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

Some Google History Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California.  They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Links are the highways that Google and other search engines travel in an effort to determine the popularity, relationship and relevancy of every page and website they come across. Very generally speaking if a website has a large amount of links pointing to it search engines can assume that others will also find that resource to be valuable. Search engines have evolved from simply counting the number of links (They now look at quality of links, originality of content and other trust factors) but this basic idea still exists. There are two types of links; "external" and "internal" An internal link is a hyperlink that links to another page on the SAME website. An external link is a hyperlink that links to another page on a DIFFERENT website.

Internal links will generally make up your navigation, links to your articles and blog posts, and all the pages on your website. An optimized internal link structure helps search engines efficiently index your content and check for updates, along with ranking your pages for the best keywords. Optimizing your internal link structure includes having proper categories and search friendly content, featuring your best pages by linking to them more, and taking a look at the anchor text of each link. Anchor text is the visible text that you click in a link. In this example link: Real Estate SEO, the words "Real Estate SEO" are the anchor text. Search engines associate the anchor text of a link with the page the link leads to (In this example our SEO website WorkingTheMagic.com) and will begin ranking our site for those keywords. External links on your website send visitors to other websites.  External links on other people's websites to yours are called "backlinks" for you, also called incoming links, inward links and inlinks.

To improve rankings in the search engines the key is to get relevant, quality links from respected websites to yours. The more relevant backlinks the better, especially if those backlinks contain the keywords you are trying to rank for in the anchor text like "Seattle real estate" or "Phoenix homes for sale". I'll cover some effective linking strategies in future posts and for now subscribe to this blog. Related Posts: Evaluate Your Google Competition 8 Tips: Online Lead Capture SEO to Capture a Major Metro

Labels: blogger, SEO Strategies, Website Design