Market Samurai has been a preferred tool of mine for several years. The keyword research functionality, along with the rank tracker and competition monitor modules have helped me and my clients to do a lot of research, get great rankings and earn lots of $$$!

One of the great advantages of Market Samurai was always it’s affordability. With a one off payment of $147 it was so affordable, I bought several copies so that every team member could have access to the software as well. I know many people who would have paid multiples to use this software!

However, now their cheap pricing seems to become their downfall. In recent times Market Samurai has had problems and hang-ups with monitoring Google rankings and doing research on keyword competition. They have now announced that the monitoring Google Rankings with Market Samurai cannot continue as it is and will most likely move to a paid model, if it continues at all.

To read more about the recent changes with Market Samurai, read their blog post here.

Alternatives to Market Samurai

Here is a short list of recommendations on alternative keywords research and monitoring ranking tools. Detailed Reviews will follow soon.

• RavenTools
• SEM Rush
• Keyword Spy

Raven Tools

Has an outstanding functionality for research and tracking modules. It also integrates with social media reporting (such as Facebook analytics), as well as Google Analytics and AdWords accounts. It’s geared towards bigger businesses and has a price tag of $99/month for the smallest plan. Raventools has outstanding support team, detailed manuals and regular training webinars. The staff are very responsive and the software gets updated regularly, with new features being added all the time.

SEM Rush

SEM rush is an outstanding keyword research tool that is used by many professional agencies. It monitors search engine keywords, Google AdWords keywords, along with Ads and Adcopy, a ranking tracker and it can create regular reports that show you where you can further improve your SEO or AdWords campaign by pointing out the “holes” in your strategy. At $69.99/month it is a more affordable option that Raventools, however it is more specialised in Keyword research. For example it misses the social media integration. For an example report click here.

Keyword Spy

Keyword Spy is a keyword research tool that advertises itself as being one of the major tools for affiliate marketers. It monitors organic rankings as well as AdWords. One of the main advantages of KeywordSpy is it’s specialisation in different countries. For example you can get Australian specific AdWords data, or UK specific AdWords data. This also applies for non-English speaking countries such as Germany which is especially handy for Affiliates that are working in different countries. Keyword Spy has an unlimited free trial that has limited functionality. Other options range from $89.95/month to $139.95/month. To sign up for your free trial, clikc here.

This is the second post in a 2 part series on advanced keyword research with Market Samurai. See advanced keyword research with Market Samurai Part 1, so this tutorial makes sense.

Once you have completed the first part of the advanced keyword research with Market Samurai, you will have one tab in the Market Samurai software with a long list of keywords.

Now go through the list and identify any keywords that you think are relevant and should be explored further. Do Not Click Analyze Keywords (as this take up a lot of time and should be done at the end of the process).

Click on the key next to the keyword. This will open another window to generate additional keywords.

Press the key, to open the keyword research in another window.

Go back to the previous tab and copy all negative keywords. Then paste these negative keywords into the negative keyword field on the new tab. Continue this with every new tab you open so that you will end up with one list of all negative keywords.

When you have explored all relevant keywords open a new tab called ALL KEYWORDS.

Advanced keyword research with Market Samurai - All keywords tab

Paste the list of negative keywords into the negative keywords field.

If you have done keyword research with any other tools, copy and paste all keywords from your other files into the positive keyword field.

Then click Keyword analysis.

On the next screen, make sure the settings are the same as explained in Part 1 of this tutorial:

• Local Total Searches
• Locals SEO traffic (SEOT)
• Phase to Broad (PBR)
• AdWords CPC
• SEO Comp (SEOC)
• Local SEO Comp (SEOLC)
• OCI (if available)
• Match type: Phrase
• Period: Daily
• Filter: No Filters

Then click Analyze keywords.

This analysis will take a few moment and you will most likely need to fill our a captcha form.

Then click Export. The file should be saved in the dropbox folder as a .csv file.

We then use a proprietary tool to sort the keywords into an appropriate SEO structure. If you’re interested in getting access to this tool, email me at janna.jungclaus @ gmail.com (no spaces).

Advanced keyword research goes well beyond looking at simple keywords and searches per month.

If you want the best chances of reaching your ideal outcome, you should be well prepared. That’s exactly what you can do with advanced keyword research: analysing the number of searches, estimated SEO traffic, SEO and AdWords competition, and even the commercial intent of your buyers tells you exactly what you need to know before you start.

Here are some basic step of how to do advanced keyword research with Market Samurai.

1. Go to your Market Samurai software and create a new project. Name it as the client name or website.
2. Enter the keyword, set settings for Australia (or whatever country you are doing the keyword research for).
3. Click on keyword research.
4. Set the related keywords for minimum 2 maximum 5. Then click generate keywords.

Click Generate Keywords to Get Your Keywords

Now go through the keyword list and identify any negative keywords. These include any geographic locations we are not interested in and any totally unrelated words.

When you have identified a negative keyword, click on the keywords (it will now be underlined) and the click on the cross on the right hand side.

Repeat this for all keywords that should be excluded from this and future search.

Now click Keyword analysis at the bottom right hand of the screen.

How to remove negative keywords from your Market Samurai advanced keyword research

When you arrive at the next screen, you can set the filters for your keyword research. I currently set the following filters for local keyword research (i.e. when I am looking to build a website for mainly Australian visitors).

• Local Total Searches
• Locals SEO traffic (SEOT)
• Phase to Broad (PBR)
• AdWords CPC
• SEO Comp (SEOC)
• Local SEO Comp (SEOLC)
• OCI (if available)

I also set the following:

• Match type: Phrase
• Period: Daily
• Filter: No Filters

From here you get a basic list of keywords.

I will explain how to do further advanced research in Advanced Keyword Research with Market Samurai Part 2.

For a full Market Samurai review read this blog post.

Doing a website audit is an essential part of making the most of your online assets. Website audits are like a SWOT analysis of your website, you want to find out what its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are.

It would be too much to cover all aspects of such an audit in this post, so I am simply starting with the main aspects of an SEO focused audit. This means you will be looking at whether your on-page optimisation is fit for the search engines and whether it will contribute to better search engine rankings.

Keywords

Keywords are the beginning and the end of your SEO strategy. Once you have done your keyword research and decided on the best keyword, you will need to include it in your website. As a rule of thumb, you want to include it in about 2 percent of the website text, meaning you mention your keyword twice in every hundred words. Your keywords or key phrase should also be included in your websites title tag, description and meta tags.

Internal Links

A very powerful, but often disregarded strategy to increase search engine rankings is internal linking. You should include as many internal links as you can, while still keeping it natural. A good goal might be to have three internal links for each webpage or blog post on your site. Make sure the internal links spread out to all of your pages and blog posts rather than just your homepage. You also need to pay attention to the anchor text, which is the text that people click on that links to another page. You should use the keyword phrase you have used to optimise each individual webpage and blog posts to link to that page. For example, you click on the word ‘swiss watches’ from one of your web pages and you land on another page that is optimised for the keyword ‘swiss watches’.

Sitemap

Building on the importance of internal linking, you should include a sitemap on your website. A sitemap helps the search engine robots to understand what content is on your site. In addition it creates internal links which help with your SEO ranking.

Search engine friendly URLS

When someone starts their own website, they often pay a lot of attention to the domain name, and rightly so. If possible, the domain name should include your core keyword in it. But unfortunately, this is often where the attention to the URL stops. In many cases, subpages of the domain are simply named with IDs and other code, such as example.com/index.php?id=19 To increase your chances of higher search engine rankings, and make your own website audit complete, you should change these links to include your keywords and look like this example.com/keyword-phrase.html

If this sounds a little bit complicated to you, you can decide to use a well-established SEO software to do your own website audit for you. The audit will be done in minutes and give you a great step-by-step program to increase your search engine rankings.

Doing proper keyword research is essential to your success online. Spending a little bit of time understanding what is involved and how to get it right will pay off hundredfold later on.

In this first article in a series on keyword research and analysis, I will introduce you to some free keyword research tools, such as Google.

Getting Started With Free Keyword Research

To get ready start a txt file in which you can cut and paste the keywords you collect. Start with a keyword that is central to your business. Let’s use the term “life coaching” as an example.

A lot of people use word documents to store their keywords but I would advise against this, as word automatically corrects the spelling and sometimes we want to have keywords that are deliberately mis-spelled.

Finding relevant keywords

Enter this keywords into Google and take note of the suggestions that Google gives you. These suggestions will come up automatically when you enter a keyword into Google and wait a few seconds without hitting enter. Note these keywords in your txt file.

Doing free keyword research with Google.

Now press enter and do Google search for this keyword. At the bottom of the search results you will see related search terms. Also note these in your txt file.

How to do lateral keyword research with Google

Try Some Lateral Keyword Research

Keywords aren’t always just variations of one term, finding some lateral keywords can really help you to get more traffic.

A good tool is the Google wonder wheel. You can access it by going to the search results page and then clicking ‘Show Options’ right underneath the search box. You will now see a menu of options on the left hand side. Under the header Standard Review, click ‘Wonder wheel’. Add those keywords that aren’t on your list yet, to your list.

Lateral keyword research with Google Wonder Wheel

Go through the list and delete any keywords that are not relevant to your project.

You should now have a list of at least 10-15 keywords to start with. In the next post I’ll be describing how to analyse your list of keywords to find the best ones. In the meantime, please leave a comment below.

Squidoo Lenses are a super-easy way to create a basic website with lots of backlinks to your websites, videos, articles and other projects. You can create Squidoo Lense at http://www.squidoo.com.

The site can be a little confusing at first, so here are 8 tips to get you started, a little beginner tutorial Squidoo:

1. Use a good article as the main content – it could be a variation of an article you’ve already submitted to Ezine Articles or other article submission software.
2. Use photos or other pictures – they should be royalty free photos to which you’ve bough the rights, for example from Istock Photo. Otherwise you can get royalty free photos from Wikipedia or Flickr.
3. Add an RSS feed for another one of your websites or blogs to add additional content and create backlinks to your sites.
4. Add a video from your YouTube Channel where appropriate – this creates additional content and increases the views of your video if your Squidoo lense gets lots of traffic.
5. Do not mention any topics that are forbidden on Squidoo, these include debt, finances, sex, and more. Check the Squidoo Terms and Conditions to be sure.
6. Make use of the “health” button at the top of the page as this will give you some clues to improve your lense while you create it.
7. Don’t forget to add links back to your blog by adding in
   

   < a href="http://yourdomain.com" > keyword < /a>

   There is no obvious way to add links but using the html code works after you hit the publish button.

8. Add tags that relate your keywords in the right hand column.

What are your favourite Squidoo Lenses Tips? Leave a comment below

What is social media? Generally speaking social media is user-generated online content that gets shared across communities. It allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Social Media is widely regarded as a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. From an academic point of view, some even regard social media as the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

Social media marketing is the act of using social influencers, social media platforms, online communities for marketing, public relations and customer service.

There is a wide range of social media tools to be considered for your social media marketing strategy, and the list changes every day. In summary, social media range from communication (blogs, social networking) and collaboration (Wikipedia, social bookmarking), to multimedia sharing (YouTube, Flickr), reviews, opinions and entertainment.

Which social media tools for marketing?

More social media tools are appearing on the net every day. For business use and social media marketing it is advisable to focus on the most popular social media applications so that your social media marketing strategy can leverage the number of potential customers that can be contacted. Using the most popular social media tools for marketing also allows your business to take advantage of the large number of participants and a well established context for business use.

Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing

There is a plethora of reasons, why well established companies are afraid of branching out into social media marketing – they fear the disadvantages of social media marketing could outweigh the advantages.

These disadvantages should be detailed in your business’ social media marketing strategy where the benefits and limitation of social media marketing should be analyzed to determine whether it’s the right strategy for your business, your marketing goals, and your marketing budget.

For many businesses, the time investment required for many social media marketing tools is an alarm bell or a red flag. The time spent marketing on social media should be closely monitored to assess whether the return in website traffic, promotion of your business brand, distribution of your business content, and resulting leads and sales is worth the investment in time and resources.

This is the first post in a series of articles on social media marketing. Are there any particular topics within this series you’d like to know more about? Leave your feedback below.

When you get started online, there are some essential internet marketing tools that should be in your internet marketing toolbox.

There are so many types of internet marketing tools, so here are just a few of them: email autoresponder provider, domain name registration services, cheap domain name registration, best places to register a domain name, domain name registration Australia, website hosting services and specifically Australia website hosting.

Free internet marketing tools?

A lot of people will try and get everything for free when they’re starting out online. That is not the approach I take. I will let you in on a little secret and tell you why:

1. This is your business. If you’re growing a business there will be some costs associated to it. If you treat online marketing as a business, it will grow as a business too.
2. It’s not actually free! Although you’re not paying for it, someone else is spending either money or time to provide this service to you. If you’re not paying upfront, it’s likely you’ll be paying at some other time.
3. You’re paying for service and support. If you’re new to internet marketing, then you probably need some guidance, service and support. Even those who have been in internet marketing for a while, often use the service and support function. So decide for yourself, is it worth paying a little extra knowing that you will get guidance, service and support?

New page on Internet Marketing Tools

I have just added a new page to this blog on internet marketing resources. On this page I recommend the providers I have previously used and am currently using. This includes email autoresponder provider, domain name registration services, cheap domain name registration, best places to register a domain name, domain name registration Australia, website hosting services and specifically Australia website hosting.