What does a SEO Company Do?

I know, it sounds like a simple question, but someone who doesn’t know what an SEO professional does is likely to get screwed by some con man looking to rip him off. Most people will do a few minutes of research and find out that people who help others with SEO exist to help others climb in the search results of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc.

Last year, I wrote an article about how to work with SEO consulting companies, but after the events of today, I wanted to riff a bit more.

Last night I was contacted by the representative of an SEO company who was looking to help another company with their site’s optimization. He wanted to advertise on one of my sites and I quoted him the price. In response, he told me that the budget was tight and offered me a price that was 11% of our rate. I told him that I couldn’t do it, and got the following response:

If you really don’t want to accept $200 for the couple of minutes of work it takes to put up a[n advertisement], then that’s your decision.

Well no, I don’t want to take $200 for an ad position that is worth $1800. Does he expect to buy an $100,000 Porsche for $11k? It was simply a ridiculous request, and as someone who works consulting people on website optimization, he knows full well the value of advertising; it is not about the time it takes to place the ad, but about the value of the ad itself. The NY times could place a full-page ad on page 2 that I design, which would take 5 minutes of their time, but that position would probably be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. People simply AMAZE me!

What to Look for in an SEO Company?

Start by looking at their website. This is usually the fastest way to write off an SEO company. After getting an email from the guy, I decided to swing by his website to check it out. He was smart enough to never mention the URL of the company that he was trying to advertise, because I would have shared the following with them.

His website consisted of 3 pages: Home, Services, and Contact Us
The “Contact us” page didn’t work. The other pages were missing meta tags for keywords and description. By spending less than a minute on the website, I would have told anyone interested in hiring them for SEO to RUN! If the company you’re looking to hire isn’t fully search engine optimized themseves, why would they know how to help you any better? There is of course, more to SEO than simply adding META tags, however, on almost every occasion, when I find that there is some SEO that is doing a poor job, it turns out that they skip their own tags. It is a good screen to use to cut out the crap.

How do you Check Someone’s META Tags?

This is very simple, even if you know NOTHING about making websites or HTML. Just go to the menu bar of your browser and enter the VIEW dropdown — you’ll find either “Source” or “View Source”. When the source page opens up, you’re going to want to look for the HEAD tag, which is simply the word Head surrounded by brackets. Somewhere after the head tag and before the BODY tag, you’re looking for tags that start with META NAME.

Here’s an example of what the Meta Tags look like:

<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”SEO, META TAGS, search engine optimization”>
<META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”This is a description of the page using keywords”>

If you don’t see anything resembling the code above on their pages, then you know it is time to run.

Summary:
Had the customer of the company that contacted me, done the above before hiring the firm, they would have seen that they were not cut out to consult on SEO. If you don’t practice what you’re slated to preach, then you shouldn’t be charging folks for your services. Additionally, you don’t want to insult potential partners by offering them 11% of their going rate, because that might lead to a blog post about your nonsense . . . luckily for them I’m a nice guy and never mentioned them by name.

I’m always excited when a month comes to a close because it presents me with the opportunity to look back at what happened last month. This is especially important because I have the opportunity to see how I’m doing in attaining my goals for my sites. In particular, I’m most interested in traffic and financial trends.

Traffic Analysis
In looking at site traffic every month, I go immediately to my AWStats server software to learn how succcessful I’ve been. . .

• Did each of my sites see growth?
• What kind of growth was it?
• Did unique users increase or decrease?
• Did page views go up?
• Were there any major strains on my bandwidth (i.e. was anyone hotlinking to images on my sites)?
• What keywords were most successful in drawing traffic?
• Were there any keywords that fell in the rankings?
• How did the sites fare on the different search engines?
• Did I start to make progress on any one of them?
• Did I begin to lose ground on another?

I haven’t been especially active in tracking the number of sites linking in, the PR of my pages, or my Alexa rankings, because I don’t find them to be anything I can really control. Since I focus mainly on organic growth for my sites, I let the links come instead of undertaking a true link building program. With quality content, the links come in naturally. PR is really meaningless IMO, and Alexa rankings are extremely inaccurate. I have two different sites . . . one typically will rank on a daily basis similarly to another one, yet one of the sites gets between 10 and 20 times the traffic of the other. The one with less traffic that ranks well on Alexa is popular with webmasters and others online – people who likely have the Alexa toolbar or other tools installed on their browsers. It amazes me that this has become one of the standards for monitoring traffic because it is simply so innaccurate.

In terms of blogs, I’ll also look at numbers from places like Feedburner (# of subscribers to my feeds), Technorati (# of sites linking in), and MyBlogLog (number of people who have joined my community) in addition to the basic numbers.

May was a good month! I saw growth in all areas and by all metrics. I can’t really ask for anything else, especially considering I no longer run any keyword advertising programs. I’ll just say that I’m serving many millions of page views a month across the board!

Financial Analysis
The first of each month is also important because it allows me to reflect upon the financial status of my company over the past month. Between direct advertisers, ad networks, and affiliate programs, I draw income from various sources. In any typical month I spend a good amount of my time focused on how I can increase revenues from one or all of these sources. Because of this, I’ve been able to create a company that has seen steady growth financially since inception (with a few minor flat spots).

May was a good month and I’m looking forward to see what we can pull off in June! I guess we’ll find out next month!

Ready for another rant? Seems like I’ve been doing quite a lot of that lately. This time, it is about something that I’m sure all the bloggers can relate to: Corporate Comment Spam. It seems that the corporations have indeed resorted to non other than comment SPAM to promote themselves

In the past 3 days, I’ve had to deal with comments from the flunkies of two large corporations: AOL and the The E.W. Scripps Company, which owns HGTV. I’ve chosen to leave out the identities of the perpetrators as the purpose of this post is to to expose what corporations are up to, not to call specific people out.

• HGTV Comment Spam

  I at least give a tiny bit of credit to the guy who has SPAMMED our Real Estate Investing for Real blog comments twice in the past 3 days. It seems that he tries to relate his spammy commercials to the topic at hand. Here’s the latest (I’ve colored the acceptable part in green and the SPAMMY Crap in red):

  Its funny that you should mention Los Angeles, I live there and you are right on. Since the average price of houses is so expensive the take for an agent is ridiculous. Btw, a $350,000 in LA will get you a fixer-upper. I wanted to ask anybody who is reading this…have you seen the show Bought & Sold on HGTV? I work with them and have been alerting people of the show because I think its worth seeing, if you’re into real estate at all…It basically shows 12 different agents trying to show houses and close the deal. It gives you huge insight into the way homes are marketed and how price levels are decided upon in the Northern New Jersey market – which is one of the toughest markets in the country. You can check out a preview – [VIDEO LINK REMOVED] – It’s on Sundays at 10PM e/p time on HGTV. Definitely worth checking out. It’d be funny to see them do one here in LA.

  I actually erased the first one he did, otherwise I’d also share it with you as well. I sent him an email asking him to immediately stop wasting both of our time (his writing and my deleting) and explained what netiquette was. We’ll see if he comes back for more!

• AOL Comment Spam

  AOL is also guilty of dishing out Hawaii’s favorite meat concoction. First I received a form email from someone at AOL trying to get me to blog about their new real estate section. It was impersonal, badly formatted, and poorly written (formatted as received):

  Dear Bloggers,

  I’m a Promotions Manager for AOL Real Estate, and have read your real estate
  blog. Your insights are thought provoking and often times right on the money.
  I
  would love to get your opinion about an “Inside Stories of…” series we are
  currently running. We interviewed various players in the real estate process
  for
  candid (some harsh) realities of the business. I know you’ve posted about such
  subjects, and thought you could take a look at what we’ve done, and offer a
  fascinating perspective; good, bad, or ugly.

  I’ve included our entire lineup for this original series below. If you decide
  to blog and need more info from me, please feel free to contact me anytime.
  Thanks for your time.

  We’d love to be involved on your site if you’d like to link to our home page,
  [LINK REMOVED] we have a lot to offer in exciting original
  content,
  listings, investing information, and staging/home improvement.

  Thanks,
  ~Name Removed

  After going through my daily SPAM scan, I noticed a message that my filters caught written by the same person, as a comment on my most popular post on the blog.

  Check out Unstructured, the official editor’s blog, AOL Real Estate.

  [URL REMOVED]

  Had I gotten the email or the blog SPAM, I would have just ignored it. In conjunction, the campaign to plug AOL’s new real estate site just hit a bad nerve. I decided to write the author back:

  Name Removed-
  A few things. First, It would be great if you had actually personalized the email you sent me instead of sending a form email that probably went to every other real estate blogger around. I’m surprised that a company of AOL’s financial backing couldn’t consider such an obvious move. It looks poorly upon you and your company.

  While the site you are looking to promote is good, your tactics are nothing but amateurish. I was quite shocked to look through my blog’s comments to see that you’ve also gone and SPAMMED us with your site’s link.

  I’ve had bloggers with 2 weeks of experience conduct themselves with more netiquette and web professionalism. I have no intention of supporting your site thanks to your tactics.

  I hope you reconsider how you’re approaching people in the future.

  Sincerely,

  A few of my friends and fellow bloggers recommended that I CC the email to her bosses at AOL. Sometimes I’m a jerk, but not that big of one. I’m not trying to get her fired; I just want people to learn what is and is not okay online these days.

Conclusion

We all know that people are spending more time online these days, corporations included. Apparently the online marketing teams for large corporations want eyeballs at any cost! I think the “street teams” of old, who kept busy handing out promo items on street corners, have given way to a group of young hired SPAM teams. They’re hitting the social networks, forums, and now, the blogs.

Apparently corporations still don’t understand online netiquette. Way to go! Piss off the whole online blogging community while you’re at it! Little do they know that the backlash from the internet can be fast and relentless (we all saw what Digg went through last week), and by ignoring the established “rules” of order online they are setting themselves for a fall.

Anyone think I’ll help promote HGTV or AOL Real Estate now?

5/11/07 UPDATE: Not a day after I wrote this post, HGTV has gone and sent a different person to once again SPAM our blog. From our comments:

May 11th, 2007 at 8:38 am
It seems more and more people are getting into the real estate business these days, without a clear understanding of how the biz really works. For those of you looking for a better understanding, I suggest checking out the new reality show Bought & Sold on HGTV. It’s a great show about the inner workings of the real estate and the lengths brokers will go to just to get the deal. Check it out: [LINK REMOVED]. I work with HGTV and you won’t believe what happens this season. Good luck, and enjoy the show! Don’t forget, the show airs Sundays at 10pm. I’m sure you’ll find it beneficial! Have any of you seen it yet?

I found an article through Kevin at BloggingTips about how to support your favorite bloggers. This article covered quite a few great points and I thought I’d go into 2 of them with some more detail.

Both of the steps I mention can really make a difference for your favorite sites, and spreading the word about them can make a difference for you as well!

The 2 Best Ways to Support Your Favorite Websites

1. Socialize the Blog or Site
   If you find a site, blog, article, etc. that you find interesting or helpful, one of the best ways to support it is to “socialize” it. Of course, the original form of socialization is word of mouth, but email works great too! Let your friends and family know about the site and tell them to let their friends and family know about it. Many of the most popular websites have all grown on word of mouth campaigns.

   In addition, by submitting it to different social networking and social bookmarking sites, you increase the exposure opportunities for that site. Sites like Netscape, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, MyBlogLog, MySpace, Facebook, etc. are all wonderful tools for sharing the love. I make it a habit of social bookmarking or Digging any article or site that I think is a great one, because I hope that someone will do the same for me. If we can spread the idea of helping one another out by doing this, I think we’d see lots of great, semi-unknown, sites climb to prominence. There are tons of these sites around, but people don’t realize how easy it is to do their part to help those sites out.

   If you like a site, an article, a blog, etc., then Bookmark It! It is that easy!

2. Visit the Site’s Advertisers
   These days, most websites have some sort of advertising. Many webmasters (like myself) support their work online soley through that advertising. While we all become semi-blind to ads these days, it is extremly important that we do our part to help our fellow webmasters by visiting the advertising on their sites. Imagine if even a small percentage of your users happened to visit the ads on your site (provided they are some kind of PPC ads)? Be careful not to overdo it, though. Clicking too often on a site’s ads can constitute click fraud, something you don’t want to do.

   Even visiting ads that may not be PPC is helpful to websites. Advertisers always look at the amount of traffic they get from a site when considering whether or not they will extend their campaigns. If you do your part by visiting these ads, you help the sites to retain advertisers and increase revenue. You also help the advertiser by finding their site . . . the more eyeballs, the better!

   Remember not to just click on any and all ads. Visit those that look interesting to you.

   Like with socializing, if we can build this mentality around the ‘net where people support one another’s advertisers, I think a lot of people would be a lot happier. The advertisers would get increased exposure (which is what they are paying for) and you’d be supporting the owners of your favorite sites, blogs, etc. If only 25% of a site’s visitors supported its advertisers, I’m sure the resulting increases would be beyond remarkable!

   If you like a site, an article, a blog, etc., then visit its advertisers! It is that easy!

By following these two simple and EXTREMELY helpful tips, you too can support your fellow bloggers and favorite sites, and hopefully they will do the same for you!

Please bookmark this site and help spread the mentality! (click the Share This link below)

I was approached this afternoon by someone who was interested in promoting their real estate-related program to my site’s users. This advertiser wanted me to promote an online webinar and was willing to give me a commission for any sale made from people who went through the seminar and purchased their service. While the commission was fairly good, we felt that the odds of someone actually going through their entire webinar and then purchasing their product were not phenominal.

Choosing Between a Guaranteed Return and a Potential Greater One

We considered proposing a PPL (pay per lead) model to them, but felt that by doing so we were providing this company with tons of free branding for little in return. As a result, we decided that we would only work with them as pure advertises. They were welcome to advertise their program on our site, but would have to pay our full rates. If they generated any sales or leads, that depended on the users of our site.

What would you have done?

Do you go with the guaranteed advertising buy or do you provide free branding for someone on the remote chance that someone will go through all the steps (sign-up, webinar, sale) and buy their product?

In the best case scenario, we’d be able to charge for advertising and also get an affiliate payment per sale, but that isn’t ever going to happen. I tried to negotiate a few deals like that years ago and was simply laughed at. Was worth a shot, though!

One of the first things that you’ll need to do when starting a business is to create a logo to represent your company. It seems like this may be a simple thing, but it is often more difficult then you think!

Some Logos Are Timeless

There are certain logos we’ll never forget: Apple, CocaCola, McDonalds, Google, Nike, Target, etc.

I don’t even need to show these, because we all have them imprinted in our minds. Pretty amazing!

I wish I could write a post about what constitutes a great logo. I don’t have any magic formula, but I know one when I see it. Creating a timeless and effective logo is not an easy undertaking. Large corporations often times spend millions of dollars on their brand.

I recently found a great resource to help you out with any logo questions (which actually inspired this post) called the Logo Design Blog. According to the site, the 5 characteristics of a highly successful logo include:

1. Uniqueness
2. Relevancy
3. Appealing
4. Consistency
5. Contrast

For more details, read the post; it goes into detail about each of these characteristics. In another interesting post, the site discusses the various constituents of a logo, which include symbol, sign, emblem, or slogan. It is a great place to start learning more about logos.

What Not to Do in Creating a Logo for Your Company

While I can’t tell you the formula for a great logo, I can talk about what isn’t great. Since I’ve spent a lot of time in the real estate world, I have seen countless logos from companies who are all looking to create a brand for themselves. The interesting thing is that at least 90% of these logos have some kind of roof or home as part of the logo. While this seems logical, and we even played with a roof-esque logo, does it differentiate these companies from one another? No.

They all pretty much have the same theme and in my mind, are simply clones of one another. They do nothing to help people recognize the companies.

The Evolution of a Logo Design

I believe that an effective logo is one that instantly provides brand recognition. Lets compare the various iterations of my company, BiggerPockets, Inc.’s logos over the past several years.

A Great Resource for Creating Your Logo Design

After I knew that my student was on to something with our logo, I decided to have some professional graphic artists clean it up for me. To do that, I found a great service that everyone should utilize: SitePoint’s Logo Design Contests. All I did was give the brilliant (and not so brilliant) graphic designers on Sitepoint (a huge and amazing webmaster forum) some ideas of what I was looking for, and let them run with it. There were many wonderful ideas put forward, and I was able help the designers modify and clean their logos up until I had somthing I was happy with. The best part about running one of these contests is that it is affordible and you do get many ideas to choose from.

For small companies starting out, one of the most important things to have, other than a great product or service, is a strong brand. The largest companies in the world spend billions of dollars a year to build or maintain their brand supremacy. It isn’t easy to establish your brand, but sometimes a few simple steps can help; I’m going to look at one of these steps, and analyze the effectiveness of giving away promotional materials (swag) for the remainder of this post.

Case Study of Promotional Advertising and Branding: Geni.com

After mentioning a great new company called Geni.com in a previous blog post, (Geni has become the place to go for family social networking) I was contacted by the company. As a result of their email, I wrote a post about the power of effective follow-up in marketing, where I talked about how following up with your users/customers is essential. The company told me they’d send some free swag because I’m such a fan (and because it is a great branding opportunity) and I promised to do a final wrap-up post if the company came through and sent me some cool stuff.

Did they ever! They came through with flying colors, shipping me (via Fedex, no less) a mousepad, pens, stickers, a baseball hat, and 2 t-shirts.

Think it’s just a cheap ploy? Lets look at what the result of sending me the swag will be:

• As you can tell, I look good in that shirt! I’m definitely going to sport it around town, providing a lot of really cheap branding for Geni.
• When I tell my friends about the site, I’m sure to mention the stuff they sent me and I’ll certainly use words like “cool” and “check it out”.
• I’m now writing the 2nd post completely devoted to Geni and how they are smart in their marketing. This provides the company with even more publicity.
• I’ll probably give the stickers away to some local kids because I have no real use for them. This is great for the company because kids love stickers and they are sure to put them somewhere interesting and visible.

All in all, giving away promotional materials is a smart, inexpensive, and effective way to help build the strength of your brand.

There are tons of different techniques for promoting your business or website, and one of the more popular ones is by using article marketing. Simply put, article marketing is the act of writing articles about a topic with the goal of getting the readers to contact you or visit your website. I will cover article marketing in more detail in another post, but I wanted to talk about an experience I’m currently going through with a very popular site called Ezine Articles.

Like many other article submission sites, this site relies on authors to log in and submit articles which are then published on site. Anyone can use the article on their site, provided it is not altered and provided the byline is included.

The Failure of EzineArticles.com
Back on March 30, 2006 (YES, LAST YEAR!) I signed up and submitted an article to the site. As I’m a busy guy, I forgot about the article, but came back to the Ezine site recently in hopes of submitting another one. To my shock, I noticed a bright red notice: PROBLEM – Not Live. Trying to figure things out, I saw in tiny font, a notice “Problem: General Error – Please contact us to find out more.” Of course, I contacted them and waited.

It has now been over a week! Despite a message telling me that I’d be “contacted shortly”, I have not heard form a sole. The irony is that they have an autoresponder sending out the following message:

Hi,

Thank you for contacting EzineArticles.com’s author support center.

Every email is human reviewed and our normal response time is within
24 business hours, Monday thru Friday.

Thanks!

http://EzineArticles.com/

Looks like there is a lack of humans or something over there!

Now, I’m just another angry customer. The people running Ezine Articles have failed to establish an efficient customer service platform and people like me have fallen in the cracks. Instead of getting free positive publicity from me about how great their site is, they now have to deal with this post, telling people how they have failed to do what they set out to. People sometimes say “any publicity is good publicity” – that is certainly not the case here!

As the famous quote from Cool Hand Luke goes, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”!

What is the lesson to be learned?
Customer service is #1! If you can’t keep your users happy, especially in this day and age, the backlash can be quick and extremely powerful.

BTW – I sent a trackback to the company’s blog and the blog of the guy I think is in charge. Lets see if they have a response now . . .

9 Steps To Successfully Market to a Forum Community
In a previous post The Direct and Indirect Approaches to Forum Marketing we talked about the two approaches to forum marketing. I’d like to share the 9 steps you will want to follow to forum marketing success; this is basically a primer on indirect forum marketing (the only approach I fully endorse).

1. Find a forum in the niche you want to market to
2. Check to be sure the site allows you to create a forum signature with a link to your business
3. Set up an account
4. Create a forum signature that includes the following information: your name, website/business name, web address, contact info (if any), description of the website/business (DO NOT USE A SALES PITCH – e.g. The Best Car Parts Shop Around – that stuff is useless). Be descriptive!
5. Find the forum introductions section (most good forums will have one) and tell people about yourself. Talk about your business, but don’t just drop a sales pitch. Let people know what your interests are in the topic beyond your business.
6. PARTICIPATE! Become an active member of the forums. Help others on the site. Get involved in the debate. POST, POST, POST! In time, the members will see you as an expert in the topic. With more posts, your site/business will have more exposure, and you will see results.
7. If the forum has an area for members to advertise in, use it. (if not, don’t post ads on the site; just use your forum signature and your knowledge to do the selling for you)
8. Volunteer to become a moderator on the site (forum administrators will often be willing to trade advertising for good moderators). In addition to the opportunity of getting more exposure, moderators are typically given more respect and looked at with even more authority then other members. With this comes more clicks and more business!
9. Find other forums in the same area of interest and repeat steps 1-8.

Not only have I used these techniques, but I see others use them every day on my site! It is a proven formula. Give it a try and I know you won’t be disappointed!

Forums (aka. message boards or discussion boards) are incredible resources. Not only are they helpful for learning and helping others, but they can also be valuable tools for marketing your business or website. There are two approaches you can take in using forums for marketing; the direct approach, or the indirect approach.

The Direct Approach

Some might call this the SPAM message of forum marketing . . . I certainly do. The direct approach is basically the hard sell. You go to forums that are in the niche you want to market to and pitch your stuff. Have a gardening business and want customers . . . go to a gardening forum and post a few messages telling people what you do and sell yourself. Everytime I see someone do this, they post multiple messages around the site that are all sales pitches; on a good forum, these posts are typically removed very quickly as is the member posting them.

Is this method effective?
It depends. If you happen to catch people who are looking for someone like you, then it probably is. On the other hand, people don’t like things shoved down their throats. The hard sell typically turns people off. Many forums have rules forbidding such behavior outside designated thread areas for that exact reason. The hard sell is ineffective mostly because there is no long-term way to sustain it. You can’t keep posting ads on a forum without being asked to stop.

Would I recommend the direct approach?
Absolutely Not! Many forum administrators consider these posts to be SPAM. Posting ads on forums can get you banned very quickly in most reputable discussion boards.

The InDirect Approach

The indirect approach is more of a soft sale technique. The premise of the indirect approach is by participating on a site and helping others, you will gain the members’ trust. Eventually, you will be seen by those people as an expert in your area and they will start flocking to you. I witness this every day on my real estate forums. Many of our members are extremly helpful to others on the site. They spend their time giving advice to anyone who needs it. Soon, buzz around the site starts flowing and that member begins to get extremly busy. We have members who have built their businesses through the goodwill they have generated on our forums.

Is this method effective?
The indirect approach is simple and effective. I have used it to build traffic for many websites that I run, and see people use it on our forums as well. Don’t believe it? Try it out yourself!

How do I implement the indirect approach?
To effectively use the indirect approach, just follow the 9 Steps To Growing Your Business Using Forum Marketing.

Keyword Marketing

SEO aka. Search Engine Optimization is an art. For those of you who don’t know what SEO is, it is the process of optimizing a webpage/website so that that page/site ranks higher in the various search engines. Higher rank=better traffic. There are many keys to proper website SEO, and one of the main ones is the keyword.

Focusing your efforts on certain keywords can really pay off. I have been able to acheive 1st page rankings for several keywords I focused my energies on for various websites I run by properly conducting keyword marketing. The traffic that comes from the right keyword can be very nice!

Keyword Research Tools

Picking and choosing keywords to focus on used to be much more difficult because there weren’t all the tools back in the day that there are today. There are many pay sites you can go to, but there is just as much great info to be found on the many free keyword selector tools. Here is a list of the various free tools you can use to help you out:

The Best Keyword Tools

• Google Keyword Tool – Top Pick – Enter one or various keywords and find out search volume for the previous month and advertiser competition for those terms. Other data the tool gives out are: Estimated Average CPC for each term, Estimated Ad Position (Google AdWords), search volume trends over the past year, and possible negative keywords. Finally, you can also have the tool search your site to see what keywords it sees; this is extremely useful, as it can help you see what Google sees.
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – Top Pick – Based on Overture’s keyword data, this tool offers much more. You can find estimated monthly search volumes for Google, Yahoo, and MSN, “links to price estimate tools from Overture and Google AdWords, links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonyms, Yahoo! Suggest, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker keyword research results.” There are tons of other features here and you can spend a long time just exploring all the resources related to a few keywords. This tool is a must for anyone doing keyword optimization!
• Overture Keyword Tool from 123Promotion – Like the other Overture based keyword tools, you can find related terms for any keyword, but where this one is cool is in their estimated searches for the term and related keywords Per Hour (Avg.), Per Day (Avg.), Per Week (Avg.), and Per Month (Previous month). Best of all, it will also project the search traffic over the next 12 months, and will project the traffic per year in 3 Years time.

Other Keyword Tools

• Overture Keyword Tool – The grand-daddy of keyword tools – this one has been around forever. Just enter a keyword you want to learn about and you’ll find other related terms with the number of searches conducted in the previous month for that term.
• DigitalPoint Keyword Selection Tool – Another oldie but goodie. This tool (a bit annoying because of the very long captcha required with searches) just repackages the Overture keyword data, giving related search terms and number of daily searches for those terms.
• Webmaster Toolkit Keyword Tool – Using various search engines, this keyword tool will find related terms based on the one you enter in their form. This tool, I believe, is most useful in seeing the different related keywords that each search engine chooses.

You can apply one of only two models when it comes to dealing with online advertisers.

1. Establish a high set of standards and eliminate anyone who does not fall in that set.
2. Keep your standards lax and let pretty much anyone advertise with you.

MODEL 1: Keep High Standards
Those people who use the first set of guidelines usually do so because they want to be perceived as a site that people can trust. If you are someone who uses these guidelines to deal with potential advertisers, this may create a moral dilemma at times. When you operate a website that becomes successful, more and more people will want to advertise with you. The problem is that people want to throw money at you, and if you have standards, you will have to reject more people then you accept. That can potentially be a LOT of money!

Over the past month, I’ve personally rejected hundreds of dollars in potential ad revenues through various ad networks I participate in and from direct ad sales. I don’t know about you, but that creates a real quandry:

Do I take the money (we all really love money!) offered by advertisers, or do I uphold my standards and not let just anyone advertise?

MODEL 2: Allow Anyone to Advertise on Site
By allowing just anyone to advertise, your site can quickly become a marketplace for schlock. At first you will definitely make your money, but I think there are long term implications for doing so. Larger, more reputable advertisers will not want to be represented on a site overloaded with non-targeted garbage sites. The longer you allow these advertisers on your site, the more you dilute your perceived quality and eventually the actual quality of your site.

High standards are what made Starbucks, WalMart, McDonalds, etc. into the successful companies they are today.

What do you think?