Keyword selection is the most important aspect of SEO strategy. If you target the wrong keywords, you could be wasting time and money on a strategy that will never deliver the goods.

SEO keyword selection is part art, and part science. It’s an art in that you need to think like your audience, and evaluate each keyword’s relevance as it relates to your brand and objectives. It’s a science in that once you’ve compiled a list of potential keywords, it’s a numbers game. Ultimately, you’re looking to strike a balance among Monthly Search Volume, Level of Competition, and Keyword Relevance. All three factors must be optimized if you want to maximize ROI on your SEO strategy. But how do you put it all together to evaluate which keywords are right for your site? I’ve created metric called the Keyword Optimization Index to help evaluate keywords. Here’s how it works…

Read more

As CPMs fall on almost all forms of advertising (including online), publishers are preparing by exploring new business models. One such business model is paid content: users pay to access a portion or all of the website content. There are some very rare exceptions where paid content does have possibilities (such as market research, financial analysis, and any other types of content which businesses can profit from reading), but for newspaper and magazine publishers, it’s pretty clear that paid content is not an attractive option, at least in the near future. Here is my reasoning…

Read more

Measuring the amount and quality of traffic generated through Twitter can be challenging since most Twitter activity occurs outside of the web, on desktop clients like TweetDeck, mobile apps like Echofon, and other types of third party applications.

I’ve found six reports for Twitter client statistics from Many Eyes/IBM, TwitStat, Sysomos, Twalytics, Funkatron, and TweetStats, however there are some big differences among their reports. For example, web (twitter.com) usage varies from 18.9% to 48%; TweetDeck varies from 6.6% to 13.8%; and Hootsuite varies from 0.6% to 5.2%. That’s a lot of variation considering these reports were all generated on the same day (Feb 5, 2010) with the exception of the Sysomos report (Nov 16, 2009). Averaging the results among all six reports reduces the variances likely due to the different data collection methodologies.

Read more