I have tried numerous keyword research tools like the free Google Keyword Tool , WordTracker, Micro Niche Finder and Market Samurai. Each of them have their own strengths when it comes to keyword research. Today, I discovered another tool called WordStream Keyword Management for SEO.

Yet to give it a run but from the features page, it looks pretty promising. I practically like the part where it can perform keyword analytics and connect with your Google Analytics account for some personalised research.

I will probably sign up for the free trial and if I like it, I might just use it as part of my tools as well.

Check out WordStream here.

I love to hear feedback and comments from users at most of my blogs. Though I am flooded with spam comments in the bucket loads daily, getting real genuine comments just make you feel that there is someone after all reading your blogs.

So what can you do to get more people commenting on the blog?

I stumbled into this article by Alisa Bowman in a guest blog at Search Engine Marketing Group today and thought the tips she provided is worth trying out.

One of the technique that I found useful are ways to reward the readers when they leave comments on the blog. It can be a direct reward of giving away something of value to the readers  or sometimes pure recognition helps too.

For me, my usual technique revolves around solving problems which natually create more curiosity or more questions for further details when I provide a high level solution on the blogs. That sort of indicates to me if anybody out there has an interest of some of the solutions I provide. Once I know at least 1 person is reading or commenting on the blog, I will continue to add in more content to the page via the comment areas.

So what’s your tactic in getting more comments on your blog?

It’s 2010 already and think it’s about time to set some blogging goals for myself. This was inspire while I happen to bump into the Blog Herald by Andrew G.R. to share some of our blogging goals for 2010.

Well here’s my 2010 Top 3 Goals for this blog (I like to keep things short and simple):

1. Make at least 1 posting a day and to have a minimum of 400 posts by the end of the year.
2. Increase the traffic to this blog by 30%.
3. Earn additional $2,000 per month from this blog.

Though these are the key goals for these blogs, I do have other goals that are related to this blog:

1. Assist 10 people in starting their own SEO blog.
2. Increase the number of postings in forums to assist users. Must assist 5 people a day in a forum looking for solutions related to SEO.
3. Tweet 5 times a day.

Well that’s my simple blogging goals for 2010.

So what’s yours?

Well, I have always thought that Google will one day take over the US government. So when it was announced that  Matt Dunne is running for governor at Vermont, the news do catch attention. After all Matt is an executive of Google and wonder if he uses SEO to drive his website for his candidacy campaign.

The interesting statement I read quoted from Business Week is his vision to import the Google culture of “being organizationally flat, fast and innovative into state government”.

That would be interesting to watch if it comes true.

There is so much information about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on the internet and it’s really easy to be confused from the information overload. You will hear so many jargons like link building, on page optimization, off page optimization, pageranks, backlinks, anchor text and many more. Adding on to the confusion will be the various black hat, grey hat and white hat methods that will vary in their executions.

If you are new to SEO or has been really confused of what you read, take a step back and start from the basics again.

What is it all about and what are we trying to achieve in SEO?

Check this article by RedEvo on The Basic Of SEO to get a 10,000 feet overview on SEO.

Well, here’s my thoughts if you are starting out on doing SEO.

1. Getting your website ranked for a basket of keywords may be important but I will not overly focus on the rankings. I will work on the objective of the website first and provide value based on the objective. Only then I will work on the keywords that I would like to rank for.

2. Do check on the competition level of the selected keywords and YOUR capability to compete for them.

3. For keywords that have low competition level, you can most likely achieve your rankings by just doing on-page optimization. That means just optimizing your title tags, description tags and H1 tags.

4. For keywords that are slightly more competitive, you may most likely need to do some off page optimization. This means getting backlinks from other websites, article directories, web 2.0 sites and other external factors.

5. Generating organic traffic to your website is important but it can only be useful if your website can convert this traffic into your desired objective. Otherwise it will just go down the drain. Website objective can varies from making a sale to generating a lead or downloading a report.

SEO is part art and part science. If you are new to SEO, what I can promise you is that there’s so much to it and if you are like me, you will enjoy every part of the learning and execution process.