Wordtracker is one of the online services that webmasters use for keyword research. The service basically allows webmasters and search engine optimizers to enter a keyword and get estimations of how many times that keyword and related keywords get searched by users in search engines. Many webmasters optimize their websites and blog posts according to the results posted on keyword research sites. It is a bit more complicated than to simply pick the top performing keywords as additional research is required to estimate how easy it is to rank for these keywords. Yes, estimations are a big part of the SEO world..

The Wordtracker SEO Blogger add-on for the Firefox web browser brings the keyword research capabilities to a Firefox sidebar. Webmasters can display or hide the sidebar with a single click on the Wordtracker button that is being added to the Firefox status bar after installing the add-on.

The sidebar is divided into two sections. The first offers a search form where the keyword that the user wants to research can be entered. A list of matches will then be displayed in that section detailing the keyword and the number of searches according to Wordtracker. Each keyword has an Add link next to it which can be used to add that keyword to the second section of the sidebar.

Added keywords are displayed there including their usage on the current website. This can be interesting for users who write articles in their web browsers. It is also helpful to analyze a page on a website to get a count on the keywords that are used on that website.

SEO Blogger is an interesting Firefox add-on for webmasters who regularly do keyword research at the Wordtracker website. The keywords are limited to the first 30 results which means that it might take a few searches before all possible keyword combinations are discovered.

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Webmasters who add advertisement to their websites face the difficult challenge of having to choose a design and location for them. Design might not always be offered as a choice especially when implementing banner ads or intext ads but popular advertising schemes like Google Adsense offer a wide variety of shapes and colors for the ad units. Some webmasters keep the default settings, others look at other websites they visit to see how the ads are implemented there while a minority performs tests with various designs and locations before making a decision.

Webmasters belonging to the first or second group usually lose money day in day out while the third group is the only one to maximize ad revenue. This may be an oversimplification but it usually is true. Why is that you may ask.

Scenario 1: Default Ad Designs – Selecting default ad designs results in lower ad revenue, this is especially true for Google Adsense and other PPC advertising schemes. The colors of the ad unit are simply not optimized which has the result that the click through rate is lower than those of optimized ad units.

Alternative: The best colors either match the link color of the website or use the default link color of the web (#0000ff). There might be some other colors, for example red that yield good results as well.

Scenario 2: Default Ad Locations – Optimizing the design of the ad unit is only one side of the medal. A properly designed ad unit can be placed in the wrong location on a website leading to low click through rates. The same is true if the webmaster copies ad locations from other websites without testing. Yes, a floating ad unit next to the main content of the page produces a good click through rate but it might not be the best location.

Alternative: Placing ad units next to the main content will always result in a higher click through rate. It is however advised to test various positions to find the best working one for the website. Good positions to test are:

• Floating left of the content
• Above the content
• Above the title of the content

There can be drastic differences depending on the location selected.

How to test

Performing the tests is not that difficulty. Best option would be to alternate between the different ads at the same time. There are scripts that can rotate ads. If that is not possible it is best to run one ad unit for some days and switch to another one after that until all different ad designs and locations have been tested. If the advertiser offers channels be sure to create different reporting channels for each design and position to be able to compare the results.

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Keyword research describes the process of evaluating keywords in terms of search engine competition, projected visitor numbers and advertising potential. A company that does not start with keyword research needs to have lots of patience and deep pockets to make up for this error.

Most companies want to compete for their business’s main keywords: Say an attorney from New York wants to compete for the terms attorney and lawyer. Those are general terms and while they will bring in lots of visitors to the first few sites in the search engines they have negative side effects that will impact the business. First, they are highly competitive. The lawyer from New York will compete with lawyers from all over the country and even from other English speaking countries. That’s a lot of competition for a term that will bring in mostly untargeted traffic.

What does untargeted traffic mean? It means that English speaking users are looking for the term lawyer or attorney. This could be users from Hawaii, Alaska or Australia which do not want to do business with an attorney from New York.

The alternatives are targeted long tail keywords. An attorney from New York might want to target keywords like New York Attorney, New York personal injury lawyer or accident attorney New York. Those are called long tail keywords. Each of the keywords listed above are examples of generating targeted keywords from general ones.

A person searching for New York personal injury lawyer will be more likely to hire the New York lawyer because that is what he was looking for. The traffic numbers will be lower than for the general keyword but they are matching the location and profession of the business with the location and needs of the client.

Will it be easier to rank high for accident attorney New York than to rank for accident attorney? Yes it will definitely be easier because a lawyer competing for the first term will only compete with lawyers from New York City whereas he would compete with all accident attorneys throughout the English speaking world for the general term.

Businesses who research targeted keywords will have to spend less money, will gain highly targeted visitors and see results faster than businesses who opt for the generic keywords. And that’s the reason why keyword research is essential for any online business.

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Buying a website is a complicated process and it should not be done by someone who has no clue of what he is getting into. The real price of a website is determined by many factors and definitely not by the seller of the website who, more often than less, wants to earn as much money as possible from the sale of the website.

This article is going to evaluate the important factors and takes a look at several other – lesser important – factors as well. A potential buyer needs some knowledge to be able to calculate a price for a website in the same manner that someone who has knowledge about cars will fair better when purchasing a car than someone who does not know anything about cars.

Technical knowledge, as in programming languages, is not that important when buying websites. They only have to be considered in some special cases, for instance when buying a web application. A buyer needs knowledge in SEO and website monetization among other things to evaluate a website.

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