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Do you mean the Ad Preview & Diagnostic tool?

More context would definitely help here

I completely agree with this response.

No one knows 100% for sure what a search engine is or isn't going to do - probably not even Matt Cutts and certainly not Rand, particularly since they are tweaking and improving the system on a daily basis.

And I too agree that you should never post content (blogs) just for the sake of posting content or just for the sake of linking to another page. Updates like Panda will come back to haunt you if this is your practice. Instead of focusing on whether or not a link in a post is going to have more authority than a link elsewhere and using that to determine whether or not you are going to post new content, focus instead on your audience and how you can provide them value. Does the article and/or link provide value to your consumer?

At the end of the day, always remember that websites are for people, NOT for search engines.

Hi Robert,

I agree that it would be helpful to know more about your site. The size and content of the site will have a major impact on this. In addition, how many keywords are "several"? Optimizing for 2-3 keywords is a lot different than attempting to optimize for 10-15 at a time. Also, you need to consider how broad or long-tail those keywords are and how competitive your market is. Perhaps do a little research and check out your competition for each keywords and evaluate what they are doing, why / how is it working for them, and what you can be doing better.

One thing that you DON'T want to do is keyword stuff your homepage, title tags, or meta descriptions. Each of those needs to be as relevant to the page as possible. Keyword stuffing will only hurt the site.

I also agree that, if you are going after a particular keyword, having content related to that moved up from lower level pages to higher level pages that are easily accessible via the homepage would be a good start in boosting the homepage rankings for those individual keywords.

Hi Isaac,

The others have already provided some great feedback.

A few other ideas we had include:

1.) Guest blogging on relevant, high-quality websites or inviting other relevant businesses / bloggers to guest blog on your site.

2.) Similarly, reach out to industry leaders / related persons who already have a good following and see if they will do a short interview, give a few tips, etc.

3.) Share articles in newsletters / email blasts

4.) Share your articles via social (which you have already heard) but also consider paid advertising if you really want to invest in traffic. Most social sites have pretty granular targeting so you can reach a really specific audiences and tailor your ads to that specific niche.

5.) Consider trying different blog formats (video, for example) to see if those resonate with your audience more and perform better.

Hope some of these are helpful!

Hi there,

Have you done any analysis as to whether or not the keywords the company wants to rank for actually make sense for the company? Just because they want to rank for something doesn't mean it is necessarily a feasible goal. Google's job is to provide the most relevant content to a search query.

Also, you mentioned 101 keywords that the company wants to rank for. Have you done any research for the search volume for these keywords? Ranking for a term is great but if that term only has a tiny amount of search volume then it might not be worth your time.

Finally, while ranking for a keyword is a step in the right direction, ranking on page 7 doesn't do much good. Do you monitor / report specifically on page one keywords? Those are, in theory, the most valuable keywords that you have. It might be more valuable to try and focus on the "low hanging fruit" - say, keywords ranking on page two - and how you can improve those.

You might also want to set up a content / keyword map to see what pages on your site are ranking for what terms to see if you are lacking content in any area that could help boost rank for those terms.

The others have covered some great topics as well.

Hope that helps!

Matt has some great suggestions!

A few we'd add include:

@joehall

@aaronwall

@cyrusshepard

@stonetemple

@dr_pete

Hello There,

We tend to use a combination of both search engine research and market research - the human element.

There are plenty of articles available that discuss the inaccuracies and caveats of the Google keyword planner specifically, so we tend to take any data we gather there with a grain of salt. It is, unfortunately, one of the better / more robust free tools for keyword research available, though there are other alternatives. For us, it's a good starting point.

We would definitely recommend taking searcher intent into consideration. People searching for something generic like "cute baby pictures" are, most likely, searching for cute baby pictures and not necessarily a photographer to take cute baby pictures. Look for variations, as suggested by Dmitrii, and also try using Google suggest to find other search variations that you might not even be aware of.