Professional SEO Specialist - janet bartoli roussos

What SEO/SEM tools do you use? There have been a number of tools I have used over the years. Just to break down each set I will begin with

• Keyword Research Tools - I have used various, free and not so free.
  • Wordtracker: This was one of my first keyword research tools. After using others, I have to say, this is not my favorite any longer. If you notice they get their results from dogpile and hotmamma, who?, exactly. I do like the lists of new keywords it generates when I may be hitting a road block for a particular industry specific keyword though. Scale of 1-10 this gets a JT score of “3″
  • Nichebot: This tool used to be very basic in nature, now there seems to be lots of things going on over there like a wordtracker thesaurus, quick digging tools, a 1-click LSI (latent semantic indexing) which can help you make a listing of all thematically related keywords and a few other pretty handy free tools. You do need a login and password to access, but overall not bad for free. Does use wordtracker and overture resources. Scale of 1-10 this one gets a JT score of “3.5″
  • Overture: This is a favorite amongst many I work with and have worked with. I don’t particularly like the fact that it seems to be grabbing “January 2007″ results in August, but hey its another no cost tool you may use in conjunction with the others. Scale of 1-10 this one gets a JT score of “6″ (if they ever update their monthly results, I could give it a few more points).
  • Google Adwords Keyword Tool: I have a love/hate relationship with this tool. I do love the “highest volume occurred in” great for seasonal things, however, I do not like the “avg search volume” area, what is “low volume”? Is this less than 1,000 searches? A little help here Google? Is this really supposed to be “top secret” I can get a clearance if it’s necessary. Overall this one gets a JT score of “8″
  • Keyword Discovery (Subscription Based): I do like this tool very much, it has a way of grouping things (I know Wordtracker has the project group too), but I can also get a KD API if I wanted, don’t have any experience yet with their SEO toolkit, but looks pretty intense. Also, very helpful to your shopping channel campaign is the eBay and shopping research. The “Global Premium” area isn’t my favorite, the results seem very low like “earth concert” only shows in global premium with 310 results, but not in overture. Overall this one does get a very decent JT score of “8.5″.

  At this point it would be great to get your input, any an all tool reviews are welcome.

I will move on to other SEM/SEO tool reviews later… for now, enjoy the tools!

In your opinion, does it make sense for a company that is targeting just the U.S. Hispanic market to optimize for Spanish language keywords?

Many clients I work for have foreign language content they’d like to get in front of their non English speaking audience. The biggest challenge so far has been getting the clients to grasp that in order to secure non-U.S./non-English language visitors; they will need to produce keyword rich content in the language of those they’re seeking to attract. I think a lot of this has to do with an American-centric perspective and our culture’s inclination to not be concerned with HAVING to know another language in order to do business and be successful.

Most clients do have foreign language translators, what they don’t have are those that specializes in search engine optimization within that specific country. As someone learning a foreign language I can say, it may be easy to translate basic jargon, such as “Which way to the nearest bank?”, but it’s another to know what these foreign language folks are searching for when looking for a specific product or service. Every culture is different and you can pretty much figure out what one American is typing in when searching for small business resources, but what words or combination of words are they using in France or Japan?

It’s become very obvious how necessary it will soon be to know both English and Spanish, at the very least, in the U.S. marketplace.

Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (”SEO”). It blows my mind how many titles of some very large corporate sites have just the company name listed or even worse “home”. Title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility. They should be a engaging and give the user a reason to click on your natural result.

I had actually taken a very small site, an accounting site I had built for an accounting firm three years ago, performed keyword research specific to this firm’s geographic area and optimized the title and description of the home page and an interior page (services).

This site had no prior SEO performed on it at all, in fact this site was not optimized well at all no on page or off page factors. Not even a Google site map generated, I’m talking nothing. This was done in January of this year, and by the beginning of March, just two months later, this little nothing site was found in the 20th position for “nj tax help’, as of this writing and no further optimization done since, they are now found in 15th position in Google.

There are a few pages to compete with over 13 million pages indexed with “nj tax help” — Yes, the title tag is very important.