If yesterday’s post about the SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet got you looking for more information on SEO standards and best practices, then the subject of today’s post will knock your socks off.

Today I ran across Adam Audette’s SEO Guide to Information Architecture and was blown away by all of the great information and practical advice all wrapped up into a single document.

The guide includes the following sections:

• Domains
• Sections & Categories
• Pages
• Internal Linking
• Final Considerations

As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If yesterday’s post about the SEOmoz Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet got you looking for more information on SEO standards and best practices, then the subject of today’s post will knock your socks off.

Today I ran across Adam Audette’s SEO Guide to Information Architecture and was blown away by all of the great information and practical advice all wrapped up into a single document.

The guide includes the following sections:

• Domains
• Sections & Categories
• Pages
• Internal Linking
• Final Considerations

As someone who has underestimated the importance of information architecture and on-page optimization for SEO in the past, I can attest that modifications to code, design, and internal linking can truly boost your site’s SEO performance in meaningful ways. So take some time today and read Adam’s guide…you can thank me later.

Posted by James Omdahl at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, so I had never heard of the AdWords Change History Tool until today. Yeah, laugh if you want – but I bet there are a number of you out there that have never heard of it either, so this post is for you.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Change History Tool, it is a feature in AdWords that allows you to look back on the account changes you’ve made in since 2006. In doing so, the tool helps you remember what changes you made that could have caused a change in your accounts performance.

To access the tool, just login to your AdWords account and click on ‘Tools” under the “Campaign Management” tab. Once you have done this, click on “My Change History” and enter a date range.

The way I see it, this is an invaluable tool these days, especially for people who are managing large AdWords accounts that require constant tweaking to try to increase ad ranking and decrease cost-per-click. By utilizing something like the Change History Tool, a PPCer will be able to better interpret the effects of account changes on their quality score/ranking/etc.

Also exciting (and the way I learned about this tool), PPC Hero announced that Google will be adding some graphing features that will give advertisers a more graphical look at how the changes effect their accounts.

If you’ve got an AdWords account or 20, make sure you start taking advantage of the Change History Tool…it could help you answer some of the magical mysteries of AdWords.

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First off, apologies for the lack of posts over the last week. I was out of the office so things got a bit stale. I’m playing a bit of catch-up on work, but hopefully the posts will settle back to their regular intervals now.

I’ve been digging through my feed reader today and finding a number of gems. The greatest in my option that I have run across so far is a post from Barry Schwartz titled US Court Learns SEO, Decides META Keywords Don’t Matter.

The post discusses the recent case Standard Process v. Banks which looked at trademark infringement as it related to SEO. In the process of deciding the outcome of the case, the court got up to date on SEO and decided that the use of META keyword tags was immaterial to the ranking of a particular webpage.

Barry’s post is based off the analysis from law professor Eric Goldman, which can be found here, which includes a quote that I love. It is:

Lawyers, on the other hand, have been living in a parallel fantasy universe where keyword metatags single-handedly divert unwaveringly brand-loyal customers to piratical competitors.

Gotta love that.

This brings up an interesting SEO tactic – don’t try to figure out SEO, let the courts do it for you.

Kidding.

Two more articles of SEO interest for you to peruse over the weekend:

Diagnosing The SEO Health of Your Website by Jill Whalen
Link Development Tool Shortcuts for Firefox by Rae Hoffman

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week is keyword research week on the PPC Hero blog, so it’s needless to say that I’m looking forward to each new posts they do. Today’s PPC Hero post got me really excited since it covers one of my favorite things - free SEO/SEM tools.

The list cover 4 different keyword tools that can help you expand your keyword list, research keyword volume and trends, and even identify a general cost-per-click for different keywords. All important things to understand before you start a PPC or SEO effort for a particular product or service.

Out of all of the tools I think the one I like most is Spyfu.com. Specifically, I really like the data they give on the CPC range for keywords – something I’ve been missing since Yahoo! went all “black box” with their Panama platform.

Make sure you read the full post, Expand Your Keyword List For Free: 6 Keyword Tools You Should Be Using (but probably aren’t), for a full rundown on what each tool can do for you.

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quick! Raise your hand if you can accurately guess the exact pixel size of an image by just looking at it.

Anyone?

I’m guessing not. I’m also guessing that I’m not the only person who has been in a situation where you need an image to be a particular size, but you’re not sure how big it is.

Enter the JR Screen Ruler. This little download can give you an expandable moveable ruler on your screen – just perfect for quick measuring of images, webpages or the size of Ivan the Terrible’s hat (200 pixels!).

Also cool, the ruler will give you size in pixels. Inches, Centimeters and Picas.

If you want to get a JR Screen Ruler of your own, head to the Spadix Software site to get it – it’s free!

Now if you excuse me, I’ve got some more hats to measure.

[via]

Posted by James Omdahl at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was having lunch with one of our PPC affiliates this week and the topic of privacy policy came up. Specifically, the affiliate said that even if he’s running traffic through AdWords to a thin site “one page site”, the site will still have more than one page – and one of the main reasons is because the site will have a privacy policy page.

Coincidentally, Search Engine Land’s Bill Slawski posted an article that talks about the importance of a privacy policy when you are doing search engine marketing. Like any of Bill’s articles, this one is well thought out and researched and points to three reasons you’d want to make sure you include a privacy policy on your site (so make sure you read the full article here). They are:

1. Privacy policies give your site credibility and reassures your users
2. Whether your site has a privacy policy or not has an influence on your PPC Quality Score with Google
3. Some people think that having a machine readable privacy policy will affect everything for search rankings to the filtration of sites by toolbars and other tools

All this privacy policy talk made me realize that a lot of new affiliate marketers probably don’t even think to add a privacy policy to their affiliate site – which could be hurting their chances of success. If you fall into that boat, you should make it a goal to get a privacy policy added to your site(s) by the beginning of next week.

Oh yeah, one other thing, don’t just go and steal someone’s privacy policy off their site…that’s bad form. Instead use one of the helpful online tools out there like this privacy policy generator.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wow.

Debra Mastaler has done it again. To see what I am talking about check out her comprehensive list of link building tools at Search Engine Land. By comprehensive I mean she covers tools to help in all stages of link building, including tools that:

• Check for broken internal links on your site
• Check for sites that rank well on more than one search engine
• Find “hub sites” that link to more than one of your competitors
• Analyze anchor text on competitor’s links
• Check the age of potential link partner’s domains and their bad neighborhood status
• Search for directories and sites that allow URL submissions in your niche
• Search for blogs that can be mined for links

Based off a quick count it looks like Debra points to no less than 20 sites that can help you get a better grasp on how to build quality links to your site.

Needless to say, I know how I’m spending the rest of my day…

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are an affiliate who doesn't have a word processor on their computer, and you want to quickly write something up in a word processing program, you have a couple choices, both of which have their drawbacks. You can either go out and pay Microsoft a bunch of money to get a copy of Word or you can use one of the alternative programs that are out there like Open Office.

While Word can do a ton of fancy stuff, the average user will likely never do a whole lot with the more advanced Word features, and paying Microsoft and bunch of money for Word never feels that good. Open Office is a good (and free) alternative, but going through the process of downloading and installing can be a bit of a hassle - so if you are into instant gratification, you're not going to be happy.

Luckily, if you are the type who is as impatient as I am, there are some online alternatives to traditional word processing programs that will get you processing in less than a minute.

The first of these alternatives is Google Docs. If you currently have a Google login, Docs is ready and available to you. Just sign in, follow this link and start typing.

Another alternative, if you are scared of the giant Borg of Google eating your thoughts, is a new site called Buzzword. I am actually using Buzzword to type up this blog post and it's working quite well. The site has a very clean design and the navigation and functions are all quite intuitive (something that can't really be said for the latest version of Microsoft Word).

The interesting thing about Buzzwords is that it is flash based, which to me is a neat use of Flash technology.

Both Google Docs and Buzzword natively allow you to output your documents into traditional Word formats, so you don't have to worry about compatibility problems with other programs (yet another problem with the new Word, which likes to put out documents in the "new" Word format which does not play well with other word processors). Both also have sharing and collaboration functionality...which is quite neat.

So if you're looking to save some cash but you still want to process some words, think about using one of the Word alternatives out there. For quick and dirty web work, they are all that you really need.

[Thanks to Web Worker Daily for pointing out Buzzword]

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The DEMO conference happened this week and it gave a lot of companies the opportunity to step out and show their new, innovative ideas/concepts to industry leaders, bloggers and journalists. Needless to say, social media, communication and collaboration were hot topics at the conference.

As I was looking through some of the blogs covering DEMO, I ran across an extremely positive post from prolific tech watcher Marshall Kirkpatrick talking about a widget creation web application called Sprout.

Sprout describes its service as a way to create sophisticated and dynamic interactive content. That pretty much means it’s an easy to use, drag and drop widget maker. The widgets can be anything from an RSS feed reader, like the one I created below, to a countdown clock, to an MP3 player.

After getting my invitation from Sprout I took about a half hour to build my first “sprout.” After a bit of tinkering (and some UI frustration) I ended up with this feed reader for this blog…something that I could add to any website I choose. Pretty cool, but what I really like is that sprout is made to hook into dozens of social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Orcut. So, in effect, you can create a Facebook widget without having to know how to code for Facebook…pretty neat. Here’s what the widget looks like:

Marshall thinks Sprout has a lot of potential, and as long as they can build some post DEMO buzz, I think I agree with him. As Sprout’s features grow I can see potential for using the service to create interesting affiliate-type widgets…so if I were you I’d sign up for an invite and spend a little time seeing what you can come up with.

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve written a bit in the past about how affiliates who are not terribly tech savvy should consider using a content management system to build their affiliate websites. I’ve also suggested that affiliates consider using the WordPress blogging platform to get their sites up and running. Today, I cam across a free e-book that tells you how to do just that.

The book is called How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress and was written by Caroline Middlebrook. The e-book does a fantastic job of outlining how take a domain, get it hosted, and how to install and configure WordPress to build a site that is capable of driving traffic to your AdSense or affiliate links.

While the e-book is a little AdSense heavy, it does a really good job pointing out the various things you will need to do to tweak a WordPress site to turn it into a viable ecommerce site.

Download the book here and enjoy!

Thanks to Shoemoney for pointing this one out.

Posted by James Omdahl at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s a new year, and if you’re one of the few affiliates out there who are still trying to make money online without having a website of your own, it’s time to get off your backside and build something.

And no, I don’t mean setting up a spam blog on Blogger.

Building a professional website will not only give you a lot more control over your business, but lets you control your online destiny as the future seems to be increasingly bleak for spammy hosted pages and “thin” doorway page websites.

The good news is that getting a professional site put together is really not all that hard, and in most cases it can be done in a couple of hours (this doesn’t really include time for creating content for the site, which should be your next priority). In a world where having an online presence is no longer optional; a whole industry of easy and inexpensive (if not free) website creation platforms has cropped up.

One good example is Weebly – a site that lets you create and download entire websites for the low, low price of free. Weebly gives you a number of attractive templates to choose from, the ability to add all sorts of page elements, and even options to add Google maps, videos and blogs to your site. The great thing is that you don’t have to know HTML to use Weebly - but if you do you can do some customization to your site as well.

Once you have your site built, Weebly will either host your site for free or will let you download everything you created into a .zip file so you can upload it to your server (if you are doing PPC or SEO, make sure you host the site yourself, ok?). It’s easy as that!

If you are still one of those affiliates who relies on framing, redirects or just plain old direct linking to merchants, make a resolution to get a site of your own up by then end of January. It’s not hard to do and it will help you future-proof your business.

[Big thanks to Web Worker Daily for pointing out Weebly. Also check out their other two recommendations SiteKreator and SynthaSite. And if you are looking for more of a content management system, make sure you read my posts about WordPress and Web Site Baker.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Getting started in SEO can be a bit challenging, but not for the reasons you may think. The first skill one must learn when learning about search engine optimization is how to filter through the gobs of SEO information online. I can’t tell you how many times an affiliate or colleague has approached me with an outdated SEO tactic that they learned about from a webpage that is two or three years old.

Google search isn’t much of a help when it comes to this stuff, since natural search in Google tends to favor older information. A lot of times searching for something SEO related on the Google will bring up dated and plain old wrong information.

So knowing you can’t really search for SEO info on search engines, where should you search?

The e:visibility Insider knows, and in their blog post Newbie Guide to SEO – Where Do I Start?, the Insider point our where SEOs can get accurate, timely and trusted information on website optimization. The post also includes an SEO Tools section that covers a lot of our favorite tools here at the InsureMe Affiliate Blog.

If you’re an SEO newbie, check out the post and maybe even bookmark it. I have a feeling you are going to want to come back to it as you progress in learning about SEO.

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Video ads. Just typing it leaves me with a feeling of opportunity and skepticism all at once. If you read the research, experts link that online video advertising will be the next big ad platform on the Web – and I bet they’re right. But I also bet that current video ad channels are ineffective in driving direct conversions and are more a branding tool. Not an ideal thing for your average affiliate marketer.

Even with my trepidation in this area, I think forward looking marketers need to start experimenting with this channel sooner rather than later. But getting started means doing something that may be a little outside of most online marketer’s comfort zone – creating a video advertisement.

Even though InsureMe has produced a number of videos in the past, the idea of creating a short video advertisement kind of freaks me out. I mean, what should an ad say? Should we use live action or screen grabs? Should we have music? If so, where can we find something that will sound right but doesn’t have royalties? Is our ad going to look so low-budget that it will scare people off?

Luckily, there are companies sprouting up that are addressing the video creation dilemma. One company of this type that caught my eye today was AdItAll. AdItAll allows you to put together videos using pre-made video clips, audio clips and text effects. The end result is a video ad you have the rights to use for $80.00 to around $400, depending on which elements you use. Here’s their video about how AdItAll works.

Continue reading "Want to Get into Online Video Ads? AdItAll Can Help" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This post will be short and sweet. Why? Because I am too busy because I am pouring over the information available through the Google Webmaster Tools interface. And guess what? You should be doing the same.

Google just rolled our some new features for webmasters like Sitelinks controls and the ability to filter reports in different date ranges (more detail info on this on SEL). For me, the information about our sites internal and external links was not only helpful, but also led me to some pretty good conclusions about changes that should be made to our site. I mean, if Google is going to let you know what they know about your site, don't you want to know what they know? (huh?)

Enough reading…get over to Google Webmaster Tools and start crunching your data.

It could change your life (or at least your afternoon).

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you look on the navigation bar on the right you will see that I have hopped on the BlogRush bandwagon in a hope to see if BlogRush can really bring in a substantial amount of traffic as it has for many other bloggers. The concept is a very impressive one, any you can learn all about its viral goodness from this video.

Sounds like the service is being crushed by its popularity at this point…which isn’t a bad thing. Let’s see if they become the blog widget de jour and sell out to one of the big guys, a la MyBlogLog.

BlogRush could be a great tool for you if you are an affiliate/blogger and you want to get more traffic to your site. My only fear is that the service will be overrun by spammers with AdSense/Blogger blogs...but heck, what isn't being overrun with spammers with AdSense/Blogger blogs these days? (Ahem, CJ says what?)

If you are interested in trying out BlogRush, please use this link here (so I get all the credits for your visits) or not. Thanks to Linda at 5 Star for posting the video…Linda, I went through your referral link because you rule. ;)

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are like me, you might find yourself modifying an existing website from time to time. And if you have luck like me, that also means you are going to have to mess with the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for that page. The thing is, I’m not that great with CSS, and manually modifying a style sheet is an equation for disaster when I’m at the keyboard.

Luckily, Chris Pederick has built a Firefox extension for those of us who are not CSS inclined. The extension is called Web Developer and it gives you the ability to go to any site and edit the style sheet on the fly. The good thing is that the changes are not permanent, but if you like what you’ve done you can always upload the style sheet to your server.

The benefit here is you can modify multiple elements of a site’s CSS, in your browser, without actually having to make the changes to the live site. This extension also makes it much easier to modify multiple elements in the CSS and view the effects of the changes.

I was messing around with a site’s CSS the other day and the Web Developer extension saved me a lot of time and anguish. If you do any site design or modification, I highly recommend you download the Web Developer extension…and hey, it’s free!

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’ve been playing around with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool this afternoon and I’ve found it to be a good way to identify keywords that good a decent amount of search volume but aren’t already saturated with AdWords advertisers.

Here’s how you can use it…

1. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool website
2. Click on the “Site-Related Keywords” tab
3. Enter in the URL of your homepage or one of the pages on your site
4. Optional: Check the box next to the words “Include other pages on my site linked to this URL”
5. Click on the “Get Keywords” button
6. Once you have the results, click on the search volume column title
7. Starting at the top of the list, look for terms with high search volume and low advertiser competition
8. Click the “Add” button to add the terms to your AdWords account
9. Repeat the process for the URLs of your competitors and other sites in your vertical

By identifying the terms searchers are searching for, but don’t have a lot of advertiser competition, you should be able to secure some good clicks at a lower price than normal…and who doesn’t like that?

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last year at the Blog Business Summit I was introduced to the concept of a mind map and I’ve been using mind maps ever since. (Big hat tip to Buzz Bruggerman for bringing his entire presentation in mind map form.)

What is a mind map? According to Wikipedia, a mind map is:

a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

A mind map looks like this:

Continue reading "Cool Affiliate Tool: MindMeister" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wow – I just had an eye opening experience. I was searching around in the InsureMe Google Analytics account this morning and started looking at the “non-paid” keyword report. What I found would have made Chris Anderson proud:

This is a graph of the total number of visits by search term that we received on www.InsureMe.com through natural search engine traffic. As you can see, this graph shows the classic “long tail” – while we have a handful of terms that bring a large amount of traffic, we have THOUSANDS of keywords that bring one or two visits to our site. Actually, to be exact, we received natural traffic to our site from 22,135 different keywords!

There is a lesson in all of this. You see, when I optimize InsureMe I am focusing on the big keywords like “auto insurance,” “health insurance,” “home insurance,” “health insurance quotes,” etc. But in the process, I’ve gotten ranked for literally thousands of other keywords…and many of those keywords sent traffic that converted!

So next time you get bummed out that your site isn’t ranking for those big money keywords you are shooting for, remember the opportunity of the long tail. While you are waiting to be #1 for those mega-terms, you could very well be profiting from hundreds or thousands of obscure terms that people are actually searching for!

[BONUS TIP: Use the non-paid keyword report to find search terms that you can use in your PPC accounts.]

Posted by James Omdahl at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The blogosphere and news media has been buzzing about Facebook for the last couple months, so a few weeks ago I grudgingly signed up. What I found was a social network I could actually use and enjoy, not a MySpace-like mess of super hideous profile pages.

The most interesting thing about Facebook is that it’s becoming the business networking tool of choice for many of the technorati. People like Robert Scoble, Hugh MacLeod, Jason Calacanis and even Seth Godin are Facebook members (some more active than others). People like Scoble are maximizing Facebook as a communication platform, much like he does with his blogs, but with all the fun things that come with social networks.

I’m not telling you if you rush over to Facebook you’ll suddenly make lots of money or get famous or anything. While early adopters are finding ways to make money through Facebook applications (think of them as little widgets on a profile), I think the real value of Facebook is as a networking tool. And having a good network can help get you far in the affiliate marketing world.

So, to all of our affiliate readers out there reading this who have a Facebook accounts, search for “james omdahl” and add me as a friend. If you don’t have an account, get signed up and then add me as a friend. If I get a decent enough response we can explore other ways to use Facebook network to connect as affiliates.

If you still need convincing as to why to sign up for Facebook, check out this post. It gives a very good business case for using Facebook professionally.

Posted by James Omdahl at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Inside AdWords blog posted yesterday about a new AdWords feature called the Campaign Optimizer. The post says that the Campaign Optimizer is and “on-demand AdWords tool that provides personalized campaign ideas in just minutes.”

Since more and more affiliate and non-affiliate marketers are having problems with the AdWords ad serving “black box” this announcement gave me hope that Google was actually going to get specific and tell advertisers what was ailing their AdWords accounts.

In reality, it seems that the report sheds a lot less light into the black box than I thought. You see, the post outlines the types of suggestions that might be made by the Campaign Optimizer. They include:

Change (increase) daily ad budget
Add new keywords
Change keyword matching options
Adjust (increase) keyword minimum cost-per-click bid
Change ad text

Huh? That’s it? What kind of help is that? We all know that if we spend more money on a click or raise our budget we are going to get more clicks to our site. And we know that if we add keywords or turn on broad match we can get more traffic. So what’s the point of the report? You might as well just have a link go to the AdWords FAQs.

So the following words are to my friends at the AdWords team…it’s likely they won’t listen, but it’s worth a try…

Continue reading "AdWords Campaign Optimizer – Big Help or Big Duh?" »

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

No matter what industry you are in, there is a pretty good chance that you use a number of acronyms and industry terms when you talk with your peers about work. A good example is my fiancée, who works in a big ad agency. When she gives me the rundown of something that happened at work I’m often left scratching my head and wondering what the heck she is talking about. Of course, when it comes to talking about my day, I’m sure she feels the same way.

The thing about using insider language in the search industry is that it builds a fairly considerable barrier to entry for people trying to get into the field. Terms like “301,” “anchor text,” “cloaking,” “FFA,” and “LSI” can leave a search newbie feeling like they have to learn a new language before they can get into the search field…which is kind of true.

Luckily, there are a number of search engine marketing glossaries out there, and the newest of which comes from SEOmoz, one of the most respected SEM resources on the net.

If you are new to the SEM world, and you feel like you are drowning in the alphabet stew that is search, this might be a good resource to bookmark or even print out. See it here.

Use it and next time someone tells you should 301 your old site to a CMS that isn’t a scaper site so you’ll do better in the SERPs you’ll be able to tell them that you are in the sandbox and are currently taking care of canonical issues and cloaking another site to fool the SEs. And then you will be cool. ;)

Posted by James Omdahl at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wrote about the Search Engine Spider Simulator a long time ago, but since I’ve been looking for something to post all day and haven’t had any luck, I figured this would be a good refresher.

While the Search Engine Spider Simulator might seem like a fairly straightforward tool, I’d say there is nothing wrong with checking your site to make sure that your site is built in a way that is spiderable. It might save you a lot of pain down the line.

For example, I was looking at an insurance related site on Monday at the High TECC conference and I was able to use the SE Spider Simulator to show site owner that his site, as pretty as it was, contained NO indexable content on the page (except for the page footer). Why? Because the whole site was built in Flash.

Doh!

And if you like the simulator, make sure to check out the Affiliate Tools section on the navigation on the left side of the page…

Posted by James Omdahl at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Keyword research is the cornerstone of any search marketing campaign, because ranking for an unsearched term is about as useful as putting up a billboard on Saturn.

As luck would have it Danny Sullivan has taken the time to put together a fantastic post and list of keyword resources that should help you get a rockin’ keyword list put together.

Not to shoo you away or anything, but head over to Search Engine Land to get the 411 on keyword research tools. You can thank me later.