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I was recently doing some keyword research when I thought I’d come across a really good keyword for a new Amazon store that I’d been planning on building.

However, after checking the search trends (in particular the regional differences), I quickly realized that the keyword was nowhere as good as I initially thought it was.

Given that keyword research is the foundation for any site, I think trend and regional data are often overlooked in the whole keyword research process.

In this article, I’ll go through why analysing trend and regional data is a very important part of keyword research and why you shouldn’t ignore it.

Fiverr has been around for a while now and I’ve used it since it was launched, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit my experiences with Fiverr.

Firstly, my experiences on Fiverr are only as a buyer.  I have never listed a gig, but have occasionally thought about it but the actually commission you receive has put me off (although there are quite a few tricks you can you to increase your profits from Fiverr, which I might cover in another article).

The other things I should point out is all the Fiverr gigs I’ve tried are related to SEO and graphics, so I can’t comment on the quality of gigs in the other categories.

It’s a Jungle In There

With so many people offerings gigs on Fiverr, it really is like a jungle in there.  You never know if you are going to come across a beautiful butterfly or get bitten by a snake.

The Fiverr rating system can give you a general idea as to the  quality of the gig, but it’s not a completely reliable or foolproof system.   I’ve ordered some gigs that had rave reviews, but found the results were were mediocre.

As with a lot products or services, the best recommendations come from your friends as they are the people you trust the most.

Bad Fiverr Experiences

Luckily I’ve never had a completely negative experience with Fiverr.  Perhaps if I had ordered a greater variety of gigs, the odds of getting a really bad one would increase.

Of all the gigs I order, I’ve only had to get one refund due to the gig not being completed.   I have to say that I don’t find the refund process on Fiverr to be entirely obvious, but once you’ve worked out where to flag the information, it generally doesn’t take very long for a Fiverr staff member to review the details and issue a refund (if appropriate).

For me, the type of gigs I was most disappointed with the results (with the exception of one person) were the ones related to creating graphics, ie: banners, headers, logos etc.   I’m no graphic designer, but honestly, some of the work I received was very basic or just looked plain amateurish.   I know you can’t generally expect a highly professionally designed graphic for only $5, but I was expecting a little more.

In most cases, I ended up doing the graphics myself and personally thought I did a much better job.

The other types of gigs I usually avoid are anything to do with SEO.   You can do some real damage to your rankings with some of the backlinking gigs on offer.   Most of these use automated software to blast out spam comments or pretty much useless profile links.  I can understand why some of these gigs do well, as there are a lot of people who don’t know much about SEO that read the gig descriptions and get sucked in.

Good Fiverr Experiences

Like I already mentioned, Fiverr really is a jungle, but there are some great services on offer that are high quality and an absolute bargain.

In regards to graphics and logos, I’ve ordered three gigs from a user called creative1desing

The particular gig I ordered was:

Create 3 Different Logos For Your Website or Blog

You’ll probably see some negative comments as graphic design is a very subjective and personal opinion.   Obviously for $5 you can’t expect the world, but I was happy with each of the results.

The seller states that if you aren’t happy with any of the designs, they will redo them.   I got them to make some minor modifications to one set of graphics I ordered, which was done very promptly.

Now, I know I said there are a lot of SEO gigs on Fiverr that you should not touch.  I did try some recently and while I was initially impressed, I later worked out they were using greyhat methods.

In particular, there are a lot of Fiverr gigs that offer services that provide you with unique articles that are guaranteed to pass Copyscape, but in actual fact just steal unauthorized content from many sources and run it through some software to make it appear “unique”.

My next post will be covering this in more detail.

If you know of any other great Fiverr gigs you’ve come across or ones to definitely avoid, please leave a comment below.

Cheers

Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) was finally closed in November 2011.

YSE was without a doubt, the most popular tool and source of information for seeing what backlinks a site has.   Many tools and plugins used YSE to get their backlink data, so they all have been affected as well and have had to move to a new backlinking data source.

So now Yahoo Site Explorer is dead, what are the alternatives?

In this article, I will be taking a look at four alternatives for YSE.

Note that the services some of the serviced I’ve reviewed have paid subscriptions, I am only looking at the features/reports that you get with their free offerings.

Backlink Reporting Sites Reviewed

The four sites I’m be taking a look at are:

1. Open Site Explorer – Operated by SEOMoz.
2. Majestic SEO Site Explorer – Operated by Majestic SEO
3. Ahrefs Site Explorer – Operated by Ahrefs
4. Blekko – Search engine with SEO reporting facilities

One thing to note is that all of the four sites will give you different data and different results.  Unfortunately when it comes to backlink data, there just isn’t any resource that can give you 100% accurate results.

Videos of Yahoo Site Explorer Alternatives

For those who prefer the visual medium, I’ve created the following two videos to give you an overview of what each of the sites offers in terms of backlinking data and other SEO data.

This video covers Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and Blekko.

This video covers Ahrefs.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer (OSE) is operated by SEOMoz, who are a highly respected SEO organization.

OSE has free and Pro membership levels, with the paid membership getting you access to additional reports and services.

The reports you get in the free version of OSE include:

• Inbound Links
• Top Pages
• Linking Domains
• Anchor Text
• Ability to compare backlink metrics between up to 5 sites

The following OSE screenshot shows the default Inbound Links report.

 Open Site Explorer Summary

While there is some very useful data returned by OSE, probably the biggest issue is the freshness of the index.  Even though the index is large, it is only contains about 25% of all sites on the web.  That’s one of the reasons why the total number of backlinks reported is substantially fewer than what the other sites report.

Additionally, the data is only refreshed every 30 days or so, which means there is always a lag between new backlinks and when they are reported.

 Click here to try out Open Site Explorer

Majestic SEO Site Explorer

Majestic SEO currently would rank as the most popular Yahoo Site Explorer alternative.

Just about every piece of software like Traffic Travis, Market Samurai etc, all changed their backlinking data source from Yahoo to Majestic SEO.

Like OSE, Majestic SEO Site Explorer comes in free and paid subscription versions, where the paid subscription gets you access to more data.

Majestic Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Backlinks
• Referring Domains
• Top Pages
• Backlink History

Majestic SEO also have a few additional SEO tools that you can access.

The following Majestic Site Explorer screenshot shows the default summary returned for a site.

Majestic Site Explorer Summary

There’s a good reason why Majestic Site Explorer is popular, and that’s due to the size of the data and more importantly the freshness of the data.

Since March 2011, SEO Majestic update their index daily.  In the backlink history reports, you can use the “Fresh Index”, which shows you backlink data from the last 30 days, or you can use the “Historic Index” which shows you all available backlink data that Majestic SEO have for a particular site.

Click here to try out Majestic Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer isn’t as well known as Open Site Explorer and Majestic Site Explorer, but it does have some very useful data that the other sites don’t.

Ahrefs is another free/paid subscription service.   If you don’t register, you are limited to 10 queries per day, if you register for a free account, you are limited to 20 queries per day.

Ahrefs Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Pages
• Backlinks
• Anchor Text
• Referring Domains
• Referring Subnets

There is also a SERPs Analysis function that is really handy as it will show you what keywords a site is ranking for and their position and movement in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The following Ahrefs Site Explorer Screenshot shows you the default information returned.

Ahrefs Site Explorer Summary

Even though the free version of Ahrefs is more limited than the other sites, the information it returns is very useful.   In particular, the ability to see what keywords and what rankings a particular site has is great when you are doing competition analysis.

Click here to try out Ahrefs Site Explorer

Blekko

Blekko is different to the previous sites as it is primarily a search engine.   However, it is a very flexible search engine that gives you very useful SEO data.

Blekko uses special filters/modifers that they call slashtags.  One of these slash tags is /seo, so when you do a query like:

somedomain.com /seo

You will get all the SEO data for that particular domain.

Blekko SEO Reports include:

• Inbound links and their location
• Outbound links
• Internal Links
• Crawled pages and their rank
• Domains that contain duplicate content

The following Blekko screenshot shows the default SEO information returned.

Blekko Summary

Of all the newer search engines that have been created, I’ve found Blekko to be the most interesting and most useful.

While it’s backlink data isn’t as detailed as the other sites, it is free, fast and easy to use.

Click here to try out Blekko

Recommendations

A lot of the time, the type of information and style you like to see it in comes down to personal preference, so my main recommendation is to try out all four sites and see which you like best.

That said, my two favourite sites are:

1.  Majestic Site Explorer – This is mostly due to it having the most comprehensive and accurate backlink data of the four and the freshness of the index.

2. Ahrefs Site Explorer – I like to use this site to get SEO data that the other sites don’t provide, eg: keyword/ranking data.

If you know of any other similar sites (that are free to use), please leave a comment below.

Cheers

Keyword Research can be a bit like trying to put a puzzle together.   However if you are missing a piece of the puzzle or have some wrong pieces, then you can never successfully complete it.

Time and time again when I’m reading posts on Internet Marketing forums like the Warrior Forum, I see the same keyword research mistakes come up.

Keyword research is your foundation of SEO and without proper keyword research, the rest of your efforts are most likely to be a waste of time.

So what are the biggest keyword research mistakes?

1) Search Volume

By far the biggest mistake people make with their keyword research is using the wrong monthly search volume figures.

We all know that a good keyword should have good monthly search volume and low competition.   Typically “good search volume” is defined as 3000+ searches a month (this is not a figure set in stone though as it depends on the type of keyword).

Typically what happens is that someone who is doing their keyword research will go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool (GAKT), specify their keyword and see what the monthly search volume is.

Correct?

NO!

The problem is that by default, GAKT returns broad match search results when you really want to look at the exact match search results.

OK, so let’s use an example to explain what the difference is between broad and exact match search results and why it is so important.

For the rest of this article, I’m going to be using the example keyword phrase:

antique coffee table

So if we login to our Google account and go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool,  put in our keyword phrase, we can see the following results:

That’s 12,100 searches a month!  Happy days!

Not so fast.

Click on the checkbox next to [Exact] under the Match Types in the left column and let’s see what results we get:

The exact match search volume is shown for the keyword phrase in square brackets, ie: [antique coffee table]

The global monthly searches for the exact match result is a only 1000, which isn’t too bad, but certainly way less than the 12,100 results for the broad match.   I’ve seen some keyword phrases where the difference is huge; for example the broad match results over 100,000 and the exact match results less than 100.

Just imagine if you built a website and optimized around a keyword that you thought got a lot of searches, only to find that even though your site is ranked at the top of Google, you are getting a  very tiny trickle of traffic.

It can be very disheartening.

Match Types

Alright, I’ve told you that you should always be using the exact match figures, but I have explained why…..yet.

Let’s look at the three different match types and what they mean.

Broad Match

A broad match is where your keywords can appear in any order and don’t have to be next to each other.

The following are all broad match results:

• antique table with coffee grinder
• a coffee table looks great with antique features
• sit at a table sipping coffee and reading books about antique furniture
• give your table and antique look by staining it with coffee

A broad match search is the default search type when you do a Google search (that is, without quotes).

So a broad match search for our example keyword phrase, gives us:

That’s over 9 million results.

The first page of the results will have pages directly related to antique coffee tables, but let’s have a look at some of the results returned further down the search results:

This particular page isn’t specifically about antique coffee tables, but mentions a coffee table and an antique drafting table as it is still a broad match result.

This particular result was buried quite a long way down the search results, so someone searching for antique coffee table would almost certainly never even see it.

The point being, is that if you relied on the broad match search volume in GAKT, that will include all sorts of vaguely related searches that you won’t be optimizing your site for.

Phrase Match

A phrase match result is where your keywords appear in the exact order, but can be surrounded by other words or punctuation.

The following are all phrase matches:

• Why antique?  Coffee table for sale.
• antique coffee-table
• antique coffee, table free.

When you do a Google search in quotes, you performing a phrase match search.

So using our keyword phrase, the phrase match search gives us 123,000 results compared to just over 9 million results for the broad match search.

All of the search results will contain the phrase antique coffee table.

Here is one of the results on the very last page:

Notice that there is punctuation in the keywords, but the word order is the same.

Exact Match

The first and most important thing to point out is that exact match only relates to GAKT.

There is no direct way to use exact match in a Google search.

Exact match is pretty self explanatory.  It includes searches for that exact phrase.

As we’ve seen, the broad match search figures can be much, much larger as they include so many other vaguely related searches.  By using exact match search figures, you get a much more accurate idea of the actual search traffic you are going to be targeting and optimizing for.

2)  Competition

Once you’ve found a good keyword, you need to know what sort of competition you are up against to get ranked on page 1 (and there’s no point in aiming for page 2 or lower).

The two main mistakes I’ve seen with gauging competition are:

i) Number of Search Results

This advice goes along the lines of put your keywords in quotes and check the number of results returned, if they are less than [insert some random number here], then it is a low competition keyword.

Now there is some element of truth in this method.  If a keyword search in quotes (phrase match) returns 10 million results and another returns a few hundred results, it’s reasonable to assume the keyword with 10 million results will be harder to rank for.

However, that is a very poor way of judging the competition.

As you are obviously trying to rank on page 1, the sites on page 1 are really your only competition.  You need to look at various factors such as on-page and off-page SEO for the top 10 results to gauge how difficult it would be to beat them.

It doesn’t really matter if there are a million results. If most of them are poorly optimized, then you have a very good chance of outranking them.

ii) GAKT Competition Bar

Quite a number of people don’t understand what the competition bar in the GAKT results actually means.

Let’s look at the results for our example keyword again.

You can see the competition bar for the exact search is almost 100%.

Some people incorrectly interpret this as the competition strength for trying to rank for the particular keyword.

What it really means is the Adwords competition for that particular keyword, ie: the number of people trying to bid on that particular keyword for their adwords campaign.

While it can be a useful metric to look at if you are building Adsense sites, it has very little to do with the competition strength of sites for that keyword.

3) Commercial Intent

Assuming you find a good keyword with low competition and a good number of exact match search results, there is one more piece of the keyword research puzzle that you can get wrong.

This is where commercial intent (“buying keywords”) comes in.

If you have a site ranked on page 1 and are getting lots of traffic but little to no sales, it could be down to the keywords you original chose didn’t have a very high commercial intent.

By commercial intent, I mean how likely is the person searching for that term looking to purchase something.

People may be just searching for advice, information or free products, in which case, there’s not much point in creating a website targeting their searches.

So what are some of the ways of determining commercial intent?

1. Put yourself in the mind of the person doing the search.  If you were doing a search for a particular keyword, are you looking for something to buy (or potentially purchase if you came across something that looked really good)?
2. Keywords targeting specific models.  For example, if someone searches for “LED TV’s”, they are most likely in a research phase to find out more about LED TVs.  However, if someone searches for a specific model of LED TV, they are generally looking for a place to confirm their decision and hopefully purchase from.
3. Look at the CPC and Competition columns in the GAKT.  Generally if a keyword has a good CPC (say, more than $2) and high Adwords competition, it’s generally a good indication that the keyword phrase has a high commercial intent, otherwise people wouldn’t be bidding on it.

Video Summary

For those of you who prefer viewing videos rather than reading articles, the following video gives a summary of what I’ve written in this article.

Getting Keyword Research Right

While keyword research is always going to be an inexact science, by avoiding the common mistakes I’ve listed above, hopefully it will increase your chances of creating a successful site that gets good conversions.

Cheers

Given the huge popularity of the SEOPressor plugin, I thought I’d do a comparison with some recent competitors.

The basic premise of an on-page SEO plugin is that it gives you suggestions for improving on-page SEO and an overall score.

In theory, if the score that is reported by the on-page SEO plugin is high, then you should have a highly optimized page.

The six on-page SEO plugins I’m comparing are:

1.  SEOPressor – This is the most well known on-page SEO plugin.  It was developed by Daniel Tan and has been on the market for some time.

2.  BloggerHigh SEO – This is a free clone of the SEOPressor plugin.

3.  ClickBump SEO – This is a recent entrant into the on-page SEO plugin space.  It is developed by Scott Blanchard.

4. WP SEO Beast – This on-page SEO plugin arrived on the screen just after ClickBump SEO.   It is developed by Prashant Sharma.

5.  Easy WP SEO – This is the highly popular on-page SEO Plugin that is developed by Chris Landrum.

6. Measure My SEO – This is the newest on-page SEO Plugin on the market and is developed by Jason Fladlien and Wilson Mattos.

Demonstration of the On-Page SEO Plugins

The following video gives a brief overview of what each of the plugins do and how they compare to each other.

Please note that when I recorded the original video, WP SEO Beast wasn’t available, so the WP SEO Beast review is in the video below:

The video below shows a quick overview of the Easy WP SEO plugin

Note that in the Easy WP SEO video above, this was using Easy WP SEO version 1.5.  Since then Easy WP SEO v1.6 was released and has a number of major improvements, including:

• Copyscape checking
• Export/Import of Easy WP SEO settings
• Ability to check membership/protected pages
• Ability to check any URL on your site, eg: archives, categories etc
• Ability to fine tune what SEO checks are used in the ratings
• Better SEO report option.

Looking at the Plugins In More Detail

SEOPressor

I was a reluctant purchaser of SEOPressor as I really didn’t think $97 was particularly good value for what it does (particularly if you already know the elements of on-page SEO).  However, given I review products, I ended up buying a copy as at the very least, it’s a useful reminder for particular on-page SEO elements I might have forgotten.

Good Points

• Has a central administration menu for defining keywords and viewing page/post scores and descriptions.
• Works with auto-blogs by giving it a list of keywords and SEOPressor will automatically “decorate” the keywords, ie: bold, underline, italics.

Bad Points

• Price!  In my opinion, $97 for a plugin like this is way over priced.  I think somewhere between $30-$50 is much more reasonable and realistic.
• Nags you about not having an H1 tag, when the vast majority of WordPress themes automatically use H1 for the post/page titles.  Of course you can ignore the suggestion, but it’s something that really irks me.

Click here to access the SEOPressor website

BloggerHigh SEO

BloggerHigh SEO is essentially a rewritten version of SEOPressor.

The actual author and origins of BloggerHigh SEO is a little mysterious.   It appears to be a product of the “Masked Guru”.  Whatever the origins, the big plus of BloggerHigh SEO is that it is free and rebrandable.

Good Points

• Can’t argue with the price as it’s free!
• The plugin is rebrandable, so you can rebrand it yourself (with some limitations) and give it away or sell it.
• Pretty much does the same things as SEOPressor.

Bad Points

• No central administration page.  You need to go to each individual page/post to check the score and suggestions.
• If you don’t have the “hide attribution” option checked, then you’ll have an ugly footer added to each of your pages that have links to the various BloggerHigh sites.  Although, to be fair, as it is a free product, you can’t really blame them for wanting backlinks to their sites.

Click here to access the BloggerHigh SEO website

Clickbump SEO

I recently bumped (bad pun) into Clickbump SEO on the Warrior Forum.  The plugin itself is not currently promoted so much as a standalone plugin, but usually offered as part of the Clickbump Engine Bundle.

Scott did mention that he had registered a domain for Clickbump SEO, so it will be offered as a standalone product very soon.

As I wasn’t that interested in the Clickbump Engine, I purchased just the Clickbump SEO plugin.

Good Points

• It’s less than half the price of SEOPressor.
• Is aware of WordPress themes that use H1, H2 and H3 tags for headings.
• Doesn’t have any overheads of processing a page to add auto-decoration.
• Has a LSI function to grab related keywords.  Very handy reminder of what keywords/phrases to sprinkle into your article.
• Customisable keyword density settings.
• Keyword/Score summary from the Posts/Page manager.

Bad Points

• Can’t really think of any.

Click here to access the ClickBump SEO website

WP SEO Beast

I bought the WP SEO Beast plugin when it was first released so that I could add it to the list of other plugins to compare it to.

I found a few issues with version 1.0 of the WP SEO Beast plugin, so I contacted the author (who was very prompt with his responses) and waited until version 2.0 was released.  This is the version I’m basing my review/comparison on.

Prashant Sharma has obviously studied the other on-page SEO plugins that are available as WP SEO Beast seems to borrow a few ideas from all of them.

WP SEO Beast is probably best described as a cross between ClickBump SEO and SEOPressor.  It does however, have a SEO settings option (similar to all-in-one SEO) which none of the other plugins don’t have.   This has good and bad points as I’ll detail below.

Good Points

• Costs $37, for a plugin that offers more than SEOPressor at more than twice the price.
• Has an option to generate LSI keywords.
• Is aware of WordPress themes that use H1 tags for the post/page title.
• Has summary pages for post and page scores.
• Has support for mobile devices.
• Has inbuilt SEO options to set the meta Title, Description and Keywords so no additional SEO plugins are needed, eg: all-in-one SEO.   Note that I’ve also listed this feature in the bad points

Bad Points

• Probably my biggest gripe with WP SEO Beast is that it forces you to use it’s SEO settings for title, description and keywords.  This means you have no choice to use another SEO plugin like all-in-one SEO or Platinum SEO.  If you do have one of these plugins active, you will end up with two sets of clashing SEO meta data.
• Your score is marked down if you don’t use SEO Beast title, description and keywords, but more importantly, your score is marked down if you don’t use the auto-decoration options (bold, italics, underline).  That means if you manually decorate your keyword, WP SEO Beast doesn’t recognise it.

I think it is only fair to point out that Prashant Sharma is extremely keen to take on board any suggestions to improve the plugin (unfortunately he didn’t address my gripe with the plugin recognising manually decorated keywords though), so you may well find the issues I’ve brought up have been dealt with.

Click here to access the WP SEO Beast website

Easy WP SEO

Easy WP SEO was the latest of the on-page seo plugins that I had a look at.

My first impressions were very favourable as Easy WP SEO has a very professional and polished look and feel.   This certainly extends through to the very extensive documentation that is available with the plugin.  There are instructional videos for every single function of Easy WP SEO.

One big feature that only Easy WP SEO has, is the ability to specify multiple keywords.   This is really useful as most of the time, you want to optimize for your main keyword plus a selection of secondary keywords.   With Easy WP SEO, you can easily select which keyword you want to see the analysis for.

Good Points

• Very clean and professional design.
• Ability to handle multiple keywords.
• Has an LSI function, where you can list LSI keywords and drag/drop them into your article.
• Able to fine tune a large number of settings, eg: keyword density, minimum number of words, title length etc.
• Only on-page seo plugin to include a readability index.
• Has a Copyscape check function.
• Extensive documentation including a manual and video guides.

Bad Points

• Can’t think of any.

Easy WP SEO is not currently available to the public via the main website, however you can grab a discounted copy below.

Click here to access the discounted copy of Easy WP SEO

Measure My SEO 

I recently came across the Measure My SEO plugin, but haven’t had time to personally review it.  I’m including it here for completeness.

Note that I’m basing my information about the Measure My SEO plugin from the Measure My SEO website.

At first glance, Measure My SEO looks like a much more pretty version of SEOPressor or BloggerHigh.  The core functionality doesn’t appear to be much different, but there are a few key differences that make it stand out.

Good Points

• The settings page allows you to control exactly what SEO features you want to measure.
• Has a live checker that automatically updates the SEO page score without you having to update the page.

Bad Points

• Not as fully featured as WP SEO Beast, Clickbump SEO and Easy WP SEO.

Click here to access the Measure My SEO website.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an important part of on-page SEO, but you should be aware that there are a few different ways to calculate it and you will get different results depending on what tool you are using.

There are two main ways to calculate keyword phrase density.

A=Total occurrences of the keyword phrase in the article

B=Total number of words in the article

C=Number of words in the keyword phrase

Keyword density calculation 1 uses:

(A / B) * 100

Keyword density calculation 2, uses:

(A * C / B) * 100

Let’s have a look at an example and the difference in the keyword density score those two formulas can make.

Let’s say we have a article with 1000 words and using keyword phrase of “search engine results page” (4 words) where there are 10 occurrences of that phrase.

So using the first formula, that gives us:

(10 / 1000) * 100 = 1% keyword density

and using the second formula, gives us:

(10 * 4 / 1000) * 100 = 4% keyword density

That’s quite a difference depending on which formula you use.  (Note: the differences only apply to keyword phrases and not when you use a single keyword).

All the on-page SEO plugins I tested use the first formula apart from BloggerHigh SEO.

With Easy WP SEO you have the option which keyword density calculation to use, where the default is the first formula.

There is a good explanation of keyword density calculations on Wikipedia.

So Which is the Best Plugin To Use?

My recommendation is if you already have SEOpressor and are relatively happy with using it, then there’s probably not a compelling reason to throw it out in favour of BloggerHigh SEO, ClickBump SEO,  WP SEO Beast, Measure My SEO or Easy WP SEO.

If you are on a tight budget, then BloggerHigh SEO is a good option.

Of the other four plugins, my pick would be for Easy WP SEO.  With the version 1.6 update, Easy WP SEO is now well ahead of the pack.

Of the other on-page SEO plugins, my next pick would be ClickBump SEO,  followed by WP SEO Beast or Measure My SEO.

Hopefully all these on-page SEO plugins will be further developed and I’ll update this review page if there are any major changes.

If you come across any other similar on-page SEO plugins, let me know and I’ll add them to this review.

Cheers

So the big question is whether Google +1 will gain enough momentum to be as popular as Facebook Like and Twitter and what impact will that have on Google search results.

What is Google +1?

In a nutshell,  Google +1 is a way for people to indicate whether they like a particular piece of content.

It’s Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook’s “Like” button which has virtually become the de-facto standard for sharing and giving a thumbs up for content we like or find interesting.

What Effect Will Google +1 Have On Search Results?

That’s certainly what a lot of people are asking.  At this stage, the effect is quite minimal, but it’s safe to say that if Google +1 takes off in a big way, it will become a much more important factor in search engine rankings.

Here’s what Google has to say about it:

+1 helps people discover relevant content–a website, a Google search result, or an ad–from the people they already know and trust. Adding the +1 button to your pages lets users recommend your content, knowing that their friends and contacts will see their recommendation when it’s most relevant–in the context of Google search results.

When a signed-in Google user is searching, your Google search result snippet may be annotated with the names of the user’s connections who’ve +1’d your page. If none of a user’s connections has +1’d your page, your snippet may display the aggregate number of +1’s your page has received.

and particularly this quote is revealing:

Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality. For +1’s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.

Notice that Google says that they’ll be seeing how Google _+1 is used and adjusting their search algorithms accordingly.

Should I Start Using Google +1?

Regardless of whether Google +1 actually takes off or not, it certainly doesn’t hurt to start implementing it on your sites.   The worst that can happen is that it will unused or ignored and you can remove it at a later date.

However, if Google +1 does take off, it is a great advantage to get in early to establish some ratings on your sites.

Implementing Google +1 is pretty simple.  You can either generate a code snippet to add to you site at:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button

or if you have a WordPress site, then you can use the Google +1 WordPress Plugin from WPMU.org

Given Google +1 is quite new, there aren’t too many Google +1 plugins at this stage, but I’m sure that plenty more will be developed and that Google +1 will be incorporated into the popular social bookmarking plugins.

Hopefully you’ll notice this article has Google +1 buttons at the top and bottom of the article.

Cheers

A very important aspect of keyword research is gauging the number of competing sites.

Typically, almost everyone will do a keyword phrase search in quotes to get an idea of the number of sites that contain that particular keyword phrase.

On the back of that, doing an allintitle search, can be very useful as it will give you an idea of the number of sites that have that keyword phrase in their page title.  This is important as page titles carry more weight than the same keyword phrase contained within the article body.

However, if you are looking at the number of results that Google returns, then you could well be relying on incorrect or inconsistent data.

Video Overview

The following video shows you exactly what I’m talking about with the inconsistent Google allintitle results.

Allintitle Results With and Without Quotes

For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using the keyword phrase: search engine optimization

It’s important to note that the results will vary depending on your location and changes to the Google search algorithms, but as far as I can tell, the inconsistent numbers has been around for a while.

OK, so let me show you can example of exactly what I’m talking about.

First, I’ll do an allintitle search for search engine optimization without the quotes

Google reports there are 518,000 results:

Remember that without quotes, Google will be returning pages with any combination of the words “search”, “engine” and “optimization”.  For example, one of the sites listed on page one has the title:

Search Engine Submission Optimization

Now let’s do the same allintitle search, but with quotes:

Now in theory, as this is searching on exact matches, ie: titles with the phrase “search engine optimization”, we should get a lot less results than searching without quotes.

So, what numbers does Google give us?

Yep, you read it right.  That’s over 3.5 million!!

That’s 700% more than broad match allintitle search!

How’s that for inconsistent and misleading results.

OK, so what’s going on with the figures?

Well, it’s important to note that the search results figures that Google gives you on the first page is just an estimate, otherwise it would slow down Google search results if it had to search through the entire set of data for each search request.

A Better Method of Comparison

For any Google search, it will return a maximum of 1000 results.  By that, I mean if you keep clicking on “Next”, Google will give you a maximum of 99 pages (assuming you use the default of 10 results per page) of results.

Most of the time, the maximum number of results pages will be less than 99.

OK, so let’s go back to our example allintitle searches, and view the results in a different manner.

Let’s do our search with:

allintitle:search engine optimization

Now, you could keep clicking on the “Next” link to take you to the last page, but you’d soon get sick of all the clicking.

To speed up the process, click on “Next” to go to page 2 of the results, and then in the URL in your browser, look for where it has:

start=10

and change it to

start=990

and then press Enter.

This will take you to the last page of results and at the bottom of the page, you’ll see:

Now if we repeat the steps and do the search in quotes, you see the results:

So for the search without quotes, we get 857 results and with quotes it is 618.

This is much more consistent and along the lines of the results you’d expect for broad and exact match searches.

What’s the Bottom Line?

Probably the main moral of this article is to not rely too heavily on the results Google gives you.  By all means, do an allintitle search, but if you find the figures it is returning don’t agree with some of the other metrics you have checked, then it’s quite possible it’s just one of those Google quirks to keep us internet marketers on our toes.

A much better metric to check is how many sites in the top 10 results have the exact match title you are searching for.  If there are sites ranking in the top 10 that don’t use your exact search term in the title, then that gives you a reasonable idea it’s something you can go for.

If you’ve had a similar experience of inconsistent results from Google or have an explanation, please make sure you leave a comment below.

Cheers