Category: SEO

Is someone “borrowing” your content?

Nobody likes it when their very own content ends up on some website that simply “borrowed” it. Luckily there’s a way for you to find everyone who borrows your content. It’s called CopyScape and it’s extremely intuitive, so you’ll most certainly be able to figure out how to use it.

Find great expired domain names

DropScout will help you find valuable expired domain names that haven’t been renewed by their current (last) owner. It’s a great way to find domain names that have been present on the market for a couple of years, that have a good reputation, that are short and relevant to your primary keyowrds etc. Give it a shot, I think you’ll like it.

Traffic Estimator

Are you wondering how much traffic can you expect by building a website around a specific keyword or key phrase?

Google Traffic Estimator can help you with that. It might be one of the very few tools that gives you traffic estimates that you can trust. These estimates are believed to be based on system-wide AdWords performance information, and it will give you information about the average CPC, maximum CPC, estimated monthly search volume and the number of clicks per day that you can expect.

There’s a lot of tools with this functionality out there, but in my experience they’re often just providing “guesstimates” and that’s not good enough. Google Traffic Estimator on the other hand has been pretty reliable and I can only recommend it.

Get some insight into your potential customers

Google Insights for Search is another nifty tool that can be extremely useful. It shows you related search terms for the search term you enter, and you can figure out both the “top searches” and the “rising searches” in your particular niche. You can also filter search queries by location and get an extremely useful insight into the most popular keywords in a certain region.

With this knowledge, you can really do a bang-up search engine optimization job on your website and make sure the search engine spiders love you. And why shouldn’t they – by knowing what people are actually searching for, you can make sure that you provide your visitors with exactly what they were looking for.

Avoid broken links on your website

We’ve all been there – finding a link on our website that’s been broken for a couple of months and that has probably annoyed hundreds (if not thousands) of our visitors. Little annoyances like this can be enough for our visitors to get a feeling that we’re running a low quality website. What’s more, search engine spiders won’t love you for broken links either – you might get a small penalty for having broken links on your website, and you might be pushed down a bit in the search engine results.

Because of this it’s extremely important to make sure (every once in a while) that all the out-going links on your website actually work. I suggest you google for “xenu broken link finder” – the website looks a bit shady, but the software is really good and will check all your backlinks for you. It will actually check all links, images (including background images), frames, style sheets (CSS files), javascript files and java applets.

What do your visitors really want?

This is most certainly one of the biggest questions in the online business. You don’t usually come in contact with your visitors as much as you’d want, and even if you do, you don’t always ask the right questions and get the best answers. Because of all this, it can be extremely helpful to use some tools that enable you to discover some of the background of your visitors.

With Google Trends for Websites you can analyze any website’s visitors, be it your own website or your competitor’s website. You can figure out what country / region represents the largest portion of website’s visitors, what other websites those visitors like as well and what those visitors have been searching for in the past. This way you can figure out what your visitors are interested in and you can make sure that your website gives them exactly what they want.

Because of this, they’ll love you and come back for more.

Finding relevant keywords

It’s always more than just smart to find keywords with the biggest potential when you’re building a new online business. In short, it means that you should find keywords that accurately describe your business (your service or product), and then you should filter these keywords by the number of strong competitors and number of people who are searching for these keywords each month. You’re always looking for keywords with the lowest number of competitors and the highest number of monthly searches – and you always have to make a compromise.

But sometimes it’s difficult enough to come up with a list of potential keywords and key phrases. Many are using the AdWords External Keyword Tool. It is a great tool, but it’s not the only one out there. It’s not even the only one that was created by developers at Google. You should also check out Google Sets – it’s part of Google Labs and it will come up with a number of relevant and related keywords for your niche. Try it out. 🙂

Okay, I give up – here’s my blog!

As many of you already know, I’ve been more than active in the online business for the last couple of years (has it really been 4 years already?!), but I was always simply posting comments to existing blogs of our projects / products / services, commenting on marketing and web-dev forums, and I never had my own blog.

Over the time, there were so many fellow internet marketers asking me to start a blog to write down my thoughts and code tutorials etc. that I eventually had to give it a thought. And here it is. Aaron’s blog about internet business in general, business principles, inspiration, search engine optimization, marketing, revenue generation and LOTS of code.

I hope you like it! 😉