GTrends free tool finds keyphrases with low competition

Affiliate Marketing SEO 2 Comments
Reading Time: < 1 minute

I attended an informative talk by Glen Staiger about his experience with the “30 Day Challenge”, which included a mention of the free Wordtracker tool known as GTrends. It is a keyphrase competitiveness research tool, which is an extension of the free Wordtracker search tool.

My friend had blogged about Iron Maiden’s videos taken during their recent Indian tour and this had swelled his visitor count (briefly) by a huge number that I won’t reveal. So I used some Iron Maiden related phrases to test GTrends.

To check any keyphrase, type it in the Keyword field and look at the results:

GTrends result

Click to enlargeClick the bar graph icon on the right of any keyphrase and you will get a popup like the image to the right (click it to enlarge). If both bars (representing Google Competition – the number of results is less than 30k – and the number of Google visitors per day is more than 140) are green, then this is a keyphrase worthy of more research.

Now the count for Iron Maiden Tour in the popup is a lot more than 25, which I can’t explain, but I created a small blog to monitor its traffic. The above is the only link I am giving it, although it might attract one or two from elsewhere as I populate the blog later on. Check out the free tool!

SEO implication of new social networking sites

SEO Social Media No Comments
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In the past two days my contacts and best friends have invited me to join:

  • Konnects
  • Ziki
  • hi5
  • Assorted groups in BlogCatalog, Facebook and LinkedIn

In the past few weeks there were invitations to other sites I had not heard of. There are networking addicts who join everything that comes along. Some of these sites allow you to import an existing profile, such as from LinkedIn, which is such a tempting feature for the networking junkies.

SEO Implication

I see all this as a big duplicate content risk for the wannabe social networking sites. When most of the members post the same profile on numerous sites, do you seriously think that Google’s algo will let this content be displayed above the established sites? Ideally, the profile acceptance process should include a Google query to check for duplicate content, and then it should ask the member to submit a unique resume.

Best WordPress “Highlight Author Comments” plugin

Social Media 2 Comments
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Thanks to a comment following Matt Cutts’ post on this topic, I tried a couple of plugins and realised that my understanding of PHP was nonexistent and I could not follow the directions of their authors. Thankfully, Chris Hunt posted a link to a plugin by Rob Marsh, SJ (a Jesuit priest in a teaching order like we had in my old alma mater, St Xavier’s Boys’ Academy, Bombay). This plugin is dead easy to implement – just enable it and go to Options and edit the CSS statement to change the background colour, as per the readme file provided. The default CSS statement merely achieves an indent, which isn’t as striking as changing the background colour.

URL for plugin: Highlight Author Comments

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