Blog Themes and Topics of the Top 50 Technorati Blogs
One question I get asked a lot is whether it’s better to use a two column or a three column blog theme. Usually I say it’s a matter of preference balanced with the needs of your content. So, I decided to chart the top 50 blogs at Technorati, to see whether they use 2 or 3 column themes. I also noted the subject matter.
Here’s the result:
Turns out they’re about half and half split between 2 and 3 column. So – which is better? Depends on your preference and your content just as I thought. Meow!
Free Coffee for Bloggers From Joffrey’s
Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company is trying a crazy new promotion… a Java Beta Test… which means a free sample of “Jamaican Me Crazy” coffee to 10,000 bloggers.
Lucky me – I’m one of them!
There’s 1100+ bloggers in already, so go sign up while there’s still coffee for the giving.
Yes, it’s for real and has been buzzed by Mashable and CNET.
P.S. Yes, I’ll let you know what it’s like as soon as it arrives.
Keyword Selection Tools
There’s plenty of debate about which keyword tools are best. What you need to look at is (a) what you need and (b) what the tool offers.
Fact is, Google is the top search engine with over half the search market, and Google’s keyword selection tool doesn’t show the number of searches per month, per phrase. So, let’s look at what some of the keyword selection tools out there do.
Google’s Keyword Tool
The upside of Google’s keyword selection tool is that it will show you tons of related searches. The downside? Some of them may have little to no demand. A “buy phrase” with little demand but high conversion is a great find. A long tail phrase with little demand and little conversion is pretty much useless.
Yahoo/Overture Inventory Tool
It’s really a pity that this tool doesn’t work most of the time. It used to give solid and measurable demand figures. Used to tell how many times a keyword/phrase was searched at Yahoo in the past 30 days. You could take that figure, multiply by 2.5 and get a rough estimate of demand at Google. Except, it seldom loads. And results aren’t current anymore. And that’s sad to see because it used to rock.
Wordtracker
I haven’t jumped on the wordtracker rah-rah wagon. I find their results to be much lower in quality and accuracy than keyword discovery. Probably what I dislike most (aside of the totally skewed KEI figures) is that they pull results from dogpile and metacrawler – which both will list paid ads among organic. When I’m researching keywords for organic search, I don’t care what’s coming up in paid ads. Apples and oranges.
Keyword Discovery offers both paid and free keyword selection tools. I find their results to be far superior to Wordtracker. The only downfall to Keyword Discovery is that you can suck up the better part of a day finding related search phrases and buy phrases. Gives phrase suggestions as well as the demand, which is very handy for finding both high search volume phrases and long tail phrases. You can get a free trial of the full paid version here.
Not as full featured as the paid version, but still a very handy tool that will turn up more keyword phrases than you can shake a stick at. Like the full version, you can eat up a chunk of time finding tons of keywords – and it also lists demand for the phrases, which is handy so you don’t waste time chasing phrases no one is searching for.
I’ve never used it, but the grapevine says the results are very similar to Keyword Discovery. I really haven’t a clue because the 32 page sales letter (pasted into Word) is a total turnoff for me. I’ve always relied on the theory that the longer the sales letter, the faster I run. Go look at Keyword Discovery – see the difference in presentation? Personal preference, but that’s my opinion.
These were good back when Overture’s search actually worked and was kept current. The keyword selection tool, last I checked, was based on the Overture keyword selection tool and did the math of converting Overture/Yahoo demand numbers to Google numbers. Filed under ‘was good once upon a time…”
Totally free. As in, you don’t even have to give them your email address – although you can buy the guy a beer to say thank you. It’s a quick and simple way to generate a long list of related phrases. Doesn’t list the demand, though, so it’s not much more helpful than Google’s keyword tool.
This might fall under saving the best for last. Quintura isn’t a search engine. It’s not a keyword tool, either. What it does is spit out a ton of words and phrases that are related to what you searched for. It’s a little gem for finding words and phrases that you should probably include in your content and keywords to increase LSI (latent semantic indexing) relevance. Go see. You’re welcome.