If you are looking for some easy backlinks for SEO purposes and targeted traffic for your blog, we have a couple of quick tips for you that will turn you into a blogging rock and roll star in no time at all.

Yahoo Answers

Head to Yahoo Answers and look for questions that people have asked that relate to the topic of your blog. People are digging for answers, and who better to provide the solution than you? To get a good feel of how to provide a good answer, take a look at “Best Answers” for your niche market. Best Answers will also give you ideas on what to write about in your blog. Whenever you can solve people’s problems, traffic and customer’s are sure to follow.

Google Trends

Google Trends helps you identify what is a hot topic in your market right now. With Google Trends, you can identify what keywords to write about today. Of course, you can also identify what topics or keywords are losing popularity as well. Once again, by writing about current and relevant topics, readers will come.

Google Wonder Wheel

The Google Wonder Wheel is great for when you are wondering what to write about. (I couldn’t resist saying that). The Google Wonder Wheel is a nice free keyword research tool that is now accessible in the left hand margin of their search results page.  This tool will help you drill down into very small segments of your market which will help you target long tail phrases, and we all know that the money is in the long tail. They don’t call it mining the long tail for nothing. The results that the Google Wonder Wheel shows are based on user searches. So, you will have near perfect insight into what your audience is looking for.

SEO for Firefox

This next tactic is a bit more time consuming but very effective nonetheless. Here are the steps.

1. Install the SEO for Firefox Plugin and enable it
2. Run a search for a keyword in your market -> then, select show options -> finally, select blogs from the categories button.
3. Next, select the “100” option
4. Now, you will need to export the results in a CSV file to you hard drive. To export the CSV file, click the export button that is just under search box.
5. Now the valuable information that we are looking for is in the Y! Page Links column. This is letting you know the number of backlinks. At this point, I would sort the data based on the Y! Page Links in order from largest to the smallest.
6. The final step is deciding what to write about. Take a look at the posts that interest you, get your creative juices flowing and blog to your hearts content.

I remember when I first switched over to Google as my search engine of choice. This was in the early 2000s. I had regularly used Yahoo to that point, but I would often find myself having to run different queries in order to get what I was after. Basically, they were not delivering the results that I was looking for.  Thus, began my dabbling with other search engines of the day.

What I loved about Google (and still do) is that they more often understood my intent the first time around when I searched, and I also liked their no nonsense interface that was not all cluttered with ads and news items. The accuracy of their search results outperformed the other search engines and this is what has kept me and many others hooked on Google to this day.

With Google Caffeine, Google has taken a step further in understanding a searcher’s intent by delivering what is known as blended results. Blended search results are nothing new, but now Google has perfected them a bit more. With the new Google SERP, you can now be shown images, news, twitter posts, Google Products, videos and related searches based on your query. Google is also more quickly sifting through the value of Social Media sites by delivering the most relevant sites higher in their SERPS for a given topic.

Google is not just providing their search results faster. They are also providing relevant results faster for your search. This helps Google keep the Lion’s share of  the searches performed by end users.

Google knows human behavior quite well. Maybe they know us even better than they care to admit. One thing that is certain, when it comes to search behavior, is that we want our results relevant and fast. That is why Google has focused on delivering their results even faster than before. The Google search engine has always been quick, but now it’s faster than ever. Many tests that we have recently been run on the beta version of Caffeine have shown that search results are being delivered at an average of twice as fast, when compared to the last version of Google search engine.

You can tell how fast Google is delivering search results, because they publish the speed at which at they delivered your search query on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This appears right next to the number of results that there are for your keyword.

For example, when I search the term “google caffeine”, the following data is published by Google on the SERP.

It is impossible to compare the search results for keywords against such sites as Bing and Yahoo since they do not publish the speed at which they deliver their SERPs, and who can blame them. There is no sense publishing this data unless they are up to speed with Google.

We live in a microwave society today to say the least. We want everything done for us our way and in an instant. That is why Google has tweeked this part of their search engine. It’s just one more way for them to stay ahead in the search engine marketing game.

Every so often Google updates their algorithm for their massively popular search engine. When they perform such updates, many site owners brace themselves for the worst. After all, Google updates have names just like Florida hurricanes do. In fact , the Google search engine update of 2003 is known as the “Florida Update.” This update alone put businesses out of business in a day.

This time around, Google has been kinder to web masters and website owners by giving them a preview of what’s to come next. They are not just trying to be kind to web masters, but to web searchers too. After all, without the web searchers, they have no business and if web searchers are not happy with search results, they will head off to Bing or Yahoo. Now, that is what Google does not want.

By allowing web masters a sneak peek into Google Caffeine, Google was able to get input from web masters as to what they thought about Caffeine as well as help them iron out any programming bugs. It does seem a bit odd that web masters and Google could get along so well albeit for a brief time.

The main reason the Google updated their search engine is because they want to stay ahead in the search engine game. Google has no plans of being nice in the war for search users. After all, they are a publicly traded company, and they have shareholders to answer to.

Now in defense of Google, a search engine’s job is only getting harder and harder as more and more web pages are being published all over the world in multiple languages everyday. So as you can imagine, speed is of the essence. Thus, Google has appropriately named their latest search engine incarnation, Google Caffeine. It’s the fastest search engine to date.

For those just starting out in the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the topic can be a bit intimidating. After all, the Google algorithm is comprised of about 200 different ranking factors with some carrying more weight than others. Also, we have all heard the horror stories of:

1. Google de-indexing sites
2. Nasty Google updates that can put you out of business in a day
3. Google slaps that leave you dizzy
4. Google site wide penalties that drop your site in incremented values.
5. And lastly, the dreaded Google sandbox

Now you will notice up until now, all the talk is about Google and that is for a very good reason. Google is the 2 ton elephant, or gorilla if you prefer, in the Search Engine game. Depending on what reports that you read, Google handles anywhere to 75% to 80% of all search queries online.

Google and Microsoft’s Bing have recently joined forces. They each had glaring weaknesses. Hopefully together, they can build a better mouse trap or better yet, a better search engine.

The good thing about SEO is that if you grasp the basics, they will serve you very well no matter how the search engines tweek their algorithms. The days of spamming the esearch engines and creating low quality sites are coming to an end thankfully. To put it simply, a whole team of Google engineers is a whole lot smarter than most of us. On the brighter side of things, the search engines do tell you what is important to them and their customers, the searchers.