What if there was a free keyword research tool that let you find out what questions people had about your areas of expertise? Well, there is!

Wordtracker provides a free keyword research tool called Keyword Questions that is quick and easy to use. You simply enter a phrase and, in return, you get a list of questions that people have asked about that phrase.

Let’s say that you’re an accountant. This time of year, people are starting to organize material for their income taxes and are looking for helpful information online. If they find the information that they need on your site – in other words, if they find the answers to their questions – then you’ve got an excellent opportunity to also sell them on your services.

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Top 10 Ways to Generate Sales Leads in 2010

You want and need a killer sales strategy to kick off 2010 and The Search Guru is here to help. You are probably already using some of these techniques. If so, what can you do in 2010 to ramp up their effectiveness? If you’re not using any of these strategies yet, why not?

Our recommended sales-churning methods include:

• ways to use social media services
• pay per click management techniques
• organic search engine optimization strategies
• insights into your link building campaign
• buzz marketing

These methods are listed in no particular order because each situation is different – but we are confident that you can craft a powerful strategy using your own unique combination of the strategies listed below.

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Where do you want to take your business in 2010? What road map will get you there? Using what SEO strategies & PPC strategies to get sales leads?

Author C.S. Lewis has said that, “We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”

What does that mean to you and your company? Well, for one thing, if Christmas 2009 was disappointing for your business, you’ll need to honestly assess whether you did all you could with your organic search engine optimization and pay per click strategies.

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With the abundance of information floating around about search engine optimization strategy, it’s good to get back to basics to address how search engines work!

This is the first post in our multi-part series that deconstructs the technical how and why of SEO in a way that non-technical users can understand.

How search engines work

The major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) use what are commonly called “search spiders” or “search engine spiders” to examine web pages. They “crawl” or “spider” the web and index their results so that people can search through what they have found.

Search spiders and engines are very simple creatures, overall, and search engine optimization strategy – or SEO – is an umbrella term for the group of techniques that make it easier for the spiders to find and properly index pages on your website. But, first – more about the spiders.

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