Using keywords well is still an important part of helping your website or blog to stay ahead of the pack. Now there is a nifty little tool that can help you to do this without you having to become a keyword expert and spend lots of money on tools and services. Wordtracker’s new, free Firefox extension – SEO Blogger is just the thing.

Focusing on keywords means that your writing is properly targeted to what you are trying to achieve. Search engines, in particular Yahoo, use keyword data to marry what searchers are looking for to the sites that are available.

When you are preparing material for the internet keywords are also useful because they allow you to concentrate on the message that you are trying to convey to your readers. It helps you to keep to the point and this can only serve to help consumers and helping consumers is the focus of all the search engines.

SEO Blogger opens up into a sidebar that allows you to search for terms but enabling you to also have your blog application open at the same time so that you can work on it. Its an interactive programme which not only gives you information about appropriate keywords but also analyses your writing to see the inclusion and distribution of your keywords.

If you want to use SEO Blogger you need to use the Mozilla Firefox web browser. If you are not familiar with Firefox then be prepared for a pleasant surprise. Its a free download open source web browser which is the most used browser amongst IT professionals and according to some sources the second most widely used browser after Windows Internet Explorer. If you already have Firefox follow this link for SEO Blogger.

The only downside for UK users is that because the application is American the suggested keywords are not in the English we need it to be in.

Good, well targeted keywords are big business and can generate significant amounts of convertible traffic within a well structured internet marketing campaign. But how open a market should it be and is it important for businesses to have preferential treatment when it comes to bidding on their own trademarked terms?

On Tuesday the European Court of Justice heard an appeal from Google after they were ordered to pay Louis Vuitton $250,000 in 2005 over a dispute concerning the use of their trademarked words as keywords by other companies. Louis Vuitton sell high-end luxury goods such as jewellery, luggage and handbags which they sell in traditional retail outlets rather than via the internet. Other companies were bidding on keywords such at ‘vuitton’ and then using the traffic generated by search engines to sell rival products and even counterfeit goods that resembled original Loius Vuitton styles.

Louis Vuitton’ lawyer Patrice de Cande, told the court on Tuesday that ‘Google’s advertisement activities have given companies which sell fake products unprecedented visibility beyond their wildest dreams.’

A spokesperson for Google said, ‘AdWords helps users find the information they are looking for and provides advertisers with an efficient way to reach their audiences. Google believes that it has not infringed the claimants’ trademark rights and we look forward to the outcome of the cases.’

This practise has been around in the US since 2004 but Google has only been used in the UK and Ireland since May last year. The important question for Google must be this: Google claims to be user led. The idea being that searchers are looking for something and the closer a company can get to giving the consumer what it wants (and then some) the higher a sites ranking. The higher the ranking the more visitors a site is rewarded with. And so on, in a never ending cycle of supply and demand. However, if a consumer is looking for Louis Vuitton and finds a rival company, is the consumer being best served? If they are not looking for luxury bags or fake Louis Vuitton then what is the purpose of Google allowing these sites to rank well? In theory, if they are not throwing up what the consumer wants then these sites will not rank well.

In June last year, a French court ordered auction site eBay to pay 40m Euros to LVMH for allowing online auctions of fake copies of its goods. LVMH had said eBay’s French site had not done enough to stop the sale of counterfeit bags and perfumes, under brands including Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Givenchy.

There is also the question of morality? To what extent, if any, should Google be the arbitrator of morals within ecommerce? Something does not feel quite ethical about a company using a rival’s trademarked term to sell its own goods. Should Google be concerned about this? Google sometimes does take a stand, for example in June 2007 it banned Adwords adverts for student essay writing services which was very much welcomed by the Universities. Also, some terms related to gambling and hacking are not allowed either.

The outcome of the appeal is not expected to be announced until next year. We will be watching the outcome with interest.

According to research data from Hitwise, consumers are using longer search questions than this time last year.

Their online research looked at the number of search words being used by 10 million internet users and they found that most people are still using between 1-3 words (65%) but that the overall number of words used has increased by 10%.

The most significant change has been the number of people using 8 words or more: this has gone up by 22%.

These figures suggest several things:

Firstly, searchers are becoming more sophisticated as the breadth and depth of what is available on the web has increased. They know what they want and they are able to target it more effectively with more words. As the internet has become more sophisticated there are more specialist sites. The consumer is aware of this and can search with confidence for their specific needs. Knowledge, once held only by individuals and in books is now easily available to everyone.

This bredth and depth of easily available knowledge means that when we are marketing online we need to understand the sophistication levels of the audience we are targeting and choose appropriate keywords and phrases in our marketing efforts.

Secondly, there is a lot of competition out there. This is not good for individual businesses who are all competing for top search engine positions but neither is it good for consumers who have popped in a couple of words and found that the search engine has come up with a lot of sites that are not specific enough for their needs.

The next step for searchers is to add more words in order to bring something forward that is more specific to their needs.

The next step for businesses is to make their site more visible to people who might benefit from their services. If people are needing to put in more words in order to find what they are looking for then we need to capitalise on this by researching the optimum keywords for our sites and online marketing efforts.

If the internet leads business change then differentiation will probably become more important in future years. If we become harder to find because we supply too general a service then perhaps we will need to hone in on particular aspects of our businesses. Alternatively we may need to separate our business into different sectors that can be treated as individual elements to capitalise on the sophistication not only of the internet but of its users.

Equally the internet will develop in ways that will make it easier for people to find us. Specialised search engines are likely to increase in popularity and numbers. Google Maps for example already helps people to find businesses that have a particular geographical location.

Making sure that it easy for clients and potential clients to get access to you is one of the main functions of marketing.  Anything that makes this happen makes good business sense.  One of the latest products on the market is designed to help with this.  Telnic have launched .tel which is a web-based contact directory and has the potential to take over current directory providers.

Once you register your company for a .tel domain you add all your contact details.  This can be in the form of email, telephone, address, website, fax number, social networks and so on.  Any web-based information will be linked straight to its source and you can update the information quickly and easily at any time.  .tel can be accessed from any device which is linked to the internet and will be particularly useful for clients on the go to access you from their mobile phones.

Domains are on sale now at the premium rate of £325 for 3 years.  On 24th March at 3pm domains will be cheaper at around £10 for a year.

Telnic’s CEO, Khashayar Mahidavic,  thinks that spreading the word about .tel will be very easy and suspects that viral marketing will play a big role in this.  Talking to Bloomberg, Mahidavic  said that .tel is ‘the biggest innovation since .com.’  He explained that one of the reasons that the product is so unique is that it provides people with information very quickly.  Information is all stored on the Domain Name System (DNS), the back-bone of the internet  and therefore does not need an IP address. This makes it return information fast.

What will make .tel very useful as part of an internet marketing campaign is that it has keyword functionality and could be adopted as part of a search engine optimisation strategy.  You can select keywords to store and these will be used when people are searching on sites such as Google.

The service has come under criticism as it has been pointed out that unscrupulous people may try to buy up domains.  Ben Edelman, an internet specialist from Harvard University said that,

‘To date, spammers and scammers have been the quickest to adopt new domains.

‘If many .tel domains spring up containing misleading information, perhaps with the intention of soliciting email addresses or other personal data, individuals and businesses with more honourable intentions will be deterred from signing up.

 ’That problem has afflicted other new domains. From everything known about .tel so far, I think there remains a serious risk of a similar outcome.’

 Time will tell if it will achieve the success Telnic would like: for it become as universal to have a .tel domain as it does to have an email address.

What’s wonderful about the Internet is that there is nowhere to hide! For the consumer it’s fabulous; for the business, it means that you have to have your house in order.  If you make a claim or a statement you can have many interested parties knocking at your virtual door demanding that you prove yourself and come up with the goods.  The more claims you make, the louder your public shouts if you get it wrong.  And in the search engine world you don’t get much larger than Google.

Google suggests that if we want them to rank our sites highly then they must have content that is of high value and we also know that its important that our keywords match our content. But when we search in Google do we always get full and relevant information?

Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) asked people what the team should be concentrating on in 2009. The main complaint was about ‘empty review’ sites where, for example, you type into the Google bar, ‘reviews for product a’ and in return you get many sites that have empty pages with comments such as ‘there are no reviews for this product’.  This is very annoying and with time being of the essence, you don’t want to trawl through several searches of ‘nothing’ in order to find what you are looking for.  Over time, this might also make you turn to more well-known review sites immediately, rather than use Google as the first port of call (a fact that Google can’t afford to ignore). It indicates that Google will index low-value pages, to the detriment of the consumer’s experience. 

Matt Cutts, acknowledges that this is a problem and is asking for people to report in any such pages.  He says that, ‘a typical policy response would be just to remove from our index individual low-value or auto-generated pages from our index, without removing the entire site.’  Google do not want to penalise otherwise good websites but if it’s your potential customers finding your site empty of content how long will it be before they no longer even bother to click on your link.

The aim, as ever, for Google, is to add value and its commitment to getting feedback from its users can only help to enhance the public’s experience and enable business to give the best service and value possible. 

This all serves to remind us how important it is to keep using relevant keywords and target them appropriately within our websites.  This is a very  important part of search engine optimisation. Linking our keywords to excellent content is crucial because that’s what keeps not only Google happy but also, the most important people, our customers.