I received this question in a comment on my “SEO Expert Q&A” starter post, so here goes:

Comment by Dan on April 26, 2007 12:45 pm
Lara,

Could you please comment on a keyword research service called nichebot.com and if the kei is really such a good indicator of a good opportunity. I noticed that the title tag google competition results are not really accurate… have you seen this before?

Thanks for your question, Dan.

First let me start by saying that I don’t use nichebot, and I haven’t really dug into it too much, since they won’t let you do anything if you’re not willing to pay a dollar to try it out. I don’t like “squeeze pages” (the page that you’re brought to when you try to click on something that scrolls a mile long with calls to action in bright bold red every other block - they reek of “quick money making scheme” to me) and I dislike them so much that whenever I come across one, I click out and go find something else. Yep, I know - they only seem to want a dollar for a 14-day trial. But I just don’t trust anyone who’s still using pages like that.

That said, let me delve a little deeper into the whole keyword research thing. There are lots of ways to figure out if a niche or topic is going to be profitable for you. I personally use WordTracker - but honestly, I only use it to get more ideas on related topics for a term I’m already interested in, and I pay absolutely zero attention to the KEI analysis. In fact, I don’t even include it in the keyword list I send to clients when I’m seeking approval on targeted words and phrases. Keyword research is the absolute tip of the iceberg, and depending on what you’re doing and how far you can expand your mind, using any keyword discovery tool might not be necessary at all.

Let’s say for example that you’re wanting to build a site about fishing in the Great Lakes region of New York. The very first thing I would do if you came to me would be to go to the three major search engines and do a search for that (fishing Great Lakes New York) to see what’s already out there.

Google pulls 1,250,000 results
Yahoo pulls 6,190,000 results
MSN pulls 197,166 results

HUGE differences, right? But let’s take a closer look…

The sites listed in the top 10 for each engine are pretty much the same exact sites, just placed in different rankings. Google shows the DEC in #1, while Yahoo puts it in the #4 spot, and MSN tosses it down to #5.

Personally, I’m not scared of 1 million pages, any more than I am of 6 million pages. I’d love to take on this project! What I’d do at this point is use WordTracker (or whatever keyword discovery tool you prefer - even nichebot I suppose) to find other things we can talk about on this site.

A quick pull through WT gives me a lot on Lake Erie fish species; “Lake Erie Bass”, “Lake Erie Walleye”, “Lake Erie Steelhead” and a lot about ecology around the Great Lakes; “Great Lakes watershed”, “Great Lakes environment”, “Great Lakes environmental directory”.

“Lake Erie Bass” shows 10 phrases that have those three words in them. Of those 10 phrases, the predicted search count goes no higher than 7, the actual goes no higher than 4.

Now here’s my magic statement on this: If you could optimize and market your site for that phrase “Lake Erie Bass” in just half these phrase results (5), and got 2 search hits a day for each one (10 hits per day) and 40% of those hits resulted in a sale (4 sales per day), aren’t you doing pretty well? Don’t forget that you’ve got at least 5 other phrases you’ve found to work with, and we’re just talking search traffic here (no other form of advertising).

I know you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, but that’s a small niche. I want something bigger.”

So go bigger! Build a section of your site on Great Lakes fishing, a section on fishing the Mississippi, a section on deep sea fishing in the Atlantic, one on deep sea fishing in the Pacific and so on.

For each section, do the very same thing - check the search results and see what the top 20 or 30 listings are doing. Expand your own mind to think of new ideas, check out how much competition there is by doing manual searches on the topic, and see what other phrases they’re using to target search traffic.

The bottom line here is that if you’re optimizing and marketing the site properly and filling it with good, useful and fresh content you really won’t have to worry about ranking well in the search engines. This goes for any topic and any niche.

If you want to use a program like WordTracker, Nichebot, Keyword Discovery and so on - go ahead and do it. But don’t rely on those temporary results for your permanent work. You need to focus on your niche, expand it to related topics and not worry about what people are searching for - you can’t market your site for “deep sea fishing” if you’re not going to provide enough relevant and useful info on it to begin with and expect to get anywhere in the search engines anyway.

Popularity: 16% [?]

More and more I’m getting questions from new and potential clients, “What is that funny button on my site?” and when I reply with “It’s your RSS feed link,” I get, “Okay, and what the *bleep* is RSS?”

Today’s question comes on the tail of a redesign I just completed for a long-standing client, and a new project I took on the other day, where both clients asked me about RSS and that “funny button”.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and basically, when using a blog system in publishing, your posts are automatically published to an RSS feed. People can then subscribe to your site’s feed using a feed reader, and get content delivered automatically “right to their (computer) door.”

Think of it this way: When a television show goes into syndication, it gives the opportunity for other networks to re-air episodes of the show. The original network is the only one that gets to air new episodes, but I’ve seen as many as 3 other stations picking up the syndication. So fans of the show can then see these episodes at varying times (when it’s convenient for them) and can count on another network to air the show. It’s similar with RSS - someone finds your site, decides they like it, and copies your syndication feed into their feed reader (their own personal station) so they can get the goods when it’s convenient for them. In this case, the website itself is the “original network station” and the feed reader is the “syndicate”.

Before I finish this - Let me state that just because you’re syndicating a website, it does NOT give you permission to re-air it on your own website. If a site offers feeds, you’re allowed to “watch” on your own computer, and are usually NEVER (except in very rare circumstances, and only when stated by the site’s owner) allowed to redistribute the content in any way, shape, or form. Feel free to discuss and link to it though - site owners love incoming links.

So basically, having a feed reader on your computer allows you to subscribe to your favorite web sites and pull content much like creating your very own personal newspaper! I use Feedreader, but there are several to choose from: My Yahoo!, GoogleReader, and BlogLines are just a few.

And providing RSS feeds on your website, allows people to subscribe to your site’s feed and get the latest news and information you publish right in their feed reader so they get “alerted” to your new content! It’s pretty cool, huh?

For other great posts explaining RSS, please visit the following:
RSS Explained for the Blogging Newbie
How To Explain RSS the Oprah Way

Popularity: 21% [?]

This post has been reworked, resurfaced, and regurgitated for your perusal. Enjoy!

In recent years, a lot of people have battled over whether or not having a “Resources” page on your site is going to help you with search engine rankings at all. People have come up with varied ideas to make them work better, like doing 3-way links (site A links to site B, site B links to site C, site C links to site A) instead of reciprocal links (sites A and B link to each other). There’s even a theory that involves interlinking between 4 or more pages… oh wait, wouldn’t that be easier if you just went out after natural links? Hmm, oh yes, that it would.

“Reciprocal linking” was a strategy heavily used for many years in an effort to get links. At one point, people didn’t even care about relevance. These were link farms of the worst nature. Your site would be listed on a page with all sorts of questionable, unrelated content. Your baby clothes web site link would be sandwiched between a link for Ephedra and one for adult toys. It took an overwhelming amount of effort to clear out your inbox from all the junk every day, to get even one halfway decent link offer.

After that, the thing was “directory pages” where a site based say, on computers, would offer a page on hardware, a page on software, one on peripherals, one for programmers, another for web designers, and so on. They were still going for “more is better”, but were finally recognizing the importance of relevance. Despite the fact that there are still people doing this, with the advent of blogging and article repositories, reciprocal link exchanges are pretty much a thing of the past for most SEOs.

It’s still quite important to get good, relevant links to your site of course. But the fact remains that the more you can vary the techniques used on your site, the better. This means you should have a goal of doing many different things on your site by way of linking. For these examples, the practices remain the same no matter what your site’s about, but for example’s sake, we’ll assume you have a site that sells baking and cooking utensils.

• Link subpages to subpages when doing a reciprocal whenever possible. Ask the person if they wouldn’t mind liking to your page on egg beaters rather than to the main page of your site, and tell them that you’ll link to their recipe for western omelettes from your egg beaters page. Or, better yet: Ask them if they’ll link to your page on egg beaters from their western omelettes page, and tell them that you’ll link to their recipe on cheesecake from your page about springform pans.
• Make sure that every link you get is a relevant one. (This shouldn’t even have to be stated, but unfortunately, there are still some people who believe that any link is a good one.) If you sell baking supplies, don’t get a link going with an ED pill site. Plain and simple.
• You can also be skillful in placing links out within your content. Write an article about using your baking supplies, and link out to dessert recipe sites. It’s likely that without asking, they’ll give a link back to you. Again, don’t overdo it… no more than one link for every other paragraph or so.
• Create and maintain a blog. This is similar to the last point in terms of handing out links and getting them in return. Your blog can host the articles mentioned above, recipes (if you’re a bakeware site, or even a candymaker, cake decorator, etc.), news about your company, press releases, contests, and so much more. Draw your inspiration from other blogs in your field. Subscribe to related blog feeds in your industry, and read them in your reader like the newspaper. Find something relevant, link to it and publish your own commentary or opinion on the topic. It’s really not all that difficult. One can spend less than an afternoon drafting posts for a week or more, and then just a little while each day fine tuning and publishing. (In case you’re on the edge about blogging, Rand illustrates the many reasons why you should blog quite well.)
• And of course, don’t forget the free directories. These can be invaluable when it comes to link popularity, but even for the ones that don’t affect it, it can help boost traffic. You never know what kind of search engine/directory John Doe uses… just be cautious of “directories” that use cgi redirects - they do NOTHING for you. And don’t waste time on this one… a dozen or so new ones a few times a year is fine.

Popularity: 16% [?]

After meeting up with some very cool people at the ProBlogger meetup in NYC last week, Gina and I have been talking a lot about PR and its online reach. “Reputation Management Services” sounds all too much like the term “Image Consultant” did in the 80s. It’s when you hire someone to make you look better, to clear or cover all the skeletons in your closet, and all around make people think you’re better than what others have said you are.

Is there a possibility with the new “buzz” about reputation managment, that consultancies offering these services could find themselves behind a moral brick wall? What makes taking on a client with too much, too much? Is it okay to help re-invent a guy who’s got 8 of his 10 previous “businesses” listed with complaints to the BBB and pages among pages of rants and raves from blogs and the RipOff Report? Can it even be done? Should it be?

I’m pretty much set on a standpoint that I’d rather turn away a client than take on their bad reputation. Who wouldn’t feel that way if their goals are to grow and expand their business? But I’m concerned that we’re going to start seeing “reputation management” agencies popping up all over the place now. People taking money from others and just going out of their way to get rid of all negative traces of a client’s past, even if it means trying to game the search engines, or spew threats and harassment. Think about it - this could open up all sorts of ideas that will take us right back to the realm of black hat SEO and who knows what else. It’s like the mafia of online PR! I can hear it now: “I’m gonna makeya an offa you can’t refyooz…”

I sure hope that people don’t wind up thinking that all they have to do is a little “management” and all will be okay. I think that reputation management should be part of many services someone takes into consideration when looking to hire a PR firm or similar agency, but that they should also be wary of any guarantees or potentially empty promises. It could get hairy out there.

Popularity: 15% [?]

If I was any other kind of person, I’d let the sillyheads who propose “link exchanges” this way know exactly what they’re doing wrong. In this case, they’re going to have to just read it on my site. Which they clearly don’t do (read SEO blogs/forums) or they wouldn’t have gotten this SO wrong.

Dear Webmaster

I handle online marketing for my client’s site http://www.trinityinsight.com/

As you all know about the Google’s new algorithym and the improtance of oneway linking. I am also looking for triangular linking ( New Virgin of Oneway linking ) to increase the link popularity of my site as well the ranking in major search engines.

Emphasis added is mine.

I will also add your site on to my directory / within24 hours of your positive reply.
please add my site at least page rank(5) page.

I request you to do have a look on to my website and add it on your website and reply me with your site’s details.

Here is my linking details :-

URL : http://www.trinityinsight.com/

Title : ecommerce consulting

Description : Trinity Insight is an ecommerce consulting company that assists online retailers and financial companies.

Link will be added at : http://www.techsinasec.com/links/computerservices.html

You can also paste the code given below :

< p >< b >< a href="http://www.trinityinsight.com/" >ecommerce consulting< /a >< /b > Trinity Insight is an ecommerce consulting company that assists online retailers and financial companies.< /p >

(Spacing to break the code added by me. All other line breaks and spaces in this email were the real ones I got in the original.)

Your link will be added on my site within 24 hours. So if you are interested for link exchange with my site please let me know and we can do a better work for our sites.

Thanks and Regards

Shree

seo.shree@gmail.com

Are you kidding? First of all, “Shree” is contacting another SEO company here. They have to know this, because the page they offered the link back to is a computer-related page, with other SEO links on it.

But allow me to continue on with all the reasons why emails like this tick me off for wasting my time.

• Spelling and grammar. “Improtance” and “New Virgins” - I’m surprised that this email didn’t get flagged as spam for the sexual connotations right there. But the simple fact that someone wrote any kind of email like this (as opposed to an email from a client or colleague) and made misspellings like that just turns me off immediately from whatever it is they have to say to me.
• Lies! Lies! All LIES! Google’s new algorithym? Triangular linking is the “new” form of one-way linking? One-way linking strategies (in this manner, as an attempt to game the SE’s) and triangular linking died around the same time GW was re-elected. Were people still doing it? Sure. Was it doing them any good? Not so much. Fortunately my inbox is breathing a sigh of relief in comparison - I used to get over 100 emails a day like this back then. Heck, I sent over 100 a day like this (but mine made sense, and weren’t so demanding, see my next point).
• Demanding of my activity and time. Not only am I supposed to comply within 24 hours, but I’m supposed to look at the site, put THEIR link on a PR5 page (and get my link on a PR4 page, smooshed in with a ton of other idiots who took them up on this offer) and respond right away.
• Using a GMail address. GMail is great, don’t get me wrong. But WHO ARE YOU? What company do you work for; SEOShree? Trinity Insight? (TI appears to offer SEO and Internet Marketing, so are you pretending to be an outside agency when this is really for yourself?) Keep the GMail for your personal stuff, will you? Or wait, is that because you send out so much crap like this, that you need to keep changing your email address because of the spam and complaints made against you? In any event, if I can’t figure out who you are, you really won’t get anything out of me that you ask for. Nope, not even a little link exchange.
• The bottom line? This stuff just doesn’t work. You should be spending your time either blogging about all the junk you know doesn’t work anymore (like yours truly), or actually doing stuff for your client that does work. I’ve got half a mind to send this to your client myself, and let them know what kind of crap you’re doing for their money. People wonder why SEOs get a bad rap sometimes? THIS, my friends, is it.

So there you have it - I’ve really had it with stuff like this. Oh, and here was my word for word response to them (I don’t normally do this, but on occassion, if it just bites me the wrong way, I will):

You want to be on a PR 5 page, and you’re willing to give a link on a PR 4 page that’s cluttered with other links - and only links - some that are related to my business and some that are not?

Do you realize you contacted an SEO company here?

I’m sorry, but no thank you.

Looking that over, I think even that was too kind.

Popularity: 18% [?]