Exclusive Concepts Blog » SEO Monday http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog The Source, featuring Daily Videos on SEO, PPC, Conversion and E-Mail Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:52:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 SEO Monday – Top Ten Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid Part One http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-top-ten-common-seo-mistakes-to-avoid-part-one.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-top-ten-common-seo-mistakes-to-avoid-part-one.html#comments Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:12:06 +0000 Scott C http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2211
My name is Scott, an SEO Analyst at Exclusive Concepts, and today I’ll be covering part 1 of 2 of the top 10 common SEO mistakes that all site owners should avoid.

We’ll start at number 10 which covers poor site navigation. Good navigation is important on any site for two reasons: usability and spiderability. From a usability perspective, good navigation is important so the user can find what they are looking for on the site in as few clicks as possible.

For SEO however, spiderability is the important issue. Spiderability is the ease at which spiders can crawl a site and index its pages. The deeper a site is, the harder it is for spiders to effectively crawl pages and find the deeper content. For ecommerce site owners, a general rule of thumb should be that category pages are be reachable within 1-2 clicks from the homepage and your product pages within 3-4 clicks. If you have a large site and find it impossible to make products available within 3-4 clicks, another approach to help encourage spiderability is by targeting interior pages when acquiring external links. Targeting interior pages such as a category or subcategory through links from other sites can help boost your sites popularity, but it will also help spiders find these pages and continue crawling into your deeper content.

Next, we’ll move on to the issue of a site having two identical pages with different URLs. The most common example would be having a homepage that has both a www URL and non-www URL, as shown on the bad site. The problem with having two different URLs for homepage is that these are seen as different pages to search engines even though they might seem the same to the average visitor. So why should you care if the search engine sees it as two different pages? Well, the biggest issue that can occur is its potential impact on your popularity score from inbound links.

Let’s say you have 500 links pointing to www.site.com and then another 350 links pointing to site.com. In the eyes of Google, these two pages are different with separate inbound links, therefore the popularity score may not be as high as a site that has all 850 links pointing to one page. By having your site set to resolve at one location, which can be done through a canonical URL tag, it will allow all links to be directed to the one, appropriate page.

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Next, we’ll move on to number 8 which covers the poor use of anchor text hyperlinks some sites employ. How many times have you been to a site and have seen a hyperlink that says something like, “Click Here”? For SEO efforts, this is a waste of a hyperlink which could be much better optimized by using one of your target keywords in the anchor text of the link.

Next, number 7 covers the issue of sites using images instead of text, which often occurs in the navigation bars. When a site uses an image with text in it, it may be visible to the site visitors, but the text goes unseen to search engines. Rather than using images with text in them, sites should try to use anchor text when appropriate, and especially when there are opportunities to include target keywords.

While we’re on the topic of images, let’s move on to number 6 which concerns sites that don’t use alternative text in their images. I just mentioned that when a site has an image on the page, search engines can’t see what is on the image. However, when images are used on a page, using alt text tags gives an opportunity to incorporate relevant keywords for these images which are visible to search engines. Although alt tags aren’t weighed too heavily for SEO, it does carry a little weight, so why not use it in every image you have?

Well that wraps up part 1 of the Top 10 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid and I hope you’ve found it helpful for your business! Here at Exclusive Concepts we work with our clients to make sure mistakes like these are avoided at all times and that sites are optimized by employing SEO best practices through a service we call Advanced SEO. Please feel free to give us a call or fill out an audit request to get more info on how we can help your site realize its full potential. Thanks for watching and please tune in next Monday as we count down the top 5 mistakes in part 2 of the Top 10 Common SEO Mistakes.]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-top-ten-common-seo-mistakes-to-avoid-part-one.html/feed 0 Checking If You Were Hit by Google May Day Update aka Caffeine – SEO Monday http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/checking-if-you-were-hit-by-google-may-day-update-aka-caffeine-seo-monday.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/checking-if-you-were-hit-by-google-may-day-update-aka-caffeine-seo-monday.html#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:33:42 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2191 We’ve been studying Google’s Caffeine since the fall of 2009, before it was even live – when Google had given the SEO world an opportunity to look into this new indexing protocol. What we saw then is what we’re seeing live today – and the effects are quite equal to what we expected. Most websites did not see a major drop in rankings for particularly popular terms – but they surely saw a drop in long-tail traffic. In the online retail world, the effect was exacerbated by legacy tactics that have been commonplace for the online marketplace.
To summarize our logical deduction of these empirical changes, Google has remained quite persistent in their core focus of creating 2 tiers of pages in its index; a primary index and a supplemental index. The goal of the primary index is to house carefully vetted pages of every site on the internet that passes certain quality benchmarks as per Google’s current demands. Those demands typically consist of a blend between unique content and healthy spiderability. This higher quality index enjoys the liberties of 1st class citizenship in Google’s index including the ability to be easily retrieved (ie. rarely hidden in an expand results link) and more importantly, the qualification to rank for much more competitive search terms.
So that’s the primary index – the supplementary index was everything else essentially – a misfit island of duplicate content and rarely spidered pages on the internet. It’s here where we’ve seen the most impact from Google’s new caffeine push. Pages that would typically be put into the supplemental index have not been indexed nearly at the same pace since Google’s caffeine change – uh oh, May Day! As a business owners, you’re probably asking yourself – “ok, so my pages that were deemed low quality are now not being put in the index – how could that effect my traffic?” Well, quite a bit actually. The supplementary index pages have liberties too – they can be found, though not as easily; and they can rank for low competition terms ie. long-tail terms pretty easily. So if your long-tail-generating-pages are not being given the chance to generate long-tail traffic, then… you’ll see a big hit in long-tail traffic.

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I can save you a lot of time and say that if you are an online retail store, chances are you were hit by Google’s update – most probably around April or May of this year. How can you tell? Well, a quick exercise will show you everything you need about this concept. In 3 separate graphs, plot out 3 metrics for each month and see the trends:
  • metric 1: the number of google organic keywords that drove traffic to your site that month
  • metric 2: the number of landing pages that drove traffic to your site that month through google’s organic search
  • metric 3: the amount of unique visitors that entered your site that month through google organic search
If you see a dip in the number of keywords, the volume of landing page and ultimately, the amount of unique visitors through Google organic search, then you most probably are a victim of Google’s May Day update and many of the pages that you relied on to drive long-tail traffic are no longer being put into the supplemental index like they used to. You would have seen this in April or May of this year.

You can check if your approach is encouraging penalties from the changes to Google via the caffeine update. See, the swift reduction in supplementary pages within Google hinges mostly on reducing the number of duplicate content pages within Google’s index. That means that if a product page on your website is commonly found on other websites, then your page faces a highly probable risk of being penalized.
Let’s say for example there are 1,000 pages on the internet that all have the same manufacturer’s content about a specific product. Before caffeine, we would typically see most of those 1,000 pages being represented amongst Google’s 2 indexes; a few instances in the primary and the rest in the supplementary. How would some get in the primary index? All things equal, luck of the draw; as Google consistently refreshes its own index, it places first instances of duplicate content in the primary index. Before caffeine, the remaining duplicate instances would be placed in the supplementary index to enjoy the liberty of ranking for long-tail terms; now, Google has empirically put the kibosh on over-populating the supplementary; so by the same merit that the 1st instances of that duplicate content get your pages in the primary index; the next back of instances get you into the supplementary and then your chances run out until the next refresh of Google’s index.
To see whether you’re playing this circular game of luck, take a few moments to spot check 10-15 product descriptions on your website. Copy the content from each product page, put it in quotes and search for it in Google. If there are several instances of these descriptions, then you are facing a duplicate content issue and to some degree, are being penalized by Google’s changes. Actually, if this is happening then you may find it hard to spot your site at all amongst all the other sites with the same content. The first step in resolving this issue is recognizing that it exists.

Our understanding of these changes in Google come from our unique school of thought at Exclusive Concepts called Advanced SEO. Please feel free to give us a call or fill out an audit request to get more info on how we can help your site make the most of today’s world of SEO. ]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/checking-if-you-were-hit-by-google-may-day-update-aka-caffeine-seo-monday.html/feed 0 Dynamic URLS VS. Static URLS – SEO Monday http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-seo-monday.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-seo-monday.html#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:42:10 +0000 Joe http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2165
Exclusive Concepts works with many ecommerce sites, we are quite aware that database driven websites or sites with dynamically created pages are usually easier to manage over static websites. This is because static websites need to be hard coded when changes need to be made where as a dynamic site can make a site wide change at the drop of a hat.

However, where the true pitfalls occur are at the SEO level. In the past, SEO’s classified dynamic URLS as the bane of our existence as we took the stance that Dynamic urls could not be indexed.
While this is not totally true, what is true is that dynamic URLS are:
  • Ugly which result in a lower click through rate
  • They typically do not contain keywords in the url which may play into certain parts of the algorithm
  • They take longer to index by the search spiders.
  • Not memorable

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So with all these factors working against dynamic websites, you can see how it becomes a challenge from the SEO/marketing perspective. So if you do own a website or work for a website that is dynamic there is really only one option which is to rewrite your URLs to a static location. However, please note that this is not a task that should be done by a summer intern or someone with relatively little experience. Dynamic URL strings although look meaningless to us humans actually contain information helpful to a search engine spider and need to be taken into account when redirecting pages. If you have a dynamic website and are having problems with your rankings in the search engines, Please contact an expert an exclusive concepts today in order to increase your likelyhood of getting found in google.

Exclusive Concepts offers a full service testing option for our clients called Conversion Booster that will do the work for you in gathering these analytics and determining the best changes for your site to maximize conversion rate. Give us a call at 1-800-504-4324 if you're interested in learning more.]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-seo-monday.html/feed 0 Using URL Shorteners for Inbound Linking – SEO Monday http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/using-url-shorteners-for-inbound-linking-seo-monday.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/using-url-shorteners-for-inbound-linking-seo-monday.html#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:23:06 +0000 Scott C http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2146 URL shortening is a practice on the internet where a user can transform a long URL into a very short one using one of several free services available online like TinyURL or Bit.ly.
URL shortening started as far back as 2001, but really became popular alongside the explosion of micro blog sites like Twitter, which limits users to using 140 characters or less in their posts. By shortening URLs, it frees up more space for useful content, since the URL link requires less characters. So why is selecting the right URL shortener important in SEO? Well let’s say you make a tweet about a new product your business is offering and you use a shortened URL to link back to your site in the tweet. Shortly after posting this tweet, several of your followers find it to be interesting and retweet the post so that their followers will see it. Let’s say this continues and before you know it, 50 people have retweeted your original post and it has even appeared on other social sites like Facebook. From an exposure point of view this is great because your message is spreading around the web and reaching so many people.

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However, from an SEO standpoint, one issue to consider is whether or not this shortened URL is passing along the appropriate credit to your site that it deserves from all of these inbound links. URL shorteners use a few different methods of redirecting links to your site, but the one any site owner will want to use is a 301 redirect. Without getting into too many technical details, a 301 redirect basically tells the search engines that this shortened URL is a permanent redirect to your original URL, so it will then pass along the due credit to your site.
Some businesses may also find that tracking data provided by shortened URLs is helpful, so this should be another consideration when choosing a service. The tracking feature can provide businesses with helpful data such as which URLs are being clicked and which ones aren’t.

So now that we’ve covered what URL shorteners are and some of the features you as a business owner will want to consider, we should finally take a look at a few popular services that are available. Glancing quickly at this chart, you can see that several of these services offer both 301 redirects and tracking. Two of the more popular services that are used are bit.ly and TinyURL. If you require both 301 redirects and tracking, I would suggest opting for bit.ly, as it offers both and is one of the most widely used services today. If you already have enough data to sift through and tracking isn’t as important, either bit.ly or TinyURL will suffice.

That wraps up this week’s edition of SEO Monday and we hope you’ve found it helpful for your business. Thanks for watching and please tune in tomorrow for another dose of PPC Tuesday!]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/using-url-shorteners-for-inbound-linking-seo-monday.html/feed 0 SEO Monday – Using PPC Data To Improve Organic Performance http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/using-ppc-data-to-improve-organic-performance-seo-monday.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/using-ppc-data-to-improve-organic-performance-seo-monday.html#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:28:28 +0000 Tim http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2106 The theory behind using PPC data to help refine and improve your organic performance is that PPC is a marketing vehicle that allows you to do a lot of testing - with the ultimate goal of improving sales performance.
If you’re managing your PPC correctly, you should constantly be testing different components of your campaigns in order to find the keywords, messaging and merchandising strategies that perform at the highest levels.
Because testing such variables through your organic effort is FAR more difficult, we suggest leveraging the easily accessible testing data available in your Pay Per Click account toward the improvement of your organic efforts.

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So what are some examples?
Let’s start with how you can use this data to improve the success of your existing organic positioning.
Let’s say you already rank very well for a target keyword. You’re listed in the number 2 spot in Google. I’m not suggesting using PPC data as a means to move you from number 2 to number 1….that’s an SEO issue. I’m suggesting you consider using PPC data to get you more clicks while still in the number 2 spot.
How? Let’s say you’ve run PPC ad copy tests looking to find what messaging got better click through rates, and better conversion rates. If there was a clear winner with those tests, why not incorporate that same tested…proven messaging into the meta description of your organic listing? It’s worth the effort to see if you can get more clicks at the 2 sport simply by adding new messaging that may connect with potential customers better.
Now, don’t go changing everything completely around in the meta description, you still have to keep SEO in mind as you don’t want to lose that spot (you know, so keep the keywords in there). But if you have an existing branding or value proposition in there that isn’t in line with what performed best during testing – consider switching it out and see what performs better.

Another example of how you can leverage PPC data within your organic strategy has to do with planning out your future SEO efforts.
In the past example, we talked about a keyword that was already well positioned. Let’s say you have another keyword that you target with PPC and it performs very well for you, but it doesn’t show up well at all in the organic results.
When you’re strategizing where to direct your efforts on the SEO side, normally it’s great to look at your analytics to see how certain keywords are converting organically – and build around that demonstrated strength. But if you’re not showing up well organically, you may get a tiny amount of organic traffic through which to base your decision on…data that’s not statistically valid.
This is where PPC can again be utilized. If you see that you’re converting extremely well on a particular keyword with PPC, this may represent a great opportunity on the organic side. So, when you’re looking for opportunities to grow your revenue on the organic side, it’s always wise to invest and increase visibility in areas that have shown good performance in the past.

That’s it for SEO Monday, I hope you enjoyed the video. If you’re looking for ways to improve your SEO performance, give Exclusive Concepts a call at 1-800-504-4324….we offer free SEO audits to qualified businesses.

Thanks again and enjoy your day.]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/using-ppc-data-to-improve-organic-performance-seo-monday.html/feed 0 Competitive Analysis – SEO Monday http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/competitive-analysis-seo-monday.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/competitive-analysis-seo-monday.html#comments Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:25:33 +0000 Joe http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2083 www.webconfs.com or the whois.com website.

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This leads me into my next statistic…the number of links a domain age has. Inbound links to a website are a HUGE factor in not only googles algorithm but the other search engines as well. When many external websites are pointing to a website it is a signal to the search engines that this is a popular hub of the internet. When a site is seen as popular, it gets more clout with the search engines.

Next, a good way to determine the health of a website is the number of pages in the primary index. Often times websites have hundred, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of pages on their site, yet, a small percentage are actually searchable or included in the index. There are several factors that effect this such as unique content, spiderability issues etc. However, the main point is SIZE DOES MAtter, the more pages you have in the index means that you have more opportunity to bring people to your site. To determine the number of pages in googles index you can either once again consult the SEO Quake plugin or manually type this query into a search engine “ Site:yourwebsite.com/*”

So in conclusion it all comes down to site age, number of inbound links, and number of pages in the index. Obviously there are going to be exceptions and anomaly’s out there but overall if you are beating your competition in these 3 areas you most likely are winning the SEO War. And that all folks please make sure you join us tomorrow for PPC Tuesday and another great video from Chris. Also, pleas not that exclusive concepts offer free SEO audits, conversation audits, ppc audits and email audits. So give us a call today to get started attracting, converting and retaining customers.]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/competitive-analysis-seo-monday.html/feed 0 SEO Monday – Google Tags in Local Listings http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-google-tags-in-local-listings.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-google-tags-in-local-listings.html#comments Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:02:08 +0000 Lauren http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2036 You can get started by going to Google Places and sign in with your Google account. You’ll notice that there are several fields to fill out including the very important description and category section. This helps optimize the listing among other factors. For more tips about improving your listing visit: http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=28247

You may notice in Google Maps that your business is already listed – you’ll need to verify the listing if you’ve not already done so. This allows you or your company to be the sole contributors to the details in the listing and will be essential to the new feature I’ll be speaking more about today.

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OK – now that we have the basics out of the way, I’ll share the new feature Google rolled out on Thursday, June 10th to several (and soon to be all) states throughout the country : Google Tags.
It’s a new advertising feature for local businesses that can enhance their listings that appear in the search results of google.com and Google Maps for $25 per month. A yellow tag emphasizes information like a coupon, video, menu, reservations, photos or a custom message. This feature is also available on mobile web searches as well. A business owner may change the message highlighted with the yellow tags as often as he or she wishes. I must stress that the tag feature will NOT affect rankings, it is more so to make your listing stand out.

To learn more or try it, you can visit the tags help section: www.google.com/help/tags.

If you have a local or national business and you’re looking to increase your website’s visibility, Exclusive Concepts offers search engine optimization as a service. Call us today for a free audit! Thanks for watching today, we’ll see you back here for PPC Tuesday. ]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-google-tags-in-local-listings.html/feed 0 SEO Monday – Google May Day Update http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-google-may-day-update.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-google-may-day-update.html#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:36:47 +0000 Scott C http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=2009 My name is Scott, an SEO Analyst at Exclusive Concepts, and today I will be covering an update Google has made to its algorithm, referred to by many as the May Day Update. Over the next few slides, I will provide a brief background of the update, it's significance to you as a website owner, and actions you can take to turn this potential problem into a competitive advantage.

As Tim Smith from Exclusive Concepts previously reported, over the past month, many websites began to notice a drop in traffic for pages that once ranked well for long tail keywords (search terms with 3 or more words). Industry professionals everywhere had scrambled to try and make heads or tails of it, with many predicting a temporary change in Google's algorithm. This prediction was coined the May Day Update by these professionals, since drops in traffic initially began in the last few days of April and first week of May.

Shortly after rumors of this update were swirling the web, Matt Cutts from Google confirmed these predictions, saying that the company had indeed made a change to its algorithm. Google stated that the change was made to improve the quality of searches and allow the best and most relevant sites to appear higher in search results. The pages noticing the most significant changes in ranking have been long tail pages, which in the past were normally easier for sites to rank higher for because of the relatively low competition for a targeted term. A question you might be asking yourself is "How is this significant to me?" Well, one of the biggest take-aways from Mr. Cutts's statement is that this change is here to stay. Many had first speculated this update may only be a temporary drop in traffic and rankings, but this is not the case. This means that if your site has seen a drop in traffic recently for your long tail term pages, it could be a direct result of this update.

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Now that you have a basic understanding of the update and its significance, the most important question to answer is "What can I do as a site owner to address this problem?" Well, one of the first things you can do is try to benchmark your pages that have seen a drop in traffic against pages that are now ranking well for your long tail terms. What are these pages doing differently from yours that has given them an advantage from the update? Performing a competitive analysis can give you some initial insight on areas of improvement for your long tail term pages. After looking at your competition, the next step you can take is evaluating the content on your own pages. Just as Tim stated when he first reported the update, content truly is king, and you'll want to make sure your site has interesting and unique content. Often times, pages ranking for long tail terms are product pages, and many of these sites simply copy and paste the product information directly from the manufacturer's website. Search engines will penalize pages using duplicate content, as they don't consider these pages as being authoritative on a subject, and in turn it will negatively impact where the page ranks in search results. To avoid this pitfall, you will want to make sure your product pages are using unique content and not copying descriptions from another website.

Now you may be thinking, "I have hundreds of products on my site and simply don't have the resources or manpower to change each product page!" To address this concern, we would suggest focusing on the most important products first, meaning ones with the highest margins or quantity of units sold. Once you've taken care of these pages, you can then decide how to prioritize the other pages. Taking this top-down approach will help ensure that your biggest revenue generators are not negatively impacted by the algorithmic update. If you already have unique content, a few other questions you can ask yourself are, "Does my site have enough content or can more be added? Additionally, is my content currently optimized for the long tail terms I am trying to rank for?" Taking a proactive approach to adding new and unique content will not only mitigate the risk of your long tail pages dropping further in rank, but it may also give you a competitive edge against the competition that is not yet aware of the May Day Update. Unsure of whether or not your site has been impacted by the May Day Update or if there are other changes that can be made to strengthen your site? Here at Exclusive Concepts, we can help site owners evaluate their site and find out the necessary changes to help improve traffic and rankings. Armed with a slew of proprietary tools that are backed by an expert team, our team can fully examine your site to find out whether content is an issue, if there is room for improvement on long tail keyword selections, or if there another opportunity awaits that can increase traffic and improve rankings.

To take the first steps in this process, please contact us for a free Advanced SEO Audit where we will analyze all of the components of your site and outline all of the weak areas that can lead to growth opportunities. The right research gives our SEO experts at Exclusive Concepts' the information we need to help our clients achieve higher search rankings, so please give us a call at 800-504-4324 to request your free audit today.
Thanks for watching this week's edition of SEO Monday and we hope you've found it helpful for your business. Have a great SEO Monday and tune in tomorrow for a new installment of PPC Tuesday!]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-google-may-day-update.html/feed 0 SEO Monday: Free SEO Tools http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-free-seo-tools.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-free-seo-tools.html#comments Mon, 24 May 2010 20:26:12 +0000 Joe http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=1939 Now for the average Search engine optimizer there are a host of tools available to help you get the job done. These tools range in price from free to several hundred or even thousand dollars per year. With the right SEO tools in your toolbox you will be able to save time and money while also increasing your productivity. I am going to introduce you to the basics free tools available to anyone with an internet connection and a web browser. Paid tools are great and often times they present value over free tools. however, with the right assortment of free tools you can be just as effective as some of the big players in the SEO world.

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First and foremost, any SEO worth his salt s going to need a keyword tool to gauge keyword popularity. I prefer the grandfather of them all, the google adwords keyword tool but there are others available such as wordtracker, keywordspy and spyfu. These tools are excellent at helping to determine your target keywords. And the paid programs can even give you insight into your competitors PPC campaigns.

Next, a few tools that are going to make day to day tasks much easier. SEO quake. SEO quake is a multi faceted tool that covers everything from inbound links, to URL age. This is a great tool and I am even more ecstatic that it has recently become compatible with Google chrome. Nik covered this one pretty in depth a couple weeks ago so I wont get too granular on this one but it is definatley worth checking out.

Another Tool that has recently come out for google chrome is the SEO SERP tool. This is a truly awesome tool for checking rankings. Not only can you look up where your website ranks within the first 10 pages of google for a phrase, but you can also toggle between countries as well. Highly recommended.

And finally, the META SEO Inspector is another great tool for analyzing on page SEO factors. This tool really saves me tons of time throughout the day. The beauty of this tool is the fact that you can look into a web pages source code, without even right clicking. By default a box is populated in the bottom right corner of your browser that contains a web pages title tag, meta description, meta keywords etc. Although it may seem like an easy thing to pull up, having all these items right in front of you does save time.

And that’s it. I hope my suggested free Seo tools are able to save you valuable time and money in your SEO projects and ventures. Also, please remember that Exclusive Concepts offers free SEO Audits, conversion audits, & ppc audits, that should help business owners in pinpointing areas for improvement. So give us a call or sign up at our website. ]]>

]]> http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-monday-free-seo-tools.html/feed 0 SEO Quake – SEO Monday http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-quake-seo-monday.html http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/seo-quake-seo-monday.html#comments Mon, 17 May 2010 16:52:11 +0000 Nik http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com/blog/?p=1898
SO let’s start at square one. This free tool is called SEO Quake and it’s available at seoquake.com as a plug-in for both Firefox and Google Chrome. Its main purpose is to make it easy to see the SEO stats of any particular page on the internet. Interpreting those stats is another story and I’ll get into that in today’s video. By the end of this video, you should feel empowered to quickly analyze the SEO health of your website or of a competitor. It’ll make goal-setting that much easier for your SEO program. Let’s get started.

For my SEOQuake preferences, I enable the SEOtoolbar, which means that I’ll get my page stats loaded within the top toolbar of my internet browser. In that browser, I make sure that I have 5 key parameters enabled as well: Google PageRank, Google Index, Yahoo links, Yahoo Linkdomain and Webarchive Age. The last key parameter that I focus on is there by default: Internal Links.

So what do these parameters tell me? Well, I analyze the homepage first and here’s what I get from SEOQuake. We’ll discuss what you should be reading into these numbers in the next slide.
  1. Google PageRank tells me how visible the homepage is to Google’s robots in general. High PageRanks indicate a higher probability that the next page that Google sees on the internet is this page. It is influenced by the combined PageRank passed along from inbound links – so yes, both quantity and quality of inbound links have different impacts to this number.
  2. Google Index is a quick number of how many pages Google has been able to find and keep in their index from your site.
  3. Yahoo Links and Yahoo LinkDomain are two different figures worth looking at. Yahoo Link for the homepage tells you how many links point to your homepage. LinkDomain tells you how many links point to your entire site. The difference between the two gives us a powerful number: how many links point to interior pages of your website.
  4. Webarchive Age give you a date – simple. It’s the date that your page was first indexed by arhive.org. Essentially, it’s a very good record of how old your site is in SEO terms.
  5. Internal links is a default setting and it tells you how many pages the current page (ie. homepage) is linking to within this domain.

Great – now we know what stats are important and what they means – but what can you conclude from these numbers?

The read-ins are critical. When analyzing a website, you first need to answer ‘how strong is the website?’ before you start determining what keywords to go after and what traffic goals you’ll get for yourself. These stats give you just that, in a very simple form. They answer two questions: How strong is the peak of the site? And, how deep is the site from an SEO perspective.

Let’s dig deeper. The Google PageRank tells us how visible a homepage is to Google, and its supported by the Yahoo link number. The higher the PageRank, the more competitive terms you can go after for your homepage and the top level pages of your website. Webarchive Age is an immutable, uncontrollable factor, but one that supports you over time: the longer your website has been around, the more strength your homepage has in the search engines.

So now you know how competitive of terms you can try targeting in the short run, the other stats help us identify how deep into the site you can set target goals for keyword ranking. Google Index gives us a descent indication of how much strength the rest of the site has and how deep it goes. The interior pages are helped by a strong balance of internal links from the homepage as well as deep in-bound links calculated through Yahoo LinkDomain.

The subtleties of this analysis comes in the more subjective questions:
  1. Is my PageRank good enough for my industry?
  2. Are my inbound links strong and are they helping me rank?
  3. Am I utilizing internal links in a balanced way or am I either diluting or under-utilizing my strength?
  4. How much of my site is in the index and does that make me competitive in my space?

These questions are not answered by SEOQuake and shouldn’t be answered in a vacuum. Here’s what you can do if you want more answers…

Exclusive Concepts offers free SEO audits to qualified websites where we answer these questions with you and help you identify the next steps you’ll need to take in order to become the leader in your space. Give us a call at 800-504-4324 for more information or visit our website at exclusiveconcepts.com.

Thank you and have a wonderful SEO Monday.]]>

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