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;).

Organic seo is the natural search results listed on the left side of a Google search, they are the free listings.

Targeting the organic seo listings is not just about your main keyphrase, and that’s the point of this post, too many times people concentrate too much on their main keyword, and forget about all the other keywords they could be targeting, “but you can only have one main keyword” I hear you say, yes, but what about your posts!?, we go through all this effort to research and get links to our main page, we simply forget that in our posts is a goldmine of organic search engine potential.

Too Manic For Organic

To keep a long story short, I optimized this blog for my main keyword, it took me about 4 months of hard work to get their, but recently I hit number one in Google, I was so happy when I saw my site at number one, all that hard work paid off, but then…………….. no traffic, how could this be?, in my keyword research I probably should have looking more into the cyclical nature of keywords(trends), I think mine must have been very popular when I got the data, but then when I hit number 1, they were all gone!.

What kept my blog going through this was the organic search engine positions I was getting on just my posts, and this is because I realized that every post you make on your blog, should contain a subject that you researched like you would for your main site keyword phrase, however with the posts you make, don’t go for the huge competition keywords, go for the related long tail keywords instead.

Long Tail Keywords Add Up

Think of it this way, if you find a long tail keyword with low competition that gets just 10 visits a day, then you decide to optimize your brand spanking new post for that keyword, say you hit number one in Google a couple of days later(hopefully), so you’re at number one for that posts keyword which brings your blog 10 visits a day, and remember this is just one post, think about how many posts your blog will have if you post at least once a day, just for one week you would have 7 posts, so if the Google gods shine down on you, thats 70 visits to your blog a week thanks to those low competition keywords that nobody else uses.

So researching long tail keywords, and trying to hit the top spots in the organic seo listings for those keywords, is a free method that can pay off in a big way, especially if you are waiting for your main website keyword to rank in a competitive field, the traffic from the optimized posts can carry you along in the mean time.

Optimize Your Blog Posts

In the future rather than naming a post something completely unrelated, why not research it using your favorite keywords tools, stick to the low comp/traffic long tail keywords, then optimize your blog posts for them, using all the regular headings,titles, link text you would if you were starting a new site, doing this could see you through those traffic tough times:).

Oh and build inbound links to those pages also, and not just the homepage!!.

If you have trouble with keyword research, don’t worry, I’m working on a video that covers how to use some free keyword tools to find a goldmine of keywords to use!, stay tuned!:).