Category Archives: SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization and Ranking

Most Accurate Keyword Research Tool?

how accurate?

how accurate?

This is a common question, but it’s very important as some of these tools are super expensive. So what is the most accurate research tool for finding keywords and terms?

Well each has it’s own strengths and weaknesses so we’ll detail those quickly.

Here are the tools in alphabetical order

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Alexa– Alexa is an internet legend when it comes to data tracking. It now displays search analytics or High Impact Search Queries as it puts it. The only problem is that Alexa gets it’s data from the Alexa toolbar, so the traffic is skewed.
Compete-Another great utility for researching keywords. Compete is pretty accurate and has lot’s of data. The only problem is that Compete only purchases data on United States traffic. So if your market is over seas this is worthless. All in all a great site however.
Google Keyword Tool-This is the daddy of them all. Google searches made up around 75% of all searches on the internet, and because of this Google has the largest piece of the data pie. They give you the most accurate analysis in my opinion. They share this info in hopes that you will buy into their adwords service.
Keyword Spy– You have to love this site. I signed up just recently for just one month, did my searches exported my daily limit of 50,000 results into an excel spreadsheet and burnt everything to a CD. Now I have enough data to last me months. Pretty accurate, probably not as accurate as Google however.

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SEM Rush-a newcomer but a great little company that offers an API as well. Only $29.95 a month or something like that. Pretty accurate, not sure where to data comes from. The only problem I see here is that they don’t have data until you’ve searched for it before. In other words if I want details on yourdomain.com and no one has ever requested it they will not have it in their database. So it takes a few weeks to get new sites detailed.
Spyfu-Again details on your domain are not available until someone has searched for that domain at least 1x. Fairly accurate, plus some nice features.

accurate

accurate

That about sums up the most popular options that I’ve used in the past. There are other tools out there, but these are just the creme of the crop that come to mind.

Good luck and happy hunting.
Want another cool tool? Use pagestat to analyze a competitors website and get all sorts of useful data.

SEO Advice for Small Businesses

SEO Advice

SEO Advice

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If you are large corporation chances are you have a huge budget, and can afford the best of the best when it comes to SEO and SEM specialist. If however you are a small shop or business with just  a handful of employees then  here is some basic SEO advice.

First off if your budget is near nothing you should most likely d.i.y. (do it yourself) Get one of the books in the dummies genre, SEO for Dummies or similar. I love those dummy books, and I’m no dummy. (my wife will argue with that statement, but for the purpose of this article we’ll not delve into my level of competence). So do a bit of research, for basic SEO principles it’s going to take you a few weeks or a month to get the basics, but you could save yourself thousands of dollars by buying a book and learning a bit. If after you’ve read a bit you think you can’t handle the task then it’s time to hire an SEO Expert or Novice.

Don’t get to fancy. Don’t get too fancy when it comes to what you are buying or attempting. What you want are the basic seo settings that do not push the boundaries, and realistic goals. Don’t expect to rank #1 for the term Fish Tacos overnight, but at the same time don’t let those fake seo companies try to sell you on some crazy idea that ranking for longtail keywords like “fresh fish tacos for .99 on Sundays” is a keyword worth paying fore either. Use the Google keyword tool to estimate the level of traffic. If you were able to capture 1/10, or 1/20 of that traffic would it be worth it? Maybe so, maybe not.

Don’t freak out. SEO is no magic bullet, it’s not a mystical dragon, it’s just common sense, luck, and hard work in the right direction.

Top 4 SEO Tips

  1. Title Tags- use title tags, and don’t duplicate them. Let them accurate describe the content of the page.
  2. Description Tags- give a decent description of the pages content. I usually just copy and paste a segment from the body. Make this text shorter than 175 characters or so.
  3. URL- Get the title of the page into the url. This is a must, must, must.
  4. Links- Get some backlinks, but don’t spam forums and blogs to do it, these are worthless. What you need are related links, from related sites.

That about sums it up for SEO Tips for Small Businesses. Do your research, and get it done right and your company will benefit in multiple realms.

photo by homesbythomas

Related:
SEO Tips for WordPress
Display Google PageRank
Build My PageRank

Get Google PageRank Toolbar

pr toolbar from google

pr toolbar from google

One of the first things I do when setting up a new computer or reloading an old computer I own, is to get the Google PageRank toolbar. It gives me a quick idea of the credibility of the site that I’m browsing. I also install Alexa Sparky for Mozilla, as that’s my browser of choice.

Where do you get your Google Toolbar, and once It’s installed how do you enable the PageRank function. I download the app from toolbar.google.com , and as far as I’ve seen that’s the only real place to download it.

PageRank Enable Toolbar

PageRank Enable Toolbar

As for enabling the pagerank feature, if it’s not enabled by default. It should ask you to “enable advanced features” after your install. Select “enable” and the PageRank bar should be placed on the Google Toolbar.

If the image is still not present then right click the Google Toolbar in your browser window, and select “Google Toolbar Options” then click the tools tab, then put a checkbox in PageRank. Then click “Save” and close the bar.

That’s it, you know how the Google PageRank toolbar, and can better determine the validity of a website by checking it’s page rank. Let me also mention that newer pages (like this post may be) will have no PR as Google tends to update PageRank every 4 or so months.

Thanks for reading!

Google & Local Search Results

google local search

google local search

Google in the last year or so has been focusing very heavily on local search results. It has even spilled over into their auto-suggest features. What does this mean to you and your website?

Well it depends on your services and products really. If what you offer is plumbing, electric, pizza delivery, and the likes, then yes this will effect you substantially.

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When I search for Pizza, or a Lawyer, or anything that I want to get locally, I want my results to be local. This only makes sense, I’m not going to order pizza from Seattle if I live in Tampa, so why would I even want that option.

How does Google get and use local search info. That is a good question, and from a programmers point of view  I can answer it like this. I would use the whois database to find the webmasters location, as well as any on page address my bot would happen to find. I would then cross reference the data and push my data to my datacenters by region. I would then most likely have to get the person searching ip address and look it up, get their location, and give them the closest thing to their known city.

Does Yahoo Obey NoFollow Tags?

Yahoo Nofollows

Yahoo Nofollows

Here is a quick question for you to think about. Does Yahoo obey NoFollow tags? I think the answer is no, they do not, and here is why.

The basic point of the rel=”nofollow” tag is to prevent sites from passing linkjuice to external sites. This is most often implemented in blogs and forums as a method to prevent spammers from gaining ranking by simply posting for the sole reason of boosting their search rankings.

Google it seems does not count these links as valid, but Yahoo does. How can you find this out? Well you can do this by checking the backlinks in the search engines results using certain syntax, or by going to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=yourdomain.com

You will see listed in the yahoo site explorer links from pages that have obvious nofollow tags. That’s about all the proof I need right there.

The next question would be, does Yahoo count these as valid links when giving out search results. This one is a bit more tricky, and I’m not sure if the links count. According to what data I’ve seen in the past few years I would loosely say “yes”.