Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on December 24, 2009
Today’s post is a holiday themed one. Looks like the Wordpress template I’m using has the right colors for Christmas time.
I always find it really interesting and particularly useful to see what people are searching around the major holidays. So what exactly are people searching for this Christmas Eve?
Google Trends makes it easy for us to see the latest hot topics and search trends.
Hot topics are those things being discussed in the news, social media and such. Hot searches are just that, the fasted rising search queries.
Looks like health care reform is today’s hottest topic, and I’m sad to say the death of famous sportscaster George Michael is the hottest search trend.
Also, apparently you can track Santa, and that’s what people are looking to do. But why wouldn’t they. 
Anyway, that’s about all I have for today. Best wishes, and happy holidays!
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 18, 2009
One of the first places to start when doing SEO on your website is keyword research. Each page of your website should be optimized for 1-3 keywords or key phrases. So it’s a good idea to do a little keyword research before you work on optimizing each page of your website.
The keyword selection process can be very tedious, complex, and time consuming; especially on very large web sites.
So while there are tons of keyword tools available on the web, to keep it simple, I’ll list a few of the free, simple-to-use ones available.
Here are some simple free keyword research tools:
- External Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Find keywords based on your site content, identify negative keywords, find synonyms – or not, and specify a language and location. (Start with broad keywords like “cell phones”, then try more specific keywords like “Motorola cell phones”.
- External Google AdWords Traffic Estimator – used primarily for Google AdWords, but allows you to get an idea of how much traffic you would be getting if you ranked high for specific key phrases, and what people are bidding on those keywords.
- Free Keyword Suggestion Tool – Allows you to view the daily search volume for up to 100 keywords/phrases.
- Compete.com – Gives you an idea what keywords and web sites are driving traffic to your competitors, and compare your competitor websites to one another.
Once you’ve determined what keywords to optimize each page for, you can then start optimizing each page.
