I wanted to let you know about this really cool free brand new keyword research tool that runs inside Firefox browser.

Not only is it free to download but it is an nlm opportunity with a twist! We are going to see a lot more services like this coming out.

Its been developed by Brad Callen, the guy behind SEO Elite, Keyword Elite and a number of other research tools. Check out the videos at the link below, its a usefull tool if you’re doing PPC!!

Follow this link and get the free version now! Free Keyword Research Tool

Some time ago I was lucky enough to get hold of an ebook called Revenge Of The Mininet by Michael Campbell. In that book and associated tools and utilities provided by search engine optimization guru Leslie Rhode was detailed ideas and strategies about how to control the flow of PageRank through your website.

I did some modifications to my Content Management System to do just that, specifically control the flow of PageRank exactly where I wanted it in my site and my customers sites and boy, it worked like a charm.

The option I chose back then was to modify the content management system to use javascript to redirect menu links. So I changed all the regular <a href links to javascript window.location. This has worked fine and served me well.

However, at the beginning of 2005 Google, Yahoo, MSN and some of the other major players introduced a new <a tag called rel=nofollow. This tag allows you to explicitly tell the search engine spider to either follow the link or not, which is what I had done with javascript code.

Now it’s all the rage to be ‘going natural’ with SEO and I’m thinking that it might be a better option to change the content management system back to regular <a links rather than javascript. I forgot to mention that the only way the search engine spiders currently crawl any of my sites modified in this way is via a site map, either a regular html site map or now xml site maps too.

So I’m going to try and find out if this is the way to go now before making any changes. Maybe I should stick to the old adage “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”?…

I remember reading several articles last year about the death of SEO. The main point of these was that eventually Google will perfect its algorithms and search engine results will be accurate based solely on the content, which will be the most relevant.

Well, I expect that G would be the first to admit that we are a long way, years and years probably, away from that scenario. However, G has come a long way in its fight against search engine spam, making in less easy to force your web page to the top of the rankings without a lot of inbound one way links (it is still possible to do a Google bomb, but they usually disappear pretty quickly).

The most recent buzz is about Latent Semantic Indexing which is a new algorithm that has been developed and for which Google has a patent. The summary of the invention states;

‘An information retrieval system and methodology uses phrases to index, search, rank, and describe documents in the document collection. The system is adapted to identify phrases that have sufficiently frequent and/or distinguished usage in the document collection to indicate that they are “valid” or “good” phrases. In this manner multiple word phrases, for example phrases of four, five, or more terms, can be identified. This avoids the problem of having to identify and index every possible phrases resulting from the all of the possible sequences of a given number of words.’

I don’t know too much about the algorithm and how it works but its main focus is ensuring that the content of your pages, paragraph by paragraph are relevant and on topic. So it appears that G is fighting back against machine generated content and the duplicate content created private label rights articles.

You’ll be hearing a lot of buzz about this over the coming months and people will be devising new strategies to get sites with weak content to rank well. I will be maintaining the same search engine practices as always, for the time being at least. I will however be encouraging the deployment of a new model for web development and structure that incorporates blog pages within my standard web content management framework.