October 2008

Are you tired of signing into your blog to view and moderate your comments? Everytime a new comment is held in moderation, your WordPress install uses its notification feature to email you and you have to login in your blog to moderate your comments.

Moderator is an excellent solution to moderate comments from your desktop. It uses combination of WordPress plugin associated with Adobe AIR 1.1, which runs on Mac, Windows, and is currently in beta on Linux.

Some noteable features are,

• Viewing unmoderated comments.
• Dock and system tray notifications of the number of unmoderated comments.
• Accept, delete, and spam comments from within the desktop client.
• Close application window, or minimize it to the system tray while running.
• Shows the Gravatar icons for the user who posted the comment.

Download the current Moderator Plugin Bundle.

Keyword research should be the very first item in your SEO projects. Its the most important element of any SEO campaign. SEO starts even before creating a new website, before registering a domain for it.

You need to understand the audience you are marketing too,  you need to research from user prospective that what they are looking for in your industry. This is very basic marketing principal and its also applied to internet marketing. Once you had researched audience that you are working on, you will have to research keywords/keyphrases that they are looking for in SE in a routine.

Once keywords are researched, you move forward and put these keywords in your overall SEO strategy. On page placement and use of keywords in your off page factors (link anchor text). You also do data mining, industry analysis to recognize your competition. This helps you in building an SEO strategy plus recognizing how your competition is achieving top rankings.

You can do keyword research using a keyword research tool. You can get keyword ideas through these tools, keyword search estimate and do competition analysis.

There are many keyword research tools in market, some are free while some are paid. They have different set of features and have different advantages. So its a good idea to use a combination of keyword research tools.

Google Adwords Tool: Google Adwords is the best free tool available. It provides you very good keyword ideas, similar keywords and number of searches performed monthly.

Free Wordtracker Tool: Its a limited version of WordTracker. You can do a quick search and get some ideas using this tool.

SEO Book Keyword Tool: This is a good tool, provides daily estimate of searches performed.

Lately I’m relying on Google Adwords tool as Google started sharing number of searches this year. Next I’d planned to write a post on ‘How to do competition analysis’ after finding your main keywords. Please bookmark to stay updated.

Online reputation management is the latest buzz word in SEO world. I see reputation management firms popping up on daily bases. With changing economy, businesses are more concerned about their reputation then they were 1 – 2 year before.

If you don’t have a problem with your online reputation but you’re concerned about your brand name. Then first step for you is to track your reputation.
Below I’ve mentioned 5 reputation tracking tools by Google. These tools can help you keep an eye at your online reputation.

1. Google News

One of the best ways to track mainstream media mentions of your company is to use Google News. Enter your company name, sort the results by date published and then subscribe to the RSS feed. You’ll get instant RSS updates of any news items that mention your business. Example for “nokia“.

Here’s how it works. Navigate to the Google News page, and click on the news alerts link.
Next, you define a topic, by setting any number of keywords and phrases that retrieved items need to have, the type of news you want, how often you want it, and your email. That’s it -seriously. You’ll have to confirm your email.

Google will now send you news alerts that you have chosen to your email inbox, at the rate you want, from once a day, once a week, or as the news happens. Google has access to literally thousands of news sources, and I’ve found that when I’m needing more of a variety of sources on one subject, they manage to deliver.

2. Blog Search

If a blog happens to “ping” the blogosphere, the chances are that it will get on Google Blog Search. Even if the blog isn’t in Google news, or doesn’t make the main Google index, Google Blog Search might still find that story that mentions your CEO or your recent product launch. Get alerts to matching stories via email or RSS.

Early Wednesday, Google updated its blog search tool to track news stories as they pop up on various blogs. Like Google News, the company is taking a product that began as something for search and making it a destination of its own.

What’s different in blog search compared with news is that the front page shows how many outlets wrote about a story and how old in a very different manner. In blog search’s case the number of sources is given a far higher prominence, and instead of tracking how fresh a story is, Google has chosen to display how long it’s had the limelight.

3. Patent Search

Keeping track of patent filings was notoriously difficult before Google Patent Search came along. Now you can keep any eye on patents filed that relate to your industry. Better yet, keep track of patents that might violate your company held patents. Google Patent Search have a database of 7 million US patents.

4. Trends

What search queries are popular at Google right now? Thanks to Google Trends you can get an idea of which keywords are most searched for. You can narrow your research to specific countries or cities–letting you know if a product has global or local appeal.

5. Email updates

If you’re not quite ready for all of that RSS reader nonsense, you can still keep track of the latest buzz via email. Google Alerts let you track web, blogs, news and groups for any phrase you want. Select daily, weekly or “as it happens” updates and you’ll get an email whenever your company name is mentioned.