The upgraded keyword tool is making waves in and around the worldwide SEO community. The new ‘lower’ rankings for keywords that once commanded high positions on the keyword list are taking some getting used to. Although, if you scratch deeper under the surface of the new Google keyword tool then you will find gold – Google issued this statement regarding the AdWords keyword tool, “the previous version of the Keyword Tool provides search statistics based on Google.com search traffic and traffic from search partners, while the updated version of the Keyword Tool provides search statistics based on Google.com traffic only”. This sheds some light on the situation.

Having an opportunity to thoroughly review some keyword data for one of my proposals while traveling on a train up to Sheffield, I came to realise that as much as we talk about regularly reviewing keyword data we just don’t actually do it enough! We all know that every month something like 20% of all searches are unique and have not been seen by Google in the last 90 days.  

Image by Danard Vincente via Flickr

This can however be a double edged sword – lessons learnt in the past have also taught me that it is possibly even more important to pick a route and stick to it. It is all too tempting to see the vast variety of (search phrase) opportunities open to a website and to want to grab all of them. It very quickly leads to a scattergun approach, with just not enough weight behind any of it. Result: dilution, mixed messages, a multitude of pages with similar content, confusion on the site, and ultimately poor performance!

When it comes to dishing out top SEO tips, few are more important than advising on the correct use and implementation of internal linking. So many companies and individuals out there are so pre-occupied with getting quality links into their sites from reputable sites (which isn’t a bad thing) that they completely forget about the impact that good internal linking can have on a website. This article takes a look at why internal linking is so important and contains some top SEO tips on how to implement these links effectively.

SEO Tips: Why bother with internal linking?

An extremely valuable SEO tip that you need always bear in mind, is the three main effects that internal linking has on a website. Each effect has a different weight as far as its actual SEO value is concerned, however you can’t afford not to think about each when implementing internal links:

Google Adwords recently released a new search-based keyword tool that will help advertisers discover which keywords relating to their services and/or products that they are not optimising their website for, and which may cause them to miss out on additional business as a result.

It’s a handy tool in that its results eliminate the terms you are already optimising for. If you have an Adwords account, and are logged in, then it will only display those keywords that your account is not currently advertising. One of the most convenient things about the tool is that you insert your URL and it then searches your site for missing keywords, as opposed to sitting on the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and going through hundreds of possible keyword options, which will then need to be checked against your site to see if they are already optimised for.