marketing

How to use Google’s Keyword Planner for SEO research

After using Google’s Keyword Tool for several years I had developed quite a slick and effective keyword research process – allowing me to quickly identify good [exact match] phrases for SEO campaigns. It wasn’t the only keyword research tool I used, but it was the one I used the most and found most effective.

So when Google announced they were replacing it with something called the Keyword Planner, I was both anxious and intrigued. It’s never good as an SEO to rely too heavily on one tool or process, so I welcomed the arrival of a new tool to play with. The worrying part for me though was the danger of a fiddly new tool taking a big slice out of my day to do a task that I had managed to streamline and scale so well. (more…)

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You are what you read – the best SEO articles from the past week (15 – 21 June)

Kicking off this week’s roundup is not one but two communications from the Googleplex. First off they sounded the death-knell for ‘link building’ by changing the wording on their fabled webmaster guidelines, replacing the instructions for webmasters to increase ‘the number of high quality sites that link to their pages’ with instructions to create ‘high-quality sites that users will want to use and share’ (here’s Search Engine Land’s take on it: http://searchengineland.com/google-changes-ranking-advice-says-build-quality-sites-not-links-163931) (more…)

My favourite on-site SEO tools

The one question I get asked more than any other about SEO is ‘what tools do you use?’.

Unlike a lot of SEOs I know I’m not a big fan of letting tools do too much of the work, as I never fully trust a heavily automated process and I actually quite enjoy the slow and sometimes mundane task of manually crunching through data! But even so, I naturally have to depend on some tools to do a lot of the heavy lifting. (more…)