JazzFest & Keyword Research
Have been really busy lately. Spent 11 days in New Orleans for a project and a really good time at Jazzfest. What an amazing trip that was; great times, delicious southern cookouts, a superlative trip on a swamp boat, good amount of billiards, southern hospitality and really good jazz. My preconceptions of jazz music were completely off base. I imagined a slow tempo with 40-year-olds tapping their toes. But, some of the groups I saw blew my mind with how talented and fast they could play. The crowds were great as well. The trip to Nawlins was one of the best trips I have ever been on. Met some quality people, learned some life lessons from some great role models and had a ball all the while. To be honest, if someone gave me a good enough reason to move down there, I would.
Getting back to providence was a quick kick into reality. Getting the car registered was not an easy ordeal, I wish four days at the dmv on no one. It's quite annoying and peculiar how Rhode Island doesn't tell you when your license is suspended and you're not allowed to register a car. No letter in the mail, just a surprise after standing in line for an hour.
The internship has been alright, being really proactive at work makes the time fly. The problem is that I do a lot of unnecessary work and data collecting that seems to be for my own learning instead of being useful. More direction would be nice but researching how to do something before doing it would also be beneficial. Another problem I'm going to have to overcome is that I like to just jump right into data collecting instead of thinking about how I’m going to organize and categorize my efforts.
On another note, the paper I wrote for my externship seemed to come out well. I hope it's graded accordingly. Trying to make the paper understandable and easy for someone who uses computers to grasp was quite difficult. I may one day put it up on this site. I think it's a pretty good place to start for someone just getting into SEO.
Either way, I’ve been having some fun doing keyword research for product lines. The tools I’ve been using consist mostly of; Google's adwords keyword tool, Google's traffic estimator, Google's search based keyword tool and spyfu. Spyfu is especially good for their kombat mode, you can place your URL vs. someone else's and see what keywords you share or don't using a Venn diagram. They've been really useful especially when exported into excel. I'm quickly realizing how powerful excel can be for data management and collection. Keyword research has actually been quite interesting but I still have trouble deciding how effective a keyword will be. The one factor I always have to keep in mind is whether I’m trying to disqualify or qualify searchers.