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Programming Data Collection For SEO Research

May 23, 2013 at 9:57am ET by Tom Schmitz

Last month, I showed you three tricks I use when gathering data on websites. I used these techniques to download webpages into a local folder. In and of themselves, these procedures are not SEO; however, a search engine optimization professional working on a large or enterprise website ought to know how to do this. In this article, I'll show you how to: Make a list of pages inside a folder Set up a development environment Open webpages from a script and extract data If you learn these procedures, I am certain you will find legitimate opportunities to use each, together or alone [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO

Optimizing Your Digital Assets To Boost Rankings & Branding

May 20, 2013 at 11:24am ET by Paul Bruemmer

Let’s say you’re responsible for developing revenues from both traditional and non-traditional advertising. You work with a digital staff of talented people to create lead-generating Web-based content, or perhaps you are in e-commerce and sell products. Maybe you’re a brick and mortar with a website, or perhaps a pure-play Internet business with no physical storefronts. Regardless of whether you are a newspaper (publisher), e-commerce (products) or franchise (services) site, performing well within the SERPs will always lead to new customer acquisition. By identifying and optimizing al [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | How To: SEO | SEO: Video Search

The Informational Content Advantage

Apr 23, 2013 at 9:37am ET by Jenny Halasz

You may have heard that content is king, but the truth is that informational content is king. It's estimated that approximately 50-80% of search queries are informational in nature (pdf). Most websites have very little informational content on them, preferring instead to focus on driving a conversion. These websites are missing an excellent opportunity to capture search market share. Ratios of Informational Content In previous articles, I've written about the importance of theming content -- developing a strategy that truly plays to your customers' search intent. But usually, very little [...]

The Holy Grail Of Internet Marketing: Owning The Whole SERP

Apr 11, 2013 at 9:15am ET by Will Scott

[caption id="attachment_155242" align="alignright" width="250"] Photo from drp.Used under Creative Commons license.[/caption] In many ways, taking charge of your search engine results page is like answering the age-old philosophical question, “Who am I” -- but for your business. You may still be in the dark about what motivates some of your personal actions, but if you’re a business owner, I’m pretty certain you know exactly what your business is all about. That’s the first step. Now you need to translate that into Google results. Sound easy? Didn’t think so. It’s a bit [...]

A Data-Centric Approach To Identifying 404 Pages Worth Saving

Apr 2, 2013 at 11:50am ET by Annie Cushing

A critical part of doing a site or link audit is checking to see how many 404 (page not found) pages there are in a site. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an audit that lists the total number of 404 pages and advises developers to find appropriate pages to redirect these 404 pages to. That’s no big deal if we’re talking about just 20 to 30 pages. But, when a site has 404 pages in the thousands, and you tell the developers to fix these pages, you’re going to look more than a little ridiculous. So, how can you find out which of those 404 pages are actually important? Two [...]

The SEO Guide To Getting Started With Google Webmaster Tools

Mar 28, 2013 at 12:29pm ET by John E Lincoln

Google Webmaster Tools can be a powerful ally. But, if you make a mistake or put this power in the wrong hands, it can mean trouble for your search engine optimization. In this post, I provide a basic SEO Guide to Webmaster Tools to help get you started if you aren't taking full advantage of WMT yet. It is very important to point out that some of these things are more detrimental than others. Also, there could be multiple articles written about each of these tools and reports. This SEO guide to Webmaster Tools is a simple overview with a little insight. [caption id="attachment_153210" al [...]

Spring Into A New Content Strategy

Mar 26, 2013 at 11:35am ET by Jenny Halasz

It’s officially Spring! The time when we all start thinking about websites. No, I’m lying, you’re probably thinking about getting outside instead of reading this article. But, on the subject of website redesign, we’re leading several of our clients through this right now. As they’re all at various stages and have various requirements for the finished project, I thought it might be beneficial to write up a content strategy process you can use when you do redesign your website. Hire The Right People You need: A Website Developer: one who is open to a variety of platforms and c [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content

How To Do Mobile Keyword Research In 2013

Feb 4, 2013 at 11:45am ET by Bryson Meunier

As promised last month, I’ll be sharing more information about how to do mobile SEO specifically and less about why to do mobile SEO. This month, I’m going to go through how to do mobile keyword research. First, though, a brief explanation of why to do mobile keyword research. Mobile Keyword Research Then & Now One of the primary reasons for doing mobile keyword research is that you could be missing out on keywords that your audience uses on mobile that they don’t use on desktop (e.g., [keyword + “nearby”]). There are some categories, such as restaurants, where upwards of 30 [...]

How To Create Your Local SEO Roadmap Through Research, Benchmarking & Tracking

Jan 21, 2013 at 1:33pm ET by Myles Anderson

During the regular online training sessions which I deliver to our customers, I inevitably get asked the same question. Actually this question comes in a few guises. What should I focus on more - citations or links? Are reviews an important factor for local ranking? How many citations should I build for my client? How do I know the best categories for my client to be listed in? But, they are all asking the same basic question: What do I need to focus on to improve my client’s rankings? Unfortunately, I don’t have a silver-bullet answer because there isn’t one. Every clien [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate | Local Search

Back To Basics: Getting Started With Keyword Research & Content Creation

Jan 16, 2013 at 3:46pm ET by George Aspland

Sometimes, the best path to success in SEO is going back to the basics of good old fashioned keyword research and content creation with the end goal in mind: the customer and the conversion. In this article, I’ll look at a website that was submitted for review from a “Keywords and Content” focus. The site is Restoration Parts Source (RPS), an e-commerce website supplying restoration car parts and accessories for new, vintage and classic U.S. makes and models. 1. Don’t Focus Only On Broad Keywords In his submission, Michael, RPS’s Web consultant, listed some keywords that [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content

5 SEO Audit Considerations For Publishers & News Sites

Dec 6, 2012 at 9:25am ET by Tom Demers

SEO site audits should all be at least a bit unique. Everyone has their own process for pricing and conducting SEO audits, but one of the important things to keep in mind is the different needs of different types of sites. The core issues and focuses in auditing a twenty page B2B lead gen site will be very, very different than the key things you want to think about and address in auditing a large e-commerce site. The same is true of conducting an SEO audit on a publishing or news oriented site, and as a result I wanted to call out five key considerations that you’ll need to account for [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | How To: SEO

Examining Real World Uses Of Rich Snippets & Markup

Nov 26, 2012 at 3:11pm ET by Barbara Starr

Semantic markup is becoming more and more popular in conjunction with large scale SEO. Adding rich snippets to send rich signals to alert search engines as to the relevancy of your content − whatever vertical they may appear in − is not only a wise move, but an SEO best practice. Included below is an illustrative guide highlighting currently available Chrome extensions, which you can leverage to both test on-site markup as well as expose any information regarding your competitors. An example is illustrated below, and what follows is a guide to getting the information. Installi [...]

60 Minutes To Global Search Greatness Through Keyword Analysis

Nov 20, 2012 at 11:40am ET by Bill Hunt

What if you could only spend one hour each week identifying some of your biggest opportunities and problems? What would you spend the time doing? That was a question - well, more of a “challenge” given to me by a few attendees of a recent Advanced Keyword Modeling presentation. While the many possible analysis were great, they were limited by time and wanted to know of all of them, which I personally would do first. First, the 60 minutes does not include gathering the data and building the reports. Since the challenge was to me and I would obviously use the keyword management tool I [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate | Multinational Search

Have Keywords Stopped Being A Proxy To The Customer?

Oct 23, 2012 at 2:51pm ET by Jenny Halasz

It’s said that keywords are a proxy for a customer, right? So let’s talk about the customer. Schema this, canonical that, and black and white zoo animals… if you don’t have a search expert on payroll, you’re already behind the Joneses. I get emails like the one below all the time, this one being from the talented owner of Castleview 3D Architectural Renderings: “I need your help. I realy don't get the whole keywords/SEO/web marketing thing -- but I know enough to know that I shouldn't and don't want to tackle it myself. I'm a small business (small = just me) and maybe I can't [...]

11 Things To Ask Yourself When Optimizing Content

Sep 25, 2012 at 12:29pm ET by Jenny Halasz

A client asked me the other day why we were optimizing his software for Los Angeles, when he’s located in Raleigh, NC. In explaining the reason to him, I realized that a basic guideline for optimizing pages is long overdue. I’ve developed the following flow chart and explanation in response. Theming Content The first question you need to ask yourself when optimizing a page is, What is the Page About? If you can’t answer this or your answer is a keyword, then maybe you shouldn’t be building the page. Seriously. You need the page to be about something in order for it to have value [...]

How To Leverage PPC To Discover High-Converting Keywords For SEO

Sep 20, 2012 at 9:44am ET by Nathan Safran

When starting out with a new search effort or performing a keyword refresh for an existing website, the options for discovering new keywords are limited only by the SEO’s imagination. From the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, to digging through analytics, to leveraging sites like Soovle that discover ‘suggest’ keywords across multiple search engines, keyword discovery options abound. Building a pool of potential keywords to optimize for, however, is only half the battle. For those websites driving visitors to a ‘conversion event’ (e-commerce, asset download, form completion, etc [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate

SEO Basics: When Your Domain & Homepage Are Not The Same

Aug 30, 2012 at 10:59am ET by Tom Schmitz

Recently, I ran an audit on 56 music industry websites and received a startling result. Sixteen sites, 28.6%, forward people from their domain name to their homepage using 302 Temporary Redirects. These sites are tossing away valuable link authority! If your domain and homepage are different, determine how the domains forward visitors to the actual homepage. The correct way to forward visitors from one Web address to another is via a 301 Permanent Redirect. A permanent redirect tells search engines to take the authority from off-site links pointing at your domain and apply it to your rea [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate

The Difference In Keyword Research For SEO vs. PPC

Aug 28, 2012 at 11:11am ET by Jenny Halasz

Often when I complete a keyword research project for a client, they ask me about keywords I may not have included, or they want to know what the relative competition on the keywords looks like. This happens often enough that I thought I would remind everyone that while research for SEO and PPC can go hand in hand, they’re actually very different. First, think about what your goals are with each medium. What are you trying to do, and what constitutes success in that area? Next, think about how the keywords will be used. Where, when, how often? Finally, consider what your margin for erro [...]

Three Free Keyword Research Tools

Jul 3, 2012 at 12:34pm ET by Jenny Halasz

One of the hardest things to do in keyword research is to uncover related keywords. With that in mind, the tools I’m reviewing today all help identify related keywords that you may want to search in more detail. These tools are not a substitute for detailed keyword research like I talked about in my first series of articles. Rather, they may help to either identify those keywords that are most important to your competitors, or help find obscure opportunities where there may be little search volume, but there is also little competition. All of the tools I reviewed for this article are [...]

Keyword Research Tool Review: Google AdWords

Jun 12, 2012 at 12:23pm ET by Jenny Halasz

Keywords are important. I've heard from several potential clients recently who have talked to other "professionals" who told them keywords are no longer important for SEO, and that good content is all you really need. Here's the thing. Keywords are language. They'll always be important because words are how we communicate with each other. So until someone invents the microchip that can be implanted in your brain and read your thoughts without using words, you'll need to think about language in marketing. And I can only hope that those potential clients were told this by one seriously mis [...]

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