This is a guest post written by Lior Levin who acts as a senior advisor to a kitchen stools online store called Kitchen Stools Direct. They sell kitchen stools and bar stools online.

Even those who have only dabbled in SEO know the value of a good keyword research tool.

Such a tool helps you target the best keywords possible, introducing you to new, related terms that you might have ignored, and offer powerful, practical suggestions on how to optimize your content for the terms your target audience is actually trying to find it with.

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We finally got access to the new Google Analytics today, so I’ve been having a play around.

The biggest change is the way it looks, mainly the menu system, also some reports seem to have disappeared – but I guess they may get re-added at sometime in the future.

The first thing you notice is the amount of space there is in the menu, leading us to believe we’re going to see a lot more stuff added in in the near future:

The next thing you notice is that you can create and customise new dashboards, I’ve created an SEO dashboard:

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I know I’m a bit behind the times with this one, it’s been a few weeks since Google announced changes to the way they integrate social results with normal search results. In the process, they added the ability to publically or privately link your Google profile with accounts on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter and Yelp. There’s an exciting screenshot below.

Now, what self respecting geek would fail to notice that when you select “Flickr” and type in an account name, the page doesn’t send “Flickr” back to the server, it sends back a number – 18. If you choose “Facebook” it sends back 5. In numerical order, the list looks like this:

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I know flash mobs have been done to death but this looked really cool..

The Lynx Excite Angels have fallen … will they fall for you in Birmingham Bullring 19th & 20th March 2011

hahaha made me laugh anyway

The full EU Regs are here, if you’re interested or some kind of swaggering cock-about-town lawyer licking his lips at the prospect of bringing someone to “justice” in the interests of your swollen bank balance via some farcical “test case” that you just happen to bring about against a massive, high-profile and coincidentally wealthy web company. Sigh.

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..and the year’s new SEO pastime of “Out The Brand!” continues unabated. Today we learn that Hugo Boss have followed Beat That Quote and JC Penney into Google’s threshing machine. It’s a slightly different case, in that Hugo Boss are in trouble for effectively cloaking – redirecting users to relevant pages whilst serving default content to Google.

It’s probably unnecessary for a brand the size of Hugo Boss to be doing this. With their brand cachet and natural authority, it should be capable of ranking fairly handily and staying within the guidelines. But taken together, these cases highlight some problems that Google has helped to create.

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Google’s move into comparison verticals is already well underway – with mortgages, cinema listings, product reviews and credit cards already high profile additions to the regular SERPs. So the announcement that they’ve snaffled up BeatThatQuote for a tidy £37 million is no great surprise. Google’s strategy is to screw down into verticals wherever they can, effectively positioning themselves to squeeze out competition later down the line. At some point, your bread-and-butter SERPs for ‘cheap insurance’ or whatever isn’t just going to throw back the big names in the industry, but Google’s own products.

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