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In performing keyword research for a number of SEO projects, I have found that one of the important factors is to quickly get beyond any preconceptions of what the targeted keywords should be for a particular client. It is all too easy to select the keyword phrases used by most of the client's competitors. If this happens, you find yourself spending a lot of time trying to rank against keywords where there are a huge number of competing pages in the search engine indices.

I stopped to get coffee this morning on my drive into town, and watched with fascination as another customer stood and poured packet after packet of sugar into his coffee. He was grabbing two and three at a time, and by my estimate there were 30 or more packets in his medium sized cup by the time he finished several minutes later. He actually requested a spoon to mix the slurry, since the provided plastic stirrers simply bent double.

Clients often are confused about the roles served by domain name registrars and website hosting providers. Both are necessary components in having a live website, and failing to keep active accounts at both can have unfortunate consequences such as having a website go offline, email services halted, or even losing a domain name to another party.

We use BaseCamp from 37signals for general work time tracking, including project development. Over time there can be a large amount of data accumulated, and there is a nifty way it can be consolidated and used for project analysis. In essence, export the time data out of BaseCamp and use the power of Excel to make summaries and graphs. In this way, you can easily see items such as:

So much of our work these days is conducted by remote that it is very useful to be able to capture an image from a computer screen, make annotations, then send it to a client or colleague. TechSmith recently released Snagit in beta for the Mac. This tool is already available for those on Windows platforms, and it is quite useful in doing these tasks. Those using Macs probably are familiar with the built in screen capture using the Cmd-Shift-4 key combination, but I have found Snagit to have a couple of advantages. For one, it allows you to capture all of a window, not just what is showing on the screen. This is useful for long web pages that extend past the confines of your screen, for example. The other advantage is the variety of annotations available. You can use speech bubbles in addition to more standard fare such as lines and arrows, and easily adjust sizes, arc contours, etc. When trying to convey an idea to a client, or get markups out to a project team, the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words is true. Perhaps even more important, it takes time to write those thousand words, so being able to convey your thoughts efficiently can result in improved project deliveries and economics.

Email marketing is a relatively low cost, high return on investment way for companies to get their messages to prospective and existing clients. While marketing budgets have been pared in 2009, the percentage of available budgets has increased more for email marketing than for any other promotional tactics.

Most people know that blogs are a great way to help users keep informed about topics of interest, and at the same time drive qualified traffic to the website. For this reason, search engines love blogs. Blogs with new material posted on a frequent basis that is relevant to the website will encourage search engine spiders to index the parent website more frequently. For many site owners, however, adding a blog can be a daunting prospect, particularly if their website is hosted with a provider with restrictive policies regarding new features.