The problem with a lot of keyword software is they grab data from Google.com “illegally”, which means they do not use the legitimate way of getting data from Google through APIs. You may get a lot of Google stats from the Google AdWords API but it isn’t free.

What happens when you program a software to simulate searches? You’re getting results from your country and you will eventually hit a “Google block” on your IP address for making too many searches. Google isn’t stupid. They know it is virtually impossible for a human being to search a few thousand times in a short period of time.

I thought the software could simulate USA searches if I selected USA as the source but it does not work. The main problem for me while I was trying out the Keyword Research Pro was the number of ads and results returned in the software. I searched from a Thailand-based internet connection and the number of Google AdWords ads was close to zero for most keywords. The only way I could get around this was to use a good USA proxy server to simulate a search from a USA-based internet connection. This may not me an issue for Americans but it is for everyone else who isn’t living in the USA.

The Keyword Research Pro resembles Niche Inspector in many ways. It is simple and elegant without any fancy terms that isn’t already known in the SEO industry. I like the KEI, R/S, searches, results, number of Google ads and average CPC costs. You may even get stats from Yahoo and MSN.

Keyword Research Pro should not have copied Niche Inspector’s terrible customer support. Niche Inspector has been abandoned. The web site is up but users of the software cannot use the software because of the licensing problem. The author seems to have disappeared from the planet and isn’t answering any support emails.

Sebastian Kohl, the author of the software, ignored most of my emails but one. I sent him about 5 emails and only received 1 reply to him and nothing about the bugs that I discovered. The weirdest thing was the email address on his web site seems to be useless since he does not seem to reply to that email. Instead, try replying to the free trial email he sent you.

Since I had a bad experience with Niche Inspector, I am not willing to take a risk with the Keyword Research Pro because the author does not seem interested in keeping the software up to date. If the issues I raised were fixed, I would rate this software above anything I have reviewed so far.

Here’s why…

Market Samurai has a lot of formulas and new jargons that you have to get used to. Almost everyone who is remotely familiar with SEO would know what search counts and search results mean. The search counts are daily numbers and not the usual monthly figures. Market Samurai calls search results “Search Engine Competition” or SEOC. There is this “Phrase to Broad Match Ration” or PBR, which is the ration of the number of phrase matches of your keyword to the broad matches of your keyword. I am not sure how they decided that was a good indicator.

I find these new jargons extremely confusing and I have no idea how they decided that the value of a niche can be calculated by the estimated Google AdWords CPC and Google AdWords daily traffic. You cannot believe all the stats you get from this software.

One of the things that bug me the most is I cannot see how many advertisers are bidding on a certain keyword on Google AdWords. Market Samurai does not call this field the number of advertisers. Instead, it has a fancy name of “AdWords Competition”. Here’s the big problem – The number of advertisers is given in percentage and not a hard number! How many advertisers are bidding on a keyword if you see 50% in this field?

Market Samurai does not seem to be using any Google API. If you’re using an API, you should not see the captcha pop up. What that means is the software is simulating manual Google searches through their software. There is a recommended limit of 150 keywords per search. Other keyword research software I have used allow me to set the number of seconds between a search query to prevent getting a lot of captcha requests but not Market Samurai. If you search too many keywords in a short period of time, you may run the risk of getting a “Google Block”, which would result in a temporary ban on your IP  from searching on Google.com.

There are a lot unfinished modules within Market Samurai. I believe they will raise the price to above $147 when more modules are released. Overall, I do not think the Market Samurai is worth the price with all these fancy jargons, crippling flaws and flashy marketing.

Some of the information includes:

• improving title and description meta tags
• URL structure
• site navigation
• content creation
• anchor text

This PDF guide confirms some of the SEO principles we already know and helps us to optimize for Google without the fear of running foul of their rules.

Comment Spam Protection

1. Akismet is still the king of comment spam protection. It stops almost all spam comments on my blogs.

2. WP-reCAPTCHA plugs whatever Akisment fails to stop. This prevents comment spam bots from filling up your form. Once the bots see a word verification field, they won’t be able to submit a comment to your blog unless they enter the “captcha” code. After they have successfully submitted a comment, they still need to go through Akismet’s filters. Tough luck comment spammers!

Comments

1. Comment Relish automatically sends an email to a first-time comment poster of your blog. Here’s my example of how I use Comment Relish.

2. Lucia’s Linky Love encourages comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine. You may set the minimum number of comments before the “dofollow” links are turned on and many other settings. Check out my example of how I use Lucia’s Linky Love.

3. Subscribe to Comments allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. This plugin may not be useful once WordPress 2.7 is released. I read something about a similar feature that will be integrated in WordPress 2.7 or beyond.

4. Recent Comments displays a list of the most recent comments on your blog. Heaven knows why WordPress does not have default functions to do this. I highly recommend all of Rob Marsh’s plugins on posts and comments. Top notch stuff!

5. FreePress Top Commenters Widget adds a list of the most frequent commenters posting to your blog. It does not work well out of the box. Try my Top Commenters Plugin Hack if you plan to use this plugin.

6. WP-Gravatar is the best comment avatar plugin I have tried so far. This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments.

Trackbacks

1. Simple Trackback Validation performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam.

Posts

1. Recent Posts displays a list of the most recent posts.

2. Similar Posts displays a list of posts which are related or similar to the current post.

3. Popular Posts displays a list of the posts from your blog which have been viewed the most.

4. Most Commented displays a list of the posts with the most comments. Try my Most Commented hack to make this plugin display only posts with 1 or more comments.

5. the_excerpt Reloaded automatically creates an excerpt of every post according to your desired settings. This saves you time and effort from adding the “more” tags to your posts.

Pages

1. Filosofo Home-Page Control is better than the default features of WordPress because it allows you to have your blog in a virtual folder like “/blog”.

2. My Page Order lets you update the order of your WordPress pages by letting you easily set an explicit order without entering numbers.

RSS Feeds

1. Feed Control lets you include WordPress pages into your blog’s RSS feed.

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Search Engine Optimization

1. All in One SEO Pack is the best SEO plugin I have used. It allows you to manage the titles of all your posts and pages. With this plugin, it is possible to have a different title in the title tag from the post title.

2. Google XML Sitemaps generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

* Google to Yahoo Sitemap Converter – This is not actually a plugin but a normal PHP script, which needs to be run on a regular basis via a cron job. It will be obsolete soon once Yahoo and MSN adopt Google’s sitemap standards.

Contact Form

1. Contact Form 7 is a really easy to use and powerful contact form for WordPress. I like the “captcha” field because it stops email spam.

Gallery

1. NextGen is the best gallery plugin I have found for WordPress. It is highly customizable with a modern web 2.0 look.

Archives

1. Clean Archives Reloaded creates a list of all of the posts that you’ve made to your blog.

Blogging

1. Zemanta contextually relevant suggestions of links, pictures, related content and tags will make your blogging much much easier.

2. Photo Dropper lets you add free Flickr photos to your posts.

Code Markup

1. WP-Syntax provides clean syntax highlighting using GeSHi — supporting a wide range of popular languages. It supports highlighting with or without line numbers and maintains formatting while copying snippets of code from the browser.

Multimedia

1. wordTube makes it easy for you to put music, videos or flash movies onto your WordPress posts and pages.

Social Networking

1. ShareThis provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to post your site content to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail & other communication channels (like Facebook and MySpace) to a friend.

Search

1. Search Everything enhances your search box to search for literally anything on your WordPress site instead of just WordPress posts.

Backup

1. WordPress Database Backup is bundled with WordPress by default. It now has a scheduled backup feature that I think will be very useful for a lot of bloggers.

My previous post was inspired by Google webmaster blog’s post on meta descriptions. Today, I no longer use the Another WordPress Meta plugin because the All in One SEO Pack plugin is so much better.

Examples of Terrible Meta Descriptions

I forgot to add the meta descriptions when I posted the content above. This is how ugly it looks in Google.com at the moment. I hope Google will clear their cache and retrieve my latest meta descriptions for these pages soon.

Examples of Good Meta Descriptions

I remembered to enter the meta description for the posts above and see how different they look in the search engines. A tiny bit of effort really makes a lot of difference in the search engines. A good meta description encourages searchers to click through to your web site if your description is enticing enough.

You probably have never heard of Firefox being a SEO tool. Alone it is not, but the SEO for Firefox add on displays a lot of information of each web site on the search engine result pages.

Rank Checker is a tool that will allow you to keep an eye on your web site rankings at the top search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and their foreign TLDs. All you have to do is enter which search engine you want results from, a URL and a keyword. The results are automatically returned to you. All you need to utilize this tool is a SEOmoz account which is free. If you choose the free version you can run 5 keyword searches a day.

Another Firefox add on is Search Status. Search Status lets you gather search engine statistics about a web site like the number of incoming links, competing pages, Google PR rank and much more. You can get these statistics by entering search engine commands but this tool makes it very easy for you to do it without knowing the search engine commands.

Good Keywords is a Windows software that helps you find the keywords you need for your web site. This is a very basic keyword research software that does not match paid software.

Paid Software for Search Engine Optimization

Advanced Web Ranking software has 4 versions – Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Server. You may opt for a 30 day trial. For the software to scan for your web site’s rankings, you need to enter your web site’s URL and a list of keywords related to your web site. This ingenious web ranking tool monitors over 800 search engines to let you know what spot you are in and generates a lot of fancy reports for you to review. One of the best things about Advanced Web Ranking is its ability to check for your search engine rankings automatically over a period of time.

Weblog Expert analyses logs of Apache and IIS web servers. It can even read GZ and ZIP compressed logs. Apache logs are usually located in the /log/ folder of your web site. To have this log generated and saved, you must enable it in the web host’s control panel. Weblog Expert reads information from your web server’s logs and returns information on which pages visitors access, how many hits your web site gets per day, where your traffic is coming and much more. This software is available in Professional and Standard versions. You may try the free 30 day trial to test run the software. There is also a free version called WebLog Expert Lite.

Top 200 Blog RSS Submitter will submit your web site to lots of RSS and blog directories. This is a great time saver for webmasters who wish to promote their blog or web site that has RSS feeds. Not all directories can be fully automated. There are directories that require no user input whatsoever and directories that require you to fill up forms.

Niche Inspector is a software that get keyword results from the Google, Yahoo and MSN to filter out the most profitable niches from your list of keywords. What this software does is seek the keywords that pay the most and have the least competition. If you have the higher paying keywords that are also easy to rank on your web site, your site is practically guaranteed to make a nice profit from Google AdSense.

Free Web-Based Search Engine Optimization Services and Scripts

Formerly Measure Map, Google Analytics or GA is as you may have guessed a Google based service which is free of charge. It puts together concise statistics about who has visited a web site. Using this service allows you to track sales, how many people viewed a certain page and who downloaded what. By utilizing this tool, you know which advertisements are getting the most traffic and what you need to do to improve your rankings. The data you receive can be as complex or as simple as you want. Furthermore, it is not run on your own web server, which allows you to free up more web server resources for your web site.

AWStats is a favourite of many because it is bundled with cPanel. This script will allow you to gather information about your web site’s visitors. The script is usually run once everyday so that you have the current statistics everyday. AWStats works very much like Weblog Expert as it gathers its information from your web server logs. AWStats run directly from your web server and this may cause your web server to slow down your web site at times.

There 2 general schools of search engine optimization – “White Hat” and “Black Hat”. “White Hat” SEO refers to all methods of promoting your web site that adheres to the search engine’s recommendations. “Black Hat” SEO is based on the belief that “the means justifies the end”. Anything goes with “Black Hat” SEO. You can expect all sorts of dirty tricks designed to fool the search engines that usually do not last very long once the search engines plug their loopholes and delete these offending web pages from their search engine index.

Why Search Engine Optimization Is Important?

Studies on the behaviour of internet users tell us this – We are not patient when we are searching for information on the internet. The click-through rate of web sites which come up in search results drops off dramatically by the second page of results. In fact, if a web page doesn’t show up on the first 2 pages of results, it is unlikely to receive a lot of traffic through that search engine. If your site is in this situation, you are definitely in need of SEO. By using SEO to get higher rankings, you will greatly increase traffic to your site, which in turn leads to more sales and revenue.

How Do Search Engines Rank Web Pages?

No one but the search engine companies really know how search engines rank web pages. Other than a select few search engine employees, probably most people in a search engine company don’t even have a clue how their search engine’s algorithm works. So-called SEO experts are merely speculating on how the search engines rank web pages by conducting a lot of research and testing. SEO techniques that work very well initially usually do not last long after more and more people abuse it. If you would like to keep up to date with the latest news about the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search), be sure to check out their blogs regularly as they tend to drop a lot of hints on what you should and should not do on your web sites.

• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Yahoo! Search Blog
• The Official blog of the Live Search team at Microsoft

From what we do know about SEO, the search engines rank web pages by looking at the keyword or keyword phrases used on web page, how well connected a particular web page is on the internet and who are its competing web pages. A well connected web page has many incoming links pointing to it from good and relevant web sites with similar content.

People type keywords into search engines when they are looking for information online. By incorporating these keywords and phrases into the content on your site, you will get a higher chance of ranking on results pages for searches which contain terms relevant to your web site. For instance, let’s say that your business sells flower pots. You will want to use the phrase “flower pots” throughout the content on your site. Other words and phrases you might want to use are related things like “flower seeds” and “soil”.

Keyword selection will make or break your web site’s traffic from the search engines. Select a popular keyword with a lot of web pages already competing for the top spot would be a lot harder than selecting keywords that are less popular with less competing web pages. It is unrealistic to expect your totally new web site to rank in the top 10 results if you use a very popular and competitive keyword for your web page. What some people try to do is to target the easier keywords first before tackling the harder keywords once their web site earns some “trust” from the search engines. The top ranking web sites in competitive markets did not get there in a day, it requires a lot of consistent hard work to get there.

For more information on how the search engines rank web pages, please refer to SEOMoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors.

Is Search Engine Optimization Hard?

If your goal is to build a long-lasting real business on the internet, then educating yourself on SEO is a must. Check out some of these courses on search engine optimization to further your SEO education.

• SEO Book
• SEO Moz
• SEO Fast Start

SEO is not rocket science but it does require a bit of knowledge of HTML and a lot of time and patience. You will need to work hard consistently on your web page promotion to see any decent results. Don’t expect miracles and don’t fall for “Black Hat” techniques like I did in the past – It is just not worth it.