Many people rely on Google and Yahoo! to drive traffic to their websites. However, if you are far from the top of the rankings for these search engines, you may be losing money. SEO PowerSuite helps you keep an eye on your website at all times so you know exactly where you stand.

Additionally, Rank Tracker can help generate profitable keywords to attract more surfers to your site. Whether you are a freelance artist, advertiser or Orange County family lawyer, Rank Tracker from SEO PowerSuite can assist you in operating a successful website.

Below are some additional options and tools SEO PowerSuite provides to help you with your rankings:

• Number of competing sites: In any field, knowing your competition is vital to success. With SEO PowerSuite, you can check to see exactly how many sites are competing for your keyword in each of the 777 search engines available.
• Direct traffic per keyword count: SEO PowerSuite uses powerful analytical tools to determine how many visitors each keyword is bringing to your site.
• Numerous keyword suggestion mechanisms: Sometimes finding the right keywords or combinations of keywords can be frustrating. SEO PowerSuite helps you choose keywords specifically tailored to your site.
• Misspelled words: Did you know that a significant number of visitors could be sent to your website by using misspelled words? You should not deliberately misspell words on your website, but it is nonetheless interesting to see what spelling errors direct traffic to your site.
• Keyword search volumes: With SEO PowerSuite, you can check search volumes for your keywords. You can then compare volume patterns to create keywords that target your audience.

Without SEO PowerSuite, determining where your site ranks can be a boring process that may take hours. Rank Tracker lets you see the position of your site in search engines quickly. Additionally, Rank Tracker helps you monitor your site so you know when you move up or down on the search engine rankings.

When evaluating your SEO efforts, it’s often helpful to be able to see what your competitors are doing and how well it’s working for them. SEM Rush is a very useful competitive research tool that lets you do just that.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book has used SEM Rush for years, and offers a thorough review at “SEM Rush Review & Free Trial SEMRush Coupons.”

So how does SEM Rush help you spy on your competitors?

First, it helps you find them. It will display a list of sites that rank for the same keywords as you do. You can see:

• How many keywords you have in common
• How they compare in traffic and keyword value (Traffic*CPC)

You can get more detail on how a specific domain compares to you, including:

• Which keywords you have in common
• How you each rank for those keywords
• Estimated traffic volume for those keywords
• Cost-per-click (CPC) estimates for the keywords

You can also compare AdWords and organic search between sites, which is a unique and useful metric. You can find sites that are ranking organically for keywords you are buying and sites that are buying keywords that you rank for organically.

SEM Rush pulls its data from Google’s Traffic Estimator and AdWords keyword tools. This data is not real-time, but you don’t need real-time to make comparisons between sites.

SEM is not free, but the $69 to $79 per-month cost is reasonable considering the wealth of valuable information it supplies. The company now offers a 14-day free trial, so you can see for yourself how it works before risking any money. Aaron Wall’s post includes a code for your free trial.

Information in this post gathered in association with Santa Cruz Personal Injury Lawyers.

Analytics tracking is essential for understanding the success of your SEO efforts. And services that provide automated traffic reports can simplify your life by providing the data in a dashboard with easy-to-understand charts and graphs. On the other hand, these services are not all the same, and there are some downfalls to automated traffic reports.

Benjamin Estes discusses his opinion of the organic traffic data monitoring offered by a few different services in “Challenges in Automated Traffic Reporting.”

Google Analytics:

This popular option is robust, free and, of course, based on Google’s very extensive data. It provides all the traffic data you could ever want, including keyword discovery (finding new keywords that people use to find your site). The only con that Estes sees is the lack of other SEO related data.

SEOmoz PRO Campaigns:

This paid service offers much less data than GA, but the three metrics reported are three of the most important when analyzing how a site is performing. They are Organic Visits, Number of Organic Keywords and Number of Organic Landing Pages.

StatsMix:

You submit your own data to this service, which stores it and displays is as numbers over time. It’s highly customizable, but requires significant effort from your development team.

Geckoboard:

Also highly customizable, you can use pre-built widgets or build your own API to retrieve and display your data. Again, it requires a significant investment of time and effort.

GinzaMetrics:

This one provides good traffic information, keyword tracking and even keyword discovery. Its biggest downfall is a very busy dashboard display.

These services are all worthwhile in their own ways, but you might need to test a few to find the best fit for your business. You will especially need to decide how much customization ability you want or need, especially if you don’t have a development team.

Information in this post gathered in association with a New York car accident lawyer.

America’s human work force isn’t the only one affected by the desire of companies to streamline operations. Google has put Googlebot-News, its news site crawler, into retirement, too. The good-byes for Googlebot-News were brief, and Googlebot, the general web crawler, promptly took over the job of crawling news sites.

Information in this post gathered in association with a NY Personal injury attorney

If you’re not a news publisher, this won’t mean much to you. But if you are, you may want to know what—if anything—you need to do to ensure continuity in the way Google handles your content. Vanessa Fox discusses the bot change and how it might affect your site in “Google Retires The Googlebot-News Bot.”

First the good news: You probably don’t have to do anything. Googlebot will crawl your site and index your content to both news and web search. If you’ve been using a robots.txt file or meta robots tag to block Googlebot-News, Googlebot will also respect that.

The bad news is for people who were allowing Googlebot-News, but were blocking Googlebot. Now that Googlebot is crawling for both news and web search, blocking it means that Google cannot index your site for either service. You will have to allow Googlebot in order to appear in Google News.

There’s more bad news for troubleshooting pages that aren’t being indexed. Without separate bots, you can’t see whether particular pages are being crawled for web search, news or both. You can still see pages that aren’t crawled at all, but most of the time that’s not likely to be the problem. And Google’s webmaster tools aren’t much help in this area. They do provide crawl error information that’s either news- or web-specific, but the available information isn’t enough to figure out if you might accidentally be blocking news indexing.

Vanessa Fox considers this change a step in the wrong direction. Do you agree?

Do you remember Ask Jeeves? It was one of the original answer engines, launched in 1997, allowing people to enter questions using normal English and providing answers compiled by real humans. Jeeves retired and Ask.com became a regular search engine, but had trouble competing. So last summer it began a return to its Q&A roots, and is now leaning even further away from search by opening its Q&A community to everyone.

Information in this post gathered in association with a New York City visa lawyer

Matt McGee discusses the changes from the beta, opened in July 2010, to the newly opened version in Ask.com Opens Up Its Human Q&A Community, Steps Further Away From Search.

When Ask began its transformation, it kept the search box prominently at the top, adding a “Question of the Day” and a few “Popular Questions.” The newest homepage still looks very similar, but has a few notable differences:

• The search box is still there, but the button says “Ask” instead of “Search.”
• The “Question of the Day” remains, but now you can answer it on the homepage.
• The “Popular Questions” list is now “People Are Asking,” and you have the choice of viewing existing answers or answering questions yourself.
• Search options like Images, News or Advanced Search now appear in a “Search Tools” box in the right-hand column.
• The top navigation bar has two tabs: “Search the Web” and “Ask People.”

The search box still returns normal search results. But instead of ads down the right-hand column, there’s a button encouraging you to “Ask People” your tough question, along with lists of “Related Questions” and “Popular Q&A.”

The Ask People tab takes you to a page with a list of recent questions, which you can answer, and a list of categories to browse. Ask hasn’t completely abandoned search, but is strongly encouraging users to take advantage of the Q&A. Jeeves would be proud.

If you do business in other countries, you need to target your search marketing efforts to each market. Even if most of the demographic information for your target market (age, income, profession, etc.) is the same, the local culture and language will vary. A good global search marketing campaign needs to address these differences.

Information in this post gathered in association with a Los Angeles immigration law attorney

In 7 Global Search Marketing Tips, Miranda Miller summarizes some of the advice dispensed during the Global Search Marketing Best Practices Roundtable at SES San Francisco earlier this year. Among the tips offered:

• Don’t automate translation: Direct translations don’t necessarily match the terms people actually use to search. Use a vendor to create content that actually makes sense to native speakers.
• Pages with similar English content may attract a duplicate content penalty: Using individual country code top level domains (ccTLD) or segregating content into separate country folders on the main site can help. However, Bill Hunt thinks the Panda update is overriding geotargeting, so it might be hard to completely avoid problems right now.
• Use mobile and social tools: As long as you listen to your customers, they respond well to both ad-based and organic efforts.
• Learn the content preference of different audiences: Believe it or not, the American preference for brief content is not universal. Some audiences like more information, so optimizing for them might involve adding additional content to pages.
• Buy TLDs for areas where you operate, or might want to operate: Even if you can’t afford to use them, buy them and redirect them to the individual country folders on your main site. This way you protect yourself from others either using them, possibly in a way that’s detrimental to you, or buying and holding them, forcing you to pay dearly when you do want them.

Miller’s full post offers additional nuggets of wisdom from the roundtable participants.

Content creation is hard work, and as social media evolves, many users prefer to share others’ content rather than create their own. This creates a marketing advantage for anyone who can create high quality content and harness the power of their networks to distribute it.

Information in this post gathered in association with an Oakland personal injury lawyer

In the early days of social media, with its easy (and often free) access to blogging platforms, networking sites and then Twitter, everybody became a content creator. But much of that content was low quality and had a short reach. In “Social Media marketing for Lawyers: High Demand for Professional Content,” Stephen Fairley discusses the finding of a new report from GlobalWebIndex. Social media users now prefer reading (or viewing) and sharing quality content rather than creating their own.

A few additional findings:

• Early social media adopters wanted to share their own content, but the content making the rounds today is largely created professionally and then filtered through social channels.
• Micro-blogging and social networking activities consist largely of re-tweeting and re-posting of others’ content.
• Consumers want to improve their own knowledge, especially as they get older. Give them the information to do so, and they will likely share it.

What this evolution means is that if you have knowledge to share (and you know you do), you can find willing distributors within the social media circles. Create your own strong presence on Twitter, Facebook (yes, it’s for professionals, too) and LinkedIn; and share your own high-quality content. Your loyal followers will do their part to increase your audience, pulling in more followers who will continue to redistribute your content.

If you’ve been doing SEO for any length of time, you’ve most likely heard of article marketing and might even have tried it yourself. Hopefully you did it the right way: a high-quality blog, some guest posts and legitimate article sharing. Unfortunately, article marketing these days often means spamming the Internet with poorly written articles submitted to hundreds of article directories. If you’re trying to build a good reputation and long-term success, this type of article marketing will hurt your bottom line. Why? Because:

Information in this post gathered in association with a California trucking accident attorney

• Search engines want to provide the most relevant search results: Even if you get top ranking for a little while, you’ll lose it once Google (or Bing or another engine) figures out that people keep abandoning your site.
• Search engines keep tweaking their algorithms: They’re trying to raise the rank of quality sites and push undesirable sites out of SERP. When the article directories linking to your site lose rank, you lose link juice.
• Article marketing produces duplicate content: You know Google penalizes duplicate content. Unfortunately, if you post your article on your site in addition to article directories, you might be the one penalized. Then the directories get the traffic that should have been yours.
• Poor-quality content leaves a poor impression: If your name or business becomes associated with barely readable junk content, people will not want to do business with you.

SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin discussed this topic in a recent Whiteboard Friday, “Article Marketing: Mostly A Scam – Whiteboard Friday.” In it, he points out that in addition to damaging your reputation and rankings, when you do article marketing, you’re not working on other, more useful SEO techniques. If you want to do article marketing, do it right, with quality content and no spamming, and use it to supplement your other SEO efforts.