Matt Cutts Interview

I was listening to an interview with Google's Matt Cutts. Also, lately I've been going through some SEO books. I hope to improve myself as an SEO specialist by allotting some time at the start of each day to keep myself in touch with SEO principles and techniques.

The Matt Cutts interview lasted around an hour and a half, and I learned a lot from it. Many of my thoughts regarding SEO were confirmed, and some did not quite fit. For one, PageRank really is important. But I still believe that anyone doing SEO should not chase after PageRank alone, as it is only one of the HUNDREDS of factors to determine search engine placement. Relevance of links and content is also important.

The power of linkbuilding and anchor text is also affirmed. It doesn't depend only on the quantity of links, but also on the quality of links (based on PageRank, contextual relevance, position on the page, and several other factors). Google has developed complex algorithms to filter out the SPAM links, links that aren't really of any importance and are just there to improve link popularity for certain sites.

RankAlert.Net | Backlink Watch Tool

To check your backlinks, a useful tool can be found at RankAlert.Net. The quantity AND quality of your backlinks or inlinks have a great impact on your search engine rankings for your keywords. The quality of your backlinks is determined mainly by the following factors: PageRank of the page on where the link to your site is on, whether or not the page is relevant to your site, and the anchor text or the text on the link to your site (that is, use your keywords on the link to your site).

There are several other tools as well such a real PageRank checker, DataCenter Watch, Link Validator, and a lot more.

All these features are for free, all you have to do is sign up for a free account.

Hope this helps!

Article Marketer | Gaining Backlinks

On this site you'll find a useful tool for posting articles on the web and for gaining backlinks

http://www.articlemarketer.com/

GTrends Word Tracker Keyword Research Tool Down to Investigate

The keyword research tool Gtrends http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/ is currently down to investigate the problem about the keyword "Superconductors", because Google seems to be giving erroneous data.

Gtrends is something you can use to research niche keywords that you can dominate--those keywords that you can target without too much competition that you won't have a chance to rank at all.

Hope this service will be up and running again soon.

Some SEO tools for Keyword research

Here's some free online tools to help you with keyword research. These sites are phenomenal, and you should try them out.

www.spyfu.com
www.hittail.com
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/