Author Archives: Hari Varrier

Monitoring Your Industry

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I have already mentioned why it is so important to keep up-to-date in your industry. So how do we ensure we are kept on the cutting edge? You should first check to see if your industry is covered at Moreover.

Secondly you should use a tool that is hosted by Yahoo at http://news.yahoo.com/rss

Simple scroll down for the search box and type the keyword for your industry into the search box. Remember, you can do this multiple times for multiple keywords if you wish. The next step is to click the drop-down box and subscribe by using the feed reader of your choice. I personally use Google, it gives the following options:

Add to Google homepage

Your Google homepage brings together Google functionality and content from across the web, on a single page.

or

Add to Google Reader(Works Better)

Google Reader makes it easy to keep up with the latest content from a large number of sites, all on a single reading list. I personally have used both, and they are both great options, but I would recommend the “Google Reader”.

Remember, all of these options are completely free of charge. Also make sure you go to any of the authority publications or websites in your industry and subscribe to their RSS feeds.
Not only can you use the following tools to monitor your industry, there is the added bonus of using them to get your creative juices flowing. There is nothing better to spark some ideas for content then having hundreds of existing content ideas laid out in front of you. With this information you should never run out of ideas for Creative Content.

Google On Page Factors

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SEO consists of two components: On-Page and Off-Page Factors. Since Google is generally known as an Off-Page Factor search engine, many SEOs and webmasters have started to ignore the On-Page Factors. This is a big mistake. While you can’t rank well for competitive phrases just focusing on the On-Page factors, if you get the On-Page stuff wrong, your ranking suffer. To help you, I’ve put together the following checklist:

1. Validate your HTML Code so it is “Spider” Compliant. Your code should be “close to” W3C Compliant. W3C is not perfect and often will flag a problem when there isn’t one. Before making radical changes, discuss them with your webmaster.

You should know that there is a big difference between “W3C Compliant Code” and “Search Engine Compliant Code”. According to my testing, having “search engine compliant code” is what you want.
You should also check your Code to Text Ratio. Having more body text than code can give you an edge in securing a good ranking for your site. One of the best ways to improve your code to text ratio is to make your JavaScript external files and use CSS for your formatting and make that file external too. That can save you as much as 30% of your file size.

2. File Naming – Hyphens Not Underscores.

Why? Because…
blue-widget.html = blue widget (good).
blue_widget.html = bluewidget (not good).
In terms of getting a “boost” from the keyword being in the URL, if a search for “blue widget”, the first URL gets the boost. To get the second to receive a boost, a search for “blue_widget” must be done (with the underscore). Do you search that way? Of course not, and neither will anyone else. I recommend you use zero or one hyphen in your domain name. More than that it looks spammy and you will lose credibility.

3. Text Link Navigation at the Bottom of the Page.

Having text link navigation at the bottom of your pages allows you to target the specific keyword in the anchor text and send valuable PR juice to the pages you want and nofollow all others. Which means you will have better control over the terms used in anchor text as well as where your PR will go. Remember having the text link in the body text will give you the most “juice”, but if you can’t force it, the bottom of the page is better than nothing. Also, remember of the recent bug in Google – if you have an image link, you have to have a text link too somewhere on the page.

4. Character Set Tag.

First, your Character Set Tag must be correct. Which one you use depends upon what you want to do. Examples of the two most often used are:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
The biggest advantage for UTF-8 is its extended character set, thus it can display a higher number of foreign characters. If you aren’t accepting foreign characters in your forums and are mainly using “Western European Languages” (English, French and German), you want to use 8859-1. Current testing results show no differences in terms of crawlability with GoogleBot between the two character sets.

Tip: The Character Set Tag should appear as the first tag after the <head> tag. Why is it before the Title? You want the Character Set Tag before any other tag that displays text in the browser so that you are defining the character set and not allowing the browser to choose for you.

5. The Title Tag.

In terms of SEO, the Title tag doesn’t carry the same weight it did years ago in Google. The Title not only displays at the top of the browser window, but also appears when potential customers perform a search in a search engine and review the results. Therefore, in terms of clickthroughs and conversions, your Titles are extremely important. So you should focus on creating killer titles that are highly compelling and focused.
Every page should have a unique Title.
Maximum of 66 characters. Google shows 66 characters in the SERPs.
The Title should be the second tag (the character set tag should be first).
Try to formulate a question or a strong statement. If you pose a question, answer it in the Description Meta Tag.
Describe what the page is about and keep it focused.
For highest click-through, incorporate a “Call to Action” into your Title.
If you use the keyword phrase in the Title don’t keyword stuff. I recommend it as the keyword phrase will be bolded, thus drawing attention to your listing. If the keyword phrase is at the beginning of the Title, testing shows it helps “anchor” the eye to the Title.

What not to do:
Do not use ALL CAPS. Instead, capitalize the first letter of each major word.
Don’t use more than one Title tag per page.
Duplicate use of keyword in the Title.
No long Titles (more than 66 characters).

6.The Description Meta Tag.

In terms of SEO, the Description Tag is not very important to Google. The Meta Description appears with the Title in the SERPs. So, it must work hand-in-hand with the Title to attract potential customers. If you do not include a Meta Description, Google will use the first 30-40 words of your page, which could look very unappealing to a customer.

Recommendations:
Include a unique Description on every page.
Maximum of 150 characters (including spaces).
If you posed a question in the Title, answer it in the Description Meta Tag.
Your focus should be in creating curiosity in the reader. Don’t satisfy it with your Description. If done right, you will achieve higher traffic to your site.
Include offers, guarantees or even phone numbers to a install Call to Action.
Should be placed in the <HEAD> section after the Title.

What not to do:
Do not use ALL CAPS. Instead, capitalize the first letter of each major word.
Do not repeat any keyword more than three times, and do not have the same keyword repeated back-to-back.

Before moving on:
Is your Title and Description compelling?
Do they solve a problem?
Do they suggest that it solves the problem quickly?

If you answered “no” to any of the above, you need to do a rewrite. Think of your Title and Description as an Advertising Campaign and spend as much time as it takes writing an important ad. They are THAT important.

7. The Keyword Meta Tag.

Due to spamming issues in the late 90s, the Keyword Meta Tag has been devalued
– Google has never indexed it.

You should never include your “money phrases” here as there are plenty of programs out there to scrape keyword tag information. Instead, it is best to fill this tag with very general or generic terms.

Note: Commas are not indexed, nor are they used by the engines to separate the keyword phrases. Commas are for aesthetic reasons only.

A word of caution: Do not use your competitor’s company name, trademarked products and/or words in your keyword tag. Most legal experts will tell you permission is required before using a trademark on your site at all. There have also been lawsuits filed because phrases used sounded or looked similar to the owned trademark. Keep these very important factors in mind when selecting your keyword phrases. Don’t risk a lawsuit.

8. DTD statement.

According to my testing a DTD is not required in order to allow your site to be displayed in a browser, or for a search engine spider to crawl your site. Why is a DTD Statement necessary?
Using the correct DTD Statement also allows for your site to get indexed faster and deeper in Google and, according to my testing, shortens the time your site spends in the Sandbox by an average of 12 days. However, if you use a 4.01 statement, and your code was written in HTML 3.2, the engine will make note of it and there is a strong likelihood that the page (or site) will be dropped or penalized. So be sure it is the correct tag. If you don’t know, hire someone who does. I strongly recommend the Transitional tag, as it allows you some flexibility with code, especially with the use of HTML editors GoLive and DreamWeaver.

Without a DTD Statement, if the engine comes across code it doesn’t know what to do with, it may “hiccup” causing it to prematurely back out of the site. However, with the DTD Statement, it will know how to handle the code and continue to spider the site.

HTML 3.2 Warning: I suggest upgrading your code. Testing results show that HTML 3.2 does not rank as high as it would if it was HTML 4.0 or 4.01.
HTML 4.0/4.01
Strict: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>
Transitional: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
Frameset: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd”>
XHTML 1.0
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

9. JavaScript.

Due to indexing issues and ensuring your page file sizes stay as small as possible, I recommend you send your JavaScript code to an external file, especially if you have the same JavaScript appear on every page.

The process is simple:
Cut your JavaScript from the page
Open Notepad
Paste your code in Notepad
Name the file “code.js” (or whatever you decide to name it).
Load the file to a folder called “JavaScript”
Disallow the folder in the robots.txt file.
I have noticed Google will index .js files from time to time unless they are disallowed in the robots.txt file.
Then add the following code to the page:

<script language=JavaScript src=”javascript/code.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

10. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

CSS is a file that allows for consistency in all of your formatting throughout your page or site without having to place font code at the beginning of every paragraph. Having your CSS files embedded into your pages is just a bad idea. It takes up space and pushes your importance code downward.
Create a file such as style.css, include your formatting, and a reference to it in the
<head> section of your page like this:
<link href=”style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>
Note: Using processes to hide keywords or text in your CSS file can be detected by Google. Be very careful if you use CSS to stuff keywords or adjust the formatting to allow your page to receive a bigger boost from On-Page Factors.

11. The Heading Tag(s).

There are six types of headings: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6>.
They are ranked in the same order for importance, with <h1> being the most important in terms of On-Page SEO. Headings must be compelling and include the keyphrase to add the most value to your page. You can use the headings to list your “headline” (h1) with its “tagline” underneath (h2). For example:
<h1>Complete Home Security System</h1>
<h2>Self-install your home security system in One Hour or Less!</h2>
In the above example, it allows for the key phrase “home security system” to be used naturally in both headings, thus increasing the on-page optimization score.

12. Do your main graphics use the ALT tag properly?

Google indexes the ALT tag; however, over the last two years I have seen a trend which shows using ALT text for SEO purposes has diminished. According to a Google engineer, what you should do is create an ALT [text] that is relevant to the picture, so it gives the user a good experience, including the visually impaired. The ALT text is indexed, but it is downgraded in the algorithm. “‘We see ALT text as being about as relevant as the Keyword Meta tag,” said the Google engineer. That should say it all as Google has never used the Keyword Meta tag due to the high spam rate.

The American Disabilities Act (ADA) has strict guidelines as to what your site needs to contain in order to be ADA compliant. I guarantee they do not look favorably at ALT text that has been keyword stuffed. There are people who are “sight impaired” and there is nothing worse than having 200 meaningless keyword phrases jammed into the ALT text read aloud by an OCR. Don’t ruin someone’s day. Don’t practice what I refer to as “ALT Text Spam”. Use ALT text in the manner in which it was designed to be used by the W3C: to describe the image for the benefit of those who surf the Web with images turned off and for those who have the contents of Web pages read out loud to them. If appropriate, a keyword phrase can be used, but under no circumstances should you stuff the ALT tag with keywords. Keep it to a simple description. Basically, remember to be compliant, not just with the W3C, but also with the ADA.
SPAM Tip: Although ALT text may or may not be counted for relevancy, search engines may utilize it when evaluating sites for possible “spamdexing.”

13. Keyword Phrase.

If you can, meaning if it makes sense and is readable, place your keyword phrase in the following areas:
Title Tag
Meta Description
H1 tag to begin the content
First paragraph of content
Appearing in Bold or Italic in the first three paragraphs of content
Appearing in the filename.

Used in anchor text to either an internal page or relevant external site. This will help indicate to Google which keywords are important on your page as well as your overall site. Taking appropriate action on all 13 steps above should give you a nice boost in Google.

Blogging Test Results and Tips

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Many ask on the best way to blog both for the purposes of personal blog and for the sake of building authority to an affiliate site or an ecommerce site. I try to answer them to the best of my ability.

1. What is your choice of blogging software?

WordPress period. Nothing beats blogging on this platform. The sheer amout of flexibility must offer you a must use reason.

Cost: Since WordPress is open source it is free.

Control: Once you download WordPress it is yours … you control where to host it. This avoids being “held hostage” by a Blogging service where all the content you have created is on their service, and leaving with your content is either very difficult or impossible.

Community: Themes and Plugins are constantly being created and the strong user base report bugs to allow for the platform to be in a constant state of improvement.

Customizable: Since WordPress is written in PHP there is basically no limits to the customization you can do with your Blog.

Comments/Collaboration: Since Web 2.0 is all about interaction, your readers can comment directly on your Blog post and create an “interactive” discussion online which can be powerful. While it can be powerful, it can also be a negative with all of the Blog Comment Spam that is rampant; this is where all the plug-in come in, one can simply use them to cut down on the spam being put up as comments.

Keeping “Current & Cool”: Since adding content is super fast and easy with a blog (as with the WYSIWYG editor), your website can stay “current and cool” with your visitors.

Connect: Facebook, MySpace and Twitter can be an “extension” of your Blog. You can also use video too.

Prescheduled Entries: You can create 52 tips, upload them, and schedule to have one published each week. This “trains” both your visitors and the search engines to keep coming back because there is fresh content being published. This is one of the most underutilized features of blogs currently.

2. In your opinion, what are the most important features for blogs?

Comments, as mentioned above. Comments help me to understand what the readers want more of or less of. Almost like an ongoing survey the comments allow my visitors to get to know me better, thus, drives you to my products and services more.

The other most important feature is you, as the Blogger. Don’t just publish fresh content. Publish fresh and valuable content. Doing so builds your expertise and allows your audience to trust you more.

3. Can the average person conduct an upgrade for WordPress without losing their entire blog, (ie. accidentally overwriting the files on the server)?

The short answer is: Yes. However, if you upload just the core set of WordPress files to the appropriate files on your server, you’ll be fine. Before I ever do any upgrades, I always download the entire site via FTP … and I mean everything, log files, full site, cgi-bin, email, etc. That way, if something goes wrong, I have the files prior to the change. Yes, it takes some time, however, start it before heading out to lunch and by the time you get back it should be done (depending upon the size of the site, the speed of your connection and, of course, the length of your lunch break!

After you have uploaded the new files, go into your wp-admin folder on your server and you want to load the file “upgrade.php”. So, for example, on my blog, I would execute: blog.seorevolution.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php.

If you don’t have a server admin, contact your host for help. You DON’T want to lose your data.

4. Besides having the XML subscribe button posted, what are the other ways to get a blog noticed? What are your “must have” subscribe chicklets?

My favorite tool is “Share This” by Alex King. Just “Google It” and you’ll find it. What it does is it allows for an icon to appear in your blog so people can share your post through a variety of different ways. This is a great way for other people to be exposed to your blog from your current readership, but what about getting people there to begin with?

Look for other bloggers in your space and engage in the conversations on their blog. In so doing, your reputation as someone who is knowledgeable in the space will begin to grow, as will your reputation. How do you find the right Bloggers? Technorati.

Trackbacking: This a feature that let’s you comment on some else’s blog, but on your blog. It is a pretty cool feature and the hope is that readers of the comments will see your trackback commentary and then flow over to your blog to read more.

Lastly, I suggest putting on your “party hat” and jumping into the Social Media scene by searching out groups relevant to your topic or find where your target audience “hangs out” online. But I also warn you not to be a dork. Act the same way you would at a cocktail party. Be respectful; don’t pitch right out of the gate. Gain people’s trust first. use of video and audio in the Web 2.0 world is desired. Get your video and audio files on the various sharing services. The right title and the right description is just as important in this area as it is in SEO

5. What are some great marketing tips on getting a new blog in front of the right audience?

first you must KNOW your audience. You can do that by going to different groups and social media sites and finding out through the posts what they want and more importantly, the packaging and pricing structure that is most attractive to them. Moving the “Free Line”, what it means is give more of your products/services away to get potential customers a “taste” of what you have to offer.

6. What are your favorite resources for blogging information?

Covered above.

7. Which blog directories are best to submit to? Are there good country specific blog directories? Or is it best to just concentrate on US-based blog directories if your blog is outside of the US?

I suggest going into the Options | Writing area of WordPress and then scroll down to find “Update Services”. Clicking on the link takes you to Codex Section of WordPress and here you can copy and paste the list of pinging services for your blog.

I recommend (listed in order of importance) Best of theWeb Blog Search ($39.95), BlogFlux (Free), Bloggapedia (Free), Blogging Fusion ($1.99), Bloggeries ($19.95) and Eaton Web Blog Directory ($34.99).

8. Does blog and ping still work? What is the best method of getting Google back to your site? (I did a test and found that if you blog at least three times a week and don’t go more than three days of no postings, Google will come back at least a week to reindex the blog. If you blog everyday, Google comes everyday. Your thoughts?)

I like OnlyWire.com and Pingoat.com on top of the services WordPress has as covered above.

9.If a site like Feedburner distributes my content to all the other blog sites, do I really need to submit the content to all the blog directories?

No you don’t. Aside from the initial pings all you need to do is connect with other bloggers as we have already discussed. Always look to expand to new audiences.

10. What is the your to obtaining “greatness in blogging”?

Keep it Real. Stay Who You Are. Always Add Value. Share Good Information. Look into Podcasting and Videocasting to set you apart from your competition.

In other words, don’t try and be someone you’re not just to try and make it big in your industry. Embrace who you are and build on it. If you fake it, it may work for a little while, but you won’t be happy and people will eventually figure it out and you’ll lose trust. Your personality is what made you.

This is just the first parts, there is more to come. Keep in touch and please to comment and also spread some love!

Google Top Ten List

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Many have requested a Top Ten list of the items to concentrate on the most when building or revamping a site with Google in mind. This is more of a list on taking either a new site, or a struggling site and getting better performance.

1. You will need your web hosting company to assign you a unique IP address for your domain. Make sure it is a new IP address and not a recently recycled one. If they do not have a new one available, make sure you ensure that the IP address is clean from being on any blacklist. Having your own clean IP address is critical to start out on the right foot with Google. We will have a series about how to pick the right web hosting company and even tell you about a few that we use and why we do. Also included is who to avoid.

2. Create the redirect so non-www URLs resolve to www. This is more important than you think which is why I put this as step #2 after getting a web host. Do this first thing so it off your list.

3. Create a robots.txt file and upload it to your server (same place where your index.html file is located).

4. Create all CSS and JavaScript as external files. This is vital not just for the page size, but also the indexing. Testing shows that by removing CSS and JavaScript from the content of the HTML improves all aspects of your site being indexed.

5. Check your site for compliancy. You need to have a good understanding of HTML to know what to change and what to keep. You need, or your webmaster needs, to understand the difference between “W3C Compliancy” and “Search Engine Bot Compliancy”. You also want to be “Google Compliant” too. Keeping yourself familiar with the webmaster guidelines is just a good idea.

6. Keyword research should be done to target keywords that can be converted into sales, not just clickthroughs for traffic. Shoot for keywords in “the long tail”, meaning those people who are deep into the buying cycle and are close to making a decision. Usually these are phrases in the 3-6 word range. Your pages (in the body) should be in the 400-600 word range, with a strong headline (keyword included) and a keyword density of 1-2%. You also need to Create Solid Title Tags. This is often very misunderstood for SEOs. You should also review the on page factors.

7. Google Sitemaps. This is an absolute must. If you are having difficulty with Google, often this is how you find the cure to your ills. New site? This is how you don’t get into trouble. Spend 2 hours on Friday, every Friday going through and fixing problems that Sitemaps shows you and you will see continued increases in your traffic.

8. Submit your site to the top directories.

9. Get moving on solid link exchanges – and obtaining links inward to your site – not just to the home page, but to subpages as well

10. Get a blog and post to the blog every other day (at least) and get on a schedule to update your content, and add new content on a weekly basis. This will ensure that Googlebot will continue to come back and index your site on a regular basis.

Debunking Google Myths

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Every so often it is good to address this topic again as a refresher. All of these statements are backed with testing results.

1. Google gives more weight to the “body” of the document more than they do the top, left, right and bottom navigation areas. TRUE. This is especially true with links. Placing links in the body of the document cause massive upswings compared to links in the navigational areas on the same page. This was also confirmed in Vegas by an engineer. It seems it is one of the gauges they use to detect duplicate content.

2. Having non-compliant (W3C) code on your site will increase your rankings. FALSE. This was a “link bait” article that was debunked by us last year. It is total garbage.

3. On the flip-side, having compliant (W3C) code on your site will increase your rankings. FALSE. While a couple of years ago I noticed trends of increased spidering and ranking per compliant code, that has ceased. Instead, the search engines are looking for “bot compliant” code, which you can test with Leslie Rohde’s OptiSpider, which is a program I am completely hooked on.

4. Using a hyphenated domain name will harm your rankings. FALSE. What usually happens is spammers use hyphenated domains due to their push a few years ago, and thus they will practice “spamming tactics” which causes a drop in the SERPs not the hyphens in the domain.

5. Buying links will get your site banned or penalized. FALSE. Buying the wrong links can do that, but link buying in general is standard advertising practice. My advice is to deal directly with the webmaster as too many link brokers are selling “Fake PageRank” links.

6. Using Google Sitemaps will get your site banned or penalized. FALSE. If this were true, there would be a lot more articles about this.

7. Google uses human editors to change the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). FALSE. Google’s index is too massive and searches in the trillions. There is a human factor and that is filtering out Spam that the filters let through. Google has an office in India where they are doing just that.

8. Using a Dedicated IP increasing ranking. FALSE. Unless, of course, you are sharing an IP with a known spammer and you risk getting nailed by the penalty they suffer. Mostly, having a dedicated IP is for business protection as previously discussed in other articles.

9. Pages in the Supplemental Results indicates a serious problem with the site. FALSE. Google has pages in the Supplemental Index. I have pages in the Supplemental Index. Being in the Supplemental Index is usually caused by:

a) lack of links to the page
b) no internal link pointing to the page
c) indexing error when fetching the page
d) dynamically generated content
e) site is untrusted

10. PageRank isn’t important. FALSE. The main issue here is too many people just don’t understand PageRank. While pages with no PageRank appear in the top ten of the SERPs, that doesn’t diminish the value of PageRank.

The Oscar Awards

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This year the Indian Oscar thirst has been quenched. For more than some years now, India has been expecting an Oscar. The most notable Nomination was Lagaan some 5 years ago. But alas none received Oscar. This year, Slumdog Millionaire has got 8 Oscar award not to mention India’s own music maestro A.R.Rahman winning two (Yeah, I know one was shared, but what the heck…). This has been truly a phenomenal day for India and the Indian film Industry, not to mention the Indian Music Industry. Rahman had it coming for a long time. Both Freida and Patel have now bagged roles in new Hollywood movies. Freida with a better role though.

After having won just 2 Oscar till date, India added 3 more yesterday. This is truly great news. Well done India!

The Best Free Tool's to Use

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Ok like I promised, I have written a potentially great article. You might want to bookmark this page for future reference!

AdSense Calculator – Forecast future earnings with projected page views, Click Through Rates and Cost Per Click.
Best Use: What would happen to your AdSense earnings if you increased your CTR by 0.2%? Run it through this tool to figure out if the projected payout will be worth the effort.
Text Link: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/adsense-calculator/
AdSense Preview – How focused is your page based on the theme you are targeting? Check quickly with this tool that will show you ads based on the content of the page. You can check any page, not just the pages you control.
Best Use: Not sure how a page is “themed” according to Google? Run this preview. Whatever type of ads show is the “theme” Google has tagged your site. While this isn’t perfect, it is one of the quickest ways to score your content SEO work.
Text Link: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/google-adsense-preview/
Alexa – owns by Amazon, Alexa uses a toolbar (i.e. spyware) in order to track visitor behavior and rank websites by traffic.
Best Use: Don’t install the toolbar, instead go direct to Alex.com or use the Search Spy Firefox extension to get key Alexa data. Alexa ranks websites in reverse order (the lower the number the more traffic).
Text Link: http://www.alexa.com/
Archive.org – Use the Way Back Machine to see how a site looked in the past.
Best Use: Before you buy that expired domain, look it up in the Way Back Machine to make sure it wasn’t used for “other” purposes (i.e. pr0n).
Text Link: http://www.archive.org/
BlogPulse – Search the “Blogosphere.”
Best Use: Trend Search and Featured Trends are excellent areas to find “holes” in your market to exploit.
Text Link: http://www.blogpulse.com/
Code to Text Ratio – Is your webpage code heavy? Find out with this tool. Often, pages I struggle getting top ranking for are “code heavy.”
Best Use: Shoot for a level of 30% or more. Often you can improve the ratio by referencing your JavaScript and CSS to external files.
Text Link: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-ratio/
Cool SEO Tool – From WeBuildPages this tool allows you to compare your page’s ranking to the Top Ten Google ranking
Best Use: You can use this tool along with NicheWatch in order to get solid understanding of the SEO competition. Make sure you pay attention to the site’s age in the Way Back Machine.
Text Link: http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/
Copyscape – Protect your web content from being copied.
Best Use: Worried that your site’s content might be hijacked? This is a great tool to find out. I like using this tool to keep “ghost writers” honest. Many sell the articles they wrote for you to others.
Text Link: http://www.copyscape.com/
DNS Report – From DNS Stuff. Check if there are problems with your DNS hosting.
Best Use: A great way to verify that your domain is setup properly, including getting a SPF record setup to limit the amount of phony Spam showing as coming from your domain.
Text Link: http://member.dnsstuff.com/pages/dnsreport.php
Domain Tools – Formerly WhoIs.sc. This is the place to do WHOIS lookups.
Best Use: This site is your best friend. Get to know it well. Look to upgrade your account so you can do a “reverse IP check” and more.
Text Link: http://www.domaintools.com/
Evolt Browser Archive – A great archive of older browsers for testing.
Best Use: While not needed as it was a few years ago, if you need to see how a your site looked in an older browser, this is where to get it.
Text Link: http://browsers.evolt.org/
Google Alerts – This is a must to track your sites, your competitor sites or your industry.
Best Use: Track your name, company name and your domains so you are alerted each time they are referenced in Google.
Text Link: http://www.google.com/alerts
Google Cache – From WeBuildPages see the last time pages were cached by Google.
Best Use: Any page that was last cached 90 days or more needs to be updated, more quality links obtained, and a better internal linking structure.
Text Link: http://www.webuildpages.com/cache/cachetoolpublic.pl
Link Analyzer – Will grab all internal and external links and show the anchor text of each link.
Best Use: A quick way to determine the anchor text, or lack of anchor text, used in the links on any page.
Text Link: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/site-link-analyzer/
Ranks NL Spider Checker – A comprehensive keyword density checker that is free to use online.
Best Use: Look in the “header data” to ensure the information that is being reported is what you want the search engine to see. Pay attention to the “Last Modified” line. Make sure that date isn’t more than two weeks old.
Text Link: http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
SEO Browser – See your site the same way a search engine sees it.
Best Use: Not a great tool, but if you are really struggling with ranking, check your site and see if there is something “off” with how your site is being shown to a spider.
Text Link: http://www.seo-browser.com/
Server Header Check – Often your first step in determining issues if your pages are not being indexed or if a competitor is using cloaking.
Best Use: Check competitor URLs and marketing URLs for redirects. See exactly which URL the redirect is going to and which type (301 or 302). I like running any URL that redirects through this tool to understand what process is being executed.
Text Link: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/check-server-headers/
Traffic Estimate – Approximate traffic levels for last 30 days.
Best Use: Use this tool as an estimate only, not intended to be exact. Using with Alexa, you can make a good determination of a site’s actual traffic levels.
Text Link: http://www.trafficestimate.com/
Yahoo! vs. Google – Compare by graph the search results in Google and compare with Yahoo!.
Best Use: This gives me a good understanding how different or similar the search engines are for my targeted keyword phrase. Often, if the results are fairly similar, if I get a top ten listing in Google, the same should occur in Yahoo! as well.s
Text Link: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/google-vs-yahoo/
Xenu Link Checker – One of the best free link checkers available.
Best Use: Use this tool to do a complete “link audit” once a month.
Text Link: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Those were 20 tools which will most definitely give you an unfair advantage. Use them to your advantage. If you have any more such sites, please do not forget to post here. I will add them to the list. If you like this post, please bookark it and link back to it from your blog.

Keyword analysis: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know

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What is keyword analysis?

The process of uncovering the words your target customers are Googling is called ‘keyword analysis’ or ‘keyword research’. There are quite a few reliable keyword analysis tools out there. You enter a term that you think your target visitors are Googling, and they tell you how many people are actually Googling that term. They use real search data – usually from the previous one or two months. Your want relevant words and phrases that heaps of people are searching for. Obviously it’ll be easier to rank well for keywords that relatively few other sites are targeting, though, and some of these tools will help you there too.

Keyword analysis complexities:

You’ll find these tools very helpful and very powerful. They’ll give you a great insight into what people are searching for. But they won’t tell you everything. Ultimately, they just provide the raw data. Once you’ve uncovered that raw data, you need to analyze it to make some decisions. And this is trickier than it sounds. You’ll need to apply all of your knowledge of your business, the benefits you offer your customers, and how prospective customers think and talk about your products and services (which may be entirely different from how actual customers think and talk, and is almost guaranteed to be different from how people in the industry think and talk). You also need to have a good understanding of what your competitors are doing, and why. And finally, always remember that search engines don’t read as humans do. They’re nowhere near that smart. So sometimes you have to make allowances for them. Following is a rundown of some issues that quite often have people tearing their hair out.

Intent of the Searcher:
When you’re considering the merits of a particular keyword, you also need to carefully consider the intent of people searching for it. It’s not enough that a word is relevant; it also has to be a word that someone would use when they’re ready (or not far off ready) to buy your product, engage your service, subscribe to your mailing list, or do whatever it is that you want them to do.

I’ll use my own copywriting website as an example. “Copywriting” is more popular than “copywriter”, but I didn’t choose it because I know people Google it when they’re looking for copywriting jobs, copywriting advice, copywriting tips, copywriting articles, etc. When people want to engage the services of a copywriter, they usually Google “copywriter.”

Can’t I just use Google Analytics?

No. Google Analytics will tell you what searches brought your current visitors to your site. It won’t tell you anything about your target visitors. E.g. Let’s say you run a cinema website and the majority of your visitors arrived after Googling “movies”. That doesn’t means you should necessarily target “movies”. What if 10 times that many customers are finding a competing cinema after Googling “cinema”?

Single keyword or keyword phrase?

If you’re a niche business, target niche keyword phrases, not single keywords. Include extra detail, points of difference or your location. For example:
• “cheap second hand computers” instead of “computers”
• “small business income tax accountant Sydney” instead of “accountant Sydney”
• “thai restaurant delivery Highland Park” instead of “restaurant”
• “small blue widgets” instead of “widgets”

Why? Because:
1. The more specific the keyword, the fewer websites there will be targeting it. This means you’ll move up the rankings faster, and you’ll find it easier to achieve a high ranking.

2. The search results for the more generic keywords tend to be dominated by the big multinationals. Search for “computers” and you’ll see there are around 955 million results and the top rankings are dominated by the big authority sites, like Wikipedia, Computer.org, Apple, etc.
3. Searchers know they’ll find what they want faster, if they’re specific. According to OneStat.com, 58.93% of people search for either a 2-word phrase or a 3 word phrase.
4. Most people Google generic keywords when they’re researching a purchase and specific keywords when they’re ready to buy. So by targeting a more specific keyword, you’ll attract more qualified traffic.

Of course, if you need to target hotly contested generic keywords, go ahead. But I’d still recommend starting out with a niche phrase that includes your generic term. E.g. It won’t take you long to rank for “small business income tax accountant Sydney”, and this will generate income while you’re waiting for your link profile and site authority to grow enough to rank for “accountant Sydney”.

Plural or singular?

The simplest answer is to look at what the majority of your target visitors are Googling, and go for that. But if searches are equally split, think about intent. Maybe people Google “tennis shoe” when they’re deciding whether to buy a tennis shoe or a running shoe. And maybe they Google “tennis shoes” when they’re ready to buy a pair online. As an online shoe shop, you’d choose “tennis shoes”. As a shoe manufacturer, you’d choose “tennis shoe”. Still no closer to a decision? Consider the number of competing sites. If you sell televisions, you’d be better off targeting “TVs” than “TV”, because then you’re not competing against all the TV stations and TV guides. If even that doesn’t help (i.e. there’s no statistical, semantic or competitive reason to choose one over the other), then just choose whichever one is easiest to optimize for. Or go with both (that would certainly be the easiest to implement).
Google’s smart enough to index you for both if there’s no good reason not to.
Split, merged and hyphenated words:
“Copywriter”, “copy writer” or “copy-writer”? Google knows they’re different words so, as always, go with whatever version your target visitors are Googling most. If there’s no clear distinction, again, consider intent and competition. Failing that, just choose whatever’s easy to optimize for. Google’s smart enough to know that they all refer to the same animal. Search for “copy-writer” and you’ll find plenty of results that contain only “copywriter”. (In fact, Google bolds “copywriter” even when you search for “copy-writer” or “copy writer”.)

Related words:

All the important search engines use a thesaurus when analyzing your site’s content. Once they identify what your target keywords are, they then check to see if the rest of your content is related to those keywords. (Actually, they use a fancy name for it: “latent semantic indexing (LSI)”, and it’s a lot more complicated than I’ve indicated here. But if you think of it as a thesaurus, you’ll be just fine.) For example, a naturally evolved site about tennis shoes wouldn’t just contain “tennis” and “shoes”. It would also contain words like “footwear”, “sole”, “foot”, “feet”, “upper”, “inner” and “surface”. And probably “grass”, “clay” and “court”. Possibly even “racquet”, “basketball” or “running”. If it does, the search engines will deduce that it’s very relevant to people who’re searching for “tennis shoes” (and that it’s less likely to be a cheap spam site that’s just stuffed full of the single term “tennis shoes”). Of course, the corollary of this logic is that if your site has evolved naturally and is actually useful, you won’t need to worry about these issues too much.
In the next post, I will detail how to do keyword research and recommend the correct tools.

Free Money Making eBook

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Hi guys,

I recently found an ebook which detailed different ways to make money. I must sayit is not something new but, it talks about all the latest methods that one can use to make a living online. If you are a beginner to this thing, you will find it pretty usefull I must say. Experienced users I must say will find little use for this except as a checklist when going into a new venture. Nonetheless, I urge you to try this.

Free eBook

Yes it is an affiliate link. I would appreciate it if you would use that.