To build a keyword glossary start with writing down 5 to 10 keywords or phrases that you think people will search on to find your site. Don’t worry about being wrong this is just as starting point.

Next go to Google’s keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool.

The Google Keyword Tool will help you to identify how often keywords are searched on a monthly basis (globally and locally), what the competition level is for these phrases, and help you to identify other opportunities.

Next, type your 5 to 10 keywords into the “word or phrase” text box and click on the search button.

In our example we identified the following keywords: men’s shoes, men’s casual shoes, work out shoes for men, and men’s work shoes.

You can see what Google returned for this search:

As you can see this is fantastic information to have access to. Before we didn’t know how often people were searching for specific keywords. Now we’ve taken the guesswork out and can optimize for the keywords that people are actually searching on.

You will also notice that Google returns keyword ideas. You will want to scan through these ideas for additional keywords to add to your glossary.

You should end up with about 10 to 30 keywords in your glossary depending on the topic and size of your site. If your site doesn’t have a lot of pages yet, then feel free to start small – 5 to 10 keywords is fine. Once you feel comfortable with optimizing for these keywords, add new ones to your glossary every few months. At the same time, create new pages to go with these keywords to ensure the depth and breadth of your site increases. Building new pages and content will signal to search engines that you’re serious about your site and the content you write. Stagnant sites that don’t grow or aren’t updated will not be crawled as frequently by search engines.

When you scan through the list of keyword ideas, look for keywords that have a large amount of search volume. At the same time, make sure they are specific to what your site is about. If you just go for large volume keywords, the terms may be too broad (“shoes”) or have different meaning depending on the industry or service (acronyms can have different meanings in different industries) you provide. Keywords with large search volume are also going to have more competition making them more difficult to rank on.

When selecting keywords you want to make sure you find a good balance between volume and competition. It’s all right to have a few stretch words that you may never rank on. Just make sure that you have other more “realistic” keywords to provide balance.

Once you’ve selected your 10 to 30 keywords, complete the rest of your glossary by adding the search volume, level of importance, and the page on your site you want to optimize. You can even do a Google search to see if your site ranks in the top 3 search result pages. If it does, you may want to track this ranking in your glossary to see how it changes over time.

TIP: When using Google or other search engines to track your site ranking, make sure you are NOT logged in. Being logged in will bias your search results and potentially show your site ranked higher than what it would show for other users.

TIP: Track to see if your site shows in the top 3 pages (first 30 results). Listings beyond page 3 receive so few clicks that ranking there is not going to provide much traffic.

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“SEO Principles 2013″ starts by taking you through SEO strategies, details how to build a keyword glossary, and explains each of the principles and what you need to do to make your pages ready for search engine crawlers. You will also learn what it takes to make your pages stand out in search results – ranking well is the first battle but you need people to click on your search result for it to be effective. Optimizing search results is an important tactic that is often overlooked.

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We know that people like to scan content until they find what they are looking for. When you scan through a page are you more likely to click on a link that says “click here” or “request a product demo”? Most likely the latter. But it’s also not just about being more descriptive with your links. You need to take it one step further.

In the example above I used the link text “request a product demo”. What if I told you that changing “request a product demo” to “get a product demo” would increase your click through rate by 100%, would you believe me? Well I can tell you that I’ve done A/B test that have received results like this and more. Changing and rearranging your link text to try different variation can have a huge impact on the number of people clicking on your links.

Now let’s look at the impact this could have on your lead generation programs. We’ll use the same demo link example from above. Lets say that for every 100 people you send to your demo form, 20 people complete the form. In this case, if the “request a product demo” link sends 100 people per day to this form you would get 20 completions per day. Now, change “request” to “get” in your link and consider the impact. By doing this, you have not only doubled the number of people coming to your form (100% increase in click through rate), but you have doubled your number of completions – all else being equal every 100 people complete the form 20 times.

Testing your link text is time well spent. Now go through your site and look for opportunities.

Have you experimented with positioning your calls-to-action in-line with your web copy? If not, I suggest you start today. Many companies position their calls-to-action in the right column of the page. Unfortunately, this has been done for so long that most people ignore this content all together. Experiment, with different positioning on the page. Make sure you track your tests and see if putting some simple in-line links after the first paragraph of text or at the bottom of your page drives more clicks then your beautiful right column buttons.

For those that build sites in multiple languages, use at least 2 languages in your mockups. German is usually a great test because it tends to be much longer than English. If your site supports any of the Asian languages you’d want to test those too as they tend to have some unique design contraints as well.

Original: I’d like to apologize to our ReStream users who used our service to stay informed on their favorite topics. Twitter has suspended our account, @ReStreamAlerts, which we used to notify you of new content that matched your interests. We didn’t receive a notification from Twitter before our account was banned and have not received a response since appealing the suspension on Tuesday. Last time we had an account banned, it took several weeks before we received a response saying that it was banned in error.

What’s most frustrating about this ban is that we used @ReStreamAlerts for 7 months without any issues. I suspect that Twitter has changed their algorithm for auto-banning. I created a backup account called @ReStreamAlert to use while I waited for our old account to be reinstated. Just hours after setting up this backup account, it too was suspended without notification.

As a developer I’m tired of these antics. I’m tired of the ReStream login being inaccessible for several hours at a time because Twitter is unable to keep up with their traffic. If you see a fail whale it usually mean that you can’t log into 3rd party Twitter apps. Now a key piece of our application has been shut down without notification and what’s sure to be several weeks without an explanation from Twitter. I’ll continue to support ReStream as it’s a passion of mine but I won’t be building any more dedicated Twitter applications. There’s too much risk, the platform is too unreliable, and the banning of accounts without notification is ridiculous. It’s too bad because it’s a fantastic service.

The infant stages of the Right Time Web are here. Look at FourSquare, Gowalla, and Facebook. They are all building and leveraging the Right Time Web by customizing experiences based on our interests. For your web application to leverage the Right Time Web you need to be aware of the 6 pillars that encompass it. They are:

Personal Information

How old are you? What gender and race are you? Who your friends are?

Location / Time

Where are you now? What time of day is it?

Interests

What are your hobbies? What do you like to do?

Schedule

Where are you going? How much free time do you have?

Status

What are you doing right now? What do you need right now?

Wish Lists

What do you wish you owned? What do you want to learn or do?

What Makes a Web Application “Right Time”?

Right Time Web applications need to integrate 2 or more of these pillars. One is not enough.

For example, your interests can be combined with upcoming events and your schedule to notify you that on your upcoming vacation there’s a concert that you would enjoy attending.

Or, your wish list could be combined with your location to let you know the camera your want is on sale at the store you’re in.

There are hundreds of examples. What’s important is the accuracy of the information. Right Time web apps don’t spam. The noise is filtered out leaving you with just the information that you need at that point in time.