and very useful).
• PPC Analysis – Shows you where you should focus your PPC ad efforts based on top sites and top keywords.
• Page Analysis – Lets you analyze the SEO effectiveness of individual pages on your site.
• SEO Analysis – Specifically analyzes your site based on the keywords you’re trying to focus on with your blog or website.

The Keyword Tool research section is severely limited  – no competition data. However, you can type in general keywords you want to target and the tool will show you what phrases draw the highest organic searches on three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN).

Using The Search Engine Tools Can Improve Your SEO

To show you how effective this tool can be in analyzing your own blog, no matter how small or new it is – I’m going to utilize the SEO analytics features on my own young blog Top Secret Writers. Now, on this blog I often just post content without spending any time at all on SEO efforts, and other times I do. Lately I’ve been wondering what I’d need to do to go back and fix those things that I did in such a rush at the beginning.

Under the Search Engine Tools, you can define a whole list of keywords that you consider as your website’s core focus. In my case I listed things like advanced technologies, top secret government projects, UFOs and things like that. These are all fairly popular search engine phrases, but as you can see so far my blog doesn’t even make it on the radar.

Don’t give up! For new blogs, you need to focus on the other tools for now, and eventually you’ll start appearing under the major keywords that are more competitive.

Instead, click on “Top sites for keywords,” and you’ll discover which major sites do rank highest for the keywords that you would like to rank highly. You’re going to find that these are sites that are much older than yours (but not always). Other sites are just very competitive under those keywords – they have a lot of content that search engines rank as high value.

Considering how important incoming links are from highly ranked sites like this – where do you think you should be spending your time posting, writing and otherwise fraternizing with like-minded individuals like yourself? The best thing you can do for the rank of your site is to spend quality time reading, commenting on, and participating at the websites of your top competitors (this is the irony of SEO), linking to your own site whenever and wherever they allow it (just don’t spam!).

Now you’ll see why I really love the Search Engine Tools section. Click on “Backlinks to site” and you’ll discover all of the sites that have linked to you the most. Even if you’re new – if you’ve been writing interesting and useful content to your site, in time you’ll get followers and linkers, it’s inevitable. Also, if you’ve been promoting your own site from other sites (as you should be), you’ll notice those here as well. These other sites that link to you are essentially your fans, so you should go down this list and visit their site. Participate, comment and have valuable exchanges with the people there – this is what the blogosphere is all about!

Very Detailed Targeted Keyword Analysis

Another thing that I feel Traffic Travis does very well is the level of detail that it provides in analyzing search engine trends and statistics for the specific keywords you want to target. Here’s another TopSecretWriters example – at one point I wanted to write an article about Gravionics, a very weird fringe science concept. So, I actually did SEO optimize that article as much as I could, considering that the blog is still very young.

If you take Traffic Travis, go into the Keyword Research area and type in “gravionics”. It then provides you with a breakdown of the current top sites that rank highly with that term.

Traffic Travis will show you the sites that rank the highest on the term that you’re writing about. I did pretty well (ranked 13) considering that it’s a very small blog that just started up – but the more important information is the list of sites that rank above you for that term. Once again – here is valuable information you can use to improve your own ranking for that particular keyword phrase.

In this case, I should go to Barnes and Noble, Amazon and BiggerBooks and comment on that page, linking back to my blog entry (if it’s allowed). I should go to Yahoo Answers and answer or comment on the question and link back to my blog entry. Basically, the information from Traffic Travis will help you target your social networking efforts to more effectively improve the specific keyword rankings that you’re shooting for. And if you’re a glutton for punishment, you can even let Traffic Travis grade the SEO level of your page.

Hey, a B – not bad! But trust me – plenty of other pages I analyzed with this software got an F! When you blog, it’s hard to take the time to do all of those SEO techniques that you know you should – but in the long run, it will result in a stronger growth rate and a much higher quality blog drawing in large volumes of organic traffic every single day.

Share your own opinion about the Traffic Travis free SEO management tool, or let us know what other free SEO tools you find effective in the comments section below.

Most people think that to have access to this data you need to spend a lot of money on SEO services and analytics. The answer is HELL NO! We can do all of this for free using Google’s own tool called Hot Trends located here. This will give you access not only to the top 20 searched for keywords on Google from today but you can also use it to go back in time (sadly not forward yet!) to view the top twenty keywords for a specific date.

Now if you couple this with a little bit of analytics you can see how these keywords can help you improve your Google traffic. Let us take a look at the site and see how it works.

I started off by visiting Google Hot Trends and I saw this:

Listed on this page, from the top to the bottom, is first the search trends box. By adding some search keywords and hitting search trends you will see something similar to this:

This will show you the search volume for your term over a specific length of time or across specific regions. This is great for helping you nail down a search term to associate with your website.

Below that you have today’s date that you can change to view hot trending topics for recent dates or long ago. You do this like so:

Click on the change date link as shown above and you will then be able to change the date. I changed mine to February 1st 2010 and then saw this:

Sweet! Now you can add this module as an iGoogle Gadget to your Google homepage by clicking on the iGoogle Gadget button at the top right of the search term boxes next to the RSS link and icon.

When you click on this you will see something that looks similar to this.

After clicking on the Add to iGoogle button the widget will be added. If you are not logged into Google it will create a temporary page that you might or might not see the next time you log in. So log in first then add the widget. When you are finished, it will look like this:

And then finally the way I track Google’s hot trends and most popular search terms is by RSS feed (we covered ways to use RSS feeds here). That looks like this:

Yours may look different depending on what RSS feed reader you use to view the feed. I just clicked the link and allowed it to open in Firefox but you could plug this atom URL into your RSS reader. Clicking on any of the search terms will open a Google search for that specific topic!

Do you use Google Trends on a regular basis?  Or do you use another SEO tool?  If so, which one do you use?

With millions upon millions of websites on the Internet, and with potentially hundreds of thousands focused on the same subject or niche that you are – developing an audience can feel even more overwhelming than trying to start a blog from scratch in the first place.

I’ve been working on the Internet long before it became wildly popular in the 1990s, and in the process of watching the evolution of the Internet I’ve come to realize and appreciate something amazing about the current incarnation of the Internet, known as Web 2.0. That something is this; If you know the rules of the game, then it is possible to start a blog that gets instant traffic from day one – and maintains that traffic into the future. Today I’d like to share 3 powerful techniques you can use to accomplish this.

Tip #1 – Write Optimized Content The First Day You Start A Blog

Many people who start a blog do so because they love writing. That’s one of the reasons I started several blogs (horribly neglected) of my own. The problem is that most writers enjoy writing for the love of the process – not for the purpose of “optimizing” the content for search engines. The process of optimizing makes writers feel stifled, non-creative and cheap. Sort of like not wanting to go to Wal-Mart to save money even though you know that things are a heck of a lot cheaper there.

Writers know that optimizing is important to gather search engine traffic, but they either really understand the rules – or they simply don’t care. Optimizing can take years to learn how to do effectively. Many bloggers suffer low blog traffic because they believe if they simply write amazing content – people will love it so much they’ll keep coming back for more. This may be true – but it’ll take you years to accomplish, versus months if you use SEO effectively.

Abhijeet offered a fantastic list of SEO tools that you can use to come up with high-value keywords for your posts. One of those tools that I would highly recommend to all bloggers is the Google Adwords tool. Using this tool the right way, you’ll be able to start writing your very first blog posts that target exactly what people are searching for online.

What’s the “right way” to use Google Adwords? It’s very simple, just brainstorm general topics that you want to write about and enter those, one at a time, into the “Descriptive words or phrases field.” When you click “Get keyword ideas,” you’ll see a very long list of keywords and statistics appear at the bottom. Next, click on the blue column header “Global Monthly Search Volume” to sort the results by how many searches occur for each term every month.

If you find your keyword doesn’t have a lot of traffic, scroll down to the section titled, “Additional Keywords to Consider.”

Here’s the basic SEO rule #1 that I’m going to share with MUO readers. Most bloggers see a keyword with very high search traffic and think, “oooh, a goldmine!” They then proceed to expend tremendous effort writing up a brilliant post using that phrase, only to end up on page 25 or 30 of Google results for that search term. Why? Because the secret of success when choosing keywords where your new blog (or even professional blog) can compete is choosing keywords with very low competition (that cool-looking blue bar graph on the left). Choosing keywords with very high search traffic each month and very low competition will bring traffic to your site the moment Google next crawls your blog. Speaking of which, did you take Karl’s advice and submit your site to Bing and Google yet?

Tip #2 – Engage The Blogosphere Every Single Day

If you want to get a lot of traffic to your new blog from day one, you’ve got to give people who are interested in the topics you write about a good reason to visit your blog. One of the first things that I noticed when I started using Facebook is that it’s human nature for people to check out your wall if you take the time to post on theirs. The same is very true about the world of blogging, but on a much larger scale.

When you post a thoughtful comment on someone else’s blog, not only will the blogger probably check you out, but so will readers who like your comment. To do this effectively, you should use a tool like Ratingburner or Technorati to find the most popular blogs on the net within the niche that you write about.

Using Technorati to find similar blogs to my own blog FreeWritingCenter, I discovered one high-authority blog, AListApart, with fresh content just waiting to receive a good comment. You may need to sift down the list for blogs that are relevant to yours (I did).

Visit the other blogs, and if you aren’t already a subscriber then become one. Your new blog will not take off unless you’re ready and willing to engage the blogging community and contribute to other blogs as much as you want other people to contribute to yours. When you post a comment – don’t do it without reading the post you’re commenting on. Don’t be one of those annoying spammers – you’re trying to engage a community, not get free marketing for yourself.

The general rule of thumb here is to only post on blogs that allow you to include your URL, be positive and always compliment the blogger, and finally always reference one or two important points in the blogger’s post – this proves that you actually read the article and found it interesting. A well written comment can go a very long way toward immediately attracting interested readers (and fellow bloggers) to your own blog.

Tip #3 – Becoming an Active Member of the Forum Community

The third most effective way to get instant traffic to your blog is to engage forum communities filled with folks who share an interest in the topic that your blog covers. Either generate a new thread, or comment on an existing thread that covers something you wrote about.

Finding a forum based on the topic of your blog is usually as simple as typing it into Google as something like, “writing forums.” Although, I would highly recommend taking Darko’s advice and use forum search engines which are often far more effective since they specifically target forums. Using BoardReader, I found a great webmaster forum post about writing at the V7 Network.  When you register, don’t forget to include your URL in your forum profile (most forums have a field for this).

Forum etiquette is to avoid posting your own URL in the very first few posts. Simply engage in a conversation with forum members. Once you prove to the forum administrators that your goal in engaging the forum community is to have a conversation and not just advertise yourself, they’ll be far more willing to let you quote (and link) from your own blog every now and then. But the first step at any forum is just to get engaged in a quality conversation with other folks.

Forums can help in a lot of ways. Readers who find your comment interesting may click on your profile to check out who you are – and there, they’ll find the URL to your blog. Additionally, many forums (such as the one above), allow you to post a link in your signature after you’ve made a certain number of forum posts. This assures the forum administrators that you’re not only there to market yourself, and it eventually allows you to have a link back to your blog on every single post you make – which is a very powerful way to get a lot of traffic to your blog.

Forget about all of the silly instant marketing gimmicks that you find online from “SEO experts” that claim they can get you thousands of visitors a day. The unfortunate fact is that these are typically scams that use spamming techniques that’ll get you penalized by Google in the end. The most effective way to “grow” your blog in a very organic and long-lasting way is to make sure all of your content is optimized, and then start spending an hour or so a day just engaging the online community that shares your interests.

Do you have your own unique techniques to draw instant traffic to a new blog? Share them with other MUO readers in the comments section below.

Image Credit : Mike Licht

OneLook calls itself – the search engine for words. According to the web service, it indexes more than 5 million words in more than 900 online dictionaries along with encyclopedias and other reference sites. Although, OneLook offers the entire range of a dictionary service, it is the Reverse Dictionary we are interested in.

The Look”¦

Strictly utilitarian. OneLook Beta Version (1.1) looks like it has been put together by a newbie web designer, but as in the case of Google itself ““ looks are deceptive. The minimalistic interface with just a search box and how-to-do explanations are all about simplicity with speed.

The Concept”¦

Straightforwardly easy. You don’t remember the word but just what the word stands for. OneLook calls it the “˜concept’. Enter the concept in the search box in a few words, a sentence, a question, or even as a related single word. Hit Find Words to get a list of results with the best matches usually at the forefront of the results.

The site says it works by “˜using a motley assortment of statistical language processing hacks’. (D-uh, I just might reverse look it up.)

The Uses

The site explains it best as shown in the screenshot below.

How to Use it

OneLook’s Reverse Lookup takes me from the “˜word is on the tip of my tongue’ to a revelatory “˜eureka’ moment. But to get the best results in the shortest time”¦

• Keep the word or phrase short.
• The accurate matches will be usually at the beginning of the results list.
• Click on the word to verify its dictionary definition.
• The dictionary definitions are arranged according to categories of – General, Art, Business, Computing, Medicine, Miscellaneous, Religion, Science, Slang, Sports, Tech and Phrases. Phrases and slangs sometimes give interesting variations for use in writing.
• Use wildcard patterns if the meaning or word is fuzzy. And also to filter the mass of results.
• The asterisk (*) equals any number of characters. For instance, type love* to get all words and phrases like love-bird that begin with “˜love’.
• The question mark (?) equals exactly one character. For instance, type l?v? to get all words and many acronyms too.
• The number-sign (#) is a single placeholder for any English consonant.
• Similarly, the asterisk (@) is a single placeholder for any English vowel.
• Do a relatedness search by combining two wildcards. For instance, typing t*:salesman will give words and phrases starting with “˜t’ and related to salesman.
• Some searches will also let you limit the results by Common words and phrases only or Common words only.
• Get the full complement of acronyms by using the expand shorthand. For instance, expand:USA.

  

Look into these wildcard tips in the Help section of the website.

Access it as an add-on from the browser search box.

OneLook can be added to the Firefox and IE search toolbar as an add-on. In other browsers it can be added to the Links folder. Thus, giving easy access.

Customize your experience

The Customize page of the site lets you tweak the way you view the results, background colors and banner display settings.

As the web service crosses over from the beta stage, we can expect even more value additions. Even now, as a reverse lookup dictionary its byword is results at a click of Find Words.  I guess, I will now be able to crack the Times Crossword in “˜a blink of an eye’. In a heartbeat, as OneLook Reverse Lookup says.

Try it and let us know with your worded comments.

When you first go to the Monitter site you’ll see three columns that are constantly being updated in real-time with new occurrences of specified keywords. To get started you just simply type three words into the keyword text boxes. Withing seconds of entering your keywords, you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live. If you don’t feel like keeping a tab open within the site, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the keyword(s) that you’re monitoring.

As tweets continue to stream in real-time, you have the option to reply to a tweet or go to the tweeter’s profile. The only downside to the reply feature though is that when clicked, it takes you to the Twitter homepage where you can then reply. In future updates, it would be nice to see a reply box integrated right on the Monitter website.

A great feature that Monitter has implemented is the ability to change back and forth from a light to a dark theme. When you visit the site the default theme is dark which a lot of users don’t like, so it’s nice that they have this option.

As you can see above next to the light/dark link, there’s also the option to hide the informational panel that appears above the columns. As you can see below, the header takes up quite a bit of space so it’s nice to be able to open and close it whenever you need to.

Lastly there’s the Monitter widget that you can embed on any site that allows javascript. In order to use it, you will need to download the necessary files and insert Monitter widget tags (as many as you’d like) on your site. The instructions consist of four short steps and are very simple. Below you’ll see a demo widget.

So now you have yet another way to spy and monitor the Twitter world to see what they’re saying about you, your blog and your keywords.

What do you think? Do you think Monitter is something that you might use on a regular basis?

Charnita is a social media addict & Internet junkie. She blogs about internet & blog tools, website & blog promotion, web 2.0 & social media at her Social Web Tools blog.

We decided to list the best of the free tools which can help you research different keywords specific to your site and optimize the site.

1: Google Adwords Research Tool

Although this tool is primarily meant for Adwords bidders, this is also widely used by webmasters and publishers to measure the popularity of different keywords based on their Google search volume.

2: Wordtracker’s Free Tool

When it comes to finding the right keywords, Wordtracker is definitely a name you can count on. They primarily provide paid keyword research tools but they have a free tool too, which, for a particular query, can generate up to 100 related keywords and an estimate of their daily search volume.

3: Google Suggest

Google Suggest also offers a nice way to research keywords. When you start typing a word in the Google suggest box, it starts showing the related most popular search queries in a drop down menu. Therefore you can immediately come to know about the related keywords / sentences for a particular search query. Even Google Toolbar has this feature but it doesn’t show the number of search results for the keywords.

4: SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Although different SEO related sites have developed their own keyword research tools, the one by SEObook.com is worth mentioning. It is powered by Wordtracker and provides results which are much more comprehensive than the free tool provided by Wordtracker. It’s worth a try.

5: Good Keywords

Good Keywords is another handy tool for researching keywords. It is a tiny 500kb program which offers several features when you start it. Mark has already described it in detail here.

6: Keyword Discovery

This free search term suggestion tool by Trellian is a nice one too. Although it only shows the first hundred related keywords in its free edition but it still could be useful.

Have I missed anything out that you use to get the best keywords for YOUR site? Let everyone know in the comments.

By- Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

Desktop Blogging Clients

Post to your blog straigth from the desktop.

Windows Live Writer – One of the best. Plugins can be added to increase its power. Check out our review here.
w.bloggar (Windows only) – Available as a full and portable version (can run from USB thumbdrive).
AIRPress (Windows, Mac) – Adobe AIR based blog editor for WordPress blogs. AIRPress requires Adobe AIR beta 2 to work. If it’s not installed already, it will be auto installed with AIRPress.
Thingamablog (Window, Mac, Linux)
Qumana (Windows, Mac)
BlogDesk (Windows) – Optimized for WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine.

Statistics Tools

Monitor websites traffic and other stats.

Google Analytics (AIR) – Check detailed traffic stats from the desktop. Works both on Mac and Windows PCs. Google Analytics account required.
Snoop (Mac, Win) – Track website visitors in real time staight from the desktop. Stats provided by reinvigorate.net
SERPs Finder (Win) – Find where your page lists for a particular keyword on Google, Live and Yahoo! Search.

Screen Capturing Tools

Snippy (Windows) – System Tray Tool for screen capturing. Mark out the region of the screen that you want to copy “” and Snipp it.
Clip2Net (Windows) – Take screenshots, add notes and arrows, and save them online.
WebShot (Windows) – One more screesnhot grabber, free version is quite limited, but still does the job.
Camstudio (Windows) – Capture screen activity (vide+audio) and save it in AVI or SWF format.
Windows Media Encoder – Capture audio and video content and encode video captures to WMV format.
SnagIt 7 (Windows) – Powerful screenshot capture and editing tool. Normally it costs $29 but version 7 is available for free. Unfortunately, the promotion period is over.

Image Editing Programs

GIMP (Win, Linux) – Free Photoshop alternative. Also see Gimpshop which even looks like Photopshop.
Paint.NET (Win) – Another open source software tool for your image editing needs.
IrfanView (Win) – Worth a mention here, it’s an image viewer with a few editing capabilities.

FTP Programs

Filezilla (Win, Mac, Linux) – Open Source FTP Client. Read MakeUseOf review here.
FireFTP (Win, Mac, Linux) – FTP extension for your Firefox browser.

Keyword Research

Good Keywords (Win) – Excellent too for finding suitable keywords for your article titles. MakeUseOf review: Get Your Keywords Right.

Microblogging Tools

Pwytter (Win, Mac, Linux) – Cross-platofrm Twitter client.
Twitbin – Firefox Extension for Twittering
OutTwit – Twitter client for Outlook. If you’re interested check out more Outlook addons here.
Pownce Client – Official Pownce clients for Mac and Windows. [What is Pownce ?]

Task Management

Rainlendar (Win) – One of the best desktop calendar apps for Windows.
Essential PIM (Win) – A free personal information manager.

Offline HTML editors

First Page (Win) – Two paned windows HTML editor.
KomPozer (Win, Mac, Linux) – Extremely easy to use and ideal for non-technical users.

Miscellaneous

WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier – Get notifications when there are comments that need to be moderated.

That’s about it. Do you have a must-see program that’s not on the above list? Let us know in comments.