SEO Tool Tips & Techniques
Some practical notes on using SE tools and services.

As we begin a new year it makes good sense to do a practical review of some important tips and widely used SEO tools. With that in mind, the following grab-bag of crucial points, guidelines and reminders should facilitate your ability to efficiently optimize web sites without wasting time or running afoul of the SE spam police.

Useful Keyword Research Tools

• For starters, one of the more useful keyword tools is Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool available at: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

  When using it, be aware that it reduces plurals to the singular form of words. For example, a search for cars, will return the keyword car as well as the top keyphrases that contain the keyword car. And, the quantities given are for a combination of both cars and car.

You should also be aware of the way Overture's keyword tool expands acronyms. For example when doing a search for NASCAR, the tool returns National Association for Stock Car Racing with 474,539 searches performed during a month's time (in this case November '02). This is a dramatic example because (probably) 99.9% of those searches are actually for NASCAR.

Position checkers and other automated bots will often skew the results on low frequency keywords searches within Overture and other similar search services. Don't make hard business decisions based on the numbers provided by these programs.

For example, the term Mortgage Rate shows a count of 391,536 while Mortgage shows 407,342, a difference of only 15,806 hits. When the quantities for a single keyword are this close to a multiple word phrase, there is an increased chance that a substantial number of queries for both phrases are being generated by automated bots.

One of the most helpful, yet overlooked, resources are your own site's visitor logs. Here's where you should be looking to detect new keyword phrases and frequencies.

Log statistics programs often have tools for generating reports regarding such information. And ...