GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 12 - April 2010

XENU–CrawlsyourWebsiteand iden- tifies errors, link structure, page size, external links and many other things that are important to thehealthof your site. SEOSpyglass–Gives youadetailed re- port of your ownor a competitor’s back links and ranks them using important factors like follow-no follow, page rank and other factors. You can even import your Google WMC exported BL report and see if any of the back links to your sitearepotentiallyhazardous. EXCLUSIVE — VanguardSEO’s Dual Depth Back Link Checker –When ac- quiringaWebsitewewant toknowwho is linking to the sites that are linking to us, rather than just the first levelof link- ing, sowe built this free tool. - http:// toolbox.vanguardseo.com/td/ SEOMoz’s Linkscape – Another great tool for evaluating a competitor’s back links, anchor text, and discovering the strongest pagesona site. Majestic SEO – Looks at the back-link trends of competitors to determine whether a sudden surge in back links could be the reason for their rankings increase. Thenyou canuseoneofmany other tools (Link Assistant, ShoeMon- ey, SEOMoz) to identify those links that significantly changed their ranking and go after the same links or an equivalent linking structure. RankTracker–Thebest tool I’ve found so far for daily SERP (search engine rank positions) checking. It gives his- torical information and clear signs for increases and decreases from day to day, or pre-SEO to current day. It graphs everything over the full term of the campaign. It has human emulation and scheduling to reduce the chance of getting blocked. And my favorite: it queries any search engine anywhere as if youwere there, so IP concerns aren’t an issue. Firefox SEO Quake Plug-in – Great for a quick look at all of the important ranking factors of the top 10or just one site. This is a toolbar that allows you to set thevalues youwish to see, including PR, indexed pages, registration date, SBM references, DMOZ, Yahoo!, MSN, Baiduandmost other SEs, plus a tonof other informationon the fly. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 12 Niche and Long-tail Tar- geting – Imentioned this at the RoNewMedia Event in Stock- holm last year and I think a few people fell out of their seats: 25% of searches on Google that are searched each day have neverbeensearchedbefore. Now that,my friends, is a pretty significant stat! This is the reasoningbehindGoogle’sbuyingAp- plied Semantics years ago and theirmore recent claimsofgraduallycombining their current resultswithUniversal results and Latent Semantic Analysis. Doesn’t it all make sense? You take the phrases people search, look at the CTR and time on-site versus the results hierarchy, run them through a se- mantics formula for related terms, then pool the terms in relevant silos. Factor in back links and semantic associations and you’ll probablyhave apretty good start to a less-engineered set of search results. Well, that’s a sloppy example but you see what I’mgettingat. Long-tail and niche terms aren’t just im- portant to target for the low-hanging, high-converting traffic; they’re crucial in content andback-link anchor text, aswell as SBM, because Google doesn’t want to be “gamed” or see their result manipu- lated by guys/gals like you andme. They want related content from related sites, not a bunch of affiliate portals, andwith- out the best content, laid out in the best way, things are set to get a bit harder for anyone to rankwell if you’renot anopera- tor orbig-namebrand. Sohowdo you identify these LTphrases? For real-time I useHitTail. For building a database formy SQL use I prefer raw log files. Other options are Shoemoney’s key- word tool,WordTracker, or evenGoogle’s keyword tool used in conjunction with Shoemoney’s kw tool. There are also tools suchas IBP thatwill scrapeyour competi- tors’ sites and export anExcel file to your desktop to play around with (like adding your city or region or brand). I usemany of these techniques while building PPC (PayPerClick) accounts. Just be sure that you create silos with your kw strings and that youdon’t link tomultiplepagesusing closely related keywords, or Google may consider them tobe toocloselyrelatedand not index one or split the value between the two pages. If you use individual page titles and meta descriptions, along with nonduplicated content, then some back links andSBM should take careof this. Imentioned this once before: go after the low-hanging fruit. It convertsbetter. I also mentioned that 25 percent of all search queries have never been searched before. Well, this one is just as good: 60%+of all conversions come fromniche and long-tail terms. 13 Get FreeHelp – Tip 13? Yes, you’regettinga full baker’sdoz- enhere! This tip is very simple: read Top 12 SEO Tips for 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Most are still relevant. Sendmeanemail orpickup thephone– I don’t bite or charge. You are also invited toapproachmeataconferenceandhavea quickquestionor a 1-on-1 session. Lastly, I am sponsored by Euro Partners and as anaffiliateof EuroPartners youget 100% free access to me, my network and free hands-on advice – so if you aren’t an af- filiateget signedup! Those are my Top 12 SEO Tips for 2010 . I know I’m going to catch a bit of flak from colleagues for releasing some of this information–Iseem tobegoodatdo- ing that–but in theend it’sabout sharing informationandpassing it forward. If you have questions regarding any of these methods or programs email me or my team at VanguardSEO and we’ll give you freeadvice. I’ll be covering theseTop 12Tips for 2010 in greater detail, with Q&As and 1-on-1 sitdowns, all week during the CAC Am- sterdam conference, April 15-16. We are assembling some of the best SEOs in the industry for an SEO-related event rather than focusing on just Gaming or just Af- filiates.Don’tmiss it! 44 12 Top Secret SEO Tips