Here is a no-lose suggestion for improving your website. Before I tell you what it is, I want to go a step further and actually guarantee that what I am about to share with you will work.

The idea is brilliant in it’s simplicity, yet deceivingly difficult to execute. Carrying out the idea to it’s fullest potential requires discipline, persistence and a willingness to adjust your daily routine. In all likelihood, you are not currently doing what I am going to recommend that you do.

What I am proposing… assuring you will yield favorable results is to spend time each day reading through all sections of your company’s website. It doesn’t have to be a lot of time on a daily basis, and any time is better than no time, but I have never seen a site that is un-tweakable.

Areas of potential improvement include: content that could be more effectively written, organization of content that could be more intuitive, better calls to action than currently exist and let’s not forget, trying to stamp out those broken links.

I am as remiss as anybody in this regard. If we as an organization spent more time looking at MoreVisibility.com, somehow our site would incrementally improve at a faster rate.

There is, however one minor catch to this concept…as a result to the guarantee: it’s not enough to simply identify things that need to be fixed, but you need to actually fix them right away, so that you can move on to the next improvement. The more intelligent the original structure of the site and the more flexible the CMS that powers the site, the better the chance that you will be able to rapidly (and painlessly) implement changes and boost site performance.

When conducting keyword research, it is important to have as much information as possible so you can pick the best word for the page you are trying to optimize.  There are a plethora of tools available and some of our favorites include WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery and the Free Google Keyword Tool.  These tools are great because they can show you some very important statistics about each keyword.  Some stats that they show include approximate search volume and the competitiveness of the keyword.  The one thing they don’t show you however, is trending.  For that we recommend that you take a look at Google’s Insights for Search.

Insights for Search allows you to compare up to 5 keywords and look at trending data from as far back as 2004.  It also displays significant news stories or events that happened during the time frame so you can see how these events played a role in the search data for the keywords. Trending data such as this can help you to choose a better keyword.  Perhaps when cross referencing your researched terms with Insights, you will notice that a highly searched term is actually decreasing in trending data.  This might cause you to evaluate a different term that is a rising search, which you may not have discovered from your other keyword research tools alone.

Insights for Search also allows you to see related search terms, regional interest and rising searches.  In my opinion, the rising searches section is the most interesting.  These are words that you should be focusing on because they are becoming popular very quickly.  When you see “breakout” listed instead of an actual percentage, it means that the search term has experienced a change in growth greater than 5000%.

The next time you are doing keyword research for a new page or blog, also consult Insights for Search to see what other keywords you might find.

It has always been the general consensus that the keywords meta tag was no longer recognized by any of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing). We now know that to be partially true as Google announced last month that it completely ignores this meta tag and Yahoo! now claims that they haven’t been recognizing keywords for a good while either. Bing, it is claimed, has never recognized the keywords meta tag. What are the SEO ramifications of this?

It is the general belief that the keywords meta tag was devalued by the search engines some time ago as many webmasters used it to “stuff” them with as many keywords as possible in an attempt to rank for as many terms (relevant or not) as possible. The search engines quickly got wise to this and started to eliminate factoring it into their algorithms. From a user experience point of view, keywords are a non-factor, as 99% of Internet users have no idea of what a meta tag, let alone a keyword, is since you can only view them as part of the source code. From an SEO point of view, it is probably one less thing that you have to optimize for; titles and descriptions are now more important than ever.

However, an interesting article in Search Engine Land appeared on October 14th stating that although a Yahoo representative at SMX East stated that Yahoo also ignores the tag, an experiment was performed (placing the random letters  “xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk” in the keywords tag) which completely contradicted this. The random letters were placed in the keywords tag of Search Engine Land’s website homepage to see if “xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk” would be returned as a search result and it was.

In any event, even though the keywords tag is almost entirely dead, it would still benefit webmasters to utilize it, even for the primary keyphrase for the page, as some search engines still use it and Google and Bing may change their minds and use it as part of their algorithms in the future, even if they don’t announce it.