SEOgadget

Linkbuilding Tool Tip – SEOmoz Link Intersect + Top Pages on Domain

richardbaxterseo — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:55:59 +0000

Photo by: m4rlonj

Here’s a quick and handy (and headsmacking) link building tool tip you should try the next time you’re link building for a client by using competitor back links data as a starting point.

We know that the “Competitive Link Finder” tool (or, “Link Intersect Tool”) offered by SEOmoz Labs offers insightful comparison on your competitors most powerful back links, with a useful notification if any of those back links are missing from your link graph. My tip involves using two tools offered by Labs to get the most out of your link building strategy.

Here’s a search for the top 4 ranking sites for the term “Pears” with a comparision to a lesser ranking site:

Which reveals a report something like this:

Often a report like this can immediately expose valuable opportunities in contextually relevant, high value links. By expanding on the “# Linking Pages”, you get a quick summary of the urls on the linked from domain:

At this point, my advice is: don’t stop there! So often, an SEO would take this report and contact the owner of the site shown above to request to be included on any of the pages in the list. But, your job is to beat the competition, right?

Run that valuable new link opportunity through the Top Pages on Domain Tool

It’s no secret I’m the world’s biggest advocate of the SEOmoz Top Pages tool, and for good reason. It’s very, very useful. Copy your new target domain into the tool and run the top pages report:

Now you have a list of the most linked to pages on the domain target in question. To beat your competitor, if you’re going to be linked to from the same domain, get a more authoritative back link from them. Using these tools individually is powerful, but learning to use them together is awesome.Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Linkbuilding Tool Tip – SEOmoz Link Intersect + Top Pages on Domain

Draft Microformats – the Future Looks Structured

richardbaxterseo — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:03:20 +0000

Photo by: the russians are here

Microformats have been around for a while and there’s plenty of evidence that search engines wish to continue supporting the emergence of these standards in an effort to better dissect the web’s information. In fact, some known search engineers are directly involved with Microformat development.

Making sure there’s enough support for webmasters and SEO’s, Google have gone so far as to give tools to test Microformat implementations on webpages and there’s definitely a feeling from all of the search engines that structured data is part of their future.

What direction are Microformats taking us in? Here’s a selection of Microformats old and new that have useful SEO applications, today.

My favourite (approved) Microformats

Based on Microformats.org’s specifications page, here’s a list of all current, stable Microformats:

- hCalendar (creator)

A simple, open, distributed calendaring and events format, using a 1:1 representation of standard iCalendar. Good for sites that describe events, with a markup for start time, end time, location and many other options.

- hCard – (hCard creator)

A simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places. I use this particular format to markup the contact details on my jobs pages, based on a guide to using hCard I wrote.

- rel-license

An open format for indicating content licenses which is embeddable in HTML or XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. This is the standard for which we’re advised to markup Creative Commons attribution. Want to attribute a Flickr image correctly? You could do a lot worse than use ImageCodr, a tool that will choose your licence and mark up the attribution perfectly. Nice.

- rel-nofollow

By adding rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines). You might be interested to see that Matt Cutts was a concept contributor for this standard.

- rel-tag

By adding rel=”tag” to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink is an author-designated “tag” (or keyword/subject) for the current page. Note that a tag may just refer to a major portion of the current page (i.e. a blog post). Yahoo announced support for this on June 11th 2009.

- VoteLinks

“Indexing and tracking applications treat all links as endorsements, or expressions of support. This is a problem, as we need to link to those we disagree with as well, to discuss why.”

By including the attributes: rev=”vote-for” or rev=”vote-against” we can indicate in the hyperlink whether we agree with the sentiment in the linked to post, or not. Cool.

- XFN - XFN creator

XFN is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. Wordpress (allows? – I haven’t checked for a while) you to indicate your relationship to the linked to site in your blog roll. Are you a friend, colleague, family? That’s what XFN does.

Draft Microformats – the future looks structured

These Microformats are draft status, essentially meaning, use them, but they might change. That’s not a problem as most front end developers would likely agree. Microformats are reasonably easy to implement if you understand them, so what’s the risk in getting there early? I’ve included the ones that caught my eye, and the one’s I’ll probably use somewhere sometime soon.

- Geo

For marking up longitude and latitude. Tripit has a very good example of this – check the source in your contacts list.

- hAudio

Adding a link to a music file, say, an MP3 in your web page is great for people, but not so much for search engines. Use this markup to define details such as artist, production date, duration and thumbnail image. Could be very useful if you’re optimising for Google Music.

- hRecipe

Who’d have thought recipes would get their own Microformat? No longer are the subtleties of a pinch of salt or a miggins of lark’s tongue a mystery to search engine crawlers. Recipes have a markup, so will this mean recipe search wilget smarter?

- rel-Home

Rel-home indicates a hyperlink to your site homepage. One for testing, perhaps a search engine engineer might use this to determine the level of relevance passed by a specific type of anchor text?

- hResume

hResume is a microformat for publishing resumes and CVs, developed by jobs board provider Madgex, it’s reported to be in use by Guardian Jobs CV matching functionality. I know from my own experience that CV parsing has historically been a challenge, so all standards to describe candidates, their experience, work history, location and qualifications are most welcome.

There’s no doubt about it, Microformat standards are expanding their reach rapidly. With search engines looking for ever more meaningful data in webpages, I’m glad the Microformats team is here. On page SEO is about to get a lot more interesting…Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Draft Microformats – the Future Looks Structured

Fun with Godaddy’s GeoDomainMap [Domain Buying]

richardbaxterseo — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:17:00 +0000

Looking for inspiring ways to come up with domain names you’re probably never going to use? Today I learned that sellbuenosaires.com remains unregistered thanks to Godaddy’s local domain search service, GeoDomainMap.

Godaddy’s new service asks you to set a location and a keyword you’re interested in. Next, the tool combines nearby location names and the keywords you supplied and “checks the GoDaddy database of available domain names and returns those that are available”.

Sadly, the tool didn’t seem to be working quite so well for the UK this evening, though there’s still a very long list of domains ending with “SEO” available in the US for those people looking to emulate the good work of our friends at LondonSEO.

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SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Fun with Godaddy’s GeoDomainMap [Domain Buying]

Using Tables in Microsoft Excel 2007

richardbaxterseo — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:30:48 +0000

In my SEOmoz pro session last week I spent some time explaining the benefits of using Tables in Microsoft Excel. Gone are the days of broken formulas that once worked, and extending your cell range references every time you add new data in a spreadsheet.

Using this technique isn’t all that different to using cell references, and the outcome is a more agile and robust Excel, with an ability to manage your data faster making for a more time efficient experience. What’s not to like?

What are Tables?

From Microsoft Office Online [Overview of Excel tables]

A table typically contains related data in a series of worksheet rows and columns that have been formatted as a table. By using the table features, you can then manage the data in the table rows and columns independently from the data in other rows and columns on the worksheet.

That seemed really obvious! Let’s drill down a little deeper.

What’s the actual difference between data stored in an ordinary worksheet and a table?

There’s no difference at all. The benefit of using tables are how cell references change, and how they seem to suit keyword research methodologies and other SEO applications particularly well. Let’s look at an example to get the point across.

First, take a look at the table itself. By highlighting your data in a worksheet, and pressing CTRL-L, you can add a little polish to a quite ordinary data set.

Before:

After: [Highlight, CTRL-L, Select "My data has headers"]

Apart from the obvious differences in formatting, tables become quite powerful for two reasons. First of all, a formula applies to an entire column immediately, not just in the cells you apply the formula to. Enter a VLOOKUP into cell D2 and the entire column marked “September” will perform the calculation. Great for big worksheets.

The formulas change significantly

We don’t like cell references, especially when they apply to a large array of data. Why? Because if you add more data, you have to manually adjust each cell reference. This process introduces bugs and errors quickly. Using a VLOOKUP as the example, let’s take a look at how formulas change the way they refer to cell ranges, other tables and columns.

This is our “pre-table” VLOOKUP. You can see cell references “A2″, cell ranges “$A$2:$E$11″ and worksheet references “‘KW rank’!”:

=VLOOKUP(A2,‘KW rank'!$A$2:$E$11,5,FALSE)

This is the same query written in a table:

=VLOOKUP(Table1[[#This Row],[Keywords]],Table5[#All],5,0)

Where “Table1[[#This Row]” is our new cell reference, “[Keywords]” is the Column name in which the data we’re looking for is stored, and “Table5[#All]” is the table in which we’re looking to find a match and pull through the value from column 5.

Become more agile in the time it takes to drop a penny

Though it takes a small period of time to adjust yourself to this way of thinking, tables are great for keyword research agility. Imagine the scenario – you’ve nearly finished your analysis and you remember there’s a keyword type missing from the original data set. If you’re using tables, you can extract your data from Google Keyword Tool and paste the raw CSV straight into Table5. All of the VLOOKUPs in our example would automatically update as Table5 adjusted itself to accommodate the additional lines of data.

Tables save us time and effort and they’ve been around for a while. As I said in my presentation, they’ve changed the way I work with Excel for the better. Next time you’re working with a spreadsheet, try selecting your data and pressing CTRL-L. It takes a while for the penny to drop, but once it does, there’s no turning back. Good luck!

Photo: In Case Designs

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SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Using Tables in Microsoft Excel 2007

Make an SEO Activity Plan for 2010

richardbaxterseo — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:57:48 +0000

The SEOmoz / Distilled Pro Seminar was, without a doubt, a hugely successful event. While the attendees eagerly await the publication of the DVD, I thought I’d provide a bit more background on some of the slides covering organisational SEO.

Planning Your SEO Activity for 2010

One of the key points I made at the conference was have a plan. By first listing your objectives, and making them compatible with the commercial metrics that drive your business, it’s far easier to construct a case to justify additional resource or agency support. In short, you’re creating a commercially driven SEO strategy, beyond simple traffic and conversion metrics. This post covers the primary stage of making your commercial SEO plan.

Structure your plan by activity over time

The diagram below follows a simple structure. Remember how I structured an SEO team? The left hand side shows activities directly relevant to the roles and responsibilities in your group.

What should I include?

Don’t forget to include success criteria for each project, for example, you might plan to create a piece of keyword research in your analytics / research stream. The criteria for success could be as simple as how many keywords you managed to capture or the number of opportunities for new search types you spot throughout the research process.

Why plan so visually?

This is an ideal approach for early stage SEO strategy planning. Why? With a well planned and documented strategy, covering each of your disciplines, you’re able to think ahead, often more seasonally. You’re producing a really nice, high level document that works to focus your own team while communicating to those working above your next move.

Like what you’re reading? Talk to us about what we do.

Photo credit: Orangeacid

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SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Make an SEO Activity Plan for 2010

What Makes for a Great SEO Conference?

richardbaxterseo — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:46:45 +0000

Returning from this year’s A4UExpo in London, We’re feeling a sense of inspiration and a renewed sense of vigour towards conferences in our industry. Shows like A4UExpo are great for the attendees, exhibitors and speakers. A really good conference can live a long and prosperous life, but why?

What makes attendees love a good conference?

- Great content

It sounds obvious but it’s true. The speakers chosen to speak have an obligation to provide it, and the organisers have an obligation to choose the speakers who can. If attendees leave having learned new skills then the chances are they’ll have left sporting a smile. There is nothing worse than sitting watching a speaker work through slides that actually tell you nothing, or worse, talk you through the same points you heard last year. Content is king on your website and it’s king at a conference.

- Good organisation

Are there signs giving directions to attendees who have never visited your venue? Are there plenty of staff on hand to steer you to the right room? Something that impresses at A4Uexpo are the little laptops that greet you at the door. You enter a reference code (sent to you via email) and your pass is printed and handed to you by the stairs. Perfect organisation from the second you enter the building.

- Good food

Good food, though not the most important thing, can really add shine to a lunch gathering. The best experience (I’ve ever had) was SMX Advanced, with a full cooked meal, plenty of choice and table service to boot. The SMX team know how to cook a good meal!

- Networking

Access to speakers and fellow peers to share and exchange ideas with is a godsend. The networking during the event and impromtu gatherings of new people and friends at the bar always lead to that inspired feeling that just wouldn’t exist without the event.

What makes exhibitors love a good conference?

- Exposure to the right people

Exhibitors sponsor at a cost, so they need to know they’re in the right place. Check out this chart showing the attendee demographic at SMX East:

- Plenty of leads likely to give good ROI

Capturing an audience who are attending to learn and purchase services offered by the exhibitors must be a difficult marketing challenge for a conference organiser. Once more, SMX provides some data on who’s holding the purse strings at their events:

- Industry blogger exposure

There are always a lot of industry bloggers walking around looking for a subject to cover. Service providers and vendors with a brand new product take note, face to face meetings at conferences with influential industry commentators can pay huge dividends for your product exposure.

What makes the speakers love a good conference?

- A challenging panel

Though sometimes a little daunting, a challenging panel to test your “a-material” can exercise (or help you develop) your public speaking skills. It’s good to be invited to speak, and the skills you learn from your experience are invaluable.

- Exposure to a large audience

A speaking engagment in front of a large audience can enhance your credibility and create awareness of your brand. It generates enquiries, links and new contacts very quickly.

- A mix of all of the items above

Great food, new friends, other speakers you can learn from and great organisation really make the difference for speakers too. Organisers, take note – more things to eat in the press room next time, speakers, bring your best material and attendees, make sure you give feedback on the event.

Photo credit: RLFilipkowski

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SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

What Makes for a Great SEO Conference?

A4UExpo London Coverage 2009

richardbaxterseo — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:57:24 +0000

So far so good at A4Uexpo 2009 with some fabulous panels on Day 1 so far. Here’s a live list of links to coverage as the conference progresses:

Meet the Engines – a4u Expo (Searchcowboys)

Dave Naylor’s SEO Strategies To Make A Splash (SEOgadget)

Meet the Search Engines Q+A (SEOgadget)

Keith Bond’s Schedule for A4UExpo

You want to Tweet what?! (SEOgadget)

The Affiliate Doctors – Live (Search Cowboys)

If you have URLs to submit – feel very welcome to contact me and I’ll add them to the list as the conference progresses.Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

A4UExpo London Coverage 2009

Meet The Search Engines Q&A

richardbaxterseo — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:13:55 +0000

Meet the search engines Q&A at A4UExpo – session with:

* Matthew Trewhella, Google

* Dan Cohen, Microsoft

* David Naylor (?!)

This session went really, really fast – I’m going to cover points that (I feel) really added value rather than covering absolutely everything in detail. Here are some interesting slide pics from Dan Cohen of Microsoft, looking at http compression and conditional get use for crawl bandwidth improvement:

And this one, covering a high level case study of the techniques used to make MSN Video more search engine friendly (an AJAX based site):

Matthew Trewhella, Google

Matthew gave us a really solid overview of how Google works. Here are the key takeaways / favourite offerings from Google according to Matt

1) Page download time is important. He advised us to use the bandwidth tool in Webmaster tools and told us to speed up out sites!

2) Fetch as Googlebot in Google WMT – use to visualise how Google sees your content

3) Google translate

Dave Naylor (Yahoo?!)

Dave talks a little bit about Yahoo

Get clean links out of flickr to your own website;

Dave demonstrates, live a Flickr link hack, where adding a comment, then editing it to remove the rel=”nofollow” will result in a dofollowed link from Flickr! Nice.

The crowd absolutely loved his demo – go and get yourselves a dofollowed link from Flickr!

The Q+A session:

Question asked: what was the rationale / justification for the vince update?

Matt – we have to make sure we give the best experience possible for users. We saw that our users got to what they were looking for quickly after the update.

Question: The brand update was rolled out for a few dozen keywords. Is there a plan to roll that out for more?

Matt: It will be considered if it’s good for users. Matt wasn’t prepared to share indicators for SEO for us to tell if an update was being rolled out, but Dave said check for disappearance of the cache links – which can sometimes be a sign of an update if there are radical changes on pages 2 and 3 of the search results also

Question: How important is server location if you have the TLD?

Matt: Not at all – if you have the ccTLD, we use that. Gave some advice on geo-location with webmaster tools if you have one domain and multiple subdirectories targeting different countries

Matt: If it’s a .com / .org they look at the IP address for an indicator of target market. If it’s a generic domain use WMT and any other geographical hints available

Question: If you’re a site in France but can’t get a .fr what can we do?

Matt mentioned that if you can’t get the Tld, then “it’s about the links” – sounded very much like the link graph has an impact on geolocation

Dave recommended subdomains so he could host the site in France – so host location counted positively towards the ranking factors

Question: How do you handle countries with several languages?

Matt: We’re luck that generally, different languages use different words. The trick is where you have multiple languages on different URLs the translations should be correctly localised for users, not machine translated

Question: We’d like to launch a .IE version of our site – will we have to rewrite the whole site?

Matt: You can, but if you’re just replicating the entire site on a different domain, the duplicate will dilute the value. Do enough to help us understand that it’s a different page.

Update

The Flickr exploit demonstrated earlier by Dave has already been fixed. Nice hack though, Dave.Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Meet The Search Engines Q&A

Dave Naylor’s SEO Strategies To Make A Splash

richardbaxterseo — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:42:55 +0000

Below we’ve got some (very bullet pointy) coverage of Dave’s SEO session (”SEO Strategies to Make a Splash”) at A4Uexpo London. Hopefully you’ll find some useful nuggets in the list!

Dave opened by defining SEO by the Wikipedia definition (which he hates . Each heading covers the slide title presented.

Skills needed for SEO

HTML & CSS are ablsolutely required.
An ability to see an angle on things – able to see opportunity in things and understand your market sectors.
You need a will to win (at all costs)!

Other skills and qualities

Good at networking – this is really vital – make friends with people in your industry.
A sense of humour.
Don’t be naive.
Patience.
Determination.

How to learn SEO

Dave recommended a few sources of info about SEO:
DaveN (http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/)
Google Webmaster Central
Matt Cutts blog
SEO book by Aaron Wall
Gaining experience
Conferences – most SEO’s are willing to share if you ask them

Beginning as an SEO

Dave started in the industry optimising with loft conversions, inkjet cartidges, renault parts,
Use clean and good tecniques
Monitor the results and test different theories. Track your tweaks and changes. Monitor your competitors to give you an outlook on what changes are impacting your results vs general algo changes
Use tools – Raven SEO

SEO Strategy

Different strategies apply to different sectors – eg a hotel vs a gambling site
By understanding your market you can judge the best stratgey to employ to acquire links.
You should consider your long tail – competitive keywords or long tail queries
Use content (Dave honestly believes you need good content on the site to get it to rank). Dave reminded us that google really doesn’t want “thin” affiliate sites in their index – so look at the long tail and create content to capture that traffic.
The way you acquire links, for example “just” buying links can be suicide

SEO to win

Think of where you want to be in 12 months time. Think about your site structure, start with a process and don’t just dive in making lots of changes in one weekend.
Sort out your on page SEO – learn the on page factors.
Look at your competitors – what are they doing?
The way you acquire links.
Choose your keywords and do good keyword research.
Dave advised us to PPC our keywords during the KW research process to check the validity of KW data from Google Keyword Tool.

Keyword research

Google KWT
Wordtracker
Only go for really competitive keywords if you know what you’re doing. Start with the long tail first!
Make sure you track your conversions – there’s no point going for keywords if they don’t convert

On page factors

Make your title tags unique.
Meta description is good for CTR.
Keep your eye on H1, H2, H3.
URLs structure,

CSS positioning (use your CSS to make sure your content is pushed to the top of the page)

Dave’s link tips

1) Networking – get good contacts in your industry and use them

Great way to share links

- Blogrolls
- Guest posts on blogs
- Refer to each other when possible

2) Share ideas and information

- Places to get links
- Ways of getting links

3) Linkbait -Dave hates linkbait, but it works!

- Make a useful list
- Be first to break some news
- Discover something interesting
- Write a funny blog post
- Write a useful guide

4) Directory submission

- Not that useful for links
- Great for creating a smoke screen and hiding your most valuable links

5) Competitor analysis

- Download all their links
- Look for coomon links- go for those first
- Use these as ideas for linkbuilding methods unique to your industry

6) Press coverage

Something worth spreading? The Twitter exploit is still open! Dave could change your profile picture, tweet as you. The security hole at Twitter is ludicrous. Exploitation could be the next big thing – wordpress hacks, Twitter hacking etc. Dave expressed some concern that services could emerge to take advantage of these issues.

7) Article submissions

You can submit articles to a number of places, but the value is dimishing. You can use Raven to distribute content via their blog network.
Write an article and spin it – makes at least 20 or 30 articles. Dave recommended Daryl Wilcox Publishing as a good way to distribute and exchange Press Releases.

Buying links

Find the site, check the whois and other sites hosted at that IP
Map out who these sites advertise and work out who the link buyers are. Be careful not to buy too many links in the same space as obvious link buyers.

Anchor text – first link counts

Dave ran a great number of tests to prove this works. Make sure that when you’re linking out of a document, make sure your first link uses the anchor text you’re targeting

The best type of links

Are the ones your competitors can’t get hold of!

Blogs

Put a Wordpress blog on a subdomain (if you haven’t already got one). You’ll often see blogs ranking because of QDF, ranking highly for volume queries for a short period of time.

Brand search

Your brand helps you rank higher

Some theories:

- Search volume for your brand
- Mentions of your brand
- Mentions of your brand in the press

Not SEO

Spamming, bulk link buying, KW stuffing, hidden keywords, UA Cloaking, Duplicate content are all spamming techniques that just aren’t SEO anymore.

Great session covering a huge range of subjects with some really useful reminders and pointers. For more, go and check out Dave’s (newly branded) site.Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Dave Naylor’s SEO Strategies To Make A Splash

Build a Great SEO Team [Organisational SEO]

richardbaxterseo — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:41:56 +0000

Putting together a team of the right people for great SEO is just one step towards reaching organisational SEO nirvana. In my post at Blogstorm I covered the concept of how great SEO starts with the right people, and what qualities you’re looking out for during your recruiting process. This post takes a step back and discusses the organisational layout of your team.

Design an SEO team before you start recruiting

It sounds obvious enough, but search engine optimisation is still a relatively new profession in marketing and organisationally not always well established or structured. It’s very common that SEO’s are recruited to conduct a range of tasks, from reporting to linkbuilding and technical SEO. That generalist experience is rather critical for a senior search engine optimiser to progress towards SEO Management, but it’s not absolutely nessecary for SEO team building. The last thing you want your SEO doing is a day and a half reporting, every week, so how do you structure and organise a more effective SEO team?

Design your team structure by common SEO activities

There’s no definitive SEO team structure out there, and ultimately the roles you choose need to fit with the needs of your organisational framework. That said, it pays to really consider your team design, especially when you’re communicating your resourcing requirements to HR and the Board.

Here’s an example of a team structure:

SEO typically breaks down into 4 main tasks

- Technical SEO
- Content Creation and social media
- Link building, baiting and realignment
- Metrics, analytics and reporting

If these are your typical tasks then you either have a team that do a small part of everything, a more compartmentalised team with groups that are responsible for each activity [like the diagram above] or you just don’t have enough resource to be doing everything, and you need to recruit more SEO’s.

After you’ve built your perfect team, and everyone has their roles set in place, there’s no reason why your links team wouldn’t be making technical requests or requiring keyword research or tracking. That’s the beauty of a nicely built team! Encouraged to work together every member can support the group with their own individual strengths. If you can justify the recruitment, having an independent resource for each of our SEO activities makes the process of doing SEO and being competitive, easier.

Photo credit: Veni Markovski

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SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Build a Great SEO Team [Organisational SEO]

Google Keyword Tool [External vs Beta] – What’s the Difference?

richardbaxterseo — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:04:24 +0000

On the 24^th September 2009, Google announced a revision of their Keyword Tool, the imaginatively titled “Keyword Tool (Beta)”.

As Barry reported that morning at Search Engine Roundtable,

Google has a beta version of a new keyword tool available in the AdWords console. To get to it, login to adwords.google.com, go to a campaign, click on opportunities (if you have that tab), then on the left bar, click on keyword tool. A “beta” link should be available for you to click on in the top paragraph.

SEO’s all agree, the data from Google’s Keyword Tools and other sources should be taken with a pinch of salt, and I definitely agree with that too. Particularly in the US market, the Local, Global and Trend data sets just don’t feel right on certain keywords.

Has Google improved the situation in their new tool? We’ll let Google tell you about their fancy new interface and get right on with what’s important. The data.

Evaluating Google Keyword Tool Beta

From the start, let me tell you that this post does not conclude with a “this tool is right” kind of an answer. What it does do is compare new with old, and it’ll tell you where the differences are. With an understanding of those differences, you can make your own decision about which source makes more sense. I’ll give you my personal opinion on this, but, I’ve only reviewed one sector in the UK market, so the conclusion could be different in different geo locations.

For the record, I looked at local search data in the UK market, ignoring the global figures. All values relate to August 2009 comparing the data exported from the Beta tool. Variances are expressed as the percentage difference of the beta tool compared to the old tool.

Observations

1) The largest volume generating keyword in the dataset had a variance between the data sources of -242% – equating to a difference of more than 14 million searches per month. Beta significantly under reported at the head of the data, compared to the original tool.

2) With the largest volume generating term removed, Google beta continued to under report by as much as -230%, but did not over report until the 28th keyword, with a search volume of approximately 76,000 searches per month.

3) After the 28th keyword, beta begins to demonstrate a smaller negative and eventually frequently occuring positive variance further down the data set. An anomaly is visible at keyword 36, where beta strongly disagrees with the old keyword tool. From this point the variance favours the beta keyword tool, with more volume data available in the beta keyword set for long tail search queries.

4) Much further along the tail (a selection of 40 keywords with a volume between 140 and 1700 searches per month), the beta tool under reported compared to the original keyword tool data set, with the average variance around -35%:

5) More data (results with a volume figure) was acquired using the Beta Keyword tool in the same keyword list, making the Beta tool a better tool for long tail keyword data. Beta keyword tool has improved data exports with more rows of data and actual numbers for monthly trends, instead of those dreaded ratios.

6) Keyword Tool (External) and Keyword Tool (Current, signed in to adwords) are exactly the same.

Conclusion

It’s very difficult to draw a conclusion by simply comparing the two data sources. There are obvious differences, and my personal opinion is that the beta tool is a step up from what we have now. The data exported (as a CSV) contains more usable values from the outset, and there are powerful categorisation features available in the user interface.

Keyword data evaluation is not easy. My recommendation would be try this for yourself, pulling actual rankings and Google referral data from your analytics tool to benchmark the numbers. My theory is that you’ll see some consistency between organic CTR% on a more accurate dataset, by keyword category / group. That’s a different blog post though.

Image credit: Pasta Boy Sleeps

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SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Google Keyword Tool [External vs Beta] – What’s the Difference?

Implementing named anchors to improve your SERPs

richardbaxterseo — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:54:00 +0000

On Friday (25th September) Google announced their support for new features, using named anchors found in webpages that provide additional links in the search result page snippets, which allow users to jump directly to more relevant parts of a larger page.

In their first example, Google shows a result for “trans fats” in Google.com:

And a “jump to:” link, which was first picked up by Rob at iCrossing on the 10th September, 2009:

How does it work? According to Google Webmaster Central Blog:

We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors.

Google have been testing these results for some time, and though we’re not seeing them in the search results consistently yet, I thought it would be worth implementing the approach in my “how to install Ubuntu” guide, if for no other reason than the fact that it would be interesting to see what happens!

Here’s how to quickly and easily review and implement named anchors into a page on your site.

1) First, do some keyword research or check out your analytics for the long tail keyphrases bringing traffic to your page and make sure that your page titles and anchores are relevant to the traffic you’re recieving:

2) Google advised us to use distinct, logical sections on our pages. Review each of your page sub-titles to make sure they’re as relevant as you can make them to actual search queries:

3) Create your table of contents and prepare the anchor ID’s to insert into your HTML source:

Table of contents

Install from CD
Install with Wubi
Install in EXT3 Partition
Install from USB

And prepare your anchor points:

id="install-from-CD"
id="Install-with-Wubi"
id="Install-in-EXT3"
id="Install-from-USB"

4) Work through your titles first, rewording them to suit your keyword research if nessecary and inserting the id’s you created earlier on:

5) Paste in your table of contents at the top of the page and text that all the anchors work:

Of course, the next step is wait, and watch. This is one of those SEO tweaks that will take some time to propogate though into your own SERPS, but will be worth the wait when it does.Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Implementing named anchors to improve your SERPs

An interview with Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting

richardbaxterseo — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:32:34 +0000

Search marketing industry stalwart Eric Enge has been in the technology business since 1982 as a qualified electrical engineer, computer software engineer, tech startup founder and expert SEO. After several years in software and hardware design, and co-founding Whodoweknow.com, he became President of his own company Stone Temple Consulting Corporation in January 1997.

Eric is one of the most prolific contributors to the search marketing industry, better known for a near endless list of interviews with search industry movers and shakers on Stone Temple, his research studies, his columns at Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch. Eric is Co-Author in the forthcoming book release, “The Art of SEO”, alongside Rand Fishkin, Stephan Spencer and Jessie Stricchiola.

I had a chance to meet up with him while I was in Boston, which I blew thanks to bad diary management and an unpredictable workload. Regardless, he’s been kind enough to make the time to answer a few questions by email.

You started Stone Temple back in 1997. How did you make the move into SEO?

It was not something I planned, that’s for sure. The company was originally focused on business development consulting, which in this case was a fancy word for sales. Then a friend of mine took over as CEO of a company called ULN, that ran a site at BestPrices.com (which is now at: ULN.com).

So I started trying to do some business development work for him. After a short while I realized that what they really needed was traffic from search engines. So I started working on that. This was back when SEO was keyword and metatag based, so it was pretty easy. Then I saw them generate millions of dollars from sales from search referrals, and the light bulb went off: “hey, maybe there is some money to be made here …”.

What was the demand like for SEO services back then? Were you having to find the clients, or were the clients finding you?

When I first started seriously pursuing SEO, I simply relied on my contacts and referrals to get new clients. Initially, it was just me, and it ran that way for a few years. I was spending half my time doing SEO consulting work, and the other half publishing our own sites and optimizing them.

Four or so years ago I made the decision to scale the consulting business up. I had developed a pretty good rep as a solo artist, but wanted to get more out of it. Then, I was out in Las Vegas for a friend’s 50^th birthday celebration. One of the other guys there, John Biundo, and I started talking about SEO at some length. John had made some money from a company he participated in selling to Sun Microsystems, and had stepped out of the working world for a few years.

But, he was looking to get back into the game. I had known John for years, and had always known that he had strong technical knowledge, and strong business and marketing skills, which is a combination that I believe is a major asset for a professional SEO. And, there I was, looking to expand, so we decided to partner on taking the business to the next stage.

So I began to up my focus on writing articles, speaking at conferences, and otherwise generating visibility. Nonetheless, the sales model has not changed dramatically. We have no salespeople. Basically, if you want to work with Stone Temple Consulting you have to contact me by some means and ask.

I am sure that there is some gain to be had by reaching out and proactively seeking new clients, but the business is growing nicely using the existing model. We are constantly looking for new people to bring into the company.

What advice have you got for aspiring startup CEO’s in digital marketing today?

Now that’s a big question. Looking at it from the top level, I would say that these are the most important things:

1. You need to get an SEO professional involved prior to making any decisions at all about your web site. There is too much that can go wrong if you don’t.

2. On page SEO can only carry you so far. Put in other words, smart on page SEO is simply an enabler – it enables you to compete for ranking on search terms. Links drive rankings. You must get people to link to your site. I was speaking to a web publisher the other day, and here is what I told her “Getting links to your site is the only thing you can do to grow your business”. That’s a pretty strong statement, but in her case, it was true. Being a bit more precise about it, once you have done a good job making your site search engine friendly, the most important thing, by far, that you can do to grow your web site traffic is to get people to link to your site.

3. To get significant links, you must provide significant differentiation from other web sites. This means great content, great tools, or a product or service that becomes a big hit online. If you are a reseller or an affiliate you need to focus on content or tools. If you run a business where your product is good, but not the next iPhone (or the next Twitter), you need to focus on content or tools.

As you begin to realize the importance of content to your business, bear in mind that the content must be differentiated somehow. 40 articles about topics that have been written about dozens of times will not cut it. You have to be the real deal, and provide unique value.

I know I have presented this as if they were hard and fast rules, but that’s because I believe this is the environment making up the web today. Be search engine compatible. Feed them some words to chew on. Become a recognized expert or leader in your field. Promote your site. Every time we have followed this formula, it has worked.

How has your background in Electronics and computer engineering helped you in SEO?

As I mentioned above, I believe a mix of technical and marketing skills are a big plus for an SEO practitioner. You need to be able to speak to web developers, and ideally about specific code constructs that they are using in a web site. You need to be able to explain why one construct is good for search engines and another one is not.

On the other hand, you need to be able to speak to senior marketing people and C-Suite management and explain to them why something is a good or bad idea, and how to prioritize the investments they make in digital marketing.

The result is that you must be able to speak in programming languages and the language of business at the same time.

“The Art of SEO” is set to be one of the most exciting publications in Digital Marketing for some time. Tell us how the idea was first hatched, and what can we expect from the book?

I was the last author added to the book team, so some of the details are a bit fuzzy. Basically, as I understand it, Rand and Stephan were working on a book project, and Jessie was working on a different one. I believe both had a contract with O’Reilly, but both projects were not progressing that well, because they are all very busy people who are in high demand.

O’Reilly then asked the three of them to work together. However, none of them got any less busy, so there will still some fits and starts. At SES Chicago 2008, Stephan asked me if I would be willing to join the team. I felt extremely honored by the request, and I jumped on board after thinking about it for a grand total of one hour.

I feel privileged to have been a part of such an incredible team. Everybody made huge contributions, and the result is 592 pages of what we hope is a comprehensive and thorough look at SEO from top to bottom. We certainly cover a lot of high level things, but we go into intense detail on many specific aspects of SEO as well.

When will we be able to get our hands on a copy?

October 15, 2009 is the official publication date! Copies can be pre-ordered online at Amazon now.

Stone Temple are well known for their interviews and podcasts with industry experts. Which ones have uncovered the most interesting “nuggets” in the past?

The killer nuggets seem to be spread out a bit. My most recent interview, with Chris Silver Smith has some great stuff on local search in it. Another great one for local search is the interview with Pankaj Mathur.

But, my best interviews were probably the two with Matt Cutts, on link building and general SEO issues. That latter interview has some interesting history in it, because it is one of the few places where Matt Cutts publicly stated that using NoFollow for PageRank sculpting purposes was something that Google was OK with webmasters doing, but he made that practice obsolete with this post.

Eric, thank you so much for your time!

Thank you Richard!Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

An interview with Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting

How to buy a (registered) domain name using brokerage

richardbaxterseo — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:05:05 +0000

Photo by: Macinate

Have you ever felt screwed because someone on the internet owns your beloved domain name? I can honestly say that I can sleep a little better tonight, since I acquired SEOgadget.com, the .com brethren of my beloved UK TLD, SEOgadget.co.uk.

How to buy a domain through using domain brokerage

I used SEDO, but there are a number of other recommended domain brokers to choose from. In the past, I’ve worked with services from Godaddy and Snapnames.com. I’d love to write about them all, but I only bought one domain this time so here’s how it worked with SEDO.

First, you have to register and get your email address approved. Once you’re done with the account activation process, head to the domain brokerage page and fill out the domain search form:

If a domain is already registered, complete the domain brokerage application, including any details of previous contact with the domain owner.

The more info you can give to your broker, the better – particulary (failed) attempts to acquire the domain on your own.

Next, comes the fun part. The wait, followed by a torrent of emails explaining that your request has been received, followed by an acceptance and confirmation that the brokerage process has begun.

According to the email you receive:

A broker has been assigned to your account and will begin efforts to establish contact with the owner. Your broker will provide periodic updates via the Brokerage Status page as additional progress is made. Please keep in mind that this can take several weeks. If the broker is unable to negotiate an agreement within your current budget, he or she will contact you for further consultation.

Within a week I received another email announcing that a message awaited me in the brokerage status control panel at SEDO.com. This was the message confirming the purchase had been agreed:

Time to make your agreement

At this point you have to reply in writing (by email) to an agreement which looks a little like this:

1. I agree to buy seogadget.com for xxx USD

2. I understand that I, the Buyer will also pay the Sedo fees (10% of the final sales price).

3. I understand that Sedo reserves the right to disclose and publicize the sales price and domain name (otherwise an additional fee of 2.5% will apply to the requesting party).

All of which seems pretty fair. You have to sign the email with your name, address and contact details, making the email reply pretty much a formal contract. No pulling out now!

I’ve agreed and paid, now what?

Once the payment has been sent through, and your domain is held in Escrow, your domain transfer manager asks you to initiate the transfer process. By the way, they (Sedo) accept payments via Paypal. Very handy indeed! Initiating a domain transfer request on your side is really easy too. Login to your existing domain management account and initiate a transfer from there.

The domain owner is contacted by the registrar (usually via email to the administrative contact on the whois details) and, provided the domain owner has unlocked the domain for transfer and provides the AUTH code given by the current registrar, the domain transfer process begins.

How long does it take?

This domain transfer took a week, making the whole domain brokerage process from start to finish take almost exactly 1 month:

It’s (amazingly) simple.

This was my first experience of a domain brokerage and I have to say, it was much, much easier than I thought. So, if someone else owns the domain name you’ve been longing for, why not make a move and acquire it for yourself?Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

How to buy a (registered) domain name using brokerage

Get high rankings by building authoritative, irrelevant links?

richardbaxterseo — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:04:22 +0000

Photo by stevendepolo

Some SEO’s argue that irrelevant links have long been detected and discounted by search engines, making related links an important part of your link building strategy. Do you really need large numbers of “relevant” links to get a site to rank for your top keyword?

No. As long you’ve built links on reasonably trusted, authoritative domains, and you’ve thrown in some (sometimes over) optimised anchor text for good measure, you can still rank. That’s not to say relevance plays an important role, but not as much as one as I had been hoping for.

I’ve been checking out some high search volume, relevant key phrases to get optimising my new company website for. One of the most consistent things I’ve found by checking out the back link profile data is that link authority and inbound anchor text optimisation completely outweighs relevance of the links themselves. Though I can’t tell you the keyphrase, or expose the competition’s link building strategy, there are some very cool take aways below.

The data sources

I gathered data from Yahoo Site Explorer and Linkscape. All the usual metrics were there (see below) with an additional series of percentage calculations and counts of inbound link relevancy by profiling link URL’s, titles and domains.

Data captured

- URL
-Google Position
-Pagerank
-# Yahoo Inlinks
-# Relevant links in first 100 Yahoo Inlinks
-Yahoo Inbound link Relevancy %
-mozRank and other Linkscape metrics from the advanced report CSV
-Inbound link URL relevancy (count in Linkscape export)
-Inbound link relevance %
-Most valuable inbound link mR
-Count of relevant anchors
-Relevant anchor % of total inbound links
-Average URL mR of all relevant inbound anchors
-Highest mR of all inbound (relevant anchors)

The takeaways

1) The first 100 links reported by Yahoo showed high, medium or low relevancy counts. There was no strong correlation between Yahoo Site Explorer inbound link relevancy in the first (arguably most authoritative) 100 links and Google ranking for the term monitored. The top ranking site had 1 relevant inbound link, on a non keyword rich domain name.

The second and third results contained much larger numbers of relevant inlinks, though the vast majority of them were nofollowed, comment links from blogs.

2) mozRank of the URLs offers a stronger correlation in some cases, with a significant anomaly in position 6. This ranking happened to be a very strong domain, with an article on the subject in question holding the ranking position with a non canonical form URL.

3) Juice-wise, most of the domains sat in a comparitively similar range (domain juice is the sum of mozRanks for all URLs in a domain. It is shown on the same 10 point logarithmic scale that mozRank uses), so not much joy there.

4) Inbound link URL relevancy *(count) was calculated by looking at the URLs, domains and titles of the most authoritative inbound links in the Linkscape data.

* I would like a way to make this calculation stronger by also including mentions of the key phrase in the body content on the linked-from page, so consider this a rough guide. To make the calculation even stronger, an array of related key phrases could be generated and each one used to count towards relevancy. This would likely increase the relevancy count in some cases!

5) The overall inbound link relevancy expressed as a percentage to make the comparision a touch more meaningful. Again, the highest ranking sites inbound link profiles often produced the lowest (or very low) levels of relevant inbound links.

6) I found the percentage of “optimised” inbound links for our top 10 ranking URLs quite interesting. Could there be a tolerance range in which a search engine finds certain anchor text distribution percentages acceptable? The first 5 results, with a gentle downward slope followed by a increasing percentage for the lower positions looked really interesting and I’m definitely looking forward to doing more tests with other search terms.

7) My favourite measure – a plot of the average URL mozRank of all inbound links that carry relevant anchor text, originally discussed in a post about the Vince update, appears once again. Although the difference (slope) is gradual, and there are a few anomalies, there’s definitely a trend to be found here.

What’s the conclusion?

My conclusion? Sites are ranking regardless of how “relevant” this test percieves their inbound link profiles to be. The top ranking sites in the test had consistently low relevant link counts. Instead, authority factors such as value (mR) passed via relevant anchors and anchor text term distribution percentages seem to play a strong influencing role in final ranking position.

For next time, I’d really like to spend more time analysing and defining “relevancy”, as I mentioned in point 4. That said, I don’t think we would see much of a change in the patterns, with high ranking sites continuing to obtain rankings using heavily optimised inbound link anchors from trusted domains.Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Get high rankings by building authoritative, irrelevant links?

Google launches Rich Snippets Preview Tool (RDfa)

richardbaxterseo — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:52:51 +0000

You (hopefully) remember a few posts on SEOgadget discussing HTML5 and the impact that structured data will have on SEO, and if you do, you’ll remember me banging on about my hcard implemention too. I’ve been convinced for some time now that Google’s attitude towards structured HTML markup is really starting to get serious, which is why today’s news is very exciting.

On this, the last meaningful day of Summer in the UK I say, thanks be to Google for giving us their Rich Snippets Testing Tool allowing even us mere mortals to view and tweak a rich snippet result after implementing a structured markup modification on a site.

On the news of the release, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land writes:

Brian Ussery spotted that Google released a beta version of the Rich Snippets Testing Tool that does just that. What is interesting is that you can plug in any URL, not just URLs that you own via the verification process in Google Webmaster Tools, and preview the snippet data.

Here’s the preview of one of the job postings on SEOgadget.co.uk:

Google points out that “there is no guarantee that a Rich Snippet will be shown for this page on actual search results.” and helpfully advises: “For more details, see Documentation“. Fair enough.

I’ve already learned a lot from reviewing a few of my own results. A tool like this can really inspire a “penny drop” moment or two, an experience I’ll be taking note of ready to make some changes to my hcard markup in the very near future.Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Google launches Rich Snippets Preview Tool (RDfa)

Speaking at A4UEXPO – London

richardbaxterseo — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:38:19 +0000

I’m delighted to be speaking at this year’s A4UEXPO at the Excel Centre, 13-14th October 2009. A4UEXPO London is Europe’s Largest Affiliate Marketing Conference and Exhibition. Apparently the organisers have limited the registrations this year to 1200 people, so, register soon to avoid disapointment.

On Day 1, I’ll be on a so far TBC SEO session panel moderated by Jon Myers, who as well as being a stand up guy is probably one of the best moderators in the land. On Day 2, I’ll be on the “Extreme SEO Moderated Debate” with Dave, Ciaran and Marcus Tandler.

I’m particularly looking forward to the networking and meeting fellow colleagues in the price comparison / affiliate industry so please feel really welcome to say a quick hello!Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Speaking at A4UEXPO – London

Creating inspirational sitemap architecture diagrams

richardbaxterseo — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:37:49 +0000

photo credit: slimygherkin

Whatever tools we have available for making sitemap diagrams and mapping architecture right now, just don’t seem to quite inspire. At least, that’s how I’ve been feeling. How do you take the site architecture design process to a more inspirational level through more creative visualisation?

Hoping to find an answer, and some sweet inspiration, I started checking out different ways to visualise and generate sitemaps on the interwebs. Along my travels I’ve found some really interesting site map diagrams and I’ve been looking at various methods to document site maps, using commonly (and less commonly) available tools.

Why document a site architecture diagram?

A nicely documented site architecture diagram can give you a complete enough view of your current site map for you to identify any potential problems with pagerank flow, pages with very low levels of internal links and content too many clicks away from your homepage. It can also make you think differently, and (for me anyways) anything that inspires me to think differently about something I’ve done the same way for a long time is a good thing. By creating a diagram of your site, you can solve existing problems, add links to flatten your site architecture and you can always use your work later on to plan for a better site redesign.

Graphviz

One of the first tools I came across was Graphviz, a piece of software (with its own language) designed to represent “structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks”. Bottom line is, if you can get your head round the language, “DOT”, then you should be able to produce some amazing architecture diagrams like this (click to enlarge):

I really liked the way the deeper content surrounds the homepage at the centre, rather that the homepage sitting at the top of the diagram. Pagerank doesn’t flow “down” your site architecture, it’s distributed around it. Cool.

Using Graphviz is rock hard though – you’ll need some patience to produce something like the diagram above. There’s a lot of messing around learning DOT, which is a very simple language but requires some further code driven tomfoolery to get the design / layout of the visual just right. To make life apparently easier, Xenu’s link sleuth supports an export file type compatible with Graphviz, thanks to contributor Kevin Niehage but, every export I did ended with hilarious (crash related) results.

Visio 2007

Perhaps a little less exciting, but far simpler is Microsoft Visio. Visio actually crawls your site, and generates a site map, just like that! Admittedly, the first results tend to be a bit useless, but with the discovery of the list view toolbar, you’re set:

The process of mapping a web sitemap in Visio is simple – here’s the step by step:

1) Open Visio and select networks > web site map – the dialogue that appears looks like this:

2) Click ok (there are some settings to play with, but let’s not cover those – you don’t need to change much, if anything):

3) Use the Filter Window to select filetypes you’d like to exclude eg: css files, gif’s and javascript files:

On sites of a reasonable size, you can produce something visually appealing for your clients quite quickly.

Nicheworks

Some of the most impressive visualisation tools I found out there seem not to exist any more – Nicheworks being a good example. According to this site:

Nicheworks is a interactive tool for visualising massive networks with hundreds of thousands of nodes. It was developed by Graham Wills at Bell Labs. The screen-shots here show Nicheworks visualisation of the network structure of a large Web site.

Check out the graphics produced by Nicheworks (Click to enlarge):

WebTracer2

By far the coolest visualisation tool of them all (and I really, really hope it gets some more development one day) is WebTracer2. According to their homepage:

WebTracer is an project based on the intention to visualise the structure of the web. There are many applications that analyse websites for structural integrity and diagnostic purposes, but few reveal the visual structure that web hypertext creates. Webtracer represents this structure as a three dimensional molecular diagram, with pages as nodes(atoms) and links as the strings(atomic forces) that connect those nodes together.

Check out these visuals (click to enlarge):

These images are not static! In fact, they’re interactive. Webtracer is a really exciting piece of visualisation software, so how do you make a pretty picture like this?

The way the tool works is incredibly simple. Download the WebTracer2 ZIP file and extract it to a directory somewhere on your PC. Open the “Spider” application and enter your URL, like this:

The spider sets about crawling, ready to be told when to save its data in the /Maps subdirectory. The crawl isn’t too aggressive – one or two pages per second is quite reasonable. I’d love to take the crawler for a spin on one of the big sites I work with when I have the time to allow for the crawl.

Once you’ve crawled your site, click the “Save Current Trace” and go back to the directory you extracted the ZIP file to. In there you’ll find another executable called “Visualiser”. Run the EXE and follow the on screen prompts to find your newly created map file. Here’s I one made after crawling SEOgadget, recorded with Camtasia and uploaded to Youtube:

The two, double helix like chains of spheres running through the middle of the space are pages linked to frequently, typically navigational elements. There are other, smaller chains of spheres which seem to be the most recent posts. From there, the spheres (nodes) decrease in size the less often they are linked to. Typically the least linked to nodes sit on the outermost periphery of the space. These are the pages / posts that I don’t mention very often (if at all) so most likely they’re liked to from one or two category pages at the most.

I really like the way you can mouse over the different spheres to find out their URL – great for exploration and a good way to kill some time, too.

Other (surprising) inspirational sources: Flickr

Thanks to finding a very similar discussion to this post on Peter Gaston’s Broken Links I quickly found some interesting ideas posted by the good folks on Flickr:

photo credit: netfuel

Peter’s favourite “hard to beat” method of sitemap creation was simply to put your pages up on the wall:

photo credit: jimbola

There’s much inspiration left to discover

Just by looking around the internet and discovering some of these applications, I quickly began to realise the gap in the market for an upto date architecture visualisation tool. Imagine the power of a tool that could crawl and recrawl your site, identifying, visually, areas of your architecture that need work from the perspective of pagerank flow. Extra points for anyone who can build chronological crawl data to check for orphaned content – still a huge problem with large scale dynamic sites. Inspiring stuff.Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Creating inspirational sitemap architecture diagrams

The most contentious issues in the SEO industry

richardbaxterseo — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:51:32 +0000

This year’s “Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009” from SEOmoz offered up a new metric alongside each ranking factor to measure the standard deviations of contributor answers. Basically, a percentage to define the range of disagreement / agreement alongside each answer given by the contributors.

Interestingly, the most contended factors were all negative ranking factors, activities likely to negatively impact your ranking:

Why were those negative factors more contentious than positive factors?

If you ask 72 known SEO’s in the community, most of them will be working on “ethical” campaigns for their clients. They’re highly unlikely to be currently recommending or engaging in activities involving hidden text or user agent detection. There are just probably fewer people in the contributors list that have used or tested all of those “black hat” techniques compared to the number of people who have employed (and tested) the more positive factors (obviously) – so the negative factor data is likely to be less reliable than the positive data.

The exceptions

In some cases though, you may choose to employ techniques similar to this for more ethical reasons, like a/b testing for example. This issue was most definitely taken into account in the contributor comments by being summarised nicely by Tom Critchlow:

A lot of these factors depend on intent. For example, cloaking by user agent can be fine so long as the intent is pure and many large sites get away with it and have done for years. Also, a fair number of the link factors (such as manipulative bait and switch campaigns) are more likely to have 0 value than negative value. We’ve seen Google preferring to de-value spammy techniques/links rather than apply penalties for them where possible.

I agree – some of the negative factors raised in the list above can sometimes be applied without considering they could be interpreted as search engine spamming. We’ve also seen Google apply page level penalties for certain activities and I can think of a few examples of sites using hidden H1 / H2’s using CSS that flew under the radar for ages and were never detected. In my own tests, on some of those items there were plenty of occasions when the page was not banned (nor was the site) but the technique did not nessecarily enhance the rankings.

At the end of the day, it’s just easier to do the job right without risking your domains. Be mindful of the negative factors and the damage they are (highly) likely to do to your site. If you are tempted by this stuff, do your testing first Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

The most contentious issues in the SEO industry

Leeds SEO – Interview

richardbaxterseo — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:09:42 +0000

The nice folks at Leeds SEO recently interviewed me for their SEO Bio series:

SEO.BIO is a regular feature on Leeds SEO; a beautiful creamy blend of SEO factoids and biographical tidbits from some of the most interesting, notorious or just downright friendly figures in our industry.

I’m not quite sure which category I fall into, hopefully a nicer one. Anyways, here’s the link to the interview if you haven’t come across it already.Similar Posts:

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Leeds SEO – Interview