Applications for the Apple iPhone – often referred to as Apps – can help drive significantly more traffic to your web site in a number of ways. Here’s why:

1.) You can create apps that make it less difficult to use your web site on an iPhone. For example, PayPal offers an application that enables phone users to easily conduct transactions in their accounts. FedEx and USA Today provide similar programs.

2.) Offering specialized iPhone apps for download on your site can also drive more traffic to it, even if they are non-Internet applications (like games). Fewer apps exist for it than the major systems like Windows and Linux, so it isn’t as hard to compete for traffic.

3.) Programmers can submit their free or commercial apps to Apple for inclusion in the iTunes App Store. If successful, this has the potential to drive much more traffic to the associated web site and expose many Apple users to it for the first time.

4.) Applications which refer to or interface with your web site remind people to continue using it, making them more likely to become repeat visitors. Gaining regular repeat users is far preferable to always having to attract new visitors.

Why is this important? In early 2008, Nielsen Mobile estimated that approximately 2,300,000 Americans use the iPhone and about eighty-two percent of them connect to the Internet with it. Such a large number of users offer great potential for web site traffic and sales.

iPhone ownership also likely indicates that a user is willing to purchase fairly expensive products and services, which adds to the value of working to enhance iPhone-based traffic.

Many such apps also work on the iPod Touch, a somewhat less costly alternative to the iPhone. Ensuring compatibility with the Touch should drive additional traffic to your site.

Even if you haven’t heard about Google Suggest, you may have seen it in action while typing a search query on Google. As you type, it displays suggested search phrases in a drop-down menu below the search box. Here are seven great things about using Google Suggest:

1.) It can make entering long search queries much faster; searchers may use the mouse pointer or down arrow key to select a desired suggestion, after only typing a few letters.

2.) Because its content is partially based upon other searchers’ queries, Google Suggest is great for learning about what sort of things people are searching for on the web.

3.) Google Suggest can be helpful for getting new writing ideas on a particular category you are interested in; just type in one or two words describing the subject.

4.) This Google feature is also great for helping you remember the names of places, songs, products, and other things that you can only recall a portion of.

5.) It lets users preview how many results there are for a particular word or phrase. The number of results is listed to the right of each suggested query (in no particular order).

6.) Additionally, this tool makes it easier to search for words you don’t know how to spell. Type the first few letters of the word, and there’s a good chance the rest will be suggested.

7.) Google Suggest pops up quickly and works under most major web browsers. It doesn’t require the installation of any extra software or new browser plug-ins.

If you prefer to use another search engine, it may have an equivalent to Google Suggest. Yahoo! has “Search Assist” and Ask.com offers “Search Suggestions”. These are quite similar, except that they don’t show the number of results alongside each suggestion.

Google.com offers its Webmaster Tools service to all webmasters free of charge. The tools provide a range of useful statistics, the ability to communicate certain search listing preferences directly to Google, and diagnostic features that list search optimization errors to correct.

Google Webmaster Tools holds great importance to webmasters for two main reasons:

1.) It gives webmasters a “look under the hood” of how Google works, which provides them with a greater understanding of search result rankings and indexing.

2.) It enables webmasters to get a better idea of what Google “thinks” about their web sites, how the Google “spider” sees them, and what improvements could be made.

MANY USEFUL FEATURES

In addition to interactively helping webmasters better comply with Google’s guidelines, Webmaster Tools can automatically perform various useful services like creating a Robots.txt file, counting links, or generating custom 404 error page messages.

Webmasters can not only find out what Google search phrases brought visitors to their sites, but the searches that made their pages show up in results. This holds importance because it may be used to determine what pages need more attractive description tags.

Site listing preferences like URL style (show “www” in results or not), image search inclusion, country-specific targeting, and “spidering” frequency, may be set in Google Webmaster Tools as well (under the “Settings” tab).

OVERALL IMPORTANCE

It is of the most importance that Webmaster Tools gives webmasters clear information on how to make their sites more acceptable to Google, the top search engine. This has the potential to raise a site’s position in results, considerably increasing its traffic.

However, the Webmaster Tools service does not replace Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tasks like META tag creation, keyword density enhancement, or link building. It also doesn’t take into account the policies of different search engines like Yahoo and MSN, which also hold importance.

OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Do other major engines offer Webmaster Tools equivalents? To some extent, yes. MSN/Live has the Live Search Webmaster Center (webmaster.live.com), and the “Webmaster Resources” section of Yahoo! Help offers some useful links within their site. Ask.com has a page oriented to webmasters as well.

ABOUT GOOGLE.COM

According to their web site, Google was incorporated in 1998 and relocated to Mountain View, CA (its current location) a year later. Google’s importance to webmasters grew as it rapidly became the top engine in following years, and Webmaster Tools was established in 2006.

Considering that this service is free and easy to register for, there is little reason for webmasters not to give it a try.

Gmail has a lot of features beyond just sending and receiving email. Some of these are included to but not limited to creating filters and labels. Having filters and lables allows you to organize your email quickly and efficiently. We all receive lots of email each day – we might as well keep our Gmail accounts organized.

After I created my video I did a little research and found a video from Google. Ours is a little bit shorter without all the fluff!

Filters and Labels – Google

Here is a fast way to see how your rankings are working in other countries.  You simply have to add the string &gl=XX to the end of the URL in your browser. XX is the 2-letter ISO country code you need, i.e. RU for Russia, AU for Australia

http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+marketing&pws=0&hl=en&num=10&gl=au

This is a quick way to check Search Results in other countries as well as average position for Google Adwords campaigns.  Here is a list of ISO country codes from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1

Many people may not think of Firefox as an SEO tool, but in actuality, it’s a great one. It works well for SEO for many reasons. Among them are that it’s free, secure, works on Mac, Windows, and Linux with the same features and functionality and has a large developer network creating extension that are generally independent.

After you make the decision to use Firefox though, it can be overwhelming deciding which plugins you should use. To that end, here is a list of the 7 highly useful plugins and what you can use them for:

1. SEOQuake – This tool helps analyze search results and various parameters that may influence SEO such as Google PR (Google PageRank of current page), Google Index (Number of indexed pages. Google version), Google link (Number of links, pointed to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain) as well as similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters.

2. SEOpen: Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization, including Google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar. (Note: Not yet compatible with Firefox 3.0)

3. SEO Link Analysis: Adds display of PageRank, linktext and nofollow links to external links in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Portal.

4. Mahalo Share: Share and recommend Web pages across many different services; recommend a link once and have it automatically posted to any of Twitter, del.icio.us, MySpace, Ma.gnolia, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Facebook, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Faves, or Google Bookmarks.

5. SearchStatus: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

6. RankQuest SEO Toolbar: RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensure the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.

7. About This Site: One-click access to web site metadata – traffic, related and linked pages, and more – added to the Tools menu and context menu.

There are lots of different tools online that provide quick data regarding websites, two sites that we use are Quarkbase and Website Grader.  Here is a quick overview of Mortgage101.com using both tools along with some interpretation of the information found by the tools.

Google supports query words that have special meaning to Google. These are known as advanced operators and modify a search in some way or tell Google to do a different type of search. Quite a few of these operators use punctuation instead of words and quite a few of them are accessible from the Advanced Search page of Google. Here is a list of the more common types and what they do.

1. link: Using the query [link:www.webpage.com] will list web pages that have links to the web page you specify. Make sure you do not put a space between the “link:” and the web page URL.
2. related: The query [related:www.webpage.com] will list web sites that are similar to the web page you specified. Again, you cannot leave a space between the colon and the web site specified.
3. site: This query [site:www.webpage.com] allows Google to restrict the results to the web sites in the given domain.
4. allintitle: This query [allintitle:example search] restricts the search results to ones with all of the query words in the title.
5. intitle: [intitle:example search] restricts the results to documents containing the word you search for in the title.
6. allinurl: [allinurl:example search] limits the results to ones will all of the query words in the URL. This query works on words only and not URL components.
7. inurl: [inurl:example search] confines the search results to documents containing that word in the URL.

Keep in mind there can be no space between the colon and the first word in any of these queries. Using these advanced Google searches as well as the additional ones found on Google can help you with your search engine optimization

We use this keyword ranking tool (Download Rank Checker) at least a couple of times a day to check keyword rankings quickly.  In addition, we use the .CSV export to show the rankings to clients and potential clients.  The rankings are tracked for the Top 200 rankings in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Additional features include the ability to set a preset list that will let you re-check at a later date as well as the history of the keyword preset lists.  Once a preset list is setup, you can schedule the Firefox extension to run at a set time…be sure to set you search interval to between 4-7 seconds so you are being ‘friendly’ to search engines.

This product review of Wordtracker is by Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com
and covers some useful keyword research techniques.

Basically, keyword research should begin with looking at your current web logs or analytics reports since basically these keywords should have some type of ranking. The logic is that you can probably rank for similar keywords.

The key to using a keyword research tool is to start with general themes like ‘chocolate’ and then find other keywords like ‘white chocolate’ and ‘chocolate truffles’. Once you identify some of these, you should visit competition to see how they have ranked.

According to SEOQuake, the more keywords in a search results the better lower quality sites did in the results. This long tail strategy can be good for sites that don’t have the authority to rank for competitive keywords.

Quintera shows keyword phrases that people might be using by relating keywords from the top Google SERP results.  There are lots of keyword tools that can be used for ideas as part of the discovery process.  Be sure to review keywords volumes as part of the input, but don’t rely on the data from any of the tools.

Google’s keyword tool not only provides keyword variations but you can also plug in a url and Google will use the content of the home page to pull relevant keywords.  Compete also provides a traffic / ranking based keyword terms that allows you to ’spy’ on your competition.

Picking the right keywords can lead to traffic quickly if you the right modifers.  Only half of the search queries on Google are unique, so be sure to use modifiers that might include product names, brands, and action items like ‘buy’, ‘price’,'order’, ‘cheap’, etc.  For another example, clothes might have modifiers like ‘loose’ or ‘tight’.  Aaron Wall gives a lot of good ideas regarding the type of keyword modifiers that might be used and these items could potentially be used for on-page body copy.