For those of you without Market Samurai, here is your chance to download a free trial of this awesome piece of software! Market Samurai is SEO software at it’s best, and I’ve been lucky enough to use it on my own sites for just over a year now.

Market Samurai Free Trial

This is without doubt the best search engine optimization software I have personally used, and it just keeps getting better and better with each new update to the software.

I have used Market Samurai to find me some killer low competition keywords that I can target and build entire websites around, but it’s not just a keyword tool either!

Market Samurai can also…

• Track Your Rankings In The Search Engines.
• Find You Important Back-link Possibilities For Your Sites.
• Gather Related Content That You Can Use In Your Niche.
• Find Out If Your Potential Niche/Market Has Any Affiliate Products To Promote.
• Check The Competition You Will Be Up Against In The Search Listings.

Best of all, this can all be done at the click of a button! It’s that powerful!

For me, what puts Market Samurai ahead of the rest is the fact that it’s the only software I use every single day without fail. The other programs are really just glorified keyword finders, and if you want to do anything other than just find keywords, your going to be pretty much out of luck.

One of the main reasons I use this software everyday is because of a new module called Rank Checker. And you probably already know what this thing does right?….. Checks your website rankings;)

All you need to do is enter your domain name into Rank Checker, then a keyword you are targeting with a certain page of your site. Rank Checker then goes out and finds your rank listings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It then returns your results in superb forms that are easy to read, and also easy to understand.

As you can see Rank Checker lists your websites position for that keyword, in both broad and phrase match. It also has colored green and red indicators to let you know in an instant if you are gaining places, or sliding down the rankings. How many back-links you have is another cool stat. And then finally you have your page rank.

But there is more…… It will also display all the information above in a graphical time-line!

Very cool ah!

This information, as well as finding keywords and being able to spy on your competition really gives you the upper hand in the search engines! With a well thought out approach you can dominate your niche listings, and get the flood of traffic you have been looking for by using Market Samurai.

You can get your hands on a FREE Trial of Market Samurai right now, just click this link to get it ->

Market Samurai Free Trial

I hope this software will do for you what it has done for me! Good luck!!

I posted a while back now about a free analytics site I use called BLVD Status. Just recently BLVD Status launched a few updates to their site, one of which is an awesome keyword tracker tool called Alerts, and its this update that made BLVD Status my newest and most favorite keyword tool of choice!

Why Alerts is so good is because it allows you to start individual campaigns that alert you when a particular event occurs. When I say “particular”, what I mean by that is you can have it track traffic, referrals, campaigns and keyword ranking events that you set up within your account.

(Does that make sense?) If not here is a few examples as to what you can track->

• TRAFFIC ALERT – You can set it up to alert you when your site receives a certain amount of hits, in a pre-set period of time. So if I wanted it to let me know if my site gets 500 visits in a 10 minute period, It will!
• REFERRAL ALERT – This is the same as the traffic alert but with one cool addition. You can have it only count referrals from a particular domain(like Twitter, Digg).  Neat huh!
• CAMPAIGN ALERT – You can set this up to track your website conversions.
• KEYWORD ALERT – This is the cool keyword tracker tool that will notify you when your site reaches a particular rank for a keyword. So if you want to be notified when you hit the top 10 for your main keyword phrase, this will let you know when that happens.

Another great feature of this alert function is that not only can you have it notify you via email, but you can also have it tweet you at your twitter account. Don’t worry if you do not want others viewing all your stats, you can set it up to DM you at twitter instead.

This keyword tracker tool makes everything so much easier than just manually searching Google for your site in the listings. It does everything for you.

The free account only allows you to enter one website to track I believe, but they do have upgrades available if you try it and really cannot live without it:)

I’ll leave you with a quick video from the BLVD Status crew showing you just how good these updates are! To take a closer look for yourself visit the BLVD Status keyword tracker tool alerts and sign up for a free account.

Alerts from BLVD Status on Vimeo.

I’ve recently made a few changes to not only this site, but also on a few other niche based websites all in the name of SEO! One reason I did this was because I am fed up of struggling in the search engines, and also because I found a free traffic tool to use along the way.

This traffic tool is basically a FREE plugin that you install on new or older blogs. What it does is allow you to add an auto configured set of plugins to your WordPress blog that are already optimized for the best SEO performance.

It means that after you install this plugin traffic tool your blog is basically fully SEO ready, so all you really need to do is concentrate of writing great content with he addition of a few strategically placed html tags within them. Don’t worry when I say html, what I mean are just basic heading and title tags that this plugin will show you how to use within your new posts anyway.

I have only really just started to use this plugin myself a few days ago, so I cant really comment on great gains in the search engines as yet, that will probably take a bit more time. However while using this traffic tool over the last week I have seen an increase in my sites URL’s getting picked up by the search engines. So already things are looking up.

The best thing about the plugin is how easy it is to install on your blogs, each step is clearly laid out for you to follow along with. It even redirects old URL’s to new ones if you install it on a current blog.

Here are some other features…

• Proven Traffic-Getting Technology
• Easy To Install
• Free Targeted Traffic
• Works In Any Market
• Absolutely Free

So if like me you are fed up of trying things to improve your blogs SEO rankings, give this WP Traffic Tool a try and take some of that SEO weight off your shoulders.

You can get this WP Plugin sent directly to you right here -> Traffic Tool

Enjoy Yourself!;)

I also wanted to introduce you to a couple of tools i’ll be using to aid me in this SEO case study. The first tool is a FireFox add-on called SEO For FireFox, this tool once installed will sit at the bottom of the browser window just waiting to be used;). Here is a short video to tell you all about it…

This add-on is packed with features that I will need to take a look at how the competition is looking in the search engine listings, it provides all of the following information..

• PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

SEO Tool #2

This next tool is again a FireFox add-on, I apologize if you are using IE!. This tool is called The Web Developer toolbar ,this can give us a look under the hood at the code of your competing sites, I used this when I was designing sites a long time ago, but now im starting to use it for SEO ninja stuff!!.

The Web Developer toolbar is also packed with cool features, but I will only really be using a few of the tools for what we need to do.

Both of these tools are FREE to download and use, SEO For FireFox will be used to for more of the external SEO stats like links and other good stuff, and the Web Developer Toolbar will be used to go inside the site’s I am trying to rank higher than to pick them apart.

Follow Along

If you are going to follow along with me while I try to improve my blog’s SEO, you might want to take a look at the first  SEO Case Study post to see what I’ve done already.

I’m basically using what I already know, and Dan Thies’s search engine optimization ebook SEO Fast Start to hopefully boost my rankings in the search engines.

My aim is to learn as much as I can about SEO, and to develop some kind of method that I can apply to every post in order to give it the biggest chance of becoming ranked well in the search engines, and most of all I want to do this right way, no black hat tricks in here!;)

So feel free to join me;).

SEO Improvement Case Study

After reading Dan Thies’s SEO Fast Start which I wrote about in my previous post titled Search Engine Optimization Ebook, I wanted to follow up with my findings as a case study. To be honest im sick of using PPC to get traffic, and im also sick of just not quite having what it takes to even have one number 1 Google listing!, not one!.

I’ll admit that im no SEO guru, but I do have the basics covered at least to some extent. I’m aware of Title’s, H1′s and links, and all that good stuff but I was still unable to get any good rankings, obviously their are a few long tail keywords I rank pretty high for, but I wont see any great gain in traffic from it.

This SEO ebook was just what I needed, not only because I learned a great deal from it, but also because it made me take a step back and look at this blog.

When you start a new blog you obviously expect little traffic, so in order to boost that traffic I started to look around the web for blogging groups/directories that I could join in the hope that it would boost my readers, and I ended up finding a few.

Unfortunately what I then did was to add a widget from each of these sites onto my own sidebar, this widget contained the pictures of visitors to my blog which allowed other people to then click on a link to be taken to their site. So as I started to get visitor’s to this blog what I was really doing was displaying links from other blogs in these widgets that people would follow away form my blog. Duh!

My SEO Clean Up

This blog was in need of a clutter clean up that’s for sure!. In SEO Fast Start Dan explains that on your homepage you only really want links out to other pages on your site, this will point visitors in the right direction as well as distribute PageRank between pages on your site. Their is no harm in linking out to other sites, but its best to keep it relevant to what you are posting about.

Think About Your Readers First

If someone finds your site via a search engine after looking for some information, if your post gives them the information they need, even if they do click away to another link their is a good chance they will return, because it was your post in the first place that got them the information they requested.

I’ve spent the past few days working on optimizing my own SEO for my sites, the first things to go were the blogging site widgets from MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and Google Connect, yes I had three of them!. I also took off the live tweets section and completely changed the hyperlink colors from red to blue(blue being standard).

Everything I took off was an un-needed and mostly unrelated link away from my blog to someone else, that had to stop. But their is another reason why its a good idea to take these items off your site – Javascript – , apparently the search spiders do not like JavaScript at all, and most of these widgets include a ton of it!.

Search engines see content higher up on a page as more important, while looking at the source code for this site because of all the JavaScript included in it, my main important SEO content was way down the code!, a big NO NO!. Once I removed all that code my main content is now right back at the top of the source code, sweet!.

Where Im At Right Now

As it stands right now I’ve completely cleaned up this site by getting rid of any unnecessary code and links out, I now have a much cleaner source code for the spiders to scan next time they visit, I even had to move an entire sidebar on one of my blogs to the other side of the page!!, a CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) nightmare but I did it in the end.

Now I just have to wait and see what the search engines do, I’ve only really changed about 25% of what I need to do from the book lessons, so their is still a way to go, but I’m at the point now where Dan explains that if you follow these small step…

you should see a considerable increase in rankings

As SEO does take some time I wanted to do a case study to keep following up with it, if this really does increase my rankings their is no reason why you too would not be able to follow along with your site and do exactly the same.

Heres a quick list of the first steps…

• Avoid linking out to other web sites from your homepage!!(Unless for good reason).
• Remove any unnecessary links altogether.
• Only necessary JavaScript should be left.
• If you have a sitemap, linking to them from your home page will make sure more pages get indexed.

See you next time;)