I received an e-mail from the Wordtracker keyword software that they are holding a special for the month of November. Enter the promotion code us-annual-15. This offer code provides a 15% discount on the purchase of an annual subscription if used by November 30. I've talked about Wordtracker in the past and use it regularly as part of my keyword research. For those of you who are unfamiliar here is a little overview:

SEO Visibitly for SEO Visibility

When people are searching for things they often type something wrong. This happens every day, and it might have even happened to you right now. SEO Visibitly is optimizing content or even better pay per click ads to focus on misspellings. It is often a follow up to a main SEO strategy, but it can be quite cost effective. While researching for these terms you might even come across a new niche of traffic to draw upon.

Keywords are a funny thing. Most keywords start off pretty vague, and slowly grow to something unnatural. For example my site recently came up in a search result for "list of seo & sem sites with page rank less than six in uk". Now that is truly unexpected, and just strange. I'm still not sure how I came up for this search, but I can say that watching how people find my site has really helped me discover tweaks. While I use tools like the Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool and Keyword Discovery to get an idea of what people are searching for, these tools offer ideas but not facts. I have seen these reports show huge traffic for terms that just aren't true, and no traffic for terms that I'm getting results on. That being said they are both worth taking a look at, but what's more important is...

Search engine marketing relies on good links coming in to your site. When you have a site published with original content you can often boost ranking by submitting the site to a directory. Before there were search engines there were directories. Before yahoo had search, it had a directory. A good directory ensures that your site has quality content before listing it, and it's why the link is so valuable. Here is a list of a few top directories:

When designing a site it's important to pay attention to the keywords from start to finish. You can use keywords in your domain name like seo-web-design-costa-rica.com and in your page names such as /SEO-Search-Engine-Optimization.

As much as search engines love finding new content, they hate finding the same content over and over. Using some content repeatedly, like contact information, is perfectly acceptable. The problem begins when search engines find that several of your pages just repeat the same thing again and again.

Search engines are like gardeners. They like to see things grow. Nothing makes them happy like dropping by a web site and finding more content. The more often they find new content when they drop by the more often they check out your site.

Having a sitemap is a very useful thing when it comes to search engines. A sitemap allows a search engine to easily find all of your pages, especially when certain things (like flash based menus) are involved. They also allow you to immediately inform search engines of your updated content. I highly recommend using one if your page gets beyond a few pages.