Search Engine Optimization Resources

What makes a good SEO resource? If you attend any SEO conference in 2012 or beyond you are likely to be flooded with suggestions for "great" SEO tools that help you with keyword research, link research, competitive research, etc. Here are a few realistic comments on all these SEO resources.

Keyword Research Tools

The average SEO looks to the Google Adwords keyword tool for their research. Even many of the third-party tools you can subscribe to use this data. How good is it? Not very. The most important issue with using the Adwords tool is that it is only looking at pay-per-click data. It omits much information about queries where there are no advertisements. By some Google employee estimates, only about 25% of all queries on Google show ads.

There are third-party tools that buy keyword data from other search engines like Dogpile, Mamma, etc. These search engines service real user queries but their users are not looking for the same things as on Google and Bing. Even Bing's user searches are very different from Google's searches. So all the third party tools are limited.

Bing does not make its PPC keyword data available to the public but if you have a Bing AdCenter account you can see the data. Still, it suffers from the same limitations as Google's AdWords tool.

In short, there is no reliable way to look at all available keyword opportunities. The easiest way to find new keywords to target is to trawl for them. Keyword trawling consists of writing large amounts of content that randomly use many different expressions. These are not keyword-stuffed pages (you don't know what the keywords are) but just long articles that cover a lot of topics. Then you look and see what queries bring visitors in. These will usually be queries that have very little competition.

Keyword trawling is the fastest, easiest way to target the long tail of search. You don't need any keyword research tools other than a good analytics program and a spreadsheet.

Competitive Research Tools

Competitive research tools mostly focus on creating link reports for you. These tools may not find all the links that your competitors use. Also, these tools cannot tell you which links are helping your competitors. Competitive research tools do a very poor job of identifying what your competitors are doing and targeting.

Most real SEO experts tell people not to waste their time on competitive intelligence. After all, even if you can get a reliable list of links from the research tools you will never be able to get links from most of those sources. That just doesn't happen. The idea of chasing a competitor's links is one of the biggest follies in SEO today.

The only real competitive research worth doing is to look at what the most successful Websites are not. Not the sites you think are your competitors but the "big guys". You can mine their Websites for ideas to try out on your own sites. Don't worry about the links because you cannot get 10 million links without becoming a big brand like them.

Link Research Tools

Link research has evolved from looking at competitive backlinks to looking for places where you can get links. Most link research right now is very amateurish. These tools and techniques help you find Websites that are accepting guest posts. How reliable do you think those links are if it is so easy to get guest posts from them? Guest posts are the new form of Web spam. Google has even warned people to tone it down on guest posting.

Some link tools also help you find Websites that publish infographics. Infographics are another link spam tool that Google has warned people to stop abusing. Using these link research tools is a very sure way of getting your Website into trouble. If all you can take away from an SEO conference is that you should be guest posting and sending out infographics you have wasted your money.

If you want to look for Websites where you can get links from, your best bet is to look for Websites that are NOT friendly to the SEO link building industry. Instead, figure out ways to earn links from those pickier sites by creating content that they will love.

There Are No Good SEO Resources for Sale

If someone is charging you money for an SEO tool, run away.

If someone is telling everyone else to use an SEO tool, run away.

The best SEO resources are the kind that give you information about YOUR Website and YOUR needs. The best SEO resources cannot be exploited by everyone else in the same way. The best SEO tools provide you with private information that your competitors cannot see.

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