Phrases - Arizona SEO | Phoenix SEO

New Websites Should Focus On The Tail

On April 21, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

The online space grows more competitive each and every day and the importance of finding niches and certain areas to be visible in is becoming even more evident and important. If you are targeting a space that clearly has a great deal of competition it will be very important to go after the long tail [...]

The online space grows more competitive each and every day and the importance of finding niches and certain areas to be visible in is becoming even more evident and important. If you are targeting a space that clearly has a great deal of competition it will be very important to go after the long tail keywords as well as the broad to be able to achieve some sort of rankings fairly quickly. Being a new website in a competitive environment requires a great deal of time, patience and experience. Don’t expect to rank quickly going after the broader search terms. Long tail keyword phrases will be your friend so you have to use them.

The most important advise that I can provide for a new website or new business owner is to spend the time doing your keyword research! Keyword research should be based on the existing content of each page of your website, so conduct the keyword research after you write your content. This is a big mistake that I see many people make that are new to the search world. They sometimes write content to rank well in the search engines, your content should always be written with your audience(s) and visitors in mind.

Continuing on and about the long tail track here…The mindset of many websites is to try and rank for the broad keyword phrases to pull in the largest amount of search volume. When first getting involved in search with a new website you have to be realistic. Don’t be in denial when you first launch your website because you could potentially short change your business. Try to go after some of the low hanging fruit in your industry to get some new business and sales. This will allow you to pull in some new clients and build some quick credibility in the industry for yourself by wowing some new clients. As you build your reputation in the industry your website will slowly grow in power naturally and start to climb for the much broader keywords in your industry. Don’t assume that you belong in the search results for the broad keywords right away. You have to earn those spots and that takes time.

Like any industry you have to slowly pay your dues to achieve visibility and respect to achieve the high rankings in search results. Once you have that than you will see your rankings climb for the top industry keywords.

Launching the SEOmoz Free API and Enough Power to Build Open Site Explorer

On January 27, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Gerner

Posted by Nick Gerner

The launch of Open Site Explorer last week opens up a lot of link data, filters, and anchor text to a much wider audience than we’ve ever had before. In that same vein, today we’re announcing our new and improved SEOmoz Free API.

Any registered (it’s free) SEOmoz member can visit our API Portal and get an API key that gives you access to:

Data for any URL in our index including
- Domain and Page Authority
- mozRank
- total link count
- external, followed link count
The first 500 links to any page, sub domain or domain
Filtering on those links: 301s, Follows, External, etc.
The first 3 domains linking to any page, sub domain or domain
The first 3 anchor text terms or phrases in links to any page, sub domain or domain

You’re welcome to use this data for private or publicly-facing purposes. We already have a variety of partners integrating this data including:

Buzzstream
Brandwatch
HubSpot’s Grader Suite
Quirk’s Search Status toolbar

Check out some sample code and applications on the wiki.

Our idea is that getting this data into the hands of webmasters makes everyone better off: we’re excited about our new authority scores, marketers are thirsty for metrics, and users of all kinds of tools are better off with a deeper look at real data. The free package will keep you covered up to a million links per month that you’re free to use for any purpose from consulting to building an SEO campaign management suite.

In addition to the free API (which I think is quite powerful already), we’re expanding our paid API offering. The paid API includes everything above, but also includes:

Additional metrics:
- number of domains that link to you
- mozTrust
- number of links to all pages on your domain
- and more
A deeper look at links, way beyond the first 500 (first 100k for each sort per page, domain or sub domain)
Plenty of sorts on links:
- domain authority
- page authority
- linking root domains
Way more anchor text terms and phrases (up to 100k per page, domain or sub domain if you’ve got that many)

This is exactly the same API powering Open Site Explorer. So if you think OSE missed a feature, or should include other data sources, you can build it over again and do an even better job If you do, drop me a line and I’ll take a look. We’d love to share partner apps on our wiki, Twitter, the blog, and elsewhere.

We don’t even have an attribution requirement. Although, we have a tasty 15% discount if you do cite us as a source

To sign up, just contact us, and we’ll start the process.

EDIT: The paid API is available outside of a PRO membership. A PRO membership buys the tools, and content, and sweet sweet badge. The paid API is extra. Of course, the free API is both free and full of awesome.

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Posted by Nick Gerner

The launch of Open Site Explorer last week opens up a lot of link data, filters, and anchor text to a much wider audience than we’ve ever had before. In that same vein, today we’re announcing our new and improved SEOmoz Free API.

Any registered (it’s free) SEOmoz member can visit our API Portal and get an API key that gives you access to:

Data for any URL in our index including
- Domain and Page Authority
- mozRank
- total link count
- external, followed link count
The first 500 links to any page, sub domain or domain
Filtering on those links: 301s, Follows, External, etc.
The first 3 domains linking to any page, sub domain or domain
The first 3 anchor text terms or phrases in links to any page, sub domain or domain

You’re welcome to use this data for private or publicly-facing purposes. We already have a variety of partners integrating this data including:

Buzzstream
Brandwatch
HubSpot’s Grader Suite
Quirk’s Search Status toolbar

Check out some sample code and applications on the wiki.

Our idea is that getting this data into the hands of webmasters makes everyone better off: we’re excited about our new authority scores, marketers are thirsty for metrics, and users of all kinds of tools are better off with a deeper look at real data. The free package will keep you covered up to a million links per month that you’re free to use for any purpose from consulting to building an SEO campaign management suite.

In addition to the free API (which I think is quite powerful already), we’re expanding our paid API offering. The paid API includes everything above, but also includes:

Additional metrics:
- number of domains that link to you
- mozTrust
- number of links to all pages on your domain
- and more
A deeper look at links, way beyond the first 500 (first 100k for each sort per page, domain or sub domain)
Plenty of sorts on links:
- domain authority
- page authority
- linking root domains
Way more anchor text terms and phrases (up to 100k per page, domain or sub domain if you’ve got that many)

This is exactly the same API powering Open Site Explorer. So if you think OSE missed a feature, or should include other data sources, you can build it over again and do an even better job If you do, drop me a line and I’ll take a look. We’d love to share partner apps on our wiki, Twitter, the blog, and elsewhere.

We don’t even have an attribution requirement. Although, we have a tasty 15% discount if you do cite us as a source

To sign up, just contact us, and we’ll start the process.

EDIT: The paid API is available outside of a PRO membership. A PRO membership buys the tools, and content, and sweet sweet badge. The paid API is extra. Of course, the free API is both free and full of awesome.

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Keyword Targeting: How to Employ Multiple Keywords for SEO & Conversions

On January 18, 2010, In SEO, by randfish

Posted by randfish

At some point during your University’s SEO 201: Advanced Keyword Research & Targeting class, they probably gave a few lectures and case studies on how to effectively split up your keyword research list across multiple pages and use those terms/phrases to maximum benefit. But, for those who might have missed that lesson (which would be, umm, all of us, since no formal education in SEO exists), a handy refresher might be in order.

Many SEOs struggle to answer questions like:

How many keywords can I target on a page?
Should I try to target all of my most important terms on my homepage (since it gets the most link juice)?
When I should try to target similar phrases together vs. splitting them up?

This post is meant to help with precisely those issues.

At the end of the keyword research phase you’ve established which terms and phrases are worthwhile. Now you’ll need to determine which keywords to target where, and how. This four-step process should make that easy (and apparently, checklists are awesome).

I’m using comic books both because they’re fun, and because a recently retired-from-Google friend opened his own comic shop in West Seattle, so I’ve got superheroes in tights on the brain. In the example above, I’ve sorted several high demand keywords into groupings that relate to their core subject – in this case, by superhero. You can do this with products, articles, blog post categories or any type of content.

Next, I need to segment the keywords in each group by the intent of a potential visitor. This is absolutely critical, because even if two keyword terms/phrases are very similar, putting them together can be disatrous if the goals of the searcher are different. It’s technically worse to rank 1st and convert visits at 0.1% than to rank 10th and get a conversion rate of 2%. By segmenting on intent, you can make sure to uniquely target searchers seeking a specific goal without cannibalizing or misdirecting traffic to the detriment of your site’s usability/conversion rate.

If possible, you’ll want to use the insight you gain from the keyword research and targeting process to help determine the site’s hierarchy and information architecture. Even if you’re deep down in the weeds on an already existing site, you can employ intelligent cross-linking to make sure visitors can find what they’re seeking from potential landing pages. The concept should be to make the primary content of the page the most likely target of the searcher’s intent, then provide navigation to secondary, tertiary or more specific needs.

You now have the keyword groups segmented to individual pages and a hierarchy for your site, so the final step is assigning the keyword targets to individual pages and providing recommendations on Titles, URLs, Meta Descriptions and page functionality. In the example above, I’ve employed multiple keywords in the page elements (plural and singular versions of "comic" as well as "dc comics" and "batman comics") to help attract that traffic. I’m also listing "detective comics" here, though technically, I might even have a separate subcategory for that individual series that’s linked-to on this page.

This planning process is key to getting the best results possible. Over time, your analytics data can help show you where assumptions have been incorrect and you can course correct. What’s important is understanding the basic rules for keyword targeting:

No page should target keywords just because it "can rank for them;" you need to also consider the visitor experience and whether the page’s content can serve as many "keyword masters" as you’re targeting.
Pages can target multiple keywords and phrases at once so long as the intent is the same. Don’t arbitrarily split up pages or make a new page for every permutation of a keyphrase simply so you can have "optimum" optimization. Remember it’s much easier to earn links to one page than to many (and much easier to build one good funnel than two).
Keyword targeted pages need to provide the content a visitor is seeking and the links to the detailed pages they might want. Search engines are pretty smart – if visitors aren’t getting value from your pages, they’re not going to link to them, not going to click them in the SERPs and not going to recommend them to others. Even if you manipulate your way to the top today, in the long run, the engines will identify methods to get relevant, quality content ranking.

I’d also suggest checking out previous posts on:

Hopefully this has been valuable and I’d certainly appreciate examples and suggestions from the community on how you employ keyword targeting for maximum benefit.

p.s. I may have overstated when I said there’s "no" formal education. Market Motive offers some great online classes and certification as does Search Engine College. And yes, SEOmoz has a video training series, too – the metaphor was meant tongue in cheek

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Posted by randfish

At some point during your University’s SEO 201: Advanced Keyword Research & Targeting class, they probably gave a few lectures and case studies on how to effectively split up your keyword research list across multiple pages and use those terms/phrases to maximum benefit. But, for those who might have missed that lesson (which would be, umm, all of us, since no formal education in SEO exists), a handy refresher might be in order.

Many SEOs struggle to answer questions like:

How many keywords can I target on a page?
Should I try to target all of my most important terms on my homepage (since it gets the most link juice)?
When I should try to target similar phrases together vs. splitting them up?

This post is meant to help with precisely those issues.

At the end of the keyword research phase you’ve established which terms and phrases are worthwhile. Now you’ll need to determine which keywords to target where, and how. This four-step process should make that easy (and apparently, checklists are awesome).

I’m using comic books both because they’re fun, and because a recently retired-from-Google friend opened his own comic shop in West Seattle, so I’ve got superheroes in tights on the brain. In the example above, I’ve sorted several high demand keywords into groupings that relate to their core subject – in this case, by superhero. You can do this with products, articles, blog post categories or any type of content.

Next, I need to segment the keywords in each group by the intent of a potential visitor. This is absolutely critical, because even if two keyword terms/phrases are very similar, putting them together can be disatrous if the goals of the searcher are different. It’s technically worse to rank 1st and convert visits at 0.1% than to rank 10th and get a conversion rate of 2%. By segmenting on intent, you can make sure to uniquely target searchers seeking a specific goal without cannibalizing or misdirecting traffic to the detriment of your site’s usability/conversion rate.

If possible, you’ll want to use the insight you gain from the keyword research and targeting process to help determine the site’s hierarchy and information architecture. Even if you’re deep down in the weeds on an already existing site, you can employ intelligent cross-linking to make sure visitors can find what they’re seeking from potential landing pages. The concept should be to make the primary content of the page the most likely target of the searcher’s intent, then provide navigation to secondary, tertiary or more specific needs.

You now have the keyword groups segmented to individual pages and a hierarchy for your site, so the final step is assigning the keyword targets to individual pages and providing recommendations on Titles, URLs, Meta Descriptions and page functionality. In the example above, I’ve employed multiple keywords in the page elements (plural and singular versions of "comic" as well as "dc comics" and "batman comics") to help attract that traffic. I’m also listing "detective comics" here, though technically, I might even have a separate subcategory for that individual series that’s linked-to on this page.

This planning process is key to getting the best results possible. Over time, your analytics data can help show you where assumptions have been incorrect and you can course correct. What’s important is understanding the basic rules for keyword targeting:

No page should target keywords just because it "can rank for them;" you need to also consider the visitor experience and whether the page’s content can serve as many "keyword masters" as you’re targeting.
Pages can target multiple keywords and phrases at once so long as the intent is the same. Don’t arbitrarily split up pages or make a new page for every permutation of a keyphrase simply so you can have "optimum" optimization. Remember it’s much easier to earn links to one page than to many (and much easier to build one good funnel than two).
Keyword targeted pages need to provide the content a visitor is seeking and the links to the detailed pages they might want. Search engines are pretty smart – if visitors aren’t getting value from your pages, they’re not going to link to them, not going to click them in the SERPs and not going to recommend them to others. Even if you manipulate your way to the top today, in the long run, the engines will identify methods to get relevant, quality content ranking.

I’d also suggest checking out previous posts on:

Hopefully this has been valuable and I’d certainly appreciate examples and suggestions from the community on how you employ keyword targeting for maximum benefit.

p.s. I may have overstated when I said there’s "no" formal education. Market Motive offers some great online classes and certification as does Search Engine College. And yes, SEOmoz has a video training series, too – the metaphor was meant tongue in cheek

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Whiteboard Friday – Keyword Strategies: Kill the Head or Chase the Tail

On January 7, 2010, In SEO, by great scott

Posted by great scott!

Welcome, dear readers, to the first Whiteboard Friday of 2010!! As you may notice, there’s a bit of a new look. This comes in large part from our move to a different video hosting solution. We hope these changes will provide a higher-quality WBF experience, and better accessibility for our viewers around the world. On with the show…

There’s always debate: should you focus on your big head terms, or those wide-ranging tail terms? We’ve invited one of our best mozMates, Will Critchlow of Distilled, to join us for a look at how to balance your keyword strategy.

A major factor in designing your strategy needs to be analytics data. As Will discusses, many people find that analytics show most of their conversions coming from branded keyphrases, but this doesn’t adequately reflect the search path people are following before they make a latent conversion. In the video Rand and Will discuss how to take this into account and make sure you’re targeting the best phrases for your business and your audience.

Will is currently stuck at the airport trying to get home to the snowed-in United Kingdom, so the post he references in the video isn’t available yet. In the mean time, you can view his slide deck from the "Analytics Every SEO Should Know" presentation he gave at the SEOmoz London Seminar this winter. Slides 23 and 24 show a little bit about first-touch and multi-touch search analytics. Keep an eye here, or on the Distilled blog for his post about doing first-touch analysis in Google Analytics.

Will’s post is up! Check it out: How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by great scott!

Welcome, dear readers, to the first Whiteboard Friday of 2010!! As you may notice, there’s a bit of a new look. This comes in large part from our move to a different video hosting solution. We hope these changes will provide a higher-quality WBF experience, and better accessibility for our viewers around the world. On with the show…

There’s always debate: should you focus on your big head terms, or those wide-ranging tail terms? We’ve invited one of our best mozMates, Will Critchlow of Distilled, to join us for a look at how to balance your keyword strategy.

A major factor in designing your strategy needs to be analytics data. As Will discusses, many people find that analytics show most of their conversions coming from branded keyphrases, but this doesn’t adequately reflect the search path people are following before they make a latent conversion. In the video Rand and Will discuss how to take this into account and make sure you’re targeting the best phrases for your business and your audience.

Will is currently stuck at the airport trying to get home to the snowed-in United Kingdom, so the post he references in the video isn’t available yet. In the mean time, you can view his slide deck from the "Analytics Every SEO Should Know" presentation he gave at the SEOmoz London Seminar this winter. Slides 23 and 24 show a little bit about first-touch and multi-touch search analytics. Keep an eye here, or on the Distilled blog for his post about doing first-touch analysis in Google Analytics.

Will’s post is up! Check it out: How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics

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How to Properly Conduct Keyword Research

On December 8, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Search engine optimization comes with many steps and efforts but at the end of the day it all start with your website. Before you think about generating links and other search engine marketing efforts it is important to take a deep breath and jump into the pool of keyword research. The key is to [...]

Search engine optimization comes with many steps and efforts but at the end of the day it all start with your website. Before you think about generating links and other search engine marketing efforts it is important to take a deep breath and jump into the pool of keyword research. The key is to research highly targeted keyword phrases that directly relate to the content you have written for each page of your website. Remember the search engines rank individual pages for specific keywords, not entire websites, so it is important to spend the time conducting keyword research properly.

Here are some areas to look at when starting your keyword research:

1. Google Analytics: If you have Google analytics set up on your website it already has a list of existing keywords that are attracting visitors to your website. This is a great starting point. Punching in each word into your keyword research tool will generate a nice list you can than dwindle down.

2. Competition: Do you currently have competitors that have well optimized websites? It is not a bad idea to take a look at their website and eyeball the meta information and content to see what types of keywords they are using. I don’t recommend copying content or meta information because that is just wrong but getting a feel for how they use the same types of keywords is ok.

3. Long Tail Keywords are Okay: When conducting keyword research don’t be scared to use long tail keywords that don’t necessarily have a tremendous amount of search volume. We are conditioned to want to go after the short high search volume keywords but neglecting the long tail is not the right approach. You have to remember that everyone in your industry is targeting those already. It is ok to go after them because naturally your website will target those types of keywords already but the long tail keywords can generate some good quality traffic fairly quickly.

4. Industry Buzz Terms: Don’t forget about searching for industry buzz terms to target on your website as well. Depending on your industry you could generate a very decent amount of traffic for your website if your business is in an industry that uses a lot of industry type terms.

5. Singular and Plural: Make sure to conduct research for terms using singular and plural forms of certain keywords. Sometimes the difference in search volume can be very drastic so don’t forget to keep this in mind when conducting your keyword research.

6. SEO Keyword Research Tools: There are several great keyword research tools to consider when conducing keyword research. Keyword Discovery is the best keyword research tool that I would recommend on the market…it is the tool that I personally use. I do not recommend using free keyword research tools as many of them tend to not show accurate and search data.

In addition to my keyword research tips, I located a video that show some great advice for basic keyword research:

Keyword research is probably the most important aspect of all your search engine optimization efforts (besides the content on your site of course!). These keywords will dictate what type of visitors you will target for your website so it is important to not only get them right but really not miss out on any that might generate a really targeted visitor for your website. So spend some time developing the relevant keyword list for each page of your site…all of your hard work will pay off if you give it the proper time!

SEO Tips to Find Competitors’ Keywords

On December 4, 2009, In SEO, by Jeffrey Smith

Looking for a quick way to data mine competitors keywords to determine if they are worth the hassle to optimize? After reading this quick SEO tip and using a few revealing SEO tools, uncovering their precious keyword treasure troves and dethroning them will not be a problem.
Did you know that most websites receive the majority [...]

Looking for a quick way to data mine competitors keywords to determine if they are worth the hassle to optimize? After reading this quick SEO tip and using a few revealing SEO tools, uncovering their precious keyword treasure troves and dethroning them will not be a problem.

How to Dethrone Competitors using SEMRush, Compete, SpyFu and Alexa to Extract Their Keywords.

Did you know that most websites receive the majority of visitors from a small range of keywords? These keywords often have a disproportionate amount of traffic when compared to other keywords.

The most trafficked keywords are not always the most lucrative, but tend to contain the seed phrases that when combined yield the sites most lucrative secondary or tertiary keyword combinations; which is why it is important to look for these clusters.

When you have the ability to observe which keywords are delivering the most business to your competitors, it allows you to assess if your keyword funnel is to narrow, or if you wish to expand your keyword conquest even further.

Enough Already, Just Show Me the Technique?

To discover what those keywords are, you can use a few free resources to triangulate data to ascertain validity of which keyword is worth the hassle.

Alexa.com – Now before you balk and say, ah shucks, Alexa’s data is skewed, keep in mind it is only one of a few metrics that you can use to dial-in traffic metrics for extracting or rather data mining keywords. Just visit Alexa.com and type the domain in question, then you can select the keywords tab or asses the sites at upstream or downstream data (who refers the most traffic to that online property and where they come from).
Compete.com – Once again, this site is predicated on aggregate data from various sources (which they acquire from hosting companies, Google search engine fairies and other magical online methods) and at times the accuracy can be somewhat alarming. Even though they are not psychics, what they can dig up from the trail that the web leaves behind is pretty accurate. Just visit compete.com and type in the competitors domain or domains of choice, follow the link and then observe the referrer percentages with the keywords that yield the most traffic.
SEMRush.com – This by far is the easiest of all. This is a great tool that does more than most since it allows you to see the correlation between landing pages, keywords and estimated traffic percentages. Just visit SEMRush.com and type in the domain name and off you go, where for a nominal fee you can unlock the keys to your competitions keywords for about $20 per month. Even in freebie mode, you can still glean the highlights of the main keywords to get the gist and determine if it’s worth unlocking the rest of the landing page/keyword puzzle.
SpyFu.com – This is also a great tool which allows you to not only see a slightly different skew on which keywords have traction in search engines, but it also provides a snapshot of the ads they are using for PPC. SpyFu.com offers ingenious metrics, but the emphasis here is on quick tools you can use in a pinch to unlock hints on which keywords are worthy of pursuit. It just depends on your level of commitment and budget to pay the fee for all of the above mentioned competitive analysis tools.

The method is simple:

Pick the keyword or keyword(s) you are targeting.
Find the competitor(s) ranking in the top 3 positions of Google.
Add their domain to the four SEO data mining tools (Compete, Alexa, Spyfu and SEM Rush – in three tabs) and see what percentage of traffic they get per month based on the divisible traffic metrics displayed by compete.com and / or Spyfu’s traction % of traffic / metrics.
If the competitor gets 100K visitors per month at 15% of their traffic comes from “Keyword X”, then you know that “Keyword X” represents a healthy target for acquisition 15,000 estimated visitors per month or approximately 500 visitors per day.

New Tool to Annualize Google Keyword Data

On November 13, 2009, In SEO, by Brian R. Brown

Do you use Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool for your keyword research? If not, you might be missing out. Like all keyword research tools, it may not be the end all be all, and it isn’t without its own little quirks, but it is still rich keyword data whether you use it on its own or [...]

Related posts:

Do you use Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool for your keyword research? If not, you might be missing out. Like all keyword research tools, it may not be the end all be all, and it isn’t without its own little quirks, but it is still rich keyword data whether you use it on its own or in relation with the other keyword tools you are using.

Google has modified the tool over time, and one of the great additions was the ability to see the monthly demand via a small little bar chart. This can be very useful for factoring in seasonality or growing demand for certain phrases. Wrapping your head around the actual numerical data is a bit more challenging. The Local number is just for the most recent month while the Global number is a monthly average. This is further complicated in that the Global number includes the world essentially while the Local number may factor in your campaign settings and locality (based on your AdWords campaign configuration).

To help tighten up data and provide a little more insight into the Local numbers, I just released an Excel spreadsheet that can take your Google Keyword Tool’s export and annualize the Local demand numbers. In some cases, this may dramatically change the order of importance of keywords to target.

Best of all, this tool is free to use so give it a play. The link below will take you to the download page for the tool as well as more detail about how it works and an example.

Google Keyword Tool Annualizer

Related posts:

SEO Tips for Using the SEO Ultimate Competitive Research Module

On November 3, 2009, In SEO, by Jeffrey Smith

Planning is just as big a part of SEO as execution. If a flaw is present in either, the website pays the price. Built within the fabric of the SEO Ultimate WordPress SEO Plugin is a competitor research module that allows you to use shortcuts to Google Search Operators to identify thresholds of competition for [...]

Planning is just as big a part of SEO as execution. If a flaw is present in either, the website pays the price. Built within the fabric of the SEO Ultimate WordPress SEO Plugin is a competitor research module that allows you to use shortcuts to Google Search Operators to identify thresholds of competition for specific keywords and key phrases; today, we will cover a few…

Using SEO Ultimate for Competitive Research

Behind every great ranking there is a process, with the two types of results you can create (intentional and unintentional) the former is ideal, while the latter is always a plus. However, to target a keyword, you need competitive intelligence to perform S.W.O.T analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats).

Taking things back to SEO basics, using Google search operators provides you with the ability to “zero-in” on competitive metrics such as allintitle, allintext, allinanchor, linkdomain, linkfromdomain and more all on the fly from the dashboard.

For example, say I wanted to see how my website stacked up against the competition for all of our main keywords

First, I would then select the competition researcher module.

SEO Ultimate Module Manager

Next I would add all of my keywords.

Add Keywords and Select Show 100 Results and Google's Minimal Mode

Make sure to select the checkbox below that says “show 100 results per page” as well as “use Google’s minimal mode” for this exercise and then click the “submit button”. They are optional and will save you time scrolling, however it is your preference.

Afterwards, the tool will query Google and display the multiple keywords in their own respective window, where you can analyze the results.

*It’s always a good idea to click your homepage or the page you are investigating that corresponds to a keyword first (to eliminate having to look for it amongst the other results, however, if you are familiar with your titles or meta data, then disregard clicking them in advance).

Next, look for a new tab and the search results displayed in horizontal iframes that contain each search. In this example, I want to see how many websites are actively competing for a given keyword to assess the competitive threshold of the keyword or key phrase.

To do this, I scroll to the bottom of the window of the keyword I am researching and then continue to click the next button until I see.

“in order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the (number) already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

End of competing sites for keyword SEO

This means that you have hit the depth of the well as far as relevance and Google has just informed you that there are only “X amount” of websites actually competing for that keyword.

So, instead of assuming that you are competing against millions of websites “which is what you might believe” using a broad match or normal search, this gives you the actual number of websites in between yours and the top ranking result.

Then, you could look at go back and look at:

Allintitle results (of all the websites in the index, who has the most title tag relevance).
Allintext results (of all the websites in the index, who has the most on page in text relevance).
Allinanchor results (of all the websites in the index, who has the most in anchor / link relevance).
And use a variation of the site: command to dig in to their competitive thresholds.

Usually, Google stops indexing results past 1000, so, you can gauge how competitive a keyword is, based on how close it is to that 1000 result cut-off point.

SEO in this instance stops at 903 results for “phrase match” or “in quotes” identifying that we are only competing with 903 websites vs. the 188 Million results you may think your competing with if observed in broad match.

Obviously, one word keywords are more competitive, so, better to check on two word or more queries using modifiers to investigate competitive thresholds.

Repeat that step for allintitle, allintext and allinanchor then you can simply go back to the dashboard and add the name of the website you wish to investigate before the keyword (no need to use http:// or http://www. – just the domain name is fine) then with the “show 100 results per page” active and toggle/unclick the “use Google’s minimal mode” if it was still selected, then click the “submit button”.

This is the equivalent of site:website.com keyword in Google (which allows you to determine on page keyword saturation and topical continuity). The more occurrences a competitor’s website has for a given keyword, the more SEO defense they have in the index to pad the results and stave off competitors such as yourself.

How Many Occurrences Do Competitors Have for Keywords?

So, this is a great tactic to see who the 800 lbs. Gorilla is as far as on page SEO.

*I used SEOChat.com in this example, but you can use any of your competitors to indentify how many pages they are dedicating to each respective keyword within their on page SEO.

Saturation Thresholds for Keywords

They have 28,300 instances of the keyword SEO, 1240 occurrences for seo services, 1690 for seo company, etc. I can then use the same approach on my own site to see how each metric measures up.

Observe the results next to determine which keyword you want to dig deeper into. You can also add domains by themselves for use in the query box to see how many links from the domain exist (to assess who they link to) as an indicator of hub strength or look at backlinks using the inbound links dashboard selection.

These are rather basic SEO commands used for competitive research, however, this gives you a way to access them conveniently from one consolidated control panel.

SEO Tools: Using Xenu and Excel – Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 2

On October 22, 2009, In SEO, by Brian R. Brown

During Part 1 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we started learning how to use Xenu and Excel to begin our SEO audit and focused on the foundational element, URLs.
Now let’s move on to the most important signal a site’s pages can send to the search engines, the all powerful title tag. Like URL constructs, sites [...]

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During Part 1 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we started learning how to use Xenu and Excel to begin our SEO audit and focused on the foundational element, URLs.

Now let’s move on to the most important signal a site’s pages can send to the search engines, the all powerful title tag. Like URL constructs, sites often have nearly as many constructs for title tags. Three things that a quick scan of our data will tell us:

General constructs and patterns used
Title tag duplication
General sense of optimization quality (potentially)

Branding (or lack of) always jumps out quickly, of which we have a number of different examples:

three quarter sleeve sweater | Coldwater Creek
Apparel at Coldwater Creek
Coldwater Creek misses clothing.
Coldwater Creek

What about duplication? I expect to find some levels, especially on an ecommerce site or any site that features a pagination system. Most CMS or ecommerce systems don’t provide a way, or at least an easy way, to modify the title tags (or headings and body copy) of individual paginated pages like GravityStream can. However, I also want to see beyond the pagination to identify duplication across URLs/pages that really should be unique. In this case, these pages are cannibalizing and missing an opportunity to target additional phrases.

Best way to do that in this case is to sort by the title, rather than the URL, and then filter out those with a “page=” in them to clear out all the pagination and make reviewing easier (the specific sorting will vary depending on a site’s constructs).

I quickly find some examples of title duplication.

Title: Clearance apparel at Coldwater Creek

Used on these URLs:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-apparel.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-tops-and-tees.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-dresses.aspx

Title: Coldwater Creek

Used on these URLs:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/blue-jeans-in-pink.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Catalog/catalogRequest.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/cqo/cqo.aspx

Title: Coldwater Creek offers a great selection of women’s denim jeans.

Used on these URLs:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/classic-waist-jeans.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/lower-waist-jeans.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/natural-waist-jeans.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/shop-by-fit.aspx

Not to mention the store locations, which appear to not have titles at all. Of course I would still want to verify this against the actual site, but Xenu has quickly jump started the audit process by pointing to areas of concern. It may not find the needle in the haystack, but it does move the hay from the field to the stack to begin, and sometimes cuts the stack down into manageable bales.

Some of the title tags above are okay and maybe are the most optimal … only keyword research combined with site analytics will reveal that. What we do know though is that duplicating the same title across different 4 pages means at least 3 of them are not optimal and we’ve created keyword cannibalization. Just based on the URLs, I can also tell that there are probably better, more targeted titles that could be used.

Whether a site’s title tags are manually or programmatically optimized doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the title tag is the strongest and easiest signal that a site owner has control over. This is the juiciest, ripest, most important low hanging fruit opportunity that many sites continue to miss.

A couple more interesting bits of information we can get from Xenu that also probably go mostly unnoticed, are the Level, Links Out and Links In columns. Level may not be exact, but we can get a quick idea of how deep, based on click and crawl path, content is. While purely site related, the links information can give us a quick view as to internal linking strength, identifying which pages or sections may undervalued or serving as internal hubs.

Hopefully this proved an interesting exercise. While I wouldn’t recommend doing a real SEO site audit blindfolded, I definitely recommend reviewing your site in new and different ways and removing some of the visual cues (and clutter) to see how the bots view some of the site’s most important signals. Remember that Xenu doesn’t provide the answers, but at least helps to identify areas that may be problematic and helps to better make sense of the foundation of a site … especially if that site consists of hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs.

This is also a great training tool and a way to further hone your skill set. I’ll liken it to Luke Skywalker’s blindfolded lightsaber training … one must move beyond seeing to feeling. May the SEO be with you.

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Social Media Measurement

On October 5, 2009, In SEO, by Brian R. Brown

Measuring social media will help you better understand what works, which social media venues perform for you, and provides an important metric to factor into cost analysis. Once you have pulled together your social media marketing goals, you need to lay down how you are going to measure the impact of your social media marketing [...]

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Measuring social media will help you better understand what works, which social media venues perform for you, and provides an important metric to factor into cost analysis. Once you have pulled together your social media marketing goals, you need to lay down how you are going to measure the impact of your social media marketing efforts.

Social media measurement presents some interesting challenges compared to the more typical site or page metrics. The most direct measures, such as traffic and conversion on your website, are only part of the picture. By the very nature though, much of your social media efforts will take place off your website. But let’s make it easy and start internally before we move to the more challenging external measurements.

Like site optimization, it is helpful to identify or create a landing page target on your website for your social media campaigns as well. Not all of the traffic and gains from social media will flow into your target page, but it will help your efforts to have a defined target to build your efforts around. This is especially true when focusing on link baiting efforts as an intersection of social media and SEO.

Some of your social media efforts will be indirect, just interacting with others and building your social media rapport and authority, and that is okay, even required. However without some focused targeting, you may find you’re spending a lot of energy on social media with no real purpose and fewer gains.

Target pages don’t have to be newly created or strictly for your campaigns, especially since they may generate inbound links over time as others (hopefully) link to them. What this will do though is to help sync and consolidate your social media efforts with all of your other SEO efforts. Then, as you mention target phrases in your social media campaigns, you’ll already know where it needs to link to, rather than having random linking to different pages. This is especially critical if you have a team working on your social media.

Global tracking, such as total traffic being sent to the site from each of the venues you are targeting, will provide a bigger picture view. Now with your target page, phrase and promotion combination, you can at least connect a page to your specific efforts. You’ll want to monitor your specific target pages for referring traffic from the venues you’ve targeted:

record the dates you promoted your target (begin a timeline as you may re-promote over time)
track referring traffic from each venue promoted in (also have benchmarks prior to promotion)
also track ranking positions and traffic for targeted phrases

As you can see, much of this internal tracking isn’t all that different than what you should already be doing. Of course, things like rankings and targeted phrase traffic won’t be exclusive to your social media efforts.

Social media marketing measurements should also extend beyond your site though, which is where the measurements get a little more challenging. Depending on the venue, you may only have minimal or no visibility of the types of metrics you rely on for your own site. If the site allows you to embed an image, such as an avatar that could be hosted on your own site, you can get a rough idea on page views by tracking how often the image is served up. However, like any kind of “hits” reporting, this can be highly skewed.

So rather than focusing on the more traditional site metrics, your off-site social media metrics will be more focused on popularity and activity measures. Fortunately, these types of measures are often reported in some way by the social media venues.

Whether they are called friends, fans or followers, one of the core metrics you’ll want to track is how many of those you have. This however, is only part of the picture. Social media is about conversation and interaction. These counts are purely quantitative, but what you want to strive for is qualitative measures. Sorry to say, but some portion of your fans will be inactive. You’ll want to try to understand what level of quality you have achieved by establishing metrics for:

how many fans actually interact with you
average number of comments, votes, etc. for your individual efforts (posts, videos, etc.)
mentions to your efforts
how many of your fans cross over into other venues (while this may seem to lower your total reach counts, it improves your quality counts as it means you are reaching a greater level of involvement)

Like any reputation management efforts, social media measurement wouldn’t be complete without social media monitoring. You will want to employ the same types of tracking you do for your general reputation management, but look for mentions, links, etc. back to your social media campaigns or profiles. The further you move from your own analytics on your own site, the more challenging and less precise these metrics get. But, without any metrics, you are completely in the dark.

If all this sounds a bit complex, well, it can be. Moreover, these are just a few of the basics to get you started. Understand that real value will come from tracking over time, monitoring the ebb and flow of the various metrics in relation to your activities. Social media marketing can be a huge win or a giant resource black hole. Investing time and resources into social media without some level of measurement is simply irresponsible mismanagement.

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