Researching your keywords takes time and tools. You might think you know what your primary keywords should be, but I have seen web site owners painfully discover that they were sadly mistaken.

You may be on the right track, but just need to do some tweaking. The first step is to brainstorm and make a list of, say, 25 of what you think might be keywords and phrases a web searcher would use to find your page. Come up with both single words and phrases. We’ll use some neat tools to narrow these down and even discover some nuggets you might not have thought of.

As a rule, optimizing for a single word is a lesson in frustration. For instance, can you imagine how many pages on the web would be competing for a single word like cars? Millions!

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Would you like to play a game?

Every computer geek old enough to type will remember those immortal words from the geekfest film “War Games” starring Matthew Broderick in 1983. Like all pre-Web computer nerds, I was in the theater on opening day to watch young Matthew save the world (Who needs The Force when you have got a geek handy?).

And, every time I see the movie on TV, I get a little sentimental over my first computer. We called them microcomputers in those days. This was before there was such a thing as an IBM PC.

We did not have anything resembling the GUI (graphical user interface) of today and a mouse was something the cat chased. More commonly, we just had a monitor, keyboard and CPU. Heck, hard drives were expensive and teensy compared to today (something like a 10 meg drive for several thousand dollars…and that was a bargain!) and microcomputers did not come with them. My first computer was a TRS-80 Model III with 16k (yes, that’s right) of RAM and a slow, temperamental cassette tape drive. I later brought it up to the maximum 48k of RAM and added two single sided floppy drives. I thought I was smoking.

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Those new to SEO might not know that Google does not place all of the pages it spiders into the main index. Known to some as Google Hell, the Google Supplemental Index is where Google places pages that it considers less important. This lack of importance can be due to any number of factors - duplicate content, lack of Page Rank, orphaned pages, etc.

In a nutshell, pages in the Supplemental Index are in a kind of limbo and only show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) when there is absolutely nothing for the search query in the main index.

One theory of why Google came up with such a thing has to do with the sheer magnitude of spidering and indexing involved. To sift and sort the world’s data, lots of servers are needed. The theory is that Google decided to separate what it considered the best into the main index and dump the rest into a secondary index - just in case.

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It is rare that I go through article directories, but I found a very interesting article over at GoArticles.com that discusses the recent Google toolbar Page Rank update that has thrown a lot of site owners into a tizzy. I mention some of my findings in my post Google Re-examines Recent PR Update.

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The Web Optimist Robotic Podcast is now online. Utilizing the free services at Feed2Podcast.com, my posts can now be listened to online as well as read. The RSS feed is automatically converted to voice.

Ever so cool! I just love technology!