I recently reviewed Nichebot as a keyword research tool. This week, I’m taking a look at Keyword Discovery. I’ve never used Keyword Discovery before, except through Nichebot’s interface, so I was really curious to see how everything works from Keyword Discovery itself.

The tool itself has several impressive features, giving users access to data including KEI analysis, spelling mistakes, seasonal search trends, keyword density, and industry keywords. You can also crawl for related terms, saving yourself a lot of time from researching each particular keyword. You can even choose where to extract the data, whether it’s by country, or from specific sources such as News, eBay, Shopping, or the Thesaurus. You also have the option to access Overture data – but Overture hasn’t updated since January 2007.

The Keyword Discovery interface is simple and straightforward – which is a good thing for first time users. The other pros of the Keyword Discovery service include:

• around 1000 results for deep-digging each root keyword (and more if you get exhaustive keyword lists). This is great if you’re looking for those long tail keywords that you may want to capitalize on.
• The extensive FAQ and Help section, including the PDF manuals, make it easy for users to learn how to use the tool properly and how to apply the results to their website.
• You get a variety of data from several different databases, and it’s rumored to have the largest database around.
• Unlike WordTracker, Keyword Discovery data is relatively accurate. Here’s an excerpt from their site:

The Keyword discovery total is the TOTAL number of searches in the Keyword discovery database. That is, the total number of actual searches recorded on that term, NOT an estimate.

Now, for some cons:

• Since Keyword Discovery searches for results over a 12-month period, the basic search isn’t good for getting seasonal data. To get seasonal searches, you have to click on the “Trend” button for each keyphrase.
• Data takes a while longer to load, at least compared to other tools I’ve used.

Overall, Keyword Discovery is a good tool. Although I wouldn’t trade it for my Nichebot subscription, I’ll probably be using the Keyword Discovery 9-in-1 tool in Nichebot more often. I’m impressed with the accuracy of the results. Keyword Discovery offers a free trial, so you might want to try it out first to see if it’s the right keyword tool for you.

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If you’re relatively new to SEO, odds are you’ve got some misconceptions about how it works. Alternatively, if you’re an SEO pro, you’ve probably had clients who’ve made these wrong assumptions. They probably have strange, unrealistic ideas of what your services entail. Whether you’re a pro or a rookie, this list of SEO myths should help clear up some smoke for the uninitiated.

There’s a perfect keyword research tool out there. This isn’t true at all. At least, not yet. If you’ve read my Nichebot review or my Keyword Discovery review, you’d know that while I liked both tools, they do have their own limitations. The same goes for most tools out there. In fact, I might write a comprehensive keyword research tool comparison in the future. For now, be satisfied knowing that there’s no perfect tool – what’s important is that you use a good combination of tools to get the keyword data that fits your site like a glove.

You need to get your Meta-tags perfect for SEO. Yes, in this day and age clients still want me to make “emergency changes” to their Meta-tags. It’s only okay to panic about Meta-tags if you were unexpectedly caught in a time warp and were transported to 10 years ago. Search engines don’t put as much weight on them anymore. Let me put it this way, if you optimize your Meta-tags, but forget the rest of your site – you won’t get a noticeable change in your rankings. But if you optimize your site well but don’t use Meta-tags at all, there’s a noticeable positive outcome when to comes to your rankings (to say the least).

You only need to do SEO once. This is probably one of the more prevalent SEO misconceptions out there. When a client asks us to apply SEO on their site and we include future maintenance and measurement in the contract, they’re often surprised and say that they don’t need it. SEO isn’t a constant thing – search engines change their algorithms regularly, people’s online search behavior change, and there are certain trends you also have to take into account. If you do SEO just once for your website, don’t be surprised if you can’t maintain the results over a long period.

You just optimize your site elements and sales will increase. Don’t we all wish for that? Sadly, SEO has off-page factors too, including link building, Pay Per Click campaigns, etc. Also, sales aren’t just dependent on SEO. Your copywriting has to be convincing for the reader and your business needs to be trustworthy. SEO can bring in the leads, but it’s you’re business sense that will help convert those leads into sales.

It’s good to have hundreds of keywords targeted and littered all over just one page. The more the merrier? Of course not! Search engine spiders are attempting to figure out what each of your landing pages is about. Try to keep pages focused and targeted to keywords that are specially relevant to them. For example, in a website for a shoe company, the category for women’s shoes should just contain keywords that women will enter if they’re looking for shoes. Or, for a more targeted example, don’t put keywords about boots in a web page that contains flip-flops.

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I’m not sure if I’ve made it known here at Smart SEO Blog, but I work as a professional blogger for some non-SEO blogs. When I say “professional blogger” in the context of this article, it means the following things:

I don’t own all of the blogs that I write for.
If I don’t own the blog, I’m paid to write for it.
Most of these blogs already have an existing audience.

Apart from my gigs as a professional blogger, I run some online businesses – with most of them having really competitive keywords. Let’s take the case of Business#1, my oldest-running online service. Here are the stats for the second most competitive keyword for that business (from Nichebot):

Competition: 58,900

KEI: 0.08

Predicted daily count: 123

A year ago, when the website was 3 years old, I got tired of searching amongst 20+ search engine result pages to find my site. Now, I’m on the first page for that keyword. I’m currently the 7th, to be exact. How did I get there?

As a professional blogger, I have access to blogs that have thousands of pageviews in a month. One of the blogs I write for clocks in around 45,000 monthly pageviews. Another one has at least 10,000 pageviews (a conservative estimate). All the main blogs I write for have a PR of at least 4 and above (not that it’s that important an indicator nowadays).

At this point I would like to reiterate that my website for Business#1 wasn’t within the first 20 SERPs for the competitive keyword I wanted. For three whole years, at least.
The only thing I did that made a difference in my rankings was to link to the Business#1 website. Using the said keyword as the anchor text.

And now the site is #7 within the first page of Google’s search results.

Pretty sweet. I can’t believe it took me 3 years to figure that out. (Then again, I wasn’t actively SEO-ing the site, apart from onpage stuff.)

Now the harder part is to get from #7 to #1. Here are some ideas on how I can get there:

• Get more backlinks using that keyword – not just limited to the blogs I write for.
• A small-budget ad campaign for increase visibility in the marketplace.

The rankings boost has already increased my number of clients for Business#1. I’d have to say that for an effective SEO campaign, that was pretty easy. It’s actually common sense, but it’s exactly the type of thing that you can overlook.

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