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This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

So, you’ve done the “uniqueness” exercise and you’ve got your site built with appropriate keywords, but you’re still not getting much search traffic. What’s going wrong? Well, beyond the sheer volume of competition that’s likely fighting for those words, you may be simply using ineffective keywords. Sometimes it’s difficult to predict what real users are actually searching for, and it could be that your words – as meaningful as they may be to your business – are not particularly effective for searches.

Thankfully, Google provides a free tool to help you generate keywords. Available at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, Google’s Keyword Tool can take your basic keywords and show you alternatives, along with their potential search traffic. The tool is built primarily for pay-per-click advertisers looking to generate keyword lists for their advertising campaigns, but it’s also an effective way to see what users are searching for. The Keyword Tool is one of a list of many free tools I’ll discuss in the coming months to assist you in your search engine optimization.

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Categories: Articles

One of my favorite “hybrid” web services, Jott, has come out of beta. This is good and bad news – good because the service is very mature and stable, bad because you now have to start paying (just a little bit) for it. For those of you who haven’t tried Jott, it’s essentially a speech-to-text service that allows you to call in notes, messages, to-dos and reminders to a phone number. Jott then transcribes the voice message and sends it to you (or a variety of other services, like your online calendar). It’s a great service when you can’t type a message – for instance, when you’re driving – and the transcriptions are almost always accurate. I use it almost every day, and I recommend you try it out if you spend any substantial time thinking away from a keyboard.

Categories: General

This post is from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

How do you determine the best keywords for your content? There are two important principles to keep in mind here. First, you need to think through what makes your product or service unique – drilling down to specific characteristics is the key. Second, you must put yourself in the mind of your audience; cast aside the presumptions you have about how to describe your business and get into the brain of your customers. They’re the ones doing the searching, after all.

When I teach search engine optimization classes here in Austin, we do a number of exercises to assist in creating keywords. By far the most successful exercise is “finding your uniqueness,” a strategy I recommend for anyone looking to craft a website, mission statement or even a simple company bio. Finding your uniqueness is simply a matter of taking the basic words that describe your product or service and building upon them.

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Categories: Articles