In early September I ventured to Content Marketing World in Cleveland Ohio. One of the sponsors and vendors was InboundWriter. I’m always looking for new a blogging tool to try and a SEO tool to spend my free time with so just before I left on Thursday I stopped by the InboundWriter booth to get a demo of the product they had to offer.  I was pretty impressed by the demo they showed me so I exchanged cards with the team and headed home.

A few weeks ago Erik emailed me asking if I’d be interested in beta testing their WordPress plugin before it launched. I told him I would be happy to! I’ve got to say, if you are a blogger or a member of the content marketing community who doesn’t have time to start learning all the tricks of search engine optimization, I’d highly recommend that you check out this blogging tool.

A Quick Overview of the InboundWriter WordPress Plugin

InboundWriter sits on the right hand side of your posts page inside of your WordPress backend. Once you start writing our post you have the option of including up to three “relevant terms” that you are planning on focusing on within the post. As you write InboundWriter will start grading your post. Once you hit 200 words, it will begin to show you the results of your content marketing.

While the concept of this is very simple, it is an SEO tool that all bloggers should consider using to help optimize their blogging efforts for search engines.

For each of your relevant terms, a star rating will pop up next to it helping you decide which keywords you should use more of within your blog post. After the plugin starts to score you, this blogging tool will also include “steps to improve my score” to help you figure out where you have gone wrong.

I’ve used this plugin on a few of my recent blogs and have had a lot of fun watching the score move as I work to optimize for a few different terms. It’s worth checking out if you have any concerns about your search engine optimization. The plugin works great on OLD blog entries as well!

InboundWriter Web Tool

If you’re not using WordPress (you should be) but are looking for an SEO tool to help optimize your website content, InboundWriter offers a web based version of their tool as well. This was the original demo they shared at Content Marketing World to help content marketers with their search engine optimization. You can optimize up to 8 documents a month for free and if you decide to optimize more, their plan is only $19.95 a month.

InboundWriter released a video about their product:

It is not a bad deal considering the results that this SEO tool has to provide!

Learn More About the InboundWriter WordPress Plugin

At the end of the day, I’m a nerd when it comes to learning about content marketing so I had a great time with the InboundWriter WordPress Plugin. It is a very simple blogging tool that can help improve your writing on a number of levels.

They have a free report for download and I highly recommend checking it out to understand the impact of real-time content optimization a little better.

Overall I think this is a fantastic SEO tool and I would recommend it to any blogger I run into. I’m excited to watch it evolve with the changes to search engines.

For more information on their plugin InboundWriter has added a new section to their website about the Inbound Writer WordPress Plugin. They do require registration in order to use the plugin, although you have both free and paid options available.

One of the best parts about being in the tech industry is that it is always evolving and always providing new opportunities to learn. When I was in school, I hated to study. Math and me, didn’t mix, and I was always wound up frustrated.

Now that I’m out of school and learning to get along in the real world, I’ve found that I LOVE to learn. Now it’s about social media, seo, blogging, in other words, things that I like. I especially have learned more as I get to blog more. While I spend a lot of time blogging on the GT blog, I am always looking for new places to write and reasons to force myself to learn something new.

I’ve always loved to write, whether it’s bios of gymnasts (and trust me I’ve spent years writing those), blog entries no one ever will read, or even just notes to myself that need to be ripped up and thrown away to get past a point of frustration. I’ve found that writing is just a good way to get my thoughts out.

The more I write these days the more I find myself relaxing.

So I decided to take on the “Bad Ass SEO Blogging Contest” this month and see what I could do. With a focus on keywords and what types of keywords you should focus on for your website, I decided to give it a shot.

Check out the post, leave a comment, argue with me, and tell your friends.

Oh, and check out the sponsors:

$200. Prize Sponsors

Daniel McGonagle
Link Building

BestTravelWebsites.com

Best Travel Sites

ArrangeYourVacation.com

Vacation Rentals

$150 Prize Sponsors

Candy Store

$100 Prize Sponsors

Alisa Bowman Marriage Advice

Internet Marketing Services

SEO Software

SEO Ottawa

Virtual Assistants

Hesham Zebida Thesis Skins

Gerald Weber Houston SEO

Toni J Young Network Marketing Training

Quillcards Distinctive Ecards by Quillcards

Ghostwriter Dad Ghostwriting services

$50 Prize Sponsors

Whitney Segura Whitney Segura’s Internet Marketing Blog

James Brown James Brown

Raxa Design Houston web design

Eric Brantner Freelance Copywriter

The Servant Media Houston Business Development

Ana Hoffman, Traffic Generation Cafe Increasing Targeted Website Traffic

The Lane Real Estate Team Kennewick Homes

Other prizes: Non-Cash Sponsors

Hostgator.com 1 year Business Hosting plan. Includes toll free phone number and SSL $179.40 value Business Web Hosting

David Harry A full years membership at SEO Dojo, a value of $250.SEO Training Dojo

Link-Assistant.Com SEO PowerSuite Enterprise (max. functionality license) $599 worth with a life-time Live! Plan subscription. SEO tools

Special thanks to the contest media partner: My Blog Guest. MyBlogGuest.com is the free guest post exchange community where users meet to exchange guest posts and network.

"As the next generation is introduced to search engines, it won't be just Google"

Google recently celebrated their 11^th birthday. There’s no surprise they’ve been around that long and it’s not like they’re going anywhere…  I’ve been a huge advocate of Google and once wrote a paper on “The Google Guys” being my idols when asked to write about who I look up to (yes I’m a geek, and I’m not afraid to admit it). I’ve never seen a problem with the phrase “just Google it” until today.

In talking with a friend, they were trying to tell me how they were told something was on Google maps, but it wasn’t showing up when they were doing a search. We talked for a few minutes and I just couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. It was RIGHT THERE when I looked it up. Finally I asked him what he was seeing instead of the item he was looking for. He told me “I went to msn.com and typed it in… it’s not showing up”.

We have adopted the verb “google” into the English language. Dictionary.com defines that verb as:

“to search for information on the Internet, esp. using the Google search engine”.

The problem with adopting it is that we assume that everyone is using Google. As the next generation is introduced to search engines, it won’t be just Google.

For those of us who use Google on a daily basis, it is an accurate assumption. Yet, when talking to friends who might use msn/bing we run the risk of pulling up completely different results. No two search engines think exactly alike. Google has plenty of apps and so many more coming down the line, that it is not about to disappear, but the competition is getting greater.

People who don’t spend a great deal of time on a computer don’t always know that there is a difference between Google and Bing. Imagine being a business owner and looking at your rankings between the two search engines. Chances are they’re not going to be the same.

Don’t get me wrong, my loyalty remains in Google as a search engine.

The moral of the story is be careful when you tell someone to ”just google it”. If you know that a story or event is listed on the top of Google, make sure you friends you’re sharing the story with using Google to find it. If not, who knows where they might end up!

How often do you catch yourself using the phrase “just google it”?