Every once in a while I come across a new SEO tool that works exactly how I want it to and it opens the door for a lot of great ideas.  This is one of those tools.  The people over at TagCrowd.com have put together a simple way to convert any webpage, copied text, or document into a visualized tag cloud.  Tag clouds are really just a visual depiction of the word content of a site, the more times a word is repeated the larger the word appears. 

 

What this allows you to do is take a large body of text, or an entire website at a time, and instantly generate a visual representation of all the content.  Generate a tag cloud of your own website to analyze.  When optimizing for a specific search term it’s important that those words show up prominently in your tag cloud.  Notice in the tag cloud to the right of our website the most prominent words are “real”, “estate” and “SEO”, we are actively optimizing for the search term “real estate SEO”.  If your desired keywords aren’t showing up prominently, reworking your content for a higher keyword density (Using your keywords in your content more often) makes sense.

 

Generate a tag cloud for your top ranked competitors websites.  Are there prominent words showing up that you haven’t thought about optimizing for?  Hope you have fun with this tool like I have, the usefulness of it extends even beyond SEO.

 

Related posts:

• Keyword Density and SEO
• Keyword Research – More Tools – Google Sets
• Tools for the SEO Trade

Labels: blogger, Blogging, Content, SEO Tools

A Blidget is a widget that displays your blog (Example below to the left). As ridiculous as that is to say Blidgets are a simple - and free - way to drive additional readers to your blog and make it more 'sticky'. You can make a custom Blidget for your blog in minutes and then share or embed your Blidget on as many websites as you want. Once it's setup your Blidget's views, clicks and subscriptions are all tracked for your use.

	5 steps to making a Blidget for your blog Step 1 of 5: Visit the Make Blidget page at Widgetbox. I've taken a screenshot of the page shown below. Once there, enter in your Blog URL (aka your blog web address) and click "Continue".

	Step 2 of 5: Customize the size, color, style, title and caption for your Blidget as much or as little as you like. Don't worry too much about making it prefect if you can't decide, you can easily change these features at any time in the future.
	Step 3 of 5: Chose an image that will appear at the top of your Blidget or enter in the address of an image already on the web. Add relevant tags and description for your blidget for others to find. Other visitors may want to embed your Blidget on their website, always good! Click "Publish Blidget" when done.
	Step 4 of 5: Almost there. If your Blidget looks good click the big green "Get Widget" button.

	Step 5 of 5: Chose from Flash or Javascript code, or from one of the optimized selections for all different types of blogging platforms. Flash seems to work best for ActiveRain posts. Click "Copy". Now paste the code in blog posts, along your blog navigation bar, on your other blogs or websites, wherever you want your new Blidget to show up!

Labels: Blogging, SEO Tools

Having worked with a number of blogging platforms over the years including Wordpress, ActiveRain (for Real Estate Blogging), and Blogger which is the back end for the blog here on Working The Magic I am blown away at the difference between using Blogger vs. ActiveRain.

Now ActiveRain is awesome for the amount of actual readership and commentary on posts in relatively short order so as a social network its very powerful and very targeted, but in terms of the blog posts in AR getting cached by Google I've found it to be very unsatisfactory. There are probably a number of reasons for this, not the least is the shear volume of posts taking place on AR. Google will only dig so deep into a site before it moves on to another site, so unless you are a featured agent or have a featured post I suspect that Google will not have a good way of getting to your post to cache it in the first place.

I've blogged a bit on ActiveRain for a couple of years and most recently this past week as part of an overall PR campaign to launch our Real Estate SEO Company and have received some great responses from AR participants on our business, so that part has been a success, but looking back at the posts that I've put on since I started blogging on AR I noticed that none of the blog posts have been cached by Google in the conventional way. Meaning I normally can't go to the post and then pull the cache from my Google Toolbar. What that ultimately means is that AR is not as effective in getting my keywords into Google and for my SEM (Search Engine Marketing) efforts.

Now if you contrast that to the blog on Working The Magic, what is quite interesting is that using Blogger we are getting our posts to show up in the Google cache within a few hours to a couple of days. Even though the blog itself is hosted on our own website, we use Blogger to ultimately generate the blog and ftp the blog with all the navigation up to our website. Since Blogger is a Google company the blog posts go immediately into the Google cache or in relatively short order which is what we ultimately want since many of the long tail searches that result from the blog post will bring potential clients back to our blog and hopefully learn about how we can help them achieve top rankings in the search engines.

If you check out the post prior to this one which is CMS for Real Estate... Blog for Opinions... and then look at the Google cache for that post you'll notice that it has already been spidered by Google. This is way cool since as a brand new site (less then 40 days old) much of the rest of the site has not been cached by Google however by using Blogger we are able to get a lot of keyword rich content into the Google cache which means when Google chews it all up and is searching for somewhere to send their visitors we have a reach chance of getting that traffic.

Obviously once we have done a lot of our SEO activities on the site this content will be valued even more highly in Google and then watch out traffic.

Labels: Blogging, Content, Google, SEO Strategies, Website Design