Search Marketing Tools

Probably the most common request I get in the SEO field is: “Can you check my website for errors and problems?”.  People often seem to be paranoid that there may be some feature of their websites causing the ranking to suffer, or that some secret piece of code is hurting their ranking ability.  Usually this paranoia is unfounded, and they simply need better content, more links, etc.

But in some cases, I’ve found that there can be problems with sites that hurt the ranking.  Usually these have to do with the ability of a search spider to crawl a site.  I call this “Search Engine Friendliness”.

The Most Common Website Errors

The most common errors that lead to search engine ranking problems are:

• Use of flash and java - the search engines can’t read text that appears in these website features.
• Error in robots.txt - some site developers try to get fancy with this to allow or disallow certain search engine spiders but often make mistakes causing the site to turn away the search engines.
• Use of noindex in the meta tag section is meant to tell search robots not to index the page.  This is usually not intentional unless there is a developer that doesn’t know any better.  I’ve seen cases where plugins in wordpress accidentally turn this on.
• Spam links can often times draw a penalty from the search engines.  This is another one that isn’t always intentional.  Sometimes a site can get secretly hacked and spam links placed in secret hard to find places without the owner knowing.  This can often times cause a search engine penalty as sites you link to can be viewed as an association or endorsementthr from you.
• Large database driven sites with poorly written URL structures can sometimes run into ranking and indexing problems because the search engines can’t navigate dynamic pages and URL’s very well.

The 5 Step Website Error Checkup

So how do you know if you have any of the above problems, and how do you check for common errors?  Try these 5 steps:

• Step 1 - Do You Have a Penalty? Has your search engine ranking suddenly dropped in a drastic way?  The best sign of this is a drop in search traffic.  Did you go from 2,000 search engine visitors per month to 0?  There is most likely a search engine penalty in place that dropped you from the rankings.  Proceed to step 2…
• Step 2 - Do you link to any spammy websites? This coule be intentional or unintentional.  Either way, it could bring a penalty… and if you are seeing problems like in step 1, you may want to consider checking your outbound links.  I use 2 tools for this that both work very well, the Link Validation Spider, and Link Slueth (more advanced).  Both are mainly for checking for broken links on your site, but can be used to find hidden links and spam links.  You might also try a simple query on MSN.  Visit MSN.com and type this in the search box:  “linkfromdomain:www.yourdomain.com”.  It will search for all outbound links from a domain.
• Step 3 - Don’t Drive Away the Search Spiders.  More times than not, if someone is having serious ranking problems it can be due to a robots.txt or a meta data problem like the use of noindex.  Try this tool from Submit Express to test for meta tag issues.  To check for robots.txt issues, try this robots.txt checker.  Make sure to use the address for your robots.txt file  (Example:  www.searchingsolutions.com/robots.txt)
• Step 4 - Indexing Problems? Do you have hundreds of pages on your website but find that the search engines only record a handful of these pages?  The easiest way to check how many pages you have indexed with the search engines is through the site command.  Example:  In Google, type: “site:www.searchingsolutions.com”.  If for some reason only a very small percentage of your pages show up, you may have an indexing problem.  This means that the search engine is having a hard time reaching all the pages of your website.  Make sure to set up an xml or html site map that has a hyperlink list of all your pages.  For smaller sites, you can put all your links on one page, and for larger sites, you can use multiple sitemaps or multiple categories.  Make sure the search engine spiders can reach every page of your website within 3 clicks of the home page.  Also, remove any javascript links, links that require form submission, frames, flash links, or anything other than a simple html based link.
• Step 5 - Check For Meta Tag Duplication.  This isn’t a problem that can lead to penalties or problems with indexing, but can seriously hurt your ranking.  Page titles should always be unique as to avoid keyword and page cannibalization.  Seomoz has a great Crawl Test tool that can help in this area.

I hope these 5 steps are useful.  You may not need them very often, but when you do you’ll wish you would have bookmarked this post…   

This post is a Re-Mix of a post I wrote in 2006, Formerly called: “How to Scope Out a Competitor’s Website and Learn From It.”

It’s always fun and interesting to check out what your competitors are up to. When you type in a search for your keywords, who comes up? Are your competitors ahead of you or below you? Why? Do you know what kind of traffic they get? Do you know how many links are coming into their site?

Competitive Research

In search engine marketing, competitive research and analysis is everything.  Since search engines are all about ranking, the websites you see in the search engine rankings above and below you are your competitors.  So it’s very helpful to know how to research those competitors to discover how and why they rank the way they do.

10 Free Tools For Researching Your Competitor’s Website

#1.  SpyFu.com

SpyFu is one of my favorites as it can show you how much money a competing website may be spending on pay per click advertisements.  And is also useful to show you which organic keywords may be bringing in the most traffic.  Tool Use Rating: Easy

#2.  SEODigger.com

SEO Digger is a free tool that will show you what keyword phrases different websites rank for.  The ranking database is updated every 2 weeks and is usually very accurate.  This can be a great resource if you’re trying to find out what phrases a competing website ranks for.  They can also be sorted by order of Wordtracker popularity which shows how many times those phrases are searched.  Tool Use Rating: Easy

#3. SEOmoz Tools

If you are already familiar with SEOmoz, you know that they provide a host of tools that can help with SEO.  Many of which can be helpful for competitive website analysis including: SEO Toolbox, Trifecta, Term Target, and their new tool called Linkscape.  Note on Linkscape: this tools is definitely for more advanced users, but can be very valuable to search for link data on almost any website.  Tool Use Rating: Ranging from Easy - Difficult

#4. WebsiteGrader.com

The Website Grader is an extremely user friendly site that will give a quick review of any website and show helpful data like: domain age, domain renewal information, meta data, backlinks, onpage factors, traffic, and alot more.  The really helpful thing is that it gives easy to understand explanations if it happens to find any erros on the website.  This is a great tool for discovering basic strengths and weaknesses with any competing website.  Tool Use Rating: Easy

#5. NicheWatch.com

Niche Watch takes a little different approach in that it doesn’t start with a competing website, but with keyword phrases.  You type in a phrase, and it will show you data on the top 20 competitors including backlinks, links to the page, Page Rank, and alot more.  This is a great resource to see info on offsite factors for each website and it can often times give you great insight as to why a site is ranking the way it is.  Tool Use Rating: Moderate

#6. SEO For Firefox

SEO for Firefox is one of the more famous tools of the bunch.  Aaron the creator claims that over 50,000 people are using it.  If you don’t already have Firefox, you may want to consider downloading it just for the purpose of using this great add-on.  When turned on, this tool will show extra data under each Google result after you complete a search.  The data includes useful things like: backlinks, page links, .edu links, pages, domain age, Dmoz, Yahoo Dir, and alot more.  Basically it lets you see why competitors are ranking in the results, and based on the data, it’s usually very easy to see why sites are being ranked the way they are.  Tool Use Rating: Moderate

#7.  Compete.com

Looking for exact traffic numbers for a competitors website?  Too bad, that is priviledged information.  But the next best thing can be found at a site like Compete.com.  They compile data on millions of websites to provide you with fairly accurate traffic analytics, and basic search analytics; like which terms are used the most often to bring search traffic.  It’s about as good as you can get unfortunately.  If you want to compare data try Quantcast and Alexa.  Tool Use Rating: Easy - Moderate

#8. LinkDiagnosis.com

Link Diagnosis is a newer tool that I’ve only been using for a few months.  But I have been extremely impressed so far.  It basically will look at the backlinks of any website and examine the anchor text, Page Rank, quality of link, and number of outbound links on the page and displays it in an easy to read and export format.  It is really sweet for being able to tell how strong incoming links are to any giving website complete with data on NoFollow links.  Tool Use Rating: Moderate - Difficult

#9. SearchRascal.com

Search Rascal is purely a ranking analysis tool that allows you to see who is ranking for any given keyword.  The unique thing about it is that it tracks past ranking and will show whether or not websites have moved up or down in ranking in the last day, week, or month.  It is very handy.  Note: only works for more competitive phrases.  Tool Use Rating: Easy

#10. Google & Yahoo

Believe it or not, Google and Yahoo are a couple of the best tools you have available for competitive analysis.  You just have to know how to use them… Google consistently has the best search results, so make sure you use it the most when trying to search for actual competitors.  If someone is ranking above you in Google, chances are they deserve to be there.  Yahoo is great for searching incoming links to your website.  In fact, almost all the tools above use Yahoo’s data to search for links.  To get an overall picture of how many links are coming in, visit Yahoo Site Explorer, type in your domain name with or without the www, and click on “inlinks”.  This will give you a full picture of your incoming links.  Tool Use Rating: Easy

I hope these 10 free tools will come in handy as you try to learn more about your competition.  Make sure to keep track of your findings, and if you have any questions about how to use any of them, don’t hesitate to contact me.

I’m proud to announce the addition of a new product here at Searching Solutions.  Professional website reviews!

Those of you that know me, know that I’ve been offering real estate website reviews through the Real Estate Tomato for about a month now.  I’ve had such great feedback from these reviews that I’ve decided to expand this service to the greater public.

The reason I believe these reviews are so needed in the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) industry is twofold:

First: There are plenty of tools out there that allow you to collect data on keywords, competition, structural analysis, etc.  But there are very few tools that actually synthesize the results for you in an understandable form.  None of them actually.  In all cases, it’s up to you to take the information and figure out how to implement it on your website.

Second: There are SEO companies out there that will give you a site audit and website review.  But these services don’t come cheap.  In most cases you are looking at $2,000+  for a website review/audit that goes into any kind of detail about your site.

Conclusion:

The SEO industry could use a no-nonsense webiste review service that is: scalable, inexpensive, and easy to implement.

Here Are the Packages That We’re Offering:

#1:  Standard Website Review: ($99)

• Keyword Suggestion Report
• Volume of Searches for the Suggested Keywords
• Structural Analysis Report  (Crawl Testing, Error Reports, Structural Integrity)
• Full Backlink Report
• Detailed Anchor Text Report
• Google Current Ranking Report for Suggested Keywords
• Detailed Beginner’s Guide to SEO (e-Book)

#2:  Advanced Website Review: ($149)

• Includes the entire Standard Website Review Package
• Meta Tag Suggestions for Top Pages (based on research from the Standard Review)
• Competitive Analysis Report (identifies your top competitors)
• Competition Reverse Engineered Report (intense research on your competition)
• Link Building Guide (e-Book)

#3:  Comprehensive Website Review: ($199)

• Includes the Standard and Advanced Website Review Packages
• SEO Resource Guide (e-Book)
• 1 on 1 coaching  (1 hour)

Screenshots of Website Reviews:  (click to expand)

If you are interested in ordering or learning more, please click here to request your Custom Website SEO Review, or feel free to give me a call at: 720-670-0742.

Thank you!

Your Advocate For Online Success,

Justin Smith

If you have ever done any searches for SEO related terms, you have probably seen seobook.com at one time or another. It is a great website with volumes of information on search engine marketing and optimization. One of things Aaron has spent so much time on, and one of the most popular features of the site are his SEO tools. If you’ve never been introduced to these tools, you’re missing out…

Here is a brief rundown.

http://tools.seobook.com

First, visit the above address to check out some of what he has to offer. Currently, the best tools are the Keyword Suggestion Tool, SEO For Firefox, and Rank Checker.

Keyword Suggestion Tool

There is no other place on the internet that pools the data like Aaron’s tool does. And that is why I like it so much. Sure, I have a wordtracker and keyword discovery account, and they are helpful in their own ways, but I always use this tool first when doing preliminary searches. Make sure to check it out!

SEO Firefox

This 2nd tool called SEO for Firefox is one of my favorite tools of all time. It is super easy to use, and provides great data.

As you can see from the example, it integrates data directly into your results. Most notably, it shows how many links are coming in to the page, and some other valuable data like domain age, PR, DMOZ links, and more. If you use Firefox as your primary browser, I highly suggest this tool.

Rank Checker

This last tool is the latest invention from seobook. It’s another Firefox add-on that checks the ranking for certain URLs and keeps track of historical data. I haven’t had alot of experience with it yet as it didn’t work at all on one of my computers (Google ranking always refused to show up), but overall it’s worked great. For whatever reason, I have never found a great ranking tool that gives historical data, and is easy to use. There are many out there, and this tool comes pretty close, but I remain on my quest to find that perfect rank checking tool.

So, I hope you’re able to check out some of these great tools. You don’t have to be an expert to get your feet wet in SEO, and some of these tools from http://tools.seobook.com can definitely help. Have Fun!

• Article PR’s List of Article Submission Sites & Article Distribution Lists
• Online SEO Tools - The Ultimate Collection | From Search Engine Journal
• 21 Ways to Make Your Blog or Website Sticky | From ProBlogger
• Top Directory List by Inbound Link Quality | By SEO Company
• FastPitch.com - Networking/Marketing Service
• The Ultimate RSS Toolset 100+ Resources | From OEdb
• Twitter Backlink Tip | From David Naylor
• Best SEO Firefox Extensions & Tools | From Search Engine People
• Trifecta - SEOMoz’s New Analysis Tool | From SEOMOZ

Enjoy…

It seems like there has been alot of talk about link building lately… maybe it’s just me, but most SEO’s know that quality link building is a pretty important part of offsite optimization.

So, I thought I’d share something that has helped me quite a bit. There is a great seo link building tool put out by SoloSEO (of which I’m a happy customer). It was built a while back based on a post by my hero: Rand Fishkin.

I highly suggest you try it out if you are looking for some link building help. I’ll also post some of the queries that it uses here for your reference. Just take any of these examples to Google, and it should really help you to find some good quality links.

Thanks again SoloSEO for a great tool!!!

Add/Submit

your keyword “add url”
your keyword “add site”
your keyword “add website”
your keyword “add your site”
your keyword “add a url”
your keyword “add * url”
your keyword “add * site”
your keyword “add * website”
your keyword “submit url”
your keyword “submit site”
your keyword “submit website”
your keyword “submit your site”
your keyword “submit a url”
your keyword “submit * url”
your keyword “submit * site”
your keyword “submit * website”
your keyword “suggest url”
your keyword “suggest site”
your keyword “suggest website”
your keyword “suggest your site”
your keyword “suggest a url”
your keyword “suggest * url”
your keyword “suggest * site”
your keyword “suggest * website”

Advanced

allintitle:your keyword
allinanchor:your keyword
allinurl:your keyword
allintext:your keyword

Directories

your keyword directory
your keyword * directory
directory * your keyword
intitle:directory “your keyword”
inurl:directory “your keyword”
“list of your keyword sites”
“list * your keyword sites”
“list * your keyword * sites”
“recommended links” your keyword”
“recommended sites” your keyword”
“favorite links” your keyword”
“favorite sites” your keyword”

Blogs & Forums

your keyword forum
“your keyword forum”
intitle:your keyword forum
inurl:your keyword forum
your keyword blog
“your keyword blog”
intitle:your keyword blog
inurl:your keyword blog
“add comment” your keyword
“post comment” your keyword
your keyword members
your keyword join
your keyword tag
intitle:tag your keyword
intitle:post your keyword

I’ll also add a couple of my own to this list:

• site:.edu inurl:your keyword

• site:.edu inurl:blog “your keyword”

• site:.edu inurl:forum “your keyword”

• site:.edu intitle:blog “post a comment”

You can also replace “.edu” with “.gov” to find those types of links, or replace “inurl:”, with “intitle:”

Have fun. Let me know if there are any other special operators that you use to find links!

Here is an addicting bookmark worthy tool to help you find new URL’s, and search for Whois information: www.Psychicwhois.com