SEO

The Drupal Twitter module is an answer to a problem that I had been looking for a solution to.  A fundamental part of a good traffic creation strategy is to ping social networking sites when you create content on your site.  As a part of that ping process, you want to have a description/title of whatever content you produce and a link back to your website to the full article.  The main purpose is so that you can drive traffic back to your website to consume your content.

How this works with the social networks is that in Twitter for example, everyone that is following you would see a tweet that you just posted to your blog.  But doing this manually every time you post to your blog or create an article would be time consuming.  Luckily, there are automatic pinging module available for Drupal called the Drupal Twitter module.

It works by saving your Twitter account username/password, then every time you post something, it will go out and automatically create a Tweet for you.  Its really simple, I actually found a tutorial to show you how to install the Drupal Twitter module.

For SEO strategies to work, you must first figure out which keywords you want to use to optimize your search engine hits for.  In many instances, you can probably guess what keywords will drive traffic to your site.  However, for proper SEO keyword choices, we can be smarter than that.  There are a few free SEO keyword tools that exist to help us make the decisions on which keywords to use for SEO.

The first SEO keyword tool to mention is from the source of the search engine, Google External Keyword Tool.  By putting in a general search term, this SEO keyword tool will give you the relative advertiser competition and also the average search volumes, all for the google search engine.  This can give you some hints as to which keywords are going to be the most important for driving more traffic to your website.  The competition follows the money, so going into an area with high competition isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you are hoping to make any money by targetted ads.

The second SEO keyword tool I will mention is another tool to tell what the relative number of searches are for particular keywords, but this tool isn't specific to the google search engine.  The tool is provided by Wordtracker.  This tool shows the comparitive search volume.  Again, this is great for figuring out which keywords are better than others when you are choosing to optimize.

This next tool was built to help tell which keywords that people search for might lead to a product purchase.  This is called commercial intent, and the tool is made by Microsoft AdCenter Labs.  Keywords with commercial intent have a higher chance of leading to a sale on your site for whatever product you are selling.  This might be kind of fuzzy to you, so let me show you a basic example.  Let me throw a couple of search terms at you.  The first one is "free popcorn", and the second one is "popcorn".  This is an obvious example, but as you can guess, the search for "free popcorn" obviously isn't looking to pay for anything.  However the search for "popcorn" could be looking for special popcorn kernels, or salt, or popcorn poppers.  If I put those words into the commercial intent tool, I get a probability of 0.59375 for "popcorn", but only 0.31117 for "free popcorn".  I would not include "free popcorn" as a keyword you optimize for, "popcorn" will be much better.  Or even better, how about "popcorn popper" (0.81871) or even better, "popcorn salt" (0.89281).