Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

How to AMAZE Your Clients With a KILLER Viral Campaign by SEO Bomb Blog
is a great study in how to get fast results for an SEO client. Though partnering with SEO blackhat, they use totally legit methods to create buzz and improve all aspects of the business and their web presence. Wow. Check out the results (I pasted more than I meant to becasue the results didn’t make sense sans context):

Now, as QuadZilla pointed out, my plan had several good points in it, but what was lacking was the one thing that would make this exceptionally remarkable.

The one thing that would make every single designer and Mac fan-boy go Ga-Ga:

Enter The Prizes
Week 1: iPod nano 2GB & iPod 30GB
Week 2: MacBook
Week 3: MacBook Pro
Week 4: Mac Pro with DUAL 30″ Cinema HD LCDs
See where we’re going at? Good.

But there’s one more thing missing: The seeders - and boy did we get seeders.

In addition to the link from Apple.com and the judges from About.com, 456Bereastreet, Mac Addict Magazine and 9Rules.com, you can view the full list of judges right here.

That, dear readers, is some serious link juice.

Crestock.com got 200,000 unique users from the contest, went on Digg, doubled their average daily traffic after the contest, got over 5000 new customers and increased their organic search engine traffic by 1258% - in one month!

http://www.seocompany.ca/pagerank/page-rank-update-list.html

Nice exhaustive list of Google updates, categorized by algorythm updates, page rank updates, and the like.  It has links to forum discussions or other expert analysis of each event.

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

Nice tool for Keyword density analysis.  It limits the page size, but for most people that should be fine.  I don’t put too much stock in this sort of thing… if you write and continuously update content that would be valuable for people searching for a keyword you’ll be better served.  This type of tool is more useful if you’re trying to game a search engine.  That said, there are times where I’d like an objective opinion of how a seach engine sees a page and this helps me look at the page with fresh eyes.

Directory submission has long been a part of SEO and web promotion.  It’s really no longer useful for driving traffic directly.  Search engines do at times take the recommendations of directory’s, particularly human edited one, quite seriously.  Other directorys can put you in the dreaded Google Sandbox.  So should you submit to them?  Which ones?  The link below hopes to help guide you.  A good rule of thumb is is to use your head.  Click on some of the links.  If they’re junk, stay away.  If it is good content, and related to your site or topic, submit. I’d be slow to pay for a link though.  There are better, more effective ways[1][2] to spend your money.

http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/

If you’re looking to research keywords, there are a number of tools for doing so on the web.  The (major) ones I know of are:

• Wordtracker - http://wordtracker.com/ Wordtracher is nice because it is designed for SEO types rather than for ad buyer so the tool provides a score for which keywords appear underrepresented.  It requires a subscription, but you can have unlimited free trials (only for MSN but that’s good enough).
• Google Adwords - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Google’s tool is listed here second because it’s Google (85% marketshare?). 
• KeywordDiscover - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ I’ve not tried this yet but I’ve heard good things about it from smart folks.  I can’t see spending $40 / month though unless it’s superb.
• Digital Point - http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/ You create a free account and it tracks keywords for you over time.  It’s a great thing to set up and then foorget about.  You need a Google API key but they have a link on the site for it.
• Yahoo Overture - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ I’ve been using this one forever (since it was goto.com).  I don’t know that there’s anything special about.  Rumor is that in recent months it’s been getting less accurate, but I still like it.  It’s really straight-forward… no login or anything.

The Other Guys

• Good Keywords - http://goodkeywords.com/
• Keyword Count - http://www.keywordcount.com/index.php/welcome
• Keyword Density - http://keyworddensity.com/
• NiceBot - http://nichebot.com/
• SEO Book - http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

If you have any more majors to add, please post or email me.