The Maine SEO Blog

More and more, we’re using WordPress here at flyte as our CMS of choice.  Not only is it an easy platform for our clients to learn to use and update themselves, but it’s also incredibly search engine friendly.

As always, there are way to increase search visibility even further.  With WordPress, that way is by adding SEO Plugins.  WordPress has an extensive collection of such plugins, but I thought I’d take a look at two: one for the WP beginner, and another for the more advanced WP user.

For WordPress Beginners: All In One SEO Pack

• Quickly and easily change title, meta-description, and keywords for your homepage, specific pages, or posts
• Edit your title formats on your homepage, specific pages, posts, archive pages, category pages, etc. (Making them “Page Title – Blog Title” vs. “Page Title”)

For the Advanced WP User: HeadSpace

• Everything from the All in One SEO Pack, including the option to import and support All in One SEO (as well as other related plugins), PLUS….
• Ability to more easily add (without getting messy with HTML) Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
• Add cool tools and tracking devices, like CrazyEgg

Nicki Hicks
Plugins with something for everyone

There are tons of great blogs, forums, and sites that offer the latest and greatest SEO news.  But even if you were to spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week reading, you couldn’t keep up with all of them.  So, I offer my list: of those I believe offer the widest range of information to keep you in the know.

“News” Sites

1. Search Engine Roundtable – my all time favorite SEO news source.  Not only do they live blog for major conferences and seminars, as well as just about every major happening in the Search world, but all of the articles are remarkably short, sweet, and concise!
2. Search Engine Land – with longer articles than SE Roundtable; also the company behind SMX conferences.

Blogs

1. Matt Cutts’ blog – a must for some more in depth tips and tricks from a Google insider.
2. SEOBook blog – all things SEO by guru Aaron Wall.

Forums

1. High Rankings forum – generally speaking, I’m not a forum user; simply because of the time it takes to get caught up on threads.  However, High Rankings is the one I like the most – and forums are great for when you need a technical question answered fast!

What are your favorite sites/blogs/forums?

Nicki Hicks
“These are a few of my favorite things”

I’m a huge advocate for measuring success and using geeky measurement tools to do it.  As a compliment to Google Analytics, there is Webmaster Tools.  While there is some overlap between the two, together, they give you a pretty good picture of how your site is doing.  And while some think Google knows too much about our websites (yes, they see same data as you do), the trade off is that it’s free.

1. Installation is easy. Choose to either plop a meta-tag into your code or upload an HTML file.
2. Quickly check for web crawl errors. Have any 404 errors?  Any nofollows or robots.txt you didn’t know about?
3. Can your site be accessed via smart phone? No need to check manually…Webmaster Tools will tell you!
4. Specific help for SEO. In the Diagnostics > Content Analysis section, check out any meta-description, title tag, or non-indexable content issues your site may have.
5. Top Search Queries. More of a fun fact than anything.  What top 20 keywords do you rank for?  What percentage of people that search for that term click on your site?  More importantly, ask yourself…are these the terms you optimized your site for?
6. “What Googlebot sees.” Very powerful information.  You can see exactly what anchor text people are using when linking to your site.
7. Pages with external links. Which are your most linked-to (read:popular) pages?  Webmaster Tools will show you most, if not all, of your incoming links.  Plus, you can view your backlinks in graph form with Glync.
8. Remove a URL. This tool can be incredibly useful if you have duplicate content or have removed a page for some reason.  This tool goes hand-in-hand with the web crawl errors page: after you find an error, you can then remove the page from Google’s index (it usually takes only a few days to complete the process).
9. Various other perks of having Webmaster Tools: crawl stats (how often Google crawls your site), subscriber stats (if you have a blog or email newsletter: how many subscribers do you have?), view your sitemap(s), generate and view your robots.txt file, enhance your 404 error pages (if you don’t already have a template matching your own design), and many more!

Nicki Hicks
If I add any more tools to my toolbox, where the heck am I gonna put my hammer?

I’m not sure about you, but when I end up on a page like SEOmoz’s Pro + Free SEO Tools, I’m immediately overwhelmed.  There, you are faced with a huge list of search tools, all of which can be helpful in your quest for more search visibility.  The thing is, who has time to use them all?!  So, I decided to look into them further, and break them down depending on the project.

SEO Auditing

These tools will help whether your site is new or old – giving you some insight into what you might be missing!

• Linkscape (free) – the general overview of your site – reports generated showing mozRank, mozTrust, and the number of internal and external links.  In addition, with the paid subscription, you can run a full report – which adds the mozRank of those sites linking to you, the anchor text used when linking, and a few other cool measurements.
• Trifecta (free) – measures the relative popularity/importance of a website, replacing the Page Strength tool.  You can also compare your site/blog to up to 4 other sites.
• Crawl Test (free) – find what pages are crawable, indexed, or might even have issues!
• GeoTargeting Detection (free) – very helpful if your company is localized; this tool shows you where your listings are on the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live) according to location.

Analyzing Keywords

• Term Target (free) – checks for keyword density for a specific term.  Neat bonus: SEOmoz shows you where your terms are located (title, meta-tag, header, etc.)
• Term Extractor (free) – exactly that: pulls the top words for a given page (broken into one-word keywords, 2-, and 3-word phrases.
• Keyword Difficulty (paid) – run a report to show the competition and opportunity for a given keyword or phrase.

Link Building

• Anchor Text Analysis (paid) – advanced view of backlinks including anchor text.
• Juicy Link Finder (paid) – by choosing a specific keyword, this tool will give you some great links – including the age of the site/page and its PageRank.

Just for Fun

• Popular Searches (free) – pulling from a large list of sources (Google, Amazon, Technorati, and so on), this tool shares the top ten most popular searches for any given day.
• SEO Toolbox (free) – a large variety of free tools: strongest pages on domain, who else is hosted on my IP, check inclusion, check backlinks, outbound link checker, check PageRank, find domain age, check HTTP status code, check indexed pages, whois, and IP location.
• Rank Checker (paid) – checks rankings for specific keywords in whichever search engine you choose.

SEOmoz’s tool set is incredibly helpful, and I found looking at the tools this way – based on project – helps make them an important part of every job.  By the way, many of the paid tools are extra cool, so I would highly recommend getting a Pro Membership if you don’t have one already!

Nicki Hicks
Who said cool toys are just for kids?

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about Google – attempting to keep up with their never-ending additions to the search world.  Most recently, they’ve launched SearchWiki (as a default setting to their SERP) and a new search-based keyword tool.

SearchWiki

Rich posted a great article yesterday on the flyte blog about SearchWiki.  To summarize, if you’re logged into your Google account, you can literally change your results page – either by removing results entirely or pushing them to the first position(s).  You can also write comments about a result, and see what other people have written.

Currently, SearchWiki does not affect search results; but with millions of people “voting” on websites, I think it’s only a matter of time before Google adds it to their algorithm.  Only problem being…it is incredibly easy to spam.

Search-based keyword tool

This new tool is reminiscent of Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool.  The comparison is not unlike the similarity between Google Trends and Google Insights.  The data comes from generally the same place, with a few differences in presentation.

The new keyword tool uses your website or blog as a base to search for keywords, in addition to the ones you tell it to search for.  Like the AdWords tool, you see the same categories, plus the suggested bid price for AdWords.  You can save and export your keywords with both tools.

Here are the top ten keywords from Google’s new search-based keyword tool for this blog’s domain, along with the terms “seo” and “search engine optimization”:

You can see the differences in the top ten keywords between the two tools.  The Adwords Keyword Tool pulls this data for the same search query:

All of these tools are great – and can be used in conjunction with one another in order to find the best keyword opportunities.  But, good grief, what will Google come out with next?!?

Nicki Hicks
Does ‘Googlers Anonymous’ already exist?

Finally, the (highly?) anticipated the new features on Google Analytics went live on Monday.  Among the improvements were changes to the User Interface and completely new tools: Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reporting, and Motion Charts.  So here’s a quick run through of the new tools:

Advanced Segmentation

Until now, you’ve been able to segment your Analytics history in each category (number of visits, pageviews, etc.) according to the date.  In other words, you could compare this past month to the month before.  Now, though, you can compare almost everything using advanced segments.

It wouldn’t allow you to see it, but Conversion Goals are also on this list.  You can choose any number of segments you’d like to compare.  Here, I chose to compare All Visits and Referral Traffic from this blog:

The benefit?  I can see that my traffic depends directly on the number of referring links to my site.  Other trends should also show up by using this tool and comparing other advanced segments.

Custom Reporting

If, for some reason, the advanced segmenting misses a conversion you’d like to see, you can use custom reporting.

You can choose which metrics you’d like to measure, then which dimensions to cross reference them by.  While GA gives you the ability to measure almost every conversion possible, the custom reports are helpful if you’d like to see your goals convert for more than one metric or more than one dimension.

Motion Charts

Finally, motion charts.  The Google Analytics Blog did a full synopsis on this already, so here’s a quick recap.  With several of the GA tools, you can “Visualize” the data – you will be redirected to that particular motion chart.  Here is a snapshot of what my new vs. returning visitors for yesterday look like:

Motion charts play like a movie, so this shot is the last frame.  While motion charts cannot be made for every conversion, you can customize the axis, colors, and even size of the data points.  Then, you can save individual motion charts you create – as they return to their default settings when you leave the page.

So, overall, pretty cool stuff.  Helpful, too, for that matter.  I’m interested to see what Analytics will be able to tell us next…

Nicki Hicks
Geeking out at GA

Last week, Virante released glync, a free downloadable compliment to the external links portion of Google’s Webmaster Tools.  While even without glync, you can see your backlinks, glync will give you a visual representation of the number of incoming links you have over time.  Plus, with the pro version (estimated at about $5 per month), you can see the PageRank of each page linking to you.

Here are the number of incoming links for this blog for the past five days.

Just below, you’ll see your pages with the number of external links pointing to them.  Again, you can upgrade glync and see the PR of each page on the left.

Clicking the number of links will direct you to a list of of the pages that link to you.

Glync definitely enhances your Webmaster Tools experience.  But the question is: will Google actually tell you how many backlinks you actually have?  According to Webmaster Tools, I have 1,054.  Using the link:mysite.com command on Google, I only have 7; and using Yahoo’s Site Explorer, I have 1,017.  So does that make Webmaster Tools’ number the right one?

NIcki Hicks
Glync-er

Javascript, Flash, and (God forbid) tables may look cool.  You might even get them to work the same in every browser.  Admittedly, that is half the battle – making your site appealing to people, that is.  But the other half is building a website for search engines.

One way to see exactly what the search engines see is by looking at your code (or viewing the page source).  If you can’t read HTML, then checking out Google’s cache is your next best option.

There’s a few ways to do it.  One of my apps (SEO for Firefox) gives an option to look at the cached version of the page.  Or, when making a search, you can see the option next to each result; in this case, a holiday appropriate search:

Then, when selecting “Cached”, you see exactly what Google sees.  Be sure to choose the text only version:

As you can see, Google will highlight the keyword you searched for.  This way, if pressed, you can make a decision: be it a really cool flash intro or just some great content.

Nicki Hicks
Happy Halloween!

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Keywords/Trends

1. Keyword Discovery – for all the keyword research you could ever care to know. It does require a subscription – this or Word Tracker (which I’ve never tried) are considered the best.
2. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – supplement keyword research; also gives better stats as to what people are actually searching for.
3. Webconfs.com Keyword Density Tool - there are a million keyword density tools out there, but I’ve found this one to be the most user friendly.
4. Google Insights/Google Trends – both give good insights as to what’s hot and what’s not.  Insights will also give you upcoming popular search terms.

Link Building

1. Marketleap’s Link Popularity Checker – gives you both Google and Yahoo!’s index of backlinks, plus others.

Plug-ins and Apps

1. SEO for Firefox – see nofollow links; look up PR, backlinks, meta-tags; plus much much more!
2. SeoQuake – many of the same benefits as SEO for Firefox, but you don’t necessarily have to have Firefox.  Plus, when activated, SeoQuake will give you a handy little toolbar with at-a-glance SEO stats.

Analytics (the one and only)

1. Google Analytics – it’s free and gives you everything you need.  Why go for something else??

I use quite a few more, but these are my favorite, and the ones I use the most often.  Do you have any favorites?

Nicki Hicks
I think I need a bigger toolbelt…

Are you a little over-excited when you check your Google Analytics because your stats look great?  You might be if you, people at your company, or maybe a consultant are on your website a lot.  Your analytics pick up those high stats from you!

So what to do?  Block your IP address! Check it out:

First, go to your homepage for Analytics – Analytics Settings – and click on your filter manager.

Click “add filter”.  You’ll see this screen:

Insert your filter name (using the IP address is a pretty easy choice), choose the filter type (to exclude all traffic from an IP address), and insert your IP address.  Below that, choose which sites you’d like to filter, and you’re all set!

You’ll find that your Analytics may no longer look as impressive, but at least they are no longer skewed!  Also – be sure to filter any other IP addresses you don’t want included in your analytics!

Nicki Hicks
Filter your measurements