Your favourite SEO and Keyword tools?

JaceBarnett I don't think I am doing anything special. I do SEO like I have been doing since 1996. Yes there have been new services since then (like WordPress, YouTube, Twitter ) and I do use them but at the core it's still the same. What I do takes time and I wish it didn't but it does. I am not opposed to tools but I know myself - I can very easily succumb to temptation and abuse the tools. Search Engines employ people that are a lot smarter than me and they will quickly take me to task.

My basic premise starts with the customer. So I try to think like one. If it is a corporate product, that is a different educational level and they conduct their searches differently. In other words, their English is different. Why does that matter?

Well that changes your key phrases and tags. For some odd reasons, Google gives a lot of weightage to Tags and none to Meta Descriptions. It used to be the other way around when Infoseek, Excite, WebCrawler, Alta Vista .... etc were big names. Yes I am dated. In addition, your page will be very toned down. Functional, informative but boring.

I understand PageRanks but could never figure out their worth. All the theory about them is fine. I respect it. But why one of my PR2 site shows up number 1 on Google. The second entry is a competitor with a PR6. I guess page rank works for him.

BookMarking - I understand the concept. It's worth I am not sure of. When I have experimented with BookMarks - they don't show up in sites connected. So why bother. I don't say they don't work. I am just an agnostic about them.

Directory Listing - The only directories that do matter are DMOZ and Yahoo Directories. Both seem to be 12 years behind schedule. Yahoo no longer offers free listing. If they do, they have it hidden somewhere and I don't want to pay $400 just to get listed in their directory.

Blog Comments: It works. But I only comment on very few blogs when I think I have something to say. Maybe doing it en masse would help.

Twitter is a very useful tool but not the way most people think. Tweeting all day long won't get you too many clicks. What I like is the SEO value of your tweet. For example, your twitter username is also your twitter page. On a traditional website, IANA — Example domains, yourpage is a specific indexable page. Accordingly, http://twitter.com/yourtwittername is an indexable page. So if you advertise your product as a tweet, you now have an external link pointing to your site. In my experience, when it really matters, don't use a link shortner on such tweets. It may not look neat but it matters to Google somehow.

You don't have to tweet all day long. Just create 3-4 twitter accounts and occasionally send out a tweet with your full link.

I will one day come up with a training course. However; that is easier said than done. To do stuff yourself is one thing. To come up with a training product is many times as hard. I intend to but when that would be, I do not know. Maybe end of this year or next.

Again, I hope I have not offended anyone.