Category Archives: SEO News

Posted by Danny Dover

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Chapter 4: Finding SEO Problems

Sections:

• 15 Minute SEO Audit
• 10 Minute Brand Reputation Audit (Not included in this blog post)
• Identifying Search Engine Penalties (Not included in this blog post)

15 Minute SEO Audit

The basics of SEO problem identification can be done in about 15 minutes. When completing this audit I recommend you take notes based on the action items listed in each section. This will help you later when you do a deeper dive of the website. This audit is not comprehensive (See Chapter 9 for a full annotated site audit), but it will help you quickly identify major problems so you can convince your clients that your services are worthwhile and that you should be given a chance to dig deeper. The smart ones reading this section may notice that it builds upon the ideas expressed in Chapter 2. The dumb ones reading this, will think it is Harry Potter. The latter might enjoy it more but the former will end up with better SEO skills.

Prepare Your Browser

Before you start your audit you need to set your browser to act more like the search engine crawlers. This will help you to identify simple crawling errors. In order to do this, you will need to do the following:

Disable cookies in your browser

Switch your user-agent to Googlebot

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

When the search engines crawl the Internet they generally do so with a user-agent string that identifies them (Google is googlebot and Bing is msnbot) and in a way where they don’t accept cookies.

To see how to change your user-agent go to Chapter 3 (Picking the Right SEO Tools) and see user-agent switcher. Setting your user-agent to Googlebot increases your chance of seeing exactly what Google is seeing. It also helps with identifying cloaking issues (Cloaking is the practice of showing one thing to search engines and a different thing to users. This is what sarcastic Googlers call penaltybait. ) In order to do this well, a second pass of the site with your normal user-agent is required to identify difference. That said, this is not the primary goal for this quick run through of the given website.

In addition to doing this you should also disable cookies within your browser. By disabling them, you will be able to uncover crawling issues that relate to preferences you make on the page. One primary example of this is intro pages. Many websites will have you choose your primary language before you can enter their main site. (This is known as an intro page.) If you have cookies enabled and you have previously chosen your preference, the website will not show you this page again. Unfortunately, this will not happen for search engines.

This language tactic is extremely detrimental from a SEO perspective because it means that every link to the primary URL of the website will be diluted because it will need to pass through the intro page. (Remember, the search engines always see that page as they can’t select a language) This is a big problem, because as we noted in Chapter 1, the primary URL (i.e. www.example.com/) is usually the most linked to page on a site.

Homepage

Next, go to the primary URL of the site and pay particular attention to your first impression of the page. Try to be as true to your opinion as possible and don’t over think it. You should be coming from the perspective of the casual browser (This will be made easier because at this point you probably haven’t been paid any money and its a lot easier to be casual when are not locked down with the client) Follow this by doing a quick check of the very basic SEO metrics. In order to complete this step, you will need to do the following:

Notice your first impression and the resulting feeling and trustworthiness you feel about the page

Read the title tag and figure out how it could be improved

See if the URL changed (As in you were redirected from www.example.com/ to www.example.com/lame-keyword-in-URL-trick.html)

Check to see if the URL is canonical

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

The first action item on this list helps you align yourself with potential website users. It is the basis for your entire audit and serves as a foundation for you to build on. You can look at numbers all day, but if you fail to see the website like the user, you will fail as an SEO.

The next step is to read the title tag and identify how it can be improved. This is helpful because changing title tags is both easy (A big exception to this is if your client uses a difficult Content Management System.) and has a relatively large direct impact on rankings.

Next you need to direct your attention to the URL. First of all, make sure there were not redirects that happened. This is important because adding redirects dilutes the amount of link juice that actually makes it to the links on the page.

The last action item is to run a quick check on canonical URLs. The complete list of URL formats to check for is in Chapter 2 (Relearning How You See the Web). Like checking the title tag, this is easy to check and provides a high work/benefit ratio.

Global Navigation

After checking the basics on the homepage, you should direct your attention to the global navigation. This acts as the main canal system for link juice. Specifically, you are going to want to do the following:

Temporarily disable Javascript and reload the page

Make sure the navigation system works and that all links are HTML links

Take note of all of the sections that are linked to

Re-enable Javascript

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

As we discussed in Chapter 2 (Relearning How You See the Web), site architecture is critical for search friendly websites. The global navigation is fundamental to this. Imagine that the website you are viewing is ancient Rome right after the legendary viaduct and canal systems were built. These waterways are exactly like the global navigation that flows link juice around a website. Imagine the impact that a major clog can have on both systems. This is your time to find these clogs.

Your first action item in the section is to disable Javascript. This is helpful because it forces you to see your website from the perspective of a very basic user. It is also a similar perspective to the search engines.

After disabling Javascript, reload the page and see if the global navigation still works. Many times it won’t and it will uncover one of the major reasons the given client is having indexing issues.

Next view source and see if all of the navigational links are true HTML links. Ideally, they should be because they are the only kind that can pass their full link value.

Your next step is to take note of which sections are linked to. Ideally, all of the major sections will be linked in the global navigation. The problem is, you won’t know what all of the major sections are until you are further along in the audit. For now just take note and keep a mental checklist as you browse the website.

Lastly, re-enable Javascript. While this will not be accurate with the search engine perspective, it will make sure that AJAX and Javascript based navigation works for you. Remember, on this quick audit, you are not trying to identify every single issue with the site, instead you are just trying to find the big issues.

Category Pages/Subcategory Pages (If applicable)

After finishing with the homepage and the global navigation, you need to start diving deeper into the website. In the waterway analogy, category and subcategory pages are the forks in the canals. You can make sure they are optimized by doing the following:

Make sure there is enough content on these pages to be useful as a search result alone.

Find and note extraneous links on the page (there shouldn’t be more than 150 links)

Take notes on how to improve the anchor text used for the subcategories/content pages

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

As I mentioned, these pages are the main pathways for the link juice of a website. They help make it so if one page (most often the homepage) gets a lot of links, that the rest of the pages on the website can also get some of the benefit. The first action point requires you to make a judgment call on whether or not the page would be useful as a search result. This goes with my philosophy that every page on a website should be a least a little bit link worthy. (It should pay its own rent, so to speak) Since each page has the inherent ability to collect links, webmasters should put at least a minimal amount of effort into making every page link worthy. There is no problem with someone entering a site (from a search engine result or other third party site) on a category or subcategory page. In fact, it may save them a click. In order to complete this step, identify if this page alone would be useful for someone with a relevant query. Think to yourself:

1. Is there helpful content on the page to provide context?
2. Is there a design element breaking up the monotony of a large list of links?

Take notes on the answers to both of these questions.

The next action item is to identify extraneous links on the page. Remember, from Chapter 2 we discussed that the amount of link value a given link can pass is dependent on the amount of links on the page. To maximize the benefit of these pages, it is important to remove any extraneous links. Going back to our waterway analogy, this type of links are the equivalent “canals to nowhere”. (Built by the Roman ancestors of former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens)

To complete the last action item of this section, you will need to take notes on how to better optimize the anchor text of the links on this page. Ideally, they should be as specific as possible. This helps the search engines and users identify what the target pages are about.

Content Pages

Now that you have analyzed the homepage and the navigational pages, it is time to audit the meat of the website, the content pages. In order to do this, you will need to complete the following:

Check and note the format of the Title Tags

Check and note the format of the Meta Description

Check and note the format of the URL

Check to see if the content is indexable

Check and note the format of the alt text

Read the content as if you were the one searching for it

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

The first action item is to check the title tags of the given page. This is important because it is both helpful for rankings and it makes up the anchor text used in search engine result. You don’t get link value from these links but they do act as incentives for people to visit your site.

Similarly to the first action item, the second item has to do with a metric that is directly useful for search engines rather than people (they are only indirectly useful for people once they are displayed by search engines.) Check the meta description by viewing source or using the mozBar and make sure it is compelling and contains the relevant keywords at least twice. This inclusion of keywords is useful not for rankings but because matches get bolded in search results.

The next action item is to check the URL for best practice optimization. Just like Danny Devito, URLs should be short, relevant and easy to remember.

The next step is to make sure the content is indexable. To ensure that it, make sure the text is not contained in an image, flash or within a frame. To make sure it is indexed, copy an entire sentence from the content block and search for it within quotes in a search engine. If it shows up, it is indexable.

If there are any images on the page (as there probably should be for users sake) you should make sure that the images have relevant alt text. After running testing on this at SEOmoz, my co-workers and I found that relevant anchor text was highly correlated to high rankings.

Lastly and possibly most importantly, you should take the time to read the content on the page. Read it from the perspective of a user who just got to it from a search engine result. This is important because the content on the page is main purpose for the page existing. As an SEO, it can be easy to become content-blind when doing quick audits. Remember, the content is the primary reason this user came to the page. If it is not helpful, vistors will leave.

Links

Now that you have an idea of how the website is organized it is time to see what the rest of the world thinks about it. To do this, you will need to do the following:

View the amount of total links and the amount of root domains linking to the given domain

View the anchor text distribution of inbound links

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

As you read in Chapter 1 (Understanding Search Engine Optimization), links are incredibly important in the search engine algorithms. Thus, you cannot get a complete view of a website without analyzing its links.

This first action item requires you to get two different metrics about the inbound links to the given domain. Separately, these metrics can be very misleading due to internal links. Together, they provide a fuller picture that makes accounting for internal links possible and thus more accurate. At the time of writing, the best tool to get this data is through SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer.

The second action item requires you to analyze the relevancy side of links. This is important because it is a large part of search engine algorithms. This was discussed in Chapter 1 (Understanding Search Engine Optimization) and proves as true now as it did when you read it earlier. To get this data, I recommend using Google’s Webmaster Central.

Search Engine Inclusion

Now that you have gathered all the data you can about how the given website exists on the internet, it is time to see what the search engines have done with this information. Choose your favorite search engine (you might need to Google it) and do the following:

Search for the given domain to make sure it isn’t penalized

See roughly how many pages are indexed of the given website

Search three of the most competitive keywords that relate to the given domain

Choose a random content page and search the engines for duplicate content

How Do I Do This and Why Is It Important?

As an SEO, all of your work is completely useless if the search engines don’t react to it. To a less degree this is true for webmasters as well. The above action items will help you identify how the given website is reacted to by the search engines.

The first action item is simple to do but can have dire affects. Simply go to a search engine and search for the exact URL of the homepage of your domain. Assuming it is not brand new, it should appear as the first result. If it doesn’t and it is an established site, it means it has major issues and was probably thrown out of the search engine indices. If this is the case, you need to identify this clearly and as early as possible.

The second action item is also very easy to do. Go to any of the major search engines and use the site command (as defined in Chapter 3) to find roughly all of the pages of a domain that are indexed in the engine. For example, this may look like site:www.example.com. This is important because the difference between the number that gets returned and the number of pages that actually exist on a site says a lot about how healthy a domain is in a search engine. If there are more pages in the index than exist on the page, there is a duplicate content problem. If there are more pages on the actual site than there are in the search engine index, then there is an indexation problem. Either are bad and should be added to your notes.

The next action item is a quick exercise to see how well the given website is optimized. To get an idea of this, simply search for 3 of the most competitive terms that you think the given website would reasonably rank for. You can speed this process up by using one of the third party rank trackers that are available. (Refer back to Chapter 3)

The final action item is to do a quick search for duplicate content. This can be accomplished by going to a random indexed content page on the given website and search for either the title tag (in quotes) or the first sentence of the content page (also in quotes). If there is more than one result from the given domain, then it has duplicate content problems. This is bad because it is forcing the website to compete against itself for rankings. In doing so, it forces the search engine to decide which page is more valuable. This decision making process is something that is best avoided because it is difficult to predict the outcome.

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Posted by Sam Niccolls

The analytics ninja is not dead, but with Avinash talking more about SEO analytics and SEOs like Rand talking more about web analytics, 2010 has brought with it increased cross-pollination between analytics experts and SEOs.

This blog post is for the analytics driven, SEO savvy, search samurai looking to implement tracking code best practices and take advantage of some useful Google Analytics plugins.

The focus of this post is on Google Analytics, but many of the concepts are also applicable more generally, no matter what web analytics platform you’re using.

Tracking Code Basics

Asynchronous Tracking Code – Even before the asynchronous tracking code was rolled out, I was a believer in putting the GA tracking code in the header, rather than before the closing body tag, which is where Google recommends placing the tracking code. With the announcement of asynchronous tracking code, which loads in conjunction with the page as opposed to sequentially, however, you can now have your cake and eat it too. You can get the benefit of your data not being compromised by slow page load times and also keep from getting push back from the developer that implements your tracking codes.

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {    var ga = document.createElement('script');    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' :         'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';    ga.setAttribute('async', 'true');    document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);  })();

</script>

Expanding Goal Limitations – Without setting up goals, your GA account is a glorified hit counter. So it’s imperative that you set up goal or eCommerce tracking (if not both). When setting up your GA goals in your analytics settings, you can either use the expanded goals, which allow you to track up to 20 different URLs or engagement metrics per profile. It’s important to realize, however, that you can also set your goals up so you can track hundreds or even thousands of goals. All you have to do is set up a logical hierarchy where the root of your goal URLs trigger your goal events. For us at SEOmoz, this might mean we have a tool run goal event triggered with /goal/tool-run – yet we also have the added granularity down to the individual tool level should we ever want to see which tools are being run the most or to segment traffic based on visitors who ran a particular tool.

eCommerce Tracking – Justin Cutroni did a great job with his series of blog posts that walk through how eCommerce tracking works, installing & setting up eCommerce tracking, explaining why everyone should use eCommerce tracking, & tracking lead gen forms. In addition to eCommerce tracking, not to be forgotten is using SetVar or a custom variable to segment repeat or premium buyers. For example, say your site gets 5 sales from keyword #1 and 5 sales from keyword #2. If sales for keyword #1 are each $800 and sales from keyword #2 are $10 each, you’re going to want to segment that traffic and make on-page optimizations by looking at the on-site behavior of your premium buyers who converted on keyword #1, rather than from keyword #2.  

Custom Variables for Registered & Non-Registered – One of the most powerful aspects of GA is the ability to set custom variable. Custom variables can be set at any of three levels (visitor, session, & page). The Google Analytics help documentation is particularly great, but EpikOne also has a worthwhile description on how custom variables work. The most powerful of these is the visitor level custom variable which allows you to cookie a visitor across multiple sessions. At SEOmoz, we use this to track three different member types: free members, PRO members, & canceled members. We also use custom variables to cookie at the session level.

 
Campaign Tagging & SetAllowAnchor – From widgets to newsletters to signature links in personal e-mails, campaign links should be tagged using the GA URL builder, which gives you tracking parameters that includes multiple, including required _utm values for source, medium, & campaign. In action this looks something like this:

http://www.seomoz.org/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=march-6-2010

When tagging your campaigns be aware that by default GA will only recognize tracking parameters if the string is kicked off by a question mark, which from an SEO standpoint can lead to diffusion of link juice and duplicate content issues. To avoid these issues, we you can kick off campaign parameters with the hash tag and modify your GA tracking code using the SetAllowAnchor attribute, so GA recognizes the hash tag as way to kick off a campaign tracking URLs. To do this, add — pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true); — to your main GA tracking code between the var pageTracker and pageTracker attributes. Or, for additional documentation, read LunaMetrics’ blog post on using SetAllowAnchor, but the code should look something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
  try {
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-0000000-1");
    pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
  } catch(err) {}

Tagging Email – One of the most important areas you can apply campaign tagging is e-mail. And though you can get fancy and create a filter that combines email sources you should not have to do this because your campaigns should be tagged to begin with. So definitely follow what the experts say about tagging email campaigns, but I am a huge fan of bucketing your reports by segment and grouping based on conversion goal. For example, at SEOmoz we’re rolling out a number of e-mails ranging from a customer lifecycle welcome series to newsletters to follow up emails after PRO members cancel. Rather than doing one off tracking, our GA tracking is set up in a way that we can aggregate by visitor type. This allows management to quickly look at the all up numbers and see how e-mail is driving each goal area of the business: activation, retention, and re-activation.

And if you use a logical naming convention with your email tagging, such as the one shown below, your marketing team will be able to splice and dice using regular expressions to get a much more granular view of performance for each email format, type, or version:

• Email Format:  Which types of emails are doing best (i.e. newsletters, promotional emails, system notifications, etc.)
• Performance by Email Type: Shows the breakdown of which email types have the greatest volume and/or the lowest click through rates. And thus, where you should place your testing and optimization energy. (i.e. emails sent 1 week after sign up, promos sent in December, etc.)
• Version Number: Allows you to test subject lines and e-mail variants to see which versions are driving the most conversions, engagement, or retention. (i.e. subject line #1, subject line #2, etc.)

Vanity URLs – If you’re running an offline campaign, such as a magazine ad, a business card run or a billboard creative, you’re not going to want to use the long URL builder parameter. You’ll likely be much better off using measuring your offline efforts with a short, easy to remember vanity URL, which, in order to keep your metrics from being skewed as a result of page load times, you’ll want to implement using a 301 redirect, rather than using meta refresh.  

Google Analytics Plugins

Though not on the list of must haves for the search samurai, I’m a sucker for a great browser plugin. And as ROI Revolution blogged about, there are a handful of browser plugins for GA that you might find are worth installing. Three plugins I use with varying degrees of regularity are:

Does a Page Have GA?
If you’re checking a lot of pages on your site to see if they have tracking code installed or if you want quick, at a glance reference as to whether or not a page on another site has GA tracking code, Twistermc’s GA? Firefox plugin is a great way to see if GA is installed without having to view the source code. The way it works it works is simple. If a page has GA installed, the bar chart that appears in the lower right hand corner of your browser is illuminated. If the page does not have GA installed, the bar chart is not illuminated.

Which Referring Sites & Keywords Have Changed?
Similar in concept to a custom alerts, the Better GA plugin by Juice Analytics provides a useful way to drill into your referring sites or referring keyword reports and see which sites or keywords have fluctuated the most over the last few days or week.

Better Google Analytics:
Perhaps the most robust GA plugin of all is VKIs studios’ greasemonkey script based plugin, which offers a number of bells an whistles, including page level social media data from sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious (see below),as well as added functionality such as a direct entry field to access your top content report from any other report, direct links to export to Google Docs, and a half dozen or so others.  

For more comprehensive information on Google Analytics, I encourage you to read through Google Analytics’ help documentation or tapping into some of the great web analytics resources available such as Google Analytics’ Official Blog, LunaMetrics, EpikOne, & Occam’s Razor – each of which are full of Analytics tips from top-notch experts.

Also, special thanks to David Booth from WebShare Design for his help with our recent implementation of Google Analytics and also for sharing several of the insights included in this post. For more info on GA and GWO, WebShare’s Google sponsored Seminars for Success, which I attended last year, and which the SEOmoz marketing team will be attending here in Seattle on May 12-14th, are among the most educational and best valued around.

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Posted by jennita

The holidays are long over, 2010 is well underway, we’ve already launched a new product, made a big announcement… and it’s barely February! While our amazing development and product teams are busily building new tools as I type (and I’m not even kidding, those guys work a lot), some of us are hitting the road.  For the next couple months, the SEOmoz team will be galavanting across the globe attending, speaking and even keynoting (yea.. is that a word?) at multiple Search Marketing Conferences. Essentially, in the next 45 days there’s an opportunity to see one of us at a city near you… or somewhat near you… or at least in the same country… or possibly the same continent. Anyway,  you get the picture.

Following is a detailed list of where you can find us over the next couple months. Being a part of such an amazing community means the world to us, so please if you’re attending any of these events, stop by and say hello. We’d really love to meet you. (Unless of course you’re a stalker, then make sure to look for either Sam Niccolls or Danny Dover… They’d LOVE to meet you.) Without further ado, here’s the list!

OnlineXcellence – Glasgow – February 12

Kicking off this international tour, Rand will be presenting to business owners and CEOS during a day of SEO training at OnlineXcellence.

Let me tell you something…

SES London – February 15-19

This is the first of many trips to London this year for the mozzers.  SES London is known for having great content, and this year one of my favorite speakers, Avinash Kaushik is giving one of the keynotes. Rand will be attending and speaking at the following sessions:

• PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle
• Social Media Best Practices for Marketers Inside the Brand

OMS San Diego – February 22-25

At OMS San Diego, Rand is organizing a panel of Search Marketing leaders who will be discussing advanced tactics at the SEO 2.0 Leadership Forum. Rand will also be speaking on the panel, "PR, Social Media and Search".

Miva Merchant – San Diego – February 24-26

The mozzers will be camping out in San Diego for a few days! For the Miva Merchant conference, Gillian is speaking on three sessions while Rand is keynoting about SEO on the second day.

SMX West – Santa Clara – March 2-4

This will be my first SMX West and you’ll find me volunteering in the In House Track on day 3. Rand is speaking on the Link Building Fundamentals panel, which looks pretty awesome. I’ll have the flip video camera, so be sure to hunt me down, maybe you’ll make it onto a Whiteboard Friday.

Use the code "smx10seomoz" to get a 10% discount at SMX West!

Gillian Speaking in India Last Year

SphinnConn – Jerusalem – March 4-7

SphinnConn Jerusalem is the first of it’s kind. It sold out quickly and is sure to be an amazing event. Gillian will be speaking at the SEO Fundamentals panel and the Link Building Clinic.

MVIXcon Dubai & Cairo – March 8-11

Gillian is looking forward to addressing a Women in Business group at MVIXcon in Dubai and to a meeting with members of the Royal Family during her visit.

SearchFest 2010 Portland – March 9

Just a skip, hop and a jump from us, we’ll be heading to SearchFest 2010 which has an amazing lineup of speakers. Rand will be speaking on SEO Tools panel and covering both SEOmoz tools as well as others.

Get $30 off Searchfest by using the coupon code "MOZ-SEMPDXSF1020"

InfusionCon – Scottsdale – March 10-12

Scott will be presenting on SEO to this group of small to medium e-businesses at InfusionCon. Also, we’re always interested in learning more about how to most effectively reach new customers, optimize our payment systems, and get better at customer service. Sarah will also be attending!

MountainWest RubyConf – Salt Lake City – March 11-12

The  MountainWest RubyConf is an excellent Ruby conference, which is our preferred dev language at SEOmoz. It will be a good opportunity to meet others doing cool things with the language and to get to know the community more personally.

SXSW Interactive – Austin – March 12-16

Danny Dover will be at SXSW Interactive joining and talking with the literally 10,000s of other attendees. The technology conference is aimed at all things interactive (Websites, Video Games, Movies). It will be a good opportunity to meet website creators who operate outside the sphere of the SEO industry. (Yes they exist, yes they are in Texas)

IMC Calgary – March 16-17

As part of Gillian’s world wide tour 2010, she’ll be speaking at IMC Calgary on the The Power Triumvirate of 2010: The Convergence of Social-Mobile-Local.

Use the code "imc-speaker" to save 15% on any IMC event in 2010!

SES New York – March 22-26

SES New York is jam-packed with training workshops, sessions and brilliant keynote speakers. Really, who wouldn’t want to spend some time in New York City in March? Rand is speaking on a panel plus Adam and Kate will be attending as well. This might be Kate’s first Search Marketing Conference, so go easy on her folks.

Get 50% off SES NY with the purchase of 1 Year of SEOmoz Pro. Go Pro Now and Save on SES NY!

IMC Stockholm – March 22-25

Gillian will be keynoting at IMC Stockholm, a broad group of entrepreneurs, affiliates, and search marketers.

Use the code "imc-speaker" to save 15% on any IMC event in 2010!

SMX Munich – March 23-24

Our own rockstar developer Ben, will be speaking at SMX Munich on both a ranking factors panel, as well as a spam issues panel. (Wow, I didn’t even know Ben spoke German!)

The Freemium Summit – The Business of Free – San Francisco – March 26

The Freemium Summit was recommended by Dharmesh Shah as a good conference for folks who have free offerings as an important part of their business plan. Sarah will be attending and it’s a great opportunity to learn and network with other entrepreneurs.

The craziest part is… once all these are over, we have another round starting in April. We hope you’re planning on attending some of these events and look forward to meeting you, or speaking with you again. Stay on top of our activities by following us on Twitter, or being our fan on Facebook. Happy Conferencing!

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Posted by randfish

We all work hard at the SEO process – analyzing sites, gathering data, researching potential problems and identifying the solutions. Today’s post is on how to work smarter and faster using bookmarklets for SEO. No matter your browser, these plug-and-play links will let you get your job done faster and easier, and look like a pro in front of bosses and clients.

The list isn’t completely comprehensive, but it covers 95%+ of the SEO data points I retrieve on a monthly basis and a few extras I don’t personally use that may be valuable to others. It also has a section at the end on how to make your own bookmarklets for any site, tool or service you use. To employ, just click and drag the bookmarklet links from this blog post into your sidebar or bookmarks folder and rename to whatever you’d like. I’ve divided the post up into sections so you can quickly grab the items you care about.

SEO Bookmarklets Sections:

• Site Indexation Queries
• Backlink Data Queries
• Specialized Search Queries
• Domain & Traffic Data Queries
• Social Media Data Queries
• How to Construct Your Own Bookmarklets

 
Just follow the instructions from this highly "meta" image

Site Indexation Queries

• #1 – Google site:rootdomain.com
  • Bookmarklet - GG Indexed Pages
• #2 – Yahoo! Site Explorer listing of pages on the root domain 
  • Bookmarklet – Y!SE Indexed Pages
• #3 – Bing site:rootdomain.com
  • Bookmarklet - Bing Indexed Pages

Backlink Data Queries

• #4 – Open Site Explorer (OSE) list of links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Links to URL
• #5 – OSE list of links to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Links to Domain
• #6 – OSE list of linking domains to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Linking Domains to URL
• #7 – OSE linking domains to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Linking Domains to Root
• #8 – OSE anchor text distribution for current URL
  • Bookmarklet – OSE URL Anchor Text
• #9 – OSE anchor text distribution for entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – OSE Domain Anchor Text
• #10 – Yahoo! Site Explorer (Y!SE) links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – Y!SE Links to URL
• #11 – Y!SE links to entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – Y!SE Links to Domain
• #12 – Google Blogsearch links to current URL
  • Bookmarklet – GG Bloglinks to URL
• #13 – Bing linkfromdomain for entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – Bing LinkfromDomain
• #14 – Historical PageRank for current URL
  • Bookmarklet – PR History

 Specialized Search Queries

• #15 – Google: Remove personalization
  • Bookmarklet – GG -Personalized
• #16 - Google: Include duplicate results
  • Bookmarklet – GG +Dups
• #17 – Google: Show results from last 24 hours only
  • Bookmarklet – GG 24 Hours
• #18 – Google: Show results from last 7 days only
  • Bookmarklet – GG 7 Days
• #19 – Google: Show US results (useful when performing queries from overseas)
  • Bookmarklet – GG US SERPs
• #20 – Google "Text-Only" Cache of current URL
  • Bookmarklet – GG Text Cache

Domain & Traffic Data Queries

• #21 – Domaintools lookup on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Domaintoools Lookup
• #22 – Compete.com traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Compete Traffic
• #23 – Quantcast traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Quantcast Traffic
• #24 – Alexa traffic data on current domain
  • Bookmarklet – Alexa Data
• #25 - Wayback Machine archives for curent URL
  • Bookmarklet – URL Wayback Archive
• #26 - Google Trends for Websites on the current domain 
  • Bookmarklet – GG Trends Data

Social Media Data Queries

• #27 – Backtweets Info on current URL
  • Bookmarklet – Backtweets for URL
• #28 – Tweetmeme Info on entire domain
  • Bookmarklet – Tweetmeme for Domain
• #29 – PostRank Info on entire domain
  • Bookmarklet - PostRank for Domain
• #30 – StumbleUpon Info on current URL
  • Bookmarklet – StumbleUpon URL Data

How to Construct Your Own Bookmarklets

Here’s a sample code snippet for the bookmarklet above that shows links from OpenSiteExplorer.org:

javascript:location.href='http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/'+location.host+'/a!links'

To reproduce the effect with a bookmarklet that calls data from any site, you’ll need to

1. Find a web-based tool that stores the webpage it’s calling data for in the URL. For example, Google Trends for Websites uses a format like "http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site:seomoz.org"
2. Include the initial piece – javascript:location.href=’ at the start of the bookmarklet link
3. Follow that code snippet with the desired webpage that contains data. For example, if I wanted to get Google Trends for Websites, I’d use http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A – note that for special characters in the URL like the colon : you’ll need to use the hex character codes (a good list is here)
4. Next you’ll need to call the current URL. The most common way to do this is with window.location.href or location.host which pulls the URL string from the address bar.
5. You may need to strip out portions of the URL to get just the sub or root domain. In my example with Google Trends, I’d use document.domain.replace(‘www.’,”) rather than the full URL string from #4 above. This removes the www from a domain name if it exists and extracts only the domain portion instead of the complete URL.
6. To combine the javascript code snippet, you’ll need to use proper syntax – following phrases with +, wrapping in single quotes and ending with a semicolon ;
7. The finished code snippet looks like this -  javascript:location.href=’http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A’+document.domain.replace(‘www.’,”);
8. You can use a wide variety of Javascript commands to build all sorts of bookmarklets, not just those that call URLs or append data. However, you’ll need a more advanced tutorial to show you that process – sorry!

Now you’re ready to start building your own bookmarklets. We’d love to have you share any of your favorites (or any new concoctions) in the comments below. If you’ve got great ones, I’ll even try to add them into the post tomorrow and, naturally, pass on the credit

p.s. One I’d love to see is a bookmarklet that gives a pop-up of the current website’s IP address and, for extra bonus, takes you to a Bing IP: search query to show other sites hosted on that address.

Update:

Ask, and ye shall receive! Thanks to crdunst for putting together these two bookmarklets to show the IP address and take you to the Bing IP Search!

1. DomainToIP.com Lookup
2. Bing IP Lookup

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Posted by randfish

Like 150 million or so other folks, I spent today watching the Superbowl. As a marketer, it’s hard not to pay close attention to the advertisements, and this year featured a heavy focus on sending viewers to the web. However, I was a bit surprised that we didn’t see anything like 2007′s Pontiac advertisement:

At the end of the ad, Pontiac invites viewers to "Google" their brand to learn more. This seemed a bit odd in 2007, but today, it would have been a brilliant marketing move. Here’s why:

Personalized search is now on by default. This means that every click, branded search, and expression of a "brand preference" or "brand affinity" in Google’s results is likely to result in preferential biasing towards that domain in future searches. A "Google" Pontiac message during this Superbowl wouldn’t just send users to their site, it would also mean that tens of millions of searchers would now be "personalized" towards that domain.

I’m not sure when we’ll start to see this strategy employed, but it can’t be long. Personalization (and even social search, which Google pushed out of Labs two weeks ago) make leveraging your brand, in any channel, a powerful tool for SEO.

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Posted by RobOusbey

Links. We often talk about why we want them and how to get them, but today I’d like to go back to basics and look at the constituent parts of the HTML code behind them. This is definitely a post for the new SEO, or web-developer looking to expand their experience, but even experienced search marketers may want to comment the nuances of some parts of the humble anchor tag’s attributes.

Here’s a couple of example links; the first is a link to the White House’s website, the other is to Distilled’s new US website.

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