Germy Image via Wikipedia

What’s big in health in the past decade? There are the obvious big-name near-pandemics like SARS, cholera and swine flu. And if you’re not into the “We’re all going to die!” mentality then we could talk about stem cells, genomics, and the political implications thereof. But those all pale in comparison to the most important health research of the twenty-aughts.

Don’t cover your mouth with your hand when you sneeze

My favorite destroyers of unhealthy wives’ tales The Mythbusters showed us that not only is your hand an ineffective sneeze stopper, it’s also a health liability. A germy sneezed-upon hand is one of the most effective vectors for infectious diseases and therefore a terrible option to muffle a sneeze. While the Mythbusters concluded that it’s best to sneeze into your elbow, I prefer the sneeze into your shirt or jacket method because it captures more of the foul ejecta.

Unfortunately this potentially life saving health knowledge goes against decades of moms and dads telling us to cover our mouths (with our hands) when we sneeze. How can we combat this deadly misinformation? Pop culture to the rescue.

Fist Bumps for Health, Fist Bumps for Life

Oldsters don’t get the fist bump.”It’s violent. I don’t like it.” Well, then you’re going to DIE!

Michael Jordan might’ve first popularized the fist bump in the nineties, and evidence suggests that it was around for a while before that, but the fist bump really started to take off in the past decade.

Germaphobes immediately embraced the fist bump for its considerable health advantages over the handshake. Handshakes are messy. Handshakes spread germs. Even University of Calgary Dean of Medicine Tomas Feasby lobbies that the fist bump is a  “nice replacement of the handshake” in that it can prevent transmission of some diseases.

Best Health Research of the Decade

Mythbusters: Out of using your elbow, using your hand, and using a handkerchief to cover your mouth when you sneeze, which is the best way to limit the spread of germs?

Best Health Trend of the Decade

The rise of the fist bump.

Related Articles

• The gubernatorial fist bump (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Staring at the Oven Roasted Chicken Flavor DENTAL TREATS cats love! AKA Feline Greenies (TM), I pondered yet another in a long line of unoriginal thoughts: Why do we feed cats food flavored for humans?

The answer is two-fold.

1. We do not. Well, I’m reasonably sure we’re not feeding our cats food that’s flavored to please a human. That is to say, while I haven’t tried one of the crunchy green treats, I’m confident that it tastes nothing like Oven Roasted Chicken.

2. Regardless, the cat has no money. It doesn’t go shopping. They’re trying to sell the treats to crazy cat lady (played by me in this episode,) not her cat.

So everything makes sense again in our consumer happy world. You know, the one in which we US residents alone literally spend billions of dollars annually on our pets. Or does it?

Suggestions for new flavors of cat treats

• Mouse - Duh. It’s a cat classic. Mouse flavored cat food is a no-brainer. Tom and Jerry. Herman and Katnip. Itchy and Scratchy. Your cat wants to vicariously live the adventures of those famous cat/mouse duos with every bite.
• Baby Bunny – Rabbits are the potato chip of the wild kingdom. They eat, they make those pellets, they sleep, they breed, they breed, they breed, and then they die – usually at the fangs of some hungry predator. And let’s face it, they’re none too smart, so most of them don’t even make it to adulthood. Or maybe, just maybe, baby bunnies just taste better. Yeah, we’ll go with that. Cat’s love munching on fresh baby bunny.
• Moth and Butterfly Surprise – If you own both butterfly bush and feline, you know that delish comes from a chrysalis. That’s poetic license for: Cats like to eat butterflies. These tasty cat treats could have an appealing butterfly shape. You know, for kids!
• Wasabi Soy Sparrow – The sparrow, better known as feline sushi, pairs wonderfully with a little wasabi and soy. Add a dash of pickled ginger to clear the palate between bites. Your little kitty just loves eating birds.
• Crunchy Vole Surprise – Put a cat in a room with a single mouse and a single vole, and 90% of the time that cat’s going to head for the mouse first. Vole treats can be marketed to cats with a more discerning palate. Your cat is too good for mouse flavored food. Let those commoner alley cats eat the mice. I’m a classy cat. I only eat vole.

Image via Wikipedia

Facebook sucks when it comes to privacy. I can’t wait until somebody sues them for it and forces them to change. Maybe someday they’ll realize that good usability and privacy is a great business model.

Until then, here are three different ways to clean up one of the most egregious facebook privacy screwups to date.

Annoyed that facebook has decided to make every detail of your actions everybody’s business? Tired of clicking the little x and then clicking “remove” from the annoying facebook confirmation popup over and over again? Here’s how to quickly delete your facebook recent activity.

There are three ways to eliminate all of those annoying updates with a single click. The downer is that you still have to do it periodically. Most of these are cross-browser compatible for at least firefox and chrome.

• Use better facebook.  There are tons of other reasons to use better facebook too. Not the least of which is that my top blue facebook bar is locked in place while I scroll the content of a page. Very convenient. However, betterfacebook implementation of remove recent activity is less than perfect. It misses some from time to time. But it adds a “remove all activity” link to your activity. The new version of Better Facebook removes all recent activity (or whichever bits you specify in the settings,) each time you visit your facebook profile page. Get better facebook!.

• http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/67751 You have to install greasemonkey first, but it’s totally worth it. I heart greasemonkey,  This one adds a “Remove Recent Activity” button to the right facebook side panel. Works like a charm, once you find it. Facebook is so damn cluttered. (Edit: turns out you have to reload your profile page for the button to appear.)

• I haven’t tried this one. It involves imacros and seems tedious. http://www.cynthiaperla.com/facebook/460/how-to-delete-all-groups-and-wall-posts-from-facebook-using-imacros.html

Related Articles

• Facebook: Privacy Out The Window As Comments You Make To Others Appear On Your Wall (daaaveeeee.wordpress.com)

The Short, Obtuse Explanation of Why Time Speeds Up

The relative self-investment of a given time span dictates the speed at which the passing of time is perceived.

U = Self duration (Your age at the time, minus the age at which you started to remember things.)

e = Event Span (e.g. a specific summer)

S = Perceived speed of time

The only slightly longer but clearer explanation of the speed of time

As we get older, time seems to speed up. How weird is that? (larger numbers = faster speeds)

That summer I spent playing basketball with my neighbor Trey, watching Transformers on the boob tube, and um, well, I don’t actually remember too much of what I did when I was eleven years old, but it seemed to last a long time. School was even worse. Those nine months of school seemed like a thousand eternities.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that kids really start storing long term memories, i.e. they begin becoming individuals, somewhere around the age of six. It follows then that the three months of a post-fifth-grader summer amount to a whopping five percent (5%) of your life sensations. It seems like a long period of time because given your only referential (you) it is a long time.

Conversely, 50 year-old you perceives summer’s passage to be much faster because that period is barely a half of a percent (0.005%) of your accumulated experiences. If my quick math is correct, the difference is about 1,000X. Or to put it another way, your sixth grade summer was something like 100,000% of the proportional time span that the summer of your 50th year will be.

That’s it. But if you’re a big time geek and/or Billy Mays fan, but wait, there’s more!

Implications of senility, dementia and amnesia on perceived speed of passage of time

Pure speculation here, but I assume memory loss (think: Alzheimer’s) might cause time to slow down. That is to say, if you begin to lose your experiences and frame of reference thereby attenuating your period of “self duration”, you’ll likely perceive events as taking longer.

In the case of a person with anterograde amnesia, time will largely seem to stand still. (Memento) Whereas a subject with retrograde amnesia would likely immediately perceive time to slow to a crawl and then experience a profound uptick in time’s passage as new memories are forged.

And what are the implications of looking back at past events? Does that 6th grade summer seem longer the older I get? Does it stay the same? Or is it getting shorter, its time speeding up in tandem with my perception of more recent events? Hmmm…  My memory’s not good enough to dwell on that one too much.

Image via Wikipedia - Not the Scott Goodyear I'm talking about, but it's a Scott Goodyear nonetheless.

WebPosition’s old standalone version finally stopped querying Google correctly. I’m now in the process of switching to Advanced Web Ranking (AWR). Per my earlier post about finding a WebPosition replacement and some followup in the comments, AWR is the only solution to meet all of the SEO software criteria. I’m still apprehensive; it’s always a pain to switch to unfamiliar software, but my confidence is buoyed by the great email responses I’ve received from Robert at AWR support.

A few years ago, when I still had an SEO boner for WebPosition, that happy feeling was largely because of Scott Goodyear’s great support. Scott disappeared when infospace acquired WebPosition. That’s when the WP FAIL began.

I’ll write a more thorough review of Advanced Web Ranking after I run and customize a few AWR reports. Specifically, I’ll document precisely how I overcome what at first blush appears to be a cluttered interface to accomplish specific SEO reporting customization tasks. If you have any questions you’d like me to discuss in the review, let me know and I’ll try to abide. I know AWR does search engine submission, and also offers tools for keyword research, but those are features I wouldn’t usually comment on unless somebody specifically asked for a review.

Image via CrunchBase

This article assumes your web team has already configured your blog on a good blogging platform like WordPress with all the best SEO plugins installed and configured. It also assumes that you’ve gone through the complex decision of deciding where to put your blog: e.g. mysite.com/blog vs. myblog.com

Let me know if you need help or want further discussion on any of those prerequisites.

SEO Blogging Basics

• Write often.
• Know your keywords.
• Focus all page and post elements.
• Leverage links.
• Embrace community.

Content is King

When done well, blogging benefits your brand, customer community and valuable search rankings.

Write well and often. Avoid blogger burnout by using multiple bloggers. Invite guest bloggers who will give you great content and buzz in exchange for a link to their site in the byline. Do whatever it takes to get content flowing regularly. There’s no upper limit to quantity but you want to make sure you’re cranking the quality too.

Your audience is twofold and you should write for both humans and robots. We’ll assume you know how to connect with those humans but the pesky search engine spiders are a little different. If you blog a lot, you don’t need to always pander to the bots. But…

All in-house bloggers should be aware of your SEO campaign’s keywords and should be updated as the list changes. If it’s ever convenient to fit a keyword phrase into your blog post, and it sounds natural, do it.

Page Elements and Agreement

But sometimes you’ll want to take it a step further. The best SEO blog entries have some sense of agreement throughout disparate page elements. These elements are opportunities for us to convey semantic information to Google. Some of these elements:

• title (appears in the very top left of the browser and often is the top bolded part of the Google search engine result page (SERP) listing)
• description (not visible on page, but often used by Google in SERP listings, below the title)
• body content – copy in your paragraphs – the beef
• Headlines – your primary headline on almost any blog entry is the Blog name. it’s the h1. You then define a headline specific to your entry (h2). And break up your text with tertiary (h3) and sometimes other sub-headlines (h4, h5) These headlines help both humans and robots to better understand what’s important.
• alt tags – any time you use an image you have the ability to specify an alt tag to tell search engines and accessibility devices (screen readers) some info about the image.
• page name / entry name / headline / title – in WordPress, the “Enter title here” field is often used to populate several fields including

• the first, primary headline in your post
• the page name
• the page title (see above)

For example in this post:
http://dandreifort.com/2010/10/08/the-fall-of-uncool/
I entered “The Fall of Uncool” into that field.

• Which was used verbatim as the main headline of the post
• hyphenated in the page name /the-fall-of-uncool/
• and prefixed to the blog title to create the title

The Fall of Uncool << Dan Dreifort

• WordPress SEO plugins like Platinum SEO Pack, allow you to specify unique page  titles, page names, descriptions, etc.  apart from what you enter into the “Enter Title Here” field. You should use these fields to your advantage as specified below.

Titles – Should be no more than 65 characters in length including spaces. Anything more than that and you’ll be wasting energy; Google won’t display >65 characters in the headline of the listing and won’t pay attention to the additional characters for indexing. (Use Title Case for Titles) They’ll often be similar and sometimes even identical to the main headline of your blog post.

Description – Keep them under 165 characters. Use sentence case for descriptions. This is your opportunity to suggest to Google what they should put under the search engine result page (SERP) headline.

Google uses these various bits of info you provide to create an outline of your page and they toss it into the algorithm and do the ranking magic. We don’t want to miss out on these easy opportunities to tell Google what’s what. It’ll become second nature in no time.

Back to the concept of agreement, try to avoid stuffing important SEO keywords in the title, description, alt, etc. while NOT also using the phrase in the plain body content too. Or put positively, if you use a keyword phrase in the title and headline, it should appear at least once in the body too.

Your ideal Keyword Densisty for a campaign keyphrase should be between 1% and 3%. Don’t go too much higher or you risk retribution. Ideally, at least half of that keyword density will come from your plain sentence/paragraph body text. Err on the side of caution; if you’re copy starts to sound unnatural, don’t fret about low keyword density.

I’ll use another example:

http://dandreifort.com/2010/09/07/wordtracker-kei-fail-wordtracker-alternatives-seo-news/

Take 15 seconds to scan it.

Notice that there’s a theme? (No, it’s not ‘whining’. That’s just the modus operandi, not the theme.) How did you notice the theme? Some will mention the headlines. Some will mention the images and the captions. Others might have scanned the body content. Regardless, it’s easy for both humans AND bots to figure out the big pic of what this article is trying to say. When you google some phrases about this entry, many show up first SERP on Google.

“wordtracker alternatives”

“wordtracker kei”

etc.

What if I’d used the same “Wordtracker” headlines and images but my body text was about something totally different like cooking? While most humans wouldn’t be able to notice the incongruity (or lack of agreement) at first blush, it takes Google a fraction of a second to judge every detail of your content. If you stuff a keyword into important fields like title, headline, alt, etc. but don’t also use it in your body content, Google knows you’re stuffing keywords to try to game the system.

Post tags and categories

Whether or not you choose to make them visible on the page, you have the ability to tag and categorize your posts.

Develop a main taxonomy of your content to establish your main categories. If you start writing about new content, add a new category. A post can be in more than one category. You can leave a post uncategorized but why? Put it where it belongs!

Use several words and concepts to tag your post. A tag is usually a great place for the SEO keyword on which you’ve focused for the post. Choose several tags. There’s no hard upper limit, but use common sense. Don’t overdo it. There are also WordPress plugins that will suggest tags for you.

Linking

Linking to relevant sites can add value to your post. Your readers might benefit, and it lets you tell Google more about your content via association. You can also use linking to help your main (non-blog) site’s SEO.

There are two main elements of a link. The target URL is the page the link points to. The anchor text is the text that is the link. I.e. in the web’s early days webmasters regularly employed “Click Here!” as the anchor text for most links. Click Here tells neither human nor bot anything about the content on the other side of that link. We can do better.

Linking to third-party sites

When you link to a site you’re letting Google’s algorithm know that you’re sort of voting for that site. We can greatly diminish the vote by using a trick called “nofollow”. Nofollow instructs Google that the link is censured and should be ignored vis-à-vis their index.

Unless you’re feeling generous, always specify nofollow and never use an SEO keyphrase as the anchor when you link to a site you don’t control.  The WordPress plugin “nofollow post”  allows you to select “nofollow” when creating a link. (See my earlier post about the best WordPress SEO plugins for more.)

Linking to your own site

Just like linking to your competitors’ sites, but 100% opposite! Always try to use a relevant SEO keyword phrase to link to your own pages. Never use nofollow. Furthermore, you should use Google’s guidance to decide which of your pages gets the incoming link.

First determine which of your pages already ranks best for your keyword phrase.

If you type this into Google

site:dandreifort.com seo

You’ll get a list of the highest ranking dandreifort.com pages for the phrase “seo”

The page on top has the best foothold (highest rank) and is a great candidate for some SEO love.  I.e. the page on top would be the ideal target URL for a link with anchor text “seo”.

Don’t overdo the links to your own site. Try to link to your own site less than half the time. I.e. for every link in a post to your site you should include at least one nofollow link to different sites.

Links to your site from third-party sites

Encourage others (readers, friends, etc.) to link to your site. Getting a quality incoming link (“ backlink”) to your site is SEO gold. What is a quality link?

The BEST incoming links are:

• from another site to yours
• on a page that has high Google PageRank (PR)
• on a page with content closely related to yours
• without link reciprocity (e.g. you don’t link back)
• hosted on a different server, different domain registrar info, etc.

How do we get links?

• Ask nicely (ultra low success rate)
• Offer to trade links (also pretty low)
• Rent them (expensive and frowned upon by Google)
• Do some press releases (hope for links)
• Befriend bloggers (hope for links and/or a review)
• Other networking (hope for / trade for links)
• Etc.

Syndication and Community

Encourage syndication of your content via RSS. Provide multiple opportunities for readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Use a plugin to enable easy liking/sharing of your content on popular social networks.

Enable comments. Always reply to comments. Using keywords in comments is smart too.

• Platinum SEO Pack – It does auto 301 redirects, canonical URLs and plenty more.
• Google xml sitemaps - Creates your sitemap.xml and updates it automatically. (Does not work with WP 3.0 multisite feature.)
• nofollow post – Allows you to link to sites from your WordPress blog with rel=nofollow
• All in One Webmaster – All of your Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo SiteExplorer and Bing Webmaster Central needs addressed in one plugin.
• WP Supercache – Because speed matters, and WordPress can be a little heavy on the server resources, you need this plugin to make static post pages use fewer (if any) db calls.
• Zemanta – Suggests tags, images, links and more to add spruce (and SEO juice) to your blog posts.

WordPress SEO Plugins

What do you think? Are there better plugins for WordPress SEO? Got any advice to help me count better? (I think there might be more than five SEO plugins in that list!)

Image via Wikipedia

Google places a real live email link to pat@example.com on the Google account login screen. Though I’m sure it’s intended to improve usability it has the opposite effect. They placed the pat@example.com link smack dab in between the email (login/username) field and the password field. Keyboard savvy users normally use the tab key to move from one field to another. And if you save your login credentials in your browser, you can just type the first few letters of the username into the correct field, hit tab and then hit enter. Following that standard keyboard login procedure on Google’s page doesn’t log you in;  it brings up a fresh message in your default mail program addressed to pat@example.com. Lame.

Stylish Fix for pat@example.com Google Annoyance

If you don’t use Firefox, you should. (Well, Chrome‘s OK, I guess.) This fix only works for Firefox. Install Stylish – it’s a great add-on that allows you to easily fix broken pages… like google.com! You’ll need to restart Firefox.

Then install this pat@example.com Stylish style I just made. You’re done.

My other stylish offering to fix Reddit

I used to like digg.com but then they kept “improving” things. I stopped liking Digg. I’d poked around on reddit.com before but it’s so hideous that usability suffers. I found some decent Stylish options to fix things but they weren’t quite right. So I tweaked some existing reddit Stylish styles to make the site more than bearable. If you use Reddit, try my Reddit Stylish effort.

actually uncool

Hello fall.

I used to rank #1 in Google for uncool. Not so much anymore. My uncool site is wallowing WAY down the ranks. If you have a blog or a page, please toss uncoolcentral a link with “uncool” as the anchor text. I’ll hook you up with a link too. Or maybe I should be happy with things as they are. I.e. isn’t it even more uncool to not rank highly for “uncool”?

Or how uncool lead me to SEO

That uncool site helped me stumble into the world of SEO. I was so excited when I first found that I ranked well for “uncool”. The excitement faded (a little) then I started to wonder, “Why do I rank well for that phrase?” That was over a decade ago. I didn’t immediately begin doing SEO. I didn’t even know what SEO was. I figured it out and used my SEO knowledge to rank well for other phrases too.

Or how to get started in SEO

Eventually friends at marketing agencies and friends with businesses started to ask me how I ranked well for competitive phrases. Then they asked me if I’d do it for them too. If you want to start a career in SEO consider the same path; demonstrate quality SEO on your own sites and talk about your successes. If you do something (useful) well enough people will ask you to do it for them too. They might even pay you!

Image by Matthew Burpee via Flickr

I recently reluctantly renewed my subscription to Wordtracker, a keyword research tool and database. Why was I so reluctant? (And why am I considering asking for a refund?)

Wordtracker provides poor documentation and regularly switches the formulas they use for data they offer without notifying its customers.

Wordtracker Changes the Meaning of “Searches”

In 2009 Wordtracker completely changed the way they calculate the data they provide under the column labeled “Searches”. How they get away with redefining “searches” is beyond me. I contributed to a Wordtracker support discussion about this problem, but somebody else summed it up better. “The fact that a so-called provider of data like Wordtracker does not clearly and expressly explain two critical factors relating to their data is appalling.”

One day “searches” means one thing. The next day it means something else. I got no apology from Wordtracker. I had to eat crow and throw out a few mea culpas to my clients when I realized that Wordtracker had pulled the rug out from under me. Boo. But it gets worse.

Wordtracker Changes KEI Formula

New Wordtracker KEI Formula Sucks

My $329/yr subscription just expired so I renewed. It had been a while since I used the service and Wordtracker neglected to tell me that since the last time I’d used their service they changed the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) formula. I thought I was buying one thing and Wordtracker delivered another.

KEI used to be a great metric to find low hanging fruit or “keyword gems in the rough” if you will. But the metric is now useless for that. Click the image above for a larger version. You can see that the most generic, high traffic, high competition phrases now have the highest “KEI” – and yes, “KEI” should always appear in quotes from now on until… well, maybe forever.

Though they offer great verbiage about what an improvement it is, Wordtracker’s new “KEI” borders on meaningless. Surely somebody at Wordtracker should know that when you combine data inconsistencies with poor communication and terrible documentation, usability will suffer. Apparently the usability and branding experts at Wordtracker haven’t been speaking up.

Comparison of KEI Formulas

Wondering how to determine KEI? Me too.

Typically KEI is the the ratio of the square of the searches upon a particular keyword in a day divided by the number of websites that are listed for that keyword. For example, a keyword that has 100 searches a day and for which Google shows 5000 websites would have a KEI of 2. (100 * 100 / 5000)
- web1marketing.com

So they’re saying: KEI = (daily searches)^2 / Search Engine (SE) listings

Suppose the number of searches for a keyword is 486 per month and Google displays 214,234 results for that keyword. Then the ratio between the popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 486 divided by 214,234. In this case, the KEI 0.002.
-searchenginepromotionhelp.com

For that one, the formula is: KEI = monthly searches / SE listings

Suppose the number of searches for a keyword is 821 per day and Google displays 224,234 results (pages) for that keyword. Then the ratio between the popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is: 224,234 divided by 821. In this case, the KEI is 273.
-bestpracticemarketing.com

And those jokers say that: KEI = daily searches / SE listings

Those are the first three definitions I found. I’ll bet there are more. Clearly the jury’s out on KEI. But while contradiction abounds, there’s a common thread in defining KEI. It has always related to the quantity of searches and the number of search engine listings.

So what’s the new Wordtracker definition for KEI?

Maybe we should start with the old Wordtracker definition of KEI

KEI compares the Count result with the number of Competing Web pages

Yep. That seems to be in line with what everybody else says about KEI. In case you were wondering, “count” is,  “The number of times the search phrase has been used in Wordtracker’s partner search engines.” And “competing” means, “The number of Web pages the search engine says it has in its index that match the search phrase.” So more specifically the old Wordtracker formula for KEI was

KEI = (daily searches)^2 / Search Engine (SE) listings

Here’s the new Wordtracker KEI definition

KEI = (Searches ^ 2) / In Anchor

Is that searches per day? Per month? Who knows? The only other information Wordtracker provides on its data results pages about its new KEI equation is

KEI compares the number of times a keyword has been searched for with competition (the number of pages that contain the exact keyword phrase within at least one of its incoming links, known as ‘All in Anchor’).

Does the “In Anchor” include only external pages? Or will a page with an internal “In Anchor” link make the cut too? Tough to say. Wordtracker regularly defines things their own way. While I’ll not poo poo innovation, I take umbrage with my data providers when they skirt industry norms. If Google defines a metric a certain way, clearly it is beneficial to follow the leader. Note to Wordtracker: Don’t confuse your users by regularly creating new definitions for established industry terms. Your poor usability is a disservice to your paying customers.

In Anchor And Title IAAT

Wordtracker founder and CTO Mike Mindel says

‘In Anchor and Title’ is a count of the number of pages for which the keyword appears in both the title tag and the anchor text of at least one backlink to the page (not domain).

Understandably this metric is used to help identify serious competitors. But Google measures parts of this metric differently. Back to Mike Mindel

There are two reasons why [Wordtracker] and Google show different numbers of links for seemingly similar searches. The first is that the [Wordtracker] In Anchor metric shows a count of external anchor text (from other websites), whereas Google includes internal anchor text as well (from within a website).

Google Market Share - Image from Wikipedia

‹rant› If internal In Anchor links are good enough for Google they should be a sufficient metric for Wordtracker.  Wordtracker tries to sell you on why its better to use their more specific metric, but aren’t all search engine optimizers essentially trying to play Google’s game?! Why wouldn’t Wordtracker emulate Google metrics as much as possible? Clearly they’re meaningful. Something more specific isn’t always better. Furthermore, why would you use the same terminology to discuss two separate things? ‹/rant›

Wordtracker’s Mr. Midel goes on to say,

The second reason is that Google’s AllInAnchor returns broad matches by default (the words mcdonalds, nutrition, and facts in any order), whereas Wordtracker uses the In Anchor phrase match count (mcdonalds nutrition facts somewhere within the anchor text).

(See previous ‹rant› .) Mike Mindel continues,

I hope you can see now that bigger numbers clearly do not mean better numbers.

Well, Mike, I hope you can see now that I’m not sold on your new (bigger) KEIs being better than the older, smaller KEI figures. And doesn’t Wordtracker try to sell us on bigger numbers being better? (See next paragraph.) Now I’m confused(er).

Back to Low Hanging Fruit

This new KEI formula doesn’t do much to help SEOs find keyword phrases with low competition and reasonably high traffic. It’s more tailored to high traffic phrases. Mark Nunney of Wordtracker says,

“KEI squares Searches because otherwise if both Searches and Competition (whatever metric is used for this) go up at the same rate then the KEI value remains the same and that will not take into account the increased opportunity that more Searches offers.”

I don’t know… I always thought that popularity proved only popularity itself. (Think: MC Hammer.) I also always thought that KEI was to represent some notion of ROI. Big returns aren’t valuable if the investment doesn’t make sense. Even my largest clients benefit from low hanging fruit and the small investments required to conquer them. Just because one has the deep pockets necessary to go after high traffic keywords doesn’t mean that it’s the most effective path. Mull it over. Easy pickings are more valuable to me than the garbage these new Wordtracker metrics provide.

Wordtracker Alternatives

I wrote an email to Wordtracker explaining that I want a refund. But I haven’t sent it yet. I looked for wordtracker replacements. There are a few that are too expensive for me to even consider. (We’re talking $1000 per client per year.) But I found a few tools that provide good data. They are:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://www.keywordeye.co.uk

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

I’ve also heard decent things about marketsamurai.com/ but I haven’t tried them yet, so no endorsement or link out.

The sad truth is that I think I might get enough value from Wordtracker to warrant sticking with it. After all, I can dump all of the data to CSV and make my own versions of KEI to get the data I want. That’s nice, but that’s not the point.

Wordtracker sucks. They keep changing the definitions without notifying customers which causes Wordtracker’s usability to suffer. I am searching for Wordtracker alternatives. Let me know when you find a good one. I’m willing to pay for a wordtracker replacement.