I just read (yet another) excellent article by Brian Clark from Copyblogger (a blog which is quickly becoming one of my favorites).  It’s called 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers and I highly recommend that you read it right now.  In it, Brian comes up with a number of useful, creative ways in which you can encourage people to sign up to your RSS feed.  Indeed, he claims that this method has helped him garner 6,000 subscribers in 10 months!  What’s more, he argues that the number of subscribers to your blog is a more telling indicator of the success to your blog than other, more common stats such as visitors and page views:

I value subscribers more than any other measure of blog success, such as page views or raw traffic. Subscribers are the life blood of a successful blog in my opinion, and frankly, I wish I had more of them.

Brian explains this comment in more depth in another entry:

In my opinion, there’s too much reliance on search engines and short-term traffic in blogging. You can’t control Google or its ever-shifting SERPs, and you can’t really predict when and how much traffic will come from incoming links.  But your subscriber list is all yours, as long as you treat it right.

Therefore, in order to help us make our blogs a bit more successful, he offers ten tips on how to get more people to subscribe to your blog.  Those tips are the following:

1. Make it easy and obvious (how to sign up to your RSS feed)
2. Be laser focused (on your topic)
3. Offer something of value in exchange for signing up to the blog (see his blog for his rather clever suggestion of how to do this with an RSS feed)
4. Use viral ebooks
5. [Use a] dedicated subscription landing page
6. Become a guest blogger
7. Start a podcast
8. Post in forums
9. Networking
10. Cross-promotional deals (again see his blog for a suggestion of how to accomplish this)

To these ten ideas I’d like to add a few more:

1. Use your newsletter
   Mention your RSS feed in your newsletter.  Tell people the benefits of signing up and ask them to do so.
    
2. Explain what RSS is and how to sign up to it
   Many people still do not know what RSS feeds are.  It is unreasonable to expect that people will sign up to something that they don’t understand.  Therefore, it is important that you inform your visitors of what RSS is, why it can make their (virtual) life better and how to actually use it. 
    
3. Promote your feed in your email signature
   Every email that you send (or that anyone in your company or organization sends) can also be a mini-advertisement by simply including information about your site in the signature of your email (you can even automate this signature with many, if not most, email programs).  Include in this signature a link to your RSS feed as well as a call-to-action encouraging people to sign up to it. 

And while we are at it, note what Brian has had to say on this topic in a different post.

1. Prominently display your subscription options
   Make it as easy as possible for visitors to your site to find your RSS feeds.
    
2. Simplify the subscription process
   To quote Brian himself:  “Reduce the number of steps and the amount of data it takes to complete the subscription process, and fewer people will abandon the subscription, or get distracted by something else.”

Well, with that said, all we have to do is actually implement his ideas (something that we plan to do with our new design of the site).  In the meantime, there is one easy idea that I plan to start implementing right now; namely, ask you to sign-up to my RSS feed.  Here goes:

Get free updates of this site via RSS!  To learn more about RSS, click here (or here or here).

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There is a lot going on at SEM Basics these days, so I haven’t had much time to blog.  I thought, therefore, that I’d make some collections of links to topics that I think you will find of value.  Here is the first one, three articles explaining RSS or Really Simply Syndication Feeds. 

• What are online RSS feeds?
• How to explain RSS the Oprah way
• Beginner’s Guide To RSS

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WordZe was nice enough to give me a free day pass so that I could review their product.  So here I am, ready to get started.  I thought I’d start the review with a kind of play-by-play, taking you with me as I start to get to know WordZe a bit better.  So here we go.  First stop, the home page:

It’s seems that the natrual first stop for us is the Find More Keywords section (the binacular icon in the type left corner), so let’s start there.  My plan is to test the keyword ”seo”.  I have purposely chosen a broad term to start out with.  My goal is to a) see what related keywords WordZe comes up with, b) note the quality of the keywords that WordZe provides, and c) see what level of keyword analysis WordZe is capable of.  With that said, let’s see what WordZe can do.

The Keyword Research Tool

Clicking on Find More Keywords brings us to the following screen:

The first thing that catches my attention are the filter options.  This seems like a nice feature, although obviously we’d have to see how well it works to make a final judgement.  My only complaint is that you can only filter for one option at a time (i.e., you can filter Adult sites or Drug sites, but not both at the same time).  I would prefer to have the option to filter all of these types of results at once and I don’t know why they didn’t give us that option. 

Note also the “select project” field.  You can evidently create your own projects and (I imagine) save them for future reference.  Creating a new project is easy enough to do, simply click on the arrow to the right of Select Project and click on New Project.  A window instantly appears where you can name your new project.  I have done so and am now ready to search for the word SEO. 

The search results

Having searched for the keyowrd “seo” here are a few of the initial results:

 

Let me first say that WordZe is fast, this took all of .585 seconds (according to their stats) to give me this list.  Testing the speed out a bit further, I click on SEO company which takes a whopping .579 seconds to upload.  This is certainly quicker than Keyword Discovery which takes forever (although it seems faster today than how I remember it was when I last used it).  It is also quicker than Wordtracker (whose new Wordtracker Research Tool is decently fast).  I wonder, though, is that because WordZe is inherently faster than Wordtracker, or because there are far more users of Wordtracker than WordZe.  I wanted to also compare WordZe to Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool, but I couldn’t access the tool (something that I find happens often with Yahoo).  Needless to say, .585 seconds is quicker than a tool which doesn’t even show up. 

A few other points before we take a look at the keywords themselves.  For one, note that WordZe came up with 4590 keywords.  That’s quite a bit, certainly more than the 1000 maximum that Wordtracker allows.  Of course, we don’t know anything yet about the quality of those words, but still it’s a decent number.  However, WordZe only shows 20 words per page, which means that if I want to analyze this list online I’d have to sift through 230 pages, not an easy task.  There also does not appear to be anyway to change the number of keywords displayed on a page, a feature that I personally would like to have.  

Downloading keywords

With that said, WordZe makes it rather easy to analyze these keywords offline, simply save the entire list (again, super fast) and click download.  Having downloaded my keyword list, I quickly scan the keyword list.  My first impression is that not all of these keywords are going to be of the highest quality (for instance, I doubt I’ll have much use for “link popularity seo site site software submission submission”).  But still, there are certainly a large number of interesting keywords to take a deeper look at, such as “clever seo”, “fast seo”, and “diy seo” (which I imagine stands for do-it-yourself seo).  There are, of course, so more standard keywords like “seo help”, “seo expert”, etc. 

All in all, the list looks nice.  I do wonder, though, why they don’t include the Estimated results.  After all, if they think that this is something they should include online, I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to view these stats offline.  Also, I would like the option to easily filter out keywords longer than a certain number of words as I find this helps get rid of most of the junk.  WordZe does have the option of saving and downloading only select keywords, but with 230 pages of keywords to go through that seems like more work than I want to go through.  In short, the list looks nice, but it would be helpful if WordZe could add some more sophisticated sorting and filtering options for that list.

The Top Ten Keyword

Let’s now take a closer look at these keywords.  In particular, let’s note the top ten results and compare them to the top ten results of some other popular keyword tools:

WordZe			Wordtracker			Overture		Keyword Discovery		Google Suggest
Keyword	Count	Estimated	Keyword	Popularity	Predict	Keyword	Searches	Keyword	Searches	Keyword
seo	3178	74413	seo	1138	1470	seo	63694	seo	945125	seo
seo services	1454	34045	seo michigan ohio	669	864	seo company	11580	seo services	73968	seo tools
seo company	1318	30861	seo services	514	664	seo services	11220	seo company	33131	seo forum
seo training	975	22830	seo company	256	330	seo tool	5674	seo optimization	32656	seo services
seo firm	815	19083	internet marketing seo	253	326	seo firm	5653	seo firm	32597	seo company
seo optimization	667	15618	seo web design	250	322	seo expert	5238	internet marketing seo	24554	seo book
learn seo	625	14634	michigan seo	238	307	engine promotion search seo software strategy	5098	seo keywords	19358	seo software
seo expert	598	14002	web site promotion seo search engine optimization submission	222	286	internet marketing seo	5035	seo tools	18698	seo india
seo tools	495	11590	seo technology	222	286	seo web design	4554	customized seo	17204	seo forums
seo software	494	11567	search engine optimization web site submission seo software	219	282	seo optimization	4542	seo tips	15609	seo guy

Looking at the words themselves, it seems that WordZe, Keyword Discovery, and Google Suggest have the cleanest top ten list.  Wordtracker and Overture, on the other hand, have some phrases which are of seemingly little value (”web site promotion seo search engine optimization submission” is not a phrase that I plan to optimize my site for).  Also, I can’t imagine that seo michigan ohio and michigan seo are top ten SEO material and yet Wordtracker has both of them in the top ten.  It is also worth noting that there is a certain consistancy between all of the results.  SEO, seo services, seo company appear in every list, and SEO Tools appears on every list except for Wordtracker and SEO Optimization appears on all the lists except for Wordtracker and Google Suggest.  Furthermore, every single one of these keywords appear in WordZe’s top ten results. 

Also interesting is that eight out of WordZe’s top ten keywords appear on at least one of the other top ten list.  And some of the other words which don’t appear in the top ten of WordZe, still appear fairly high up in their list.  For instance, Internet Marketing SEO  is number 18, SEO Michigan Ohio is number 23, Michigan SEO is number 33, SEO Technology is number 39, and SEO Web Design is number 42.  The only thing that I found strange was that the phrase SEO Keywords does not appear at all in WordZe’s database, whereas it appears in the database of all the other keyword tools.  It makes me wonder what other keywords might be missing from WordZe.  On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be that popular a keyword.  Wordtracker recorded five searches for that phrase over the last 90 days and Yahoo noted only 214 searches for the phrase over the last month (a number which inlcudes in it searches for the singular version SEO Keyword).  That makes me wonder even more about Keyword Discovery’s results, which notes over 19,000 searches for that phrase over the last year. 

All in all, it seems that WordZe is returning high quality keywords, particularly when you take into consideration that you have to wait to position number 71 to get a phrase such as “web site submission seo software search engine optimization”.  Furthermore, the ordering of those keywords seems better than most of the other keyword services.  Of course, this is hardly the most scientific study, but as an initial investigation things look good. 

Digging Deeper

One of the potentially nicest features of WordZe is the Dig feature, which “inspects over 10,000 websites” for related keywords.  The idea of quickly searching numerous other websites to find related keywords sounds promising.  The problem, though, is in the implementation. 

When I dug the term SEO I was given an Excel spreadsheet with almost 3,000 new keywords.  There were a number of quality related terms which WordZe provided, such as “search engine placement”, “website promotion”, “online marketing”, and more (not to mention phrases such as “search engine marketing” which I had hoped/expected WordZe to return).  Similarly, when I dug the phrase SEO Training I was given a list of nearly 2900 keywords, again containing some decent related keyword phrases. 

The problem is that many of these 3000 or so keyword phrases are useless (for instance, “wine forum” isn’t of much use to me).  And while the list does contain some quality related keywords, it is rather tedious and time-consuming to find them.  Compare that to Wordtracker, wherein I was able to sift out 20 or so related keyword phrases in a matter of minutes.  It may be that WordZe’s list of 3000 keywords contains more than 20 quality related terms (although I’m not sure), but I personally don’t have the time to find out. 

Keyword Stats

Next, let’s take a look at WordZe’s search stats.  They have two columns which interst us, Count and Estimated.  Count means the number of times that this phrase appeared in their database, whic is gathered from internet service providers over the last 30 days.  My guess is that Estimated is an estimation of the the keyword phrase for the entire internet, although I am not positive and I did not find that the FAQ gave a clear explination of this term.   

Along those lines I’d like to point out that it was not easy for me to find the FAQ section where these terms were explained.  I would like to see a better written, more thorough help section which is easily accessible from each and every page.  Also, I think that these terms should be explained whereever they are used with a simple ? link right next to the phrase in question. 

Given that I don’t know where WordZe gets their data from and I don’t really know what the term Estimated refers to, I look at WordZe’s stats as merely an indication of relative popularity until such time as I can better understand the figures.  I should point out that WordZe relative ranking of the top ten keywords roughly coincides with the relative rankings of all the other keyword tools.  I take this as a positive sign.  Still, it’d be nice to have a better sense of what the numbers represent.

Keyword Analysis - KEI

There are three different types of analysis that you can perform on keywords with WordZe.  The first is KEI (which compares the number of sites that show up in the search results to the popularity of a keyword.  This is basically useless since the number of sites that show up in the search results indicates nothing about the number of sites that one is competing against (let alone the quality of that competition).  I imagine that the only reason that WordZe includes these figures is because it is customary to include these stats.  What would be much better than KEI would be to perform an intitle/inanchor search for each keyword on Google (to learn about the advantages of an intitle/inanchor search see our How To Analyze Your Keyword List Tutorial). 

If WordZe can calculate KEI then they should be able to calculate intitle/inanchor.  If they were to do so, then they would already set themselves apart from any and all keyword tools except for Keyword Country (which I have never used) and Keyword Elite.  It certainly would be a tremendous improvement over the analysis provided by Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

Another problem with the KEI analysis is that (assuming that I would be interested in the data) I can only check this information one keyword at a time.  For large lists of keywords this is just not realistic.  What is needed is the ability to download this information (or rather the intitle/inanchor info) into an excel spreadsheet for the entire keyword list.  This would be significantly more useful in terms of quality keyword analysis. 

Search Engine Results Stats (aka WorldRank)

Perhaps one of the most exciting and important features of WordZe is the fact that you can analyze the top search results for each and every keyword.  WordZe calls this feature WorldRank.  This is a much needed feature in Keyword Research Tools.  Analyzing the top search results in Google (and the other major search engines) for a given keyword is crucial for determining the competitiveness of any given keyword.  As such, it is about time that a serious keyword tool provided us with such analysis. 

With that said, at the moment I find this feature of only limited value.  For starters, at the moment the amount of useful data in WorldRank is limited.  It checks only the number of backlinks as well as the age of the site.  There is other important information that they could (and should) include, such as the PR of the site, the number of .edu, .gov, and Wikipedia backlinks, etc.  There already exist tools which provide this data such as SEOBook’s SEO For Firefox and SEOMoz’s Page Strength Tool.  There is no reason why WordZe couldn’t provide the same information.  What would be of even greater value is if WordZe could analyze that backlink data for anchor text, unique IP addresses, and average PR (similar to what SEO Elite does).  At the same time, it might also be helpful if they could provide on-page optimization details for the top sites in the search engine results (such as whether or not the keyword appears in the title tag, h1 tags, etc.) similar to what Keyword Elite does. 

Another problem that I have with WorldRank is that it is possible to access this data for only one keyword at a time.  This limits the usefullness of this feature.  What would be nice, although perhaps difficult to do, is the ability to access this data for the entire list at one time.  I grant that this a technically difficult feat to accomplish, but if WordZe could find a way to pull it off they would clearly set themselves apart from all other Keyword Research Tools in terms of the quality of their analysis. 

My last thoughts on WorldRank has to do with the links per month by domain stat and the claim that WorldRank is patent pending. 

WorldRank provides a stat which they call links per month per domain.  It even comes with a nice graph as if to emphasize it’s importance:

I do not see tremendous value in the statistic.  All that it is, as far as I can tell, is the number of backlinks divided by the age of the site.  This stat tells me nothing about the quality of the backlinks.  What’s worse, it implies that ranking well is merely a numbers game, when today the quality rather than quality is the name of the linking game.   There are  other problems with this stat, but this is the main one.  I think that WordZe would do better to offer us real stats of real importance, rather than cleverly packaged statistics of little to no importance.

Along those lines, WordZe reports that their WorldRank feature is “patent pending”.  I do not know if there are any criteria for applying for a patent, but I see nothing in WorldRank that seems novel enough or significant enough to warrant receiving a patent.  As far as I can tell this is a simple search for backlinks and the age of the site with a couple of mathematical equations thrown in to boot.  What’s more, the data provided is no where near as sophisticated as the SEO for Firefox Tool, the Page Strength Tool not to mention more programs such as SEO Elite which provides even more sophisticated backlink data.  What then is WordZe trying to get patented?  Saying that WorldRank is patent pending sounds impressive, but the product still has a ways to go to actually be impressive.  Still, it is a step in the right direction for Keyword Research Tools.  

Historical Keyword Data

Another nice feature of WordZe is the fact that it provides historical data.  Again, this is provided with a nice graph along with a statistical chart:

 

This is, theoretically, a good start and certainly can be useful.  I say theoretically because we know little to nothing about the data sources for WordZe and thus it is difficult to know how reliable these figures are.  Further research will need to be done to determine their reliability.  In the meantime, assuming that these are reliable figures, it is certainly useful data.  But again, WordZe could improve on the functionality of this feature.  In particular, it would be nice if WordZe could allow us to define the dates that we are intersted in as well as provide more pre-set options (such as a year and/or a season).  At the moment one can only get historical data for one month.

Conclusion

Overall, I think that WordZe has promise, but still has a ways to go.  It is certainly a pleasure to use, in that it is fast, aesthetically pleasant to look at and well organized.  Also, WordZe seems to provide (at least initially) large lists of high quality keywords.  Furthermore, WordZe has taken an important step by easily providing backlink data related to each and every keyword.  Nonetheless, there are a number of improvements that WordZe can (and should) make to their tool before it can honestly be considered the “innovation in Keyword Research” which they claim it to be. 

With all the improvements that WordZe can make I still think that there can be room for it as part of your keyword research arsenal.  In particular, WordZe could potentially be a powerful companion to Keyword Elite (whose keyword building features I am less than enamored with).  WordZe could quickly provide a nice, large list of keywords and Keyword Elite could filter and analyze those keywords.  This is a powerful one-two punch, and one that I think should be seriously considered. 

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Highrankings has an interesting discussion on site redesign and SEO.  It started with the following question from

We are redesigning our site and improving the navigation. This implies moving many pages to new directories and sub-directories.  What is the best way to deal with handling issues to original pages that appeases the Google Gods?  There are 100s of pages moved - not sure whether you use re-directs in the meta tags or some magic code if it exists in .htaccess (some hope!)  Some advice please…..

Among the responses to his question was this one:

Be VERY careful about this as you can slaughter your rankings if you get it wrong…You need to get someone to write your redirect for you, I assume you have an seo or a tech head that can handle it? 

…You should try to keep the same file-names if possible at all, and in the same folder (obviously), if you can not do this, then you have the laborious task of writing a 301 list. Failing that, if you are moving pages en-bloc, then redirect match is the best way.

Something that is often overlooked at redesign time, but is more important than ever then, is the custom 404 page. Make sure that your custom 404 page is well crafted and will draw lost souls back into your site, by being self explanatory. Don’t just add lists of links, use text and describe what is on each page…The custom 404 page is crucial at the best of times, but after redesign it is crucial…

Redesigning is far FAR more risky than starting from cold, so be very VERY thorough!

To see the rest of the conversation, click here.

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