Hooray! I took a break for a couple of days and in the meantime the best keyword research tool was launched!

Finally, AdWords keyword tools give us better statistics for the keywords that we would like to rank for. Now, Google made available for everyone the exact number of search volumes for certain keywords.

You don’t have to be a genius to use Google AdWords keywoard tool, actually it’s quite simple. First, you are asked to choose between two methods of generating keyword ideas: Descriptive words or phrases or Website content. I personally prefer the second one. Here’s a screenshot of the first step:

After you did that, hit “Get keyword ideas”, wait a little and the results will show up:

As you can see, Google found the keywords that fit best for my blog, and I am shown the search volume of them. Now, I just need to get back to work and try my SEO powers.

There are pros and cons regarding this keyword research tool. Yes, it is great that we, the SEOs have some concrete numbers and we don’t have to bother anymore searching for keywords that will send us some traffic.

On Google.com I tried to rank with my automotive blog for the “concept cars reviews” structure. I thought that it may send me some traffic. I did pretty well, I am on the third place and there are about 6,000,000 results but, that structure sends me almost 0 traffic.

About the cons, imagine that everyone has access to this tool and the competition for certain keywords may grow up and it will become harder to rank for them.

A permalink is the link for a blog post. The default structure of the permalinks for the blogs that run on wordpress is the following: http://example.com/?p=n, where “n” is the number of the post.

I recommend you to change it because this is not relevant at all. The keywords in the structure of the links are very important because of two reasons:

1. SERP
2. User orientation

There are may discussions on the internet related to the ideal structure of the permalinks but nobody knows for sure what that is. Here are the two most common structures that I found on many top blogs:

• http://example.com/2008/06/29/post-name/

To have your permalinks like this, all you need to do is to log in into the wordpress control panel, then go to options->permalinks-> and here choose “Date and name based”.

This is a very good structure but I don’t like it for one reason. For a better orientation, the category should appear too, but then, the links would be way too long.

• http://example.com/category-name/post-name

This is the structure I use and I recommend it to you too. If you want your permalinks to be like this, log into the wordpress control panel, then go to options->permalinks-> and here choose “Custom, specify below” and in the “Custom structure” box write /%category%/%postname%/ .

Like I said before, maybe the ideal structure of the permalinks would be the one that has the date, category name and post name integrated in it but it would be way too long!

We all know that Google can do miracles for your blog and it’s quite easy to get some free targeted traffic to your blog. I think that many of you heard about the seo plugin for wordpress but don’t use it the right way.

Well, I think that you already know how to install it, just download it, and then upload it on the host in the folder wp-content/plugins. After that log into the admin area, go to “plugins” section and activate it.

Ok, you will notice something new at the “write post” section, under the writing box. Here’s a screenshot:

Now, let’s go a little back, at “options - > all in one seo”. There, make sure that “Use Categories for META keywords box” is not checked.

After doing that, everything is easy. At “Title” you should introduce the title of the article (many bloggers say that writing the title in capital letters may get you a better rank in google, but I personally don’t like all the title to be written in capital letters). At “Keywords” you should write some keywords related to the article, and at “Description” I generally write some keywords too. You can leave it blank, but writing some keywords there may get you a better rank in searches.