Using various tools can help you find more keywords to target. You can often find some great little gems that you wouldn’t usually think of that really are worth adding to your campaign. But with so many out there that all claim to have the most accurate information it’s difficult to finally settle on a list of keywords to use for your SEO campaign. So how can you be sure you’re targeting the right keywords?

You can always go for the obvious Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find your keywords. This is a free resource from Google and can help you find some good keywords to target, along with how many times each keyword is searched for and in which regions of the world. This tool isn’t so good for digging out those long-tail keywords but can give you a good idea on what people are searching for, in what volume and also offers related suggestions that you may want to consider.

Some go for Wordtracker, a paid keyword research tool that utilises search query results collected from Dogpile. This is a great tool for picking out those long-tail keywords and can help you find those gems that can bring in the real high quality traffic, although tends to be a little out of date as their database is only updated every 160 days.

Others look at what their competition is doing and base their list of keywords on what they are targeting – again, an effective way of generating an initial list of keyword terms to base your research on.

You get the idea – there are various other keyword research tools that are widely used. Some are free and some are paid services. But, with the explosion of social media there are plenty of tools that don’t initialy spring to mind when it comes to starting your keyword research…

How about Twitter? Not only can you use tools to find what people are talking about and how they phrase their references to a particular product, service or idea it can give you great ideas on hot topics to write about that relate to your industry that are likely to be Stumbled, Dugg, Retweeted and so on.

How about Facebook Lexicon? It lets you check terms that are being used across people’s walls and follows the trending of them, in a similar way to Google Trends (http://www.google.co.uk/trends).

There are many more tools that you could use for your keyword research that I haven’t mentioned – some that maybe do deserve the mention, others not so much. What tools do you use for your keyword research and have they been successful – or even accurate? Which do you find most helpful?

So with such a flexible and powerful platform (one that doesn’t even need to be used for a blog!) it makes sense to make the most of it’s usefulness and ease of use as a business tool and take advantage of every opportunity to optimise your WordPress blog for the search engines.

To get you started WordPress Codex includes a page dedicated to SEO topics and this page is a must-read for anyone running a WordPress blog or website.

There are a also number of great plug-ins that make it easy to implement SEO techniques with WordPress:

• All in One SEO Pack, a very popular plugin that performs a number of functions, including optimizing your page titles, adding META tags automatically and removing common duplicate content.
• Google XML Sitemaps which is another popular plug-in, Google XML Sitemaps creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap for your blog.
• KB Robots.txt enabling you to create and edit Robots.txt files from within the WordPress admin.
• Redirection helps you monitor 404 errors, automatically manage 301 redirections when a post URL changes and has a powerful set of features that helps you redirect users to different pages based on various conditions.
• Breadcrumb NavXT adds breadcrumb navigation to your WordPress blog with this plug-in.
• WordPress Related Posts allows your blog to feature related posts.
• SEO Friendly Images automatically adds the ALT and TITLE attributes to images.
• Nofollow Case by Case enables you to decide which comments should have or nofollow attribute which is otherwise automatically added by WordPress.

Have you used any other plugins that you found useful or prefer to use regularly? Please comment below.

So, without further introduction, here are some very useful tools you should consider to support your SEO work.

Basic SEO health check and analysis
1. Website Grader by Hubspot – Website.Grader.com is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness potential of a website. It provides a score that incorporates elements such as website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

2. Content Duplication finder by Virante – Virante’s content duplication tool can diagnose common causes and effects of duplicate content penalties such as server headers, Google index issues and more.

3. Builtwith by Gary Brewer – BuiltWith.com is a website analysis tool, providing technical analysis and SEO optimization information to assist in your website’s SEO effectiveness.

4. Quarkbase – Quarkbase.com is the great way to find website information including social bookmarking stats, Alexa ranking, related sites and domain information.

Basic back link analysis
5. Yahoo Site Explorer is a fantastic tool for basic back link information, to view the most popular pages from any site and to dive into a comprehensive site map.

6. Google Browser by Touchgraph -  TG Google Browser is a free Java application which you can use to explore the connections between related websites.

Basic on-page analysis
7. SEO Browser by Anduro Marketing and McAnerin International Inc – SEO-Browser.com is a free tool which lets you see your website like a search engine sees it. Useful to find image with no alt text, to ensure drop downs are crawlable and much more.

8. Image Analyzer by Juicy Studio – Image Analyzer will highlight images without alt text, long image names and much more. Because image optimisation is essential for successful SEO, image analyzers are an absolute must.

9. Server Header Checker by SEO Consultants -  Server Header Checker allows you to analyze your non www homepage version and other pages to check that the server header is returning a 301 redirect response, 200 OK response etc.

10. Popuri by Xavier Larrea – Popuri.us allows you to quickly check your link popularity across social bookmarking sites, Google Page Rank and much more.

What tools do you use? Feel free to share below.

Google Blogoscoped reported that Microsoft’s search engine Bing lets you know different domains hosted on a given IP (every web server is assigned with a unique IP address on the Internet).

First of all you will need to get the IP address of a domain. You can get the IP of any website by entering the domain name (e.g. domain.co.uk) into a tool like host2ip. Or, for those that are a little more tech-savvy, by opening the command prompt on your computer (start->Run->cmd) and typing ‘ping domain.com’. The output that appears will contain the IP address of that particular domain

Now, make note of the IP, go to Bing and type ‘ip:’ in the search box followed by the IP address you want to check. Then, the search will show you list of all domain names hosted on the same server.

The tools included around the time of the launch included Webmaster Tools, AdSense and Custom Search, aimed at helping website owners understand website and search performance, monetize their websites and improve the user experience. Going in the same vein, Google has recently rolled out more new tools to the program for all to take advantage of.

Since the introduction of the initial offerings many hosting companies have reported that it helped them enhance their services by integrating with the appropriate APIs. With the services program, webmasters can configure accounts, submit Sitemaps with Webmaster Tools, create Custom Search Boxes for their sites and monetize their content with AdSense.

Now, there are more tools to help you run a better website and offer your users more. These new tools are:

• Web Elements: With Web Elements, webmasters can enhance their websites with the ease of cut-and-paste. They can also provide maps, real-time news, calendars, presentations, spreadsheets and YouTube videos on their sites. Further, the Conversation Element allows websites to create more engagement with their communities. The Custom Search Element provides inline search within a site and it does not require you to write any code. The Custom Search Element also provides various options to customize further.
• Page Speed: Page Speed enables webmasters to evaluate the performance of their web pages. Webmasters can also use this tool to get suggestions on how to improve their websites.
• The Tips for Hosters page: With a set of tips, it assists hosters help their customers in creating richer websites for their visitors. The set of tips includes the use of analytics tools such as Google Analytics to help webmasters understand their traffic and linguistic tools such as Google Translate to help websites reach a broader audience.

Web hosting companies or web hosters who would like to participate in the Google Services for Websites program can apply here. As a web hoster, your integration with the service APIs will be required before you can make the services available to your customers!

Ranking Checker – You can use this tool to check your search engine rankings in Google and Caffeine.

Google vs. Google Caffeine – This tool takes your search and returns results from Google and Caffeine at the same time in a split screen. Great for those that need to do lots of testing.

International Google vs. Caffeine – This is another split screen tool but in addition to the US version of Google it also does the .ie / .de / .co.uk versions too.

Plug Caffeine into FireFox Search Bar – This adds Caffeine as a search engine to your FF search bar.

If you have found any other useful tools to use with Caffeine feel free to discuss by posting them a comment below.

1) Improved homepage navigation:-
Whilst on the webmaster tools homepage it’s now easy to make a clear distinction between verified and unverified sites.

2) Ability to block non home page site links:-
You can now block non home page site links which makes things a little easier as before now if you owned joeblogs.co.uk there has been no option to block site links from interior pages, for example    joeblogs.co.uk/about.html .

3) Domain name search:-
With the addition of a site selector you can now see a list of all your verified domains and the new tool has an added search function allowing you to search as you type.

4)View URL removal requests:-
Last but not least, my favourite new addition -You are now able to view URL removal requests for your sites which have been submitted by others with the ability to revoke them.  This is a great new addition as previously if a request to remove one of your URL’s was made by mistake it would have been very difficult to reverse.

All great new additions in my opinion and hopefully the start of plenty more to come.

Manually type the following prefixes and note their utility:

• link:url Shows other pages with links to that url.
• related:url same as “what’s related” on serps.
• site:domain restricts search results to the given domain.
• allinurl: shows only pages with all terms in the url.
• inurl: like allinurl, but only for the next query word.
• allintitle: shows only results with terms in title.
• intitle: similar to allintitle, but only for the next word. “intitle:seoforgoogle google” finds only pages with seoforgoogle in the title, and google anywhere on the page.
• cache:url will show the Google version of the passed url.
• info:url will show a page containing links to related searches, backlinks, and pages containing the url. This is the same as typing the url into the search box.
• spell: will spell check your query and search for it.
• stocks: will lookup the search query in a stock index.
• filetype: will restrict searches to that filetype. “-filetype:pdf” to remove Adobe PDF files.
• daterange: is supported in Julian date format only. 2452384 is an example of a Julian date.
• maps: If you enter a street address, a link to Yahoo Maps and to MapBlast will be presented.
• phone: enter anything that looks like a phone number to have a name and address displayed. Same is true for something that looks like an address (include a name and zip code)
• site:www.somesite.net “+www.somesite.+net” – (tells you how many pages of your site are indexed by google)
• allintext: searches only within text of pages, but not in the links or page title
• allinlinks: searches only within links, not text or title