Reminder: New Free Tools:
About two weeks ago I added a bunch of SEO tools to my free SEO tool list. I just made all of the new public tools open source, so if you like any of them you can do whatever you want with them.

Cool Keyword Research Tool: Needs Feedback:
I would love feedback on the SEO Book keyword research tool. Give it a try and see if you think it is useful or what features you would like added to it.

The tool does not try to do everything within itself, but provides relevant links for digging through keyword data from lots of other tools, and makes it easy to cross reference Overture results and Google Suggest results, as well as many other keyword tools.

At the bottom it also provides links to well known web directories, news sites, shopping sites, tagging sites, encyclopedias, blog search engines, and blog trend graphs. Those links are intended to help you find information that others found useful, and maybe also help you come up with linkbait ideas.

I think occasionally if it gets queried too heavily it breaks, and sometimes intermittently Overture will not provide data, but whenever I re-query it the tool usually works fairly quickly.

Link Harvester Updated:
Some people recently notified me that the xls sheet output in Link Harvester was putting array where the individual links were supposed to be. I just got that fixed too.

Backlink Analyzer Update to Come:
The last update to Backlink Analyzer (like 2 months ago) broke some of the key features. I did not realize this until recently. I just spoke with the lead developer, and although a new version was intended to be out in December I am hoping to have it out by the end of this month.

With certain sites in certain industries it can cut into your credibility to have lots of misspellings.

Although I hate to admit it, one of the biggest things holding back my credibility is spelling errors. Some people just can't take a misspelling fool seriously. Others empathise with my skills and type misspelled queries into their engine of choice.

Matt Cutts recently said that using correct spelling is good for SEO. This couldn't be any further from the truth for most boring hollow shallow lead generation / affiliate marketing / contextual ad websites (aka: 99% of the web).

Misspellings probably occur in somewhere around 10% of search queries. Across the board misspelled terms are probably less than 10% as competitive as the correct spelled counterparts. Sure some people will opt to use the search engine spell correction tools, but many do not.

While some misspellings cost me links and credibility, others earned me thousands of dollars.

Truth be told, I was financially screwed when I made those thousands of dollars off of one particular spelling error that comes to mind. Had I not been a bad speller I may have been bankrupt (and I would have neve typed this post).

Not all your sites have to be associated with your name, and I am not ashamed to profit from being a naturally craptastic speller. Is your good spelling holding back your earning potential?

Google is getting much better at extracting potential keyword information when you set up an account.

Lets say your site competed with SeoBook.com (and you are thus evil). You could set up a new ad campaign and act like it is for SeoBook.com (by entering www.SeoBook.com as your ad URL).

Google will then give you keyword groups based on the content of SEO Book.

• seo

• search engine
• search engine optimization
• search engine submit
• Miscellaneous keywords

Each of the categories has a list of keywords in it where you can add all or some of them to your keyword list.

• seo
  • seo book
  • seo rank
  • seo optimization
  • seo rankings
  • seo placement
  • seo ranking
  • seo
  • seo tips
  • how to seo
  • multilingual seo
  • seo elite
  • seo writing
  • seo software
  • seo consultants
  • seo service
• search engine
  • seo search engine
  • submission search engines
  • search engines
  • rank search engines
  • search engine registration
  • search engine ranking
  • thai search engines
  • submission to search engines
  • rank in the search engines
  • add url to search engines
  • foreign search engines
  • search engines australia
  • writing for search engines
  • search engine rankings
  • stomping the search engines
  • search engine url submission
  • submit to search engines
  • dutch search engine
  • search engine marketing
• search engine optimization
  • search engine optimization seo
  • search engine optimization tips
  • search engine optimization
  • search engine optimization seo services
  • search engine optimization ebook
  • search engine optimization and placement
  • search engines optimization
  • search engine optimization information
  • search engine optimization submission
  • multilingual search engine optimization
  • search engine optimization company
  • search engine optimization forum
  • search engine optimization forums
  • calgary search engine optimization
  • search engine optimization analysis
  • search engine optimization advice
  • search engine optimization software
  • search engine optimization thailand
  • vancouver search engine optimization
  • search engine optimization cost
  • search engine optimization tools
  • houston search engine optimization
• search engine submit
  • search engines submissions
  • search engine submissions
  • search engine submission
  • search engine submission software
  • search engine submission guide
  • canada search engine submission
  • canadian search engine submission
  • search engine submit
• Miscellaneous keywords
  • url cloaking

Google gives slightly different word sets for similar sites. For Linkhounds Google AdWords gave the following terms under the SEO category:

• seo tools
• effective seo
• seo placement
• seo optimization
• seo url
• seo tips
• seo
• seo advantage
• seo rankings
• seo business
• seo tool
• seo software
• arizona seo
• foreign seo
• seo copywriting
• seo analysis
• seo company
• seo ebook
• seo report
• seo strategies
• uk seo
• multilingual seo
• seo consultants
• seo service
• seo courses
• seo links
• seo australia
• how to seo
• seo chat
• seo london
• utah seo
• consultant seo
• seo houston
• seo consultation
• seo help
• seo school
• seo training

Google's AdWords keyword suggestion tool may make niche discovery easier by allowing you to see how Google views a variety of small niched sites or sites in other locations where slightly different language or dialects are used (think UK English versus US English).

As a content publisher, if you monetize via AdSense, the keywords Google suggest are great to target since you know they are pointing advertisers as them. The words seen by the widest number of advertisers are likely to be priced near or above their fair value.

I wish I could add more to Danny's excellent coverage of the government's bogus overarching power grab for data from search engines, but I can't, so I just want to parrot it. :)

The US government requested not personally identifiable search data from AOL, Google, MSN and Yahoo! in an effort to evaluate how often children might find porn on the web. Everyone but Google handed it over. The US government is now suing Google.

The stock market punished Google heavily on this and other news, with the stock dropping from about $470 to $399 a share last week. While Google may have wanted to keep the data for trade secret related reasons they also win a ton of user trust by being the only company which said no to the request.

Compare their position to MicroSoft. Only after Google made this request an issue by denying it did news come out that other search companies, like MSN, gave over data last summer.

How did MSN's recent post make them look?

A prime opportunity was missed last summer. Back then there was a chance to come out at a time when Google was being pounded over privacy concerns and stand up to the government instead of folding like a cheap lawn chair and working out some technical response that we would only learn about months later when the heat was on and they had to say something. Shameful, really.

As a person who likes search this lawsuit makes me wish I was a bit smarter so I could work at Google.

As a marketer I think Google being the only one doing what they are doing is a great thing for them.

• This heavily undermines the Google can't be trusted with data meme.

• By being the content in the news they raise their brand exposure. If you ARE the content that people are talking about advertising is not needed to gain market share.
• By standing up against the government they gain user trust. It is going to be hard for a competitor to build an ad demand network of Google's scale while also trying to build that much trust at the same time.

I think this incident enhances Google's implied value, as it will surely increase their market share.

I recently took a gander at the Google Modules site and saw a few great extensions. Some of them are a bit random and don't apply to me, but many of them were cool, like the to do list or the Technorati Mini extension which searches for SeoBook.com citations once a minute. (please note to track your own blog you have to view source, copy it, change the s= URL to your own URL, upload it to your server, then add it to your customized Google home page. Niall probably should have made the to track bit something you could enter after you uploaded it.)

Google is going to use many vertical databases to structure information. They also are going to allow users to create their own home pages as they see fit.

I believe one of the extensions was for horse racing. Getting links or visitors into a horse racing site is probably not a cheap and easy task, but imagine the lead value of a customer who loves horse racing so much that they have to be able to access the latest odds from their home page.

If your extension is cool enough it may provide direct traffic AND link popularity. Those who care about something enough to customize their home page for it are likely they same type of people who would also have websites and tell friends what they put on their home page.

I have not looked through all the extensions yet, but creating free extensions is perfect for concert ticket brokers, exotic travel sites, currency exchange sites, or other sites that provide free useful service.

Even if you provide a boring service you may get a few additional citations by spending 10 minutes creating a free Google Modules XML extension. The same can be said for browser extensions (think Mozdev) or other similar free distribution channels.