Hello Tool Lovers!

Today we have another neat Free tool that we just released in Beta mode called, “The Check Image Sizes, Alt Text, Header Checks and More Free SEO Tool“.

In addition, today we also upgraded the Find Broken Links, Redirects, and Google Sitemap Generator Free Tool.

Here’s what the new Check Image Sizes, Alt Text, Header Checks and More Free SEO Tool does.

You just enter in any URL.

The tool will spider that page, making a list of all image files, html files, and all other types of file that are linked within the code of the URL you entered.

The tool runs in real time so you can also watch the tool gather data about each file that is linked.

It gives you a nice summary telling you how often each file type is found on the page.

This tool then shows you a list of all the images, the width and height, the file size of each image, the alt text…and then you can mouse over the “view” column and see that image pop out in it’s actual size so you can see the image.

Below the image analysis there is a table showing all the other file types, and the header response for each of those files as well.

I hope you like it. I’ve never seen anything quite like it in the world of SEO tools… not that alone this tool is anything super duper amazing (though it is pretty cool),  but today we also added this tool into our Find Broken Links, Redirects, and Google Sitemap Generator Free Tool, which now gives more information on a page-level analysis by clicking on “Image Info +” in the crawl report analysis, which will take you to our newest tool. We’ve also added a new floating bar on the top of our crawler tool so you can more easily see the summary of page indexed, errors, and redirects.

The tools are all free.

If you like them, all I ask is for you to tell your friends about them too via Liking them, Tweeting them, Google Plus them, Link to ‘em, Review them…yada yada.

If you find bugs, please report them.  These tools are all very new, and with your help, we can make them even better.

We’re on a tool roll…and hold on, we’ll have several being released every week for as long as I can see into the future.

I’m Feeling Lucky Today.

All SEOs and webmasters worth their salt know about and use Google Webmaster Tools. These free tools give webmasters and IT departments insights into what Google sees when it crawls registered sites, shows the scope of how a site is crawled and indexed, offers configuration settings to control how the site is managed, and even provides some helpful feedback on possible site improvements/error corrections.

Given that Google owns approximately 66% of the United States market for search query traffic, registering for and using Google Webmaster Tools is a no-brainer.

Bing, the search engine from Microsoft, offers its own set of free webmaster tools. For a long time, a lot of folks gave Bing short shrift, and that attitude has extended to its Webmaster Tools. After all, back in the days when it was known as Microsoft Live Search, its marketshare was at best around 10%. However, in 2009, Microsoft rebranded Live Search into Bing, and accordingly invested a ton of resources into improving its index size, its interface (to such an extent that Google has begun emulating original Bing features), and its relevance algorithm.

And just as importantly, in 2010, Yahoo!, which had been the #2 search engine by marketshare in the US, abandoned its organic search index and began showing results using the Bing index. As a result, the domestic search marketshare of the Bing/Yahoo! collective is now in the 30% range (depending upon whom you ask) and is incrementally increasing.

The ability to gain insight into what 30% of the US search market is seeing when it searches for your website is a compelling enough reason to consider Bing Webmaster Tools to be a vital part of your SEO toolbox.

Bing’s tools in concept are similar to Google’s, in that they give you insight into and control of how your site is crawled and indexed. But Bing’s tools and presentation are not copies of Google’s, so let’s talk about what Bing Webmaster Tools has to offer and why you should register your site.

Disclaimer: I cut my SEO teeth working for Bing Webmaster Center back in 2008 through 2010. I revised the documentation for the old Live Search Tools and wrote from scratch the documentation for the first release of the new version of the Bing Webmaster Tools. But time goes on, and the Bing tools have evolved substantially since that first release. This is my chance to take a look at what they’ve done since then. And just for the record, I personally use both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools in my work. So should you!

A baseline introduction to the new Bing Webmaster Tools was written by yours truly back in 2010 (parts one and two). But as I said, much has changed since then. Let’s take a look at some of the most important functions and their new, exciting features.

Setup and settings

Overall. Bing Webmaster Tools can be quickly described as charts, charts, and more charts! Everything is laid out in a visual presentation of your site’s data. The charts are typically interactive so that you can select a point on a timeline and get specific data. You can also change and expand the chart’s default timeline view, as the tool maintains no less than six months’ worth of historical data.

What’s new in setup and settings

Silverlight is no longer required. While the initial implementation of the Bing Webmaster Tools required Microsoft Silverlight to access and present chart data, they abandoned that last year in favor of HTML5. This move improved access to all modern browsers, including those in mobile devices, and provided a notable performance boost as well.

Site registration options. You can now verify ownership of your site as part of the registration to use Bing Webmaster Tools in one of three methods. The newest method, to add a discrete CNAME record to your DNS, is in addition to the previous methods of either uploading a custom XML file or adding a snippet of <meta> tag code to page. All of the data needed for verification is provided by Bing. Find this at Home > Add Site.

Verify Ownership dialog box in Bing Webmaster Tools

Add users to the account. The days of creating new Bing Webmaster Tools accounts, one for each user, for managing one website are over. Bing now allows you to add additional users to the main site account. Better yet, you can add restrictions to each new user, limiting their access if desired to a subdomain or a subfolder of the site root. You can also specify whether the new user is a full administrator for the specified site access, is limited to read/modify rights, or has read-only rights. IT departments will appreciate that. Access this via Home > click a registered site > Users > Add User.

Add User dialog box in Bing Webmaster Tools

Email alerts. Bing now enables account holders to opt-in to email alerts from Bing Webmaster Center when problems are detected with a registered site. You can sign up for Webmaster email alerts for crawling errors, Sitemap problems, index issues and detected malware. This is configured from Home > Preferences.

Preferences dialog box in Bing Webmaster Tools

Technical resources. Bing has added a link to a new library of technical content called Help and How-To guides, covering the documentation of the individual Webmaster Tools, How-To guides, and other pertinent information of interest to SEOs and webmasters. Get to this at Home > Webmaster API.

Webmaster Tools API. All site data available within your Bing Webmaster Tools account is accessible through the API.

Webmaster API Authentication screen in Bing Webmaster Tools

Dashboard

Overall. This page remains the Tools home for a site. It’s a snapshot of data covering the last 30 days, showing numeric data (including current trend percentage) for Clicks, Impressions, Pages Indexed, and Pages Crawled. Hover over these figures to get more data. Interactive graphs are also presented covering Traffic Summary (Impressions and Clicks), Index Summary (Pages Indexed) and Crawl Summary (Pages Crawled and Pages with Crawl Errors). Many of the tools offer data export in the form of CSV files. Access this via Home > click a registered site.

Crawl

Overall. Bing offers deep historical data on pages crawled and a separate view showing pages with crawl errors. It also offers access to settings for customizing crawler behavior, data feeds, and markup validation. Access this via Home > click a registered site > Crawl.

What’s new in Crawl

Settings. You can now chart on a daily, GMT-based time graph when and how deeply Bingbot should crawl your site. This helps minimize search crawler activity during your site’s busiest business times. Also, owners of sites built in AJAX can set Bingbot to crawl escaped fragmented URLs containing #! . Access this via Home > click a registered site > Crawl > Crawl Settings.

Crawl Settings screen in Bing Webmaster Tools

Crawler details. This tool now shows all pages returning HTTP status codes 301, 302, 400-level and 500-level errors, as well as detected malware infected pages and pages determined to be significant that are blocked by your site’s robots.txt file. Clicking on the detail line pulls up a list of all URLs affected by the condition. Access this via Home > click a registered site > Crawl > Crawl Details.

Crawl Details screen in Bing Webmaster Tools

Data feeds. Bing has expanded the number of supported data feeds to the Bing index to include standard XML-based Sitemaps, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0, and RSS 2.0 feeds. Webmasters can submit, remove, and resubmit feeds using this tool. It also shows when the feed was last crawled, if there were any errors with the crawl, and how many URLs were submitted. Access this via Home > click a registered site > Crawl > Sitemaps (XML, Atom, RSS).

Sitemaps screen in Bing Webmaster Tools

Markup validation. Note that this confusingly-named, beta-level tool is not an HTML markup validator (you still need to go to the W3C for that). It is actually a microdata markup validator. The goal of this tool is to ensure Bing can correctly interpret any microdata coding used within the page (assuming it exists; if not, the tool returns an error message). The tool validates the following markup languages:

• HTML Microdata
• Microformats
• RDFa
• Schema.org
• Open Graph

Access this via Home > click a registered site > Crawl > Markup Validator.

Markup Validator screen in Bing Webmaster Tools

Index

Overall. This collection of tools is your glimpse into the Bing index for your site’s URLs. You can see how many pages were indexed over time and see details of that data using Index Explorer. You can directly submit URLs for immediate indexing (up to 10 per day for a maximum of 50 per month). You can also manage indexed URLs by blocking specific URLs or directories from your site. You can see how many sites are linking to yours in aggregate, get details of which sites link to which URLs, and see how this has changed over time. You can even submit dynamic URL parameters to be ignored by Bingbot to mitigate index content duplication (Bing calls this URL Normalization). Access this via Home > click a registered site > Index.

What’s new in Index

Manage the deep links SERP display. When deep links (what Google calls Sitelinks) are present, you can manage which links appear in which order in the Bing search engine results page (SERP) for a given URL. Note that you can’t choose to have deep links implemented if they do not already appear, and you can’t select alternative links to show. You can only manage the deep link URLs Bing has automatically selected for your site by blocking and reordering the existing deep link selections. Access this via Home > click a registered site > Index > Deep Links.

Deep Links in the Bing SERP

Block more URL parameters. Bing has upped the number of URL parameters that you can block to 50. Access this via Home > click a registered site > Index > URL Normalization.

URL Normalization screen in Bing Webmaster Tools

Traffic

Overall. This tool shows you, over a historical timeline, how traffic to your site has changed. You can see an aggregate view broken down by keywords and a separate view broken down by page. Access this via Home > click a registered site > Traffic.

What’s new in Traffic

Data sources. The Traffic data now includes aggregate numbers from Bing and Yahoo! on Impressions, Clicks, and CTR.

Rank and Traffic Stats screen in Bing Webmaster Tools

adCenter integration. The Traffic Summary view now offers Microsoft adCenter traffic data, including Average Cost Per Click and Keywords data to the chart data. You can even find and buy new keywords opportunities in adCenter starting directly in the Traffic data section.

adCenter data integration into Bing Webmaster Tools

Keywords

New tool. This is a new tool, accessible from Bing Webmaster Tools but apparently not fully integrated within the Webmaster Tools framework (oddly, you lose navigational access to go back into the other Webmaster Tools once you click the Keyword Research  tool). Access this via Home > click a registered site > Keywords. You can also access the Keyword Research tool externally, but you’ll still need to log into your account to use it.

The Keyword Research tool provides raw (no rounding!), organic Bing query volume data as well as adCenter CPC data and costs on the keyword or phrase you entered, along with related keywords and phrases. The data can be filtered by country, language, and date range. You can also enable a Strict setting to narrow the results to the exact phrase entered. There’s also a History function that remembers your last 25 queries so you can easily go back to quickly compare results.

Keyword Research screen in Bing Webmaster Tools

Good moves

Bing has done a nice job of turning around their Webmaster Tools project from what used to be commonly perceived as low-value tools back in the Live Search days. They have invested resources in this needed space to encourage webmasters and SEOs to devote time and effort to their Bing index standings. Bringing Duane Forrester over from managing the SEO effort for MSN was a masterstroke, as he is a working SEO at heart. His contribution to the improvements cannot be underestimated.

Keep an eye on Bing Webmaster Tools. Duane and his team want to help us succeed, and their continuously-evolving tools are strong steps forward in achieving that goal.

I really lucked out after moderating the morning session at SES London on Social Media Tools by joining the SEO Tools of the Trade session that followed. Both sessions had great speakers and I’ve decided to combine my notes for both into one post about social media automation tools and SEO tools.

The sources for the SEO tool recommendations include:  Richard Baxter of SEOGadget, Dave Naylor from Bronco, and Neil Walker from Just Search. The social media tool recommendations came from Andrew Girdwood from bigmouthmedia, Paul Madden from Automica and Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics.

Before I get into the list of tools, I feel compelled to share a quote that I’ve often used to give people context for tool use, since it’s so important to use them for scale, efficiency and to gain a competitive advantage:

“Tools are only as effective as the expertise of the person using them.”

I think that’s an important perspective, because some online marketers use a small handful of tools but their expertise is very deep. Therefore, they get a tremendous amount of productivity from them. Others use many, many tools without deep expertise in anyone area and as a result, effectiveness may be lacking. Once you find a handful of tools that work for you, get really, really good at using them. At the same time, always be open to trying new tools as they come along.

Ok, let’s start off with SEO Tools:

1. RedFly GoogleGlobal Firefox & Chrome Extension – See SERPs in other countries
2. Netcraft - Hosting, DNS, site uptime and many other features
3. MajesticSEO – Link tracking, research and analysis. Export links by country code (TopRank uses MajesticSEO
4. Copyscape – Find copies of your content elsewhere on the web to avoid duplicate content issues
5. Google Webmaster Tools – How does Googlebot interact with your website. Check for crawl errors that could affect inclusion and ranking of your content
6. Firebug – Firefox extension for reviewing code, look for hidden text issues that could affect search engine penalties
7.  Google Page Speed - Check the load time of your web pages. Slow loading pages are not your friend and certainly nothing Google will reward you for
8. Pingdom – Monitor uptime of your website. If your website is down neither customers or search engines can get to it.
9. Xenu Linksleuth or Screaming Frog to spider your website
10. Open Site Explorer – Download data and segment anchor text for identifying good/bad inbound links
11. KISSinsights – Find sales objections and test them with a super short survey
12. Fivesecondtest – Show an image and see what people think of it. Analyzes most prominent areas of your design
13. Google Website Optimizer - A/B test your page designs
14. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Official keyword research tool from Google
15. Spyfu – Perform competitive PPC and SEO keyword research
16. Alexa - Wide range of traffic and keyword information about websites
17. SEMRush – Get competitive SEO and PPC keyword information on websites found on Google.com and many other country domains
18. KeywordSpy - Keyword research tool
19. Wordtracker - Keyword research tool
20. Wordstream – Keyword research tool
21. Keyword Discovery – Keyword research tool
22. Socialmention – Social search tool allows you to download to csv file of social keywords and influences that you can pivot to see what what kinds of mentions are you getting, on what kinds of social media sites and how it compares to the competition.
23. Analytics SEO – page load time, pages indexed, ranking overview, reveal potential keywords, next opportunity keywords, reporting.
24. Sistrix toolbox – Tracks PageRank over time, ranking, position, search volume, traffic index
25. Searchmetrics Essentials - Suite of SEO and social media tracking tools
26. GTmetrix - Compare multiple sites for their page download speed
27. Link Research Tools – Link research and profiling tools
28. Keyword Density - DaveN tool providing a wide variety of data points about a website according to a specific keyword phrases
29. maxmind – Geographic ip detection down to the city level
30. wipmania – Geographic ip location tool

Social Media Automation Tools (Some are a bit Grayhat SEO)

1. Evri – Social content aggregator
2. Trapit – Topical news aggregator that leans your preferences with AI
3. Strawberryjam – Shows the links your social network shares the most
4. ifttt – Rules based automation of actions through social channels/media sites
5. Paper.li – Crawls links contained within RSS feeds, Twitter lists you supply and creates an online newspaper that auto-tweets the most popular twitter handles that share
6. Pearltrees.com – Tool for aggregating content and sharing content with a rich visual interface
7. Tweetguru Multi – DM up to 12 people on Twitter at the same time
8. RSS Graffiti - Pull in RSS data feeds into a Facebook page automatically
9. Tweetadder – Auto follows people on Twitter (um, kinda spammy no?)
10. Socialoomph – Schedule social content and status updates (Twitter and Facebook)
11. dlvr.it - Takes a RSS feed, filters content based on rules and publishes to Twitter, Facebook and other social channels
12. Odesk – Not a tool but a resource to outsource redundant tasks. Use for research, writing small content, etc.
13. Socialenhancer – In beta: Auto reply to tweets by keyword. Export followers for analysis
14. Tweetdeck – Twitter management tool
15. Hootsuite – Twitter, Facebook and other social channels management tool

Richard Baxter, Dave Naylor, Neil Walker

There you go. I hope you find these tools useful. Some are quite old and some are new. Some are a bit iffy in terms of being more mechanical than meaningful for social engagement. Take care when checking them out. Tools can be a bit of a time suck so think about what your goals are, what tasks do you want to achieve. Look at these sites if you have time or ask other SEO and Social SEO professionals about them to decide what you want to try or test out.

What are some of your favorite SEO tools? What tools do you use to improve efficiency and automate redundant tasks when it comes to Social SEO actions? Would you like to see us do more reviews of tools?

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
45 SEO and Social Media Tools #SESLondon | http://www.toprankblog.com

[Note from Lee: This week's guest post is from someone I've known  from the Search Marketing world for a long time.  Bryan Eisenberg is a Wall Street Journal & New York Times Best Selling Author, popular keynote speaker and well respected guru in all things related to marketing and conversion optimization. We serve on the SES Conference Board of Advisors together and as he's elevated his status in the business world, has always been helpful and full of practical advice. You'll see that in this post about several tools for which he is an advisor.]

True or false? You never seem to have enough time in the day to get your job done.

If you answered “true”, then lets explore some tools/services that will maximize your time and effectiveness. Marshall McLuhan said “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” If the explosion of tools to improve your website and marketing efforts over the last 3 years is any indication of how we are being shaped then there may be hope for the time and resource starved.

If you agree that content is king then we should serve a feast that uses our customers’ own words.  All we have to do is leverage all the  social and search data that uses our customers’ words. I offer that as a common sense recommendation. However, all too often I see people (even experienced SEMs) failing to leverage this data in their everyday workflow. Don’t you think that access to search and social intelligence while writing content that it would make you a more effective writer?

A recent study I co-authored helped prove that it provided:  a significant and consistent impact on search engine results, an increase in reader engagement. and an increase in conversion. It did all that and  improved content relevance across a variety of writers and online content types who used a new content coaching tool called Inbound Writer. It’s free for up to 8 documents and month and costs only $19.95 for unlimited documents.

Never write an ad your landing page can’t cash! Do you know who the most successful PPC advertiser of all time is? Amazon! That is because they built their PPC program opposite of the way most people do it. They built and continuously optimize each of their product and category pages to convert at maximum efficiency. They have loads of content to help customers make a buying decision. Only then do they focus on what ads would drive you to that page and then what keywords should trigger that ad. Most advertisers start at the keyword first. One way to avoid that mistake is using a tool like TagCrowd.

TagCrowd will make a word cloud from any text you paste in (i.e. a press release), a plain text file you can upload or a web page url. The larger that words appear on the tag cloud the more times those words appear on the page (tweak the setting for a minimum frequency of 2 or 3 to filter out some noise). One quick look at the tag cloud should give you a good clue about what your landing page is about. Use those words in your ads and as starting points for the keywords you’ll target.

Example of TopRank Newsroom Tag Cloud

What if you could get an army of writers who would compete on a regular basis to improve the effectiveness of your PPC and FaceBook ads and the only time you ever paid them was when they beat your best effort? Well thanks to crowd-sourcing company BoostCTR you can take advantage of that opportunity today. While this company is relatively new,  they have been producing guaranteed lifts in click through rates (CTRs) and conversions (by around 30%) for their clients. In fact, they are so confident about their service you can get started with a free trial. You pick the ad group you want their network to optimize, then they will start a contest where their writers compete in an A/B test against your best “control” ad (you pick which of the variations you choose to be included in the contest) and you only pay when you have a winner.

I hope these tool recommendations were useful to you. As an online tool junkie I review tons of other great online marketing tools you can leverage to improve your website and marketing efforts but hopefully these 3 will give you a good head start over your competition.

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
3 Tools To Instantly Boost Your Online Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com

If a user is signed in into his or her Google account, their searches will now become encrypted by default through a secure connection.Google states this change will only occur when searching on Google.com and being signed in.

Why the Need for SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Encryption?

Google has mentioned that search has become personal and customised, further evolving into a more exclusive experience, the need to protect personalised search results has become further apparent.

By the time you are reading this, the Google.com search engine would have already changed to SSL and be fully released to anyone searching using Google.com and logged into their Google accounts. You will know if your search is encrypted when you see the same little lock symbol on the bottom of your web browser you see when you’re shopping online.

What Do SSL Encrypted Search Results Really Mean?

No one except Google and the web browser can see what searches are currently being conducted. Referral data is now out of bounds to anyone, including third-party tracking software and Google Analytics!

Webmasters will begin to lose valuable data they have become dependant on – understanding which keywords their visitors have found their websites with. However, referral search engine data will still be available to third-party tracking software and Google Analytics.

What is the Percentage of Users Logged into Google and Searching?

As mentioned in the first paragraph, the new Google SSL search will only be implemented on Google.com and only for those who are signed into their Google accounts. Head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts suggests the impact can be measured as a single digit percentage of all Google searchers on Google.com

How Will AdSense and other Ad Networks Display the Correct Ads?

SSL will not interfere with referrer blocking when it comes to ads. Google will continue to allow this as Google feels there is a need to provide this data to advertisers so they can continue to monitor, examine and tweak their advertising campaigns to deliver what is best and most appropriate to users.

It would be silly if AdWords or AdSense ads were displaying irrelevant or off-topic ads and not basing them on the keywords a user is searching Google for.

However, the Future is not so Bleak

Google Webmaster Tools reports the top 1000 search terms people are using to reach websites over a 30 day period. Thankfully, Google has stated this will remain, and I’m sure many webmasters are rejoicing. Unfortunately, conversion tracking is out the door, only the search queries used to find your site using Google will be available.

Referrer data is gradually leaving the search engines, but according to Google, the lack of referrer data being passed onto web analytical software is only going to impact a very small number of Google.com searches. Anyone not signed into their Google account will still pass along their referrer data (including search terms) to all forms of web analytics programs out there. This will still leave plenty of data out there for SEOs and CROs to play with and obtain the best possible optimisation results.

If a user is signed in into his or her Google account, their searches will now become encrypted by default through a secure connection. Google states  this change will only occur when searching on Google.com and being signed in.

Why the Need for SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Encryption?

Google has mentioned  that search has become personal and customised, further evolving into a more exclusive experience, the need to protect personalised search results has become further apparent.

By the time you are reading this, the Google.com search engine would have already changed to SSL and be fully released to anyone searching using Google.com and logged into their Google accounts. You will know if your search is encrypted when you see the same little lock symbol on the bottom of your web browser you see when you’re shopping online.

What Do SSL Encrypted Search Results Really Mean?

No one except Google and the web browser can see what searches are currently being conducted. Referral data is now out of bounds to anyone, including third-party tracking software and Google Analytics!

Webmasters will begin to lose valuable data they have become dependant on – understanding which keywords their visitors have found their websites with. However, referral search engine data will still be available to third-party tracking software and Google Analytics.

What is the Percentage of Users Logged into Google and Searching?

As mentioned in the first paragraph, the new Google SSL search will only be implemented on Google.com and only for those who are signed into their Google accounts. Head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts suggests the impact can be measured as a single digit percentage of all Google searchers on Google.com

How Will AdSense and other Ad Networks Display the Correct Ads?

SSL will not interfere with referrer blocking when it comes to ads. Google will continue to allow this as Google feels there is a need to provide this data to advertisers so they can continue to monitor, examine and tweak their advertising campaigns to deliver what is best and most appropriate to users.

It would be silly if AdWords or AdSense ads were displaying irrelevant or off-topic ads and not basing them on the keywords a user is searching Google for.

However, the Future is not so Bleak

Google Webmaster Tools reports the top 1000 search terms people are using to reach websites over a 30 day period. Thankfully, Google has stated this will remain, and I’m sure many webmasters are rejoicing. Unfortunately, conversion tracking is out the door, only the search queries used to find your site using Google will be available.

Referrer data is gradually leaving the search engines, but according to Google, the lack of referrer data being passed onto web analytical software is only going to impact a very small number of Google.com searches. Anyone not signed into their Google account will still pass along their referrer data (including search terms) to all forms of web analytics programs out there. This will still leave plenty of data out there for SEOs and CROs to play with and obtain the best possible optimisation results.

Google to Implement SSL Encryption to Searches was originally published on BruceClay.com.au, an SEO services and SEO tools provider.

By now you know I’m as sold as one can be on the intersection of Social Media, SEO and Content Marketing. It’s the essence of the core principles of information Discovery, Consumption and Engagement that I talk about in Optimize and at conferences like PRSA International in Orlando this week.

Information production, sharing and consumption is accelerating faster than marketers (or consumers) can keep up with. A lot of that information is user generated content from social sharing and networking sites. Internet Marketers have long been savvy about creating, optimizing and promoting content that’s findable and relevant for target audiences.  Marketers aren’t the only corporate departments creating content in need of an audience though.

Public Relations, Media Relations, Corporate Communications, Investor Relations and many other groups part of corporate MarCom publish content to the web. Audiences may vary, from journalists and reporters doing story research to investors and potential business partners. Increasingly, PR departments are publishing direct to consumer news content, ala “brand as publisher”.

My presentation at PRSA International in Orlando focused on how PR practitioners can realize the emerging opportunities for shifts in consumer information trends, how PR content can be optimized and socialized, tools to scale and practical social media optimization tactics to elevate search visibility of social media and social news content. Here’s the embedded deck from Slideshare:

Here are the specific SEO tactics for social media in this presentation and links to other more in-depth articles on those topics:

• Blog SEO Tips – Blog Optimization – also check out our Blogging category with nearly 8 years of blog marketing tips.
• Facebook SEO - Facebook SEO Tips: Optimizing for an Audience of 800 Million
• LinkedIn SEO – Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile to Improve SEO for Your Company
• Twitter SEO –  How to Use Twitter for SEO
• YouTube SEO – 5 Basic Tips for Video Optimization
• Google+ SEO – How Google+ Will Affect SEO for Your Website

Kikolani has some great social content SEO tips posted recently as well.

Also, here are the tools mentioned in the presentation:

• RavenTools – Paid tool. For basic SEO project management & reporting.
• SocialMention – Free social media search engine and social topic search tool.
• Google Keywords Tool – Free. Basic tool for researching which words/phrases are most used on Google and how competitive they are.
• Google Insights – Free. Shows trends and comparison of keyword phrase popularity (interest) over time plus geographic information.
• Ubersuggest – Free. Handy tool that makes Google autocomplete suggested search phrases usable. Works for Google.com and Google News queries.
• Scribe – Paid tool. WordPress plugin and standalone web service that provides real-time feedback on article keyword optimization.
• Majestic SEO – Paid tool. Think of this as a clipping report for links, including information about quantity, quality and type. Has a historical feature that’s quite handy for trending.
• SEMRush – Paid tool. Want to know what your site or your competitors’ sites are ranking for organically on Google? And their pay per click ads? This is the tool. Also has a trending and comparison feature.

There are many, many more Social Media Optimization and straight SEO tools out there – certainly many more that are advanced, private or for enterprise sized sites. These are basic, easy to use tools that are free or low cost that Public Relations and Communications professionals can use to optimize their news and social content for better keyword relevancy. More relevant (and links) means better visibility in search and a better user experience.

Thanks to PRSA for another great International conference!

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
Boost Your Digital PR & Marketing Skills with Social Media Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com

Although rankings are important for SEO, once you have them, persuading more visitors to click through to the website is the next step towards the ultimate end goal of increased sales/conversions.

One of the ways that you can improve the click through rate from the search engine results pages (SERPs) is to attract attention and stand out from other results. Eye catching Meta title and description tags are a good starting point, but you can take this even further by utilising rich snippets.

The rel=”author” attribute has recently been introduced by Google to generate rich snippet displays that are very inviting.  If implemented correctly, you may see that an image of the article author appears next to the description of the search result, as below:

So the question begs: How can I replicate this and make my search results stand out with a picture of a handsome blogger?

There are three ways in which you can implement the rel=”author” attribute to attempt to trigger the photo display in the SERPs.

Method #1: Single author site

This is the simplest way. All you have to do is place a link on your post, anywhere on the page and point it towards your own Google Profile, with a rel=”author” attribute attached.

After that, ensure that you also link back to your site, from your Google Profile (Go to About> Links section).

Method #2: Multi-author site with no bio pages

This is the simpler of the two methods for multi-author sites. What you can do on every post, is link from each page to the various authors’ Google Profiles. This can be done by creating a contextual link with the author’s name on the post.

Do not forget to have the authors link back to the site from their Google Profile.

Method #3: Multi-author site with bio pages

Some sites actually link from the author’s name in the post to a bio or an author profile on the site.

The technique to get this happening on such a site is to firstly add a rel=”author” attribute to the link pointing to the author bio on the website and then link from the bio, with a rel=”me” attribute, to the relevant Google Profile.

Again, do not forget to have the authors link back to the site from their Google Profile.

For those who are more visually inclined, I’ve created a diagram to show you how it all works:

I hope that you now have a clearer idea of how you can get a handsome photo of yourself (or your authors) into the search results. It is a new feature, so there is no guarantee that if the above methods are implemented that the images will appear in the SERPS.

To check what authorship data Google can extract, use the Rich Snippets Testing tool:

For more information on how to implement rel=author, you can also check out their YouTube video.

Triggering Rich Snippets from rel=”author” attributes. was originally published on BruceClay.com.au, an SEO services and SEO tools provider.

The new version of analytics (v5) became available to all users from April 2011. Other than its new look, it has many new features for helping provide better analysis and SEO reports. The analytics team is still working to give us more surprises over the next few months. I will be covering the most useful features that were missing in the old version of analytics.

Simplified Custom Reports

The Custom Reports section of the new analytics has become more advanced and manageable compared to the older version. Now users can create new categories that group the related Custom Reports simply by clicking a few buttons. There is also an option to migrate all custom reports from the old version of analytics.

Another improvement is the ability to quickly re-order metrics and dimensions using drag and drop feature. All these simple features help to create reports the way we want in short amount of time. To learn how to create custom reports in the new Google Analytics, visit the custom reports article in the Google Analytics Blog.

The new Map Overlay reports

In the new version of analytics, we can now see region level maps of over 170 countries. The previous version had the map overlay feature within the visitors > demographics report but now it is available in other sections of report. This feature can help provide a broader view for analysing geographical data.

New map overlay feature (Source: Google Analytics Blog)

To try this feature, simply login to Analytics, select the new version if you have not already done so. Go to the Map Overlay report that is under Visitors > Mobile > Devices and then click on any country. To see cities, simply click on the City and in this view, you might be able to see a magnifying glass that appears when cities are clustered closely together just like in the image above.

New metrics and dimensions

The new metrics are always better because we get to do deeper analysis of our website using many choices. The analytics team added 45 new metrics and dimensions in the custom reports. The custom reports now can also be explored without making changes to the actual report just by selecting secondary dimensions in the explorer tab.

Categorised metrics and dimensions (Source: Google Analytics Blog)

The new metrics and dimensions cover more variety of areas such as social, e-commerce, mobile and advertising. To make it easier to use, all the dimensions and metrics are now categorised.

New categories

Another new feature of Google Analytics v5 is the new categories that can be found in the left navigation. The most useful including:

• Social reports: Once you have implemented the tracking code on your website, you will be able to measure the impact of social interactions on your websites. The social engagement report shows behaviour of your site for visits that include clicks on sharing buttons like Follow, Like and +1.The Social actions report shows the amount of social media activity on the site (Tweets,+1’s, Facebook Likes etc).Social pages report shows the pages on the site that drives the most social actions.

• Site Speed: Site speed has become an important factor in SEO, and the new version of analytics now reports on the site speed. This report can be useful to answer questions like: Which landing pages are the slowest? Or how does page load speed vary across geographies?

To setup the site speed report, you have to enable it in the analytics and update your tracking code. The detailed instruction on configuring and using site speed can be found here.

I hope these new features will help you do better analytics and create good reports. Stay tuned to Bruce Clay Australia’s blog for more Internet Marketing news

Most useful new features in Google Analytics v5 was originally published on BruceClay.com.au, an SEO services and SEO tools provider.

WordPress has come a long way since its early days as just a humble blogging platform. With each new release WordPress continues to take significant steps into becoming a fully fledged CMS. Combined with its ease of use and large plug-in repository it is fast becoming the platform of choice for many small to medium sized websites. Given that this is the case we have put together a simple two part step by step guide which walks you through the entire process of ensuring your WordPress installation is as search engine friendly as possible without requiring a significant investment of your time.

Note: This post assumes you have a fresh and working installation of WordPress on your server. For instructions on how to install WordPress check out this guide from the WordPress team on their official website.

Step 1 – Upgrade WordPress

After logging into your new WordPress installation it is a good idea to quickly ensure that you are in fact running the latest version of the software. If there is an available update WordPress will notify you with a status bar at the top of the dashboard.

Step 2 – Rewrite URLs

Once that is taken care of, we will move onto the default URL structure of your website. By default WordPress places content at a deeper URL level than we would recommend in most cases. While it may be appropriate in some instances, for most of you out there it makes more sense to ensure your URLs are shorter and don’t contain any unnecessary levels.

We recommend that you make things as simple as possible and go with something like http://www.example.com/example-page/ – to do that simply navigate to the Permalink option of the right hand navigation under Settings, click on “Custom Structure” and include the variable “/%postname%/” as demonstrated below.

Note: If you would like to customise the structure of your URLs to something a little different, WordPress have put together a comprehensive permalink guide on how to do that at their official page.

Step 3 – Ensure your website is crawlable

Next you will want to make sure that search engines can actually crawl your website by ensuring that you are not blocking them using your robots.txt file. To do that: click on Privacy under the Settings menu to view your current configuration.

Note: By default WordPress allows all search engines to crawl your website from the start. However, you may want to consider changing this option to block search engines from spidering your website until it is actually ready to go live. However, ensure that if you do this that you remember to switch it back later on. We have seen several examples of this in the real world where a website is launched and the developers forgot to update the robots.txt file to allow search engines. This step is ultimately up to you, we will re-visit the configuration of the robots.txt file at a later stage in this tutorial.

Step 4 – Stop spam ruining your website

If you have ever run even a mildly successful website that allows users to post comments, then we are sure you are all too familiar with what a problem spam can become. Luckily, WordPress ships with a plug-in by default which does an excellent job of filtering out spam automagically so that you don’t have to. The problem however is that you have to manually enable this in WordPress in order for it to do its job. Start by clicking on the plug-ins menu on the right hand side where you will then be presented with a list of the plug-ins installed (but not enabled) by default.

We are interested in the first one labelled Akismet. In order to get Akismet up and running you will need to do the following:

1. Click the activate link below where it says Akismet.
2. You will need to enter an API key in order for Akismet to work. You can get one here from the official Akismet website.
3. Click on the Akismet configuration link from the plug-ins screen where you activated it originally.
4. Enter your new API key and click “Update Options”.

Step 5 – Enable Webmaster Tools Access

One of the first things you are going to want to do when you launch your site is use the Webmaster Tools options available from Google, Bing and Yahoo to see any diagnostic information regarding the crawling and indexing of your website. Normally, this would be done via uploading a set of verification files via FTP or alternatively making changes to the code of your website. Fortunately, WordPress takes all the hassle out of this step for us through the use of plug-ins.

One of the more popular plug-ins out there is one called WordPress SEO by Yoast, which provides a number of useful functions which we will be using, including providing automatic verification for our Webmaster Tools accounts. In order to install and activate the plug-in you will need to perform the following steps:

1. Click the “Add New” option in the Plug-Ins menu.
2. Search for “Yoast”
3. Find the result that says “WordPress SEO by Yoast”
4. Click the “Install Now” link immediately below it
5. Sit back and let WordPress perform its magic (i.e. automatically download and install the plug-in)
6. Click the “Activate” link to enable the plug-in.

You should now have a new menu on your left hand navigation titled “SEO”. Once you have then clicked the “Dashboard” link from the menu you should see the following screen:

Towards the bottom you will see a section titled “Webmaster Tools”. From here you can simply enter the verification codes provided to you from the various search engine’s webmaster tools websites. Once you have done this you will need to click “Save Settings” and the plug-in will automatically insert the necessary code into the <head></head> section of your website, thus allowing you to complete the verification process with each of the major search engines.

Step 6 – Generate XML Sitemaps

While XML Sitemaps aren’t a direct ranking factor, they are however a great way of helping to ensure that your content is spidered and indexed by search engines. As such they are something we highly recommend all websites spend the time to create. We have seen many instances where clients have paid thousands of dollars to their developers (not to mention many hours of their time) to implement XML Sitemaps across their website, however, WordPress combined with Yoast’s plug-in turn this into a 60 second task. To get started click on XML Sitemaps link from the Yoast SEO menu to be presented with the following screen.

Depending on the goals of your website the options you will want to select here may be slightly different. However as a minimum we recommend you click the following options:

• Enable XML Sitemap functionality
• Ping Google
• Ping Bing
• Ping Yahoo
• Ping Ask.com

Once you have done that click the “Save XML Sitemaps Settings” and browse over to http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml to confirm that it is working correctly.

Note: While there is an option in there that allows you to add images to your XML Sitemap, we don’t currently recommend using this option. There have been several reports of webmasters who claim that combining multiple file types (such as pages, images, video etc…) resulted in indexation issues in Google. Until there is better support for this we recommend that if you wish to include images in your XML Sitemap that you do so in a completely separate file.

Step 7 – Exclude Low Value Pages from Indexation

If you already actively follow the SEO industry then you are no doubt already aware of the Panda update (and its subsequent updates) released by Google earlier this year. For everyone else, here’s the extremely quick and dirty version. Google made a significant update to how it approaches “low quality content”. When this update was first released many website owners saw a significant drop in their rankings and subsequently their traffic and revenue.

One thing that all these sites seemed to have in common was that they contained (to varying degrees) low value content which was subsequently what the focus of the Panda update was aimed at addressing.

As such, we recommend ensuring that low quality pages on your website are not indexed in order to help alleviate some of that risk. We can do that by clicking on the “Indexation” link from the SEO menu. At that point you should be presented with the following screen:

For now we are going to ignore that first option that covers the various Facebook OpenGraph settings and come back to that in a part 2 of this guide. What we want to focus on instead are the options listed below. We have outlined some settings below that cover many of the generic settings recommended for most websites. As with all of the recommendations outlined in this post, you should assess these generic guidelines in conjunction with what is appropriate for your site.

We have listed the settings below to correspond with the sub-headings outlined on the indexation configuration page.

Indexation Rules

• Search result pages
• Login & Register Pages
• All admin pages
• Subpages of archives and taxonomies
• Author archives (assuming you DON”T have multiple authors)
• Date-based archives
• Tag archives

Internal Nofollow Settings

• Nofollow login and registration links
• Nofollow comments links

Archive Settings

• Disable the author archives (assuming you don’t have multiple authors)
• Disable the date-based archives

Robots Meta Settings

• Add noodp meta robots tag sitewide
• Add noydir meta robots tag sitewide

Clean Up <head> section

• Hide WordPress Generator
• Hide WLW Manifest Links (assuming you have no need to use Windows Live Writer)
• Hide Index Relation Links

Once you have made the above changes you can then click the “Save Indexation Settings” button and for now you are done.

Conclusion

That concludes part one of this guide and already we have covered many of the basics of optimising a WordPress installation for SEO. In the next part of the series we are going to look at how to make your content easily sharable across many of the most popular social platforms, how to speed up your website, how to easily create a mobile version of your website and more.

If anyone has any questions then please don’t hesitate to get in touch in the comments.

How to optimise your WordPress installation for SEO (part 1) was originally published on BruceClay.com.au, an SEO services and SEO tools provider.

Doing SEO on your mobile phone? We decided to analyse every SEO iPhone App we could we could get our hands on from the App Store and this is what we found.

The native SEO iPhone applications currently available definitely don’t provide the full capability of desktop or hosted SEO tool solutions; however that is not necessarily the point.

SEO related iPhone apps should provide the data you need whilst away from your office and although the current offerings might not meet all of the typical SEO needs, the future looks promising. The most significant surprise was the sophistication of the analytical apps available from Omniture SiteCatalyst and Thomas Blackburn’s Analytics Pro.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, we feel that native SEO apps on any type of mobile device may be short lived, as hosted SEO tools providers (like the Bruce Clay ToolSet and Raven Tools) begin to provide suitable applications for mobile devices, allowing you to access the fully hosted feature set, including historical data and reports on any platform, as long as you have a browser and a secure connection to the Internet.

Introduction:

Let’s face it SEOs love tools that make their life easier, enabling them to skip the data gathering and churn, and start to provide analysis and insight.

A native SEO application for a mobile device will never compete with a fully-fledged desktop application, which likewise, cannot compete with a hosted solution that automatically gathers and analyses on-site and off-site data. Nevertheless, everything has its place, so we decided to see if the SEO apps available in fact had a practical place for the busy SEO practitioner and were of any use, to us anyway.

We found just over forty free and paid SEO Apps for the iPhone and iPad, paid our $60 to buy them, claimed that as an expense and downloaded them.

We then got input from the team as to what key features they believed a mobile SEO app should have and extracted the key features from the various desktop SEO toolsets we are familiar with. We then ranked each one across each of the eight categories.

The eight key categories we identified included:

1. Price: We recorded the price but did not factor this into the overall average ranking analysis.
2. Useability of App: We compared the interface speed, ease of reading, intuitiveness of the application, if the app allowed multiple domains, if the app could save reports for later retrieval and if the app enabled a user to compare different domains.
3. Accuracy & Reliability of App: Points were lost if the app could not retrieve data, data was inconsistent or the app crashed during the test.
4. External Ranking Factor Analysis: Features included external link reporting, link and anchor text analysis, PageRank and analysis of links from key websites or domains.
5. SERP Ranking Reports: Features included the ability to check rankings from more than one Search Engine and from more than one geographic location.
6. Content Analysis: Features included the ability to check titles, meta data, headings, alt attributes and body content and analyse these at any level.
7. Code Analysis: Features included the ability to check page load times, code size, robots Meta tags, W3C validation, source code and the identification of Google Analytics tracking code.
8. Domain & Server Analysis: Features included the ability to check the indexation of the domain, robot.txt, XML Sitemaps, WhoIs lookups, domain age and server location

On the first cut, we found our expectations may have been set a tad high and that none of the apps reviewed actually rated in any of the key categories. Clearly, we had the wrong factors or our expectations were wrong. An app should not be compared against a desktop tool; it is for use at a different time and place and thus needs different criteria.

The second attempt at reviewing these apps resulted in us starting from the app up, as opposed to a bunch of features down. We listed each feature of each app in a list. We found around 50 features across all apps, and used that as our baseline for comparison, which then gave a better picture of each apps functionality, capability and gaps against the other apps on offer.

SEO App Results

Although we analysed over 40 SEO apps we only included the most useful apps in the final comparison table. Many of the excluded applications provided only one feature, for example: XML Sitemap checking, URL submission or PageRank checking and it would not be fair to compare these against the other tools with multiple features.

The best performing apps are summarised below, however you can download the full SEO iPhone app comparison here.

Staff Pick – Best Overall

Staff Pick – Easy to Use

We had a tie between the two top ranking apps in the useability category. Both SEM Tab SEO Pro and SEO Pro provided a great and intuitive user experience.

In addition to a number of SEO applications reviewed, we also downloaded and tested some related applications. If analytics applications were included in this SEO app comparison, Analytics Pro by Thomas Blackburn would be a strong contender for the most usable interface.

Staff Pick – Best for External Ranking Factor Analysis

Staff Pick – Best for Ranking Analysis

Staff Pick – Best for Content Analysis

Staff Pick – Best for Code Analysis

Staff Pick – Best for Domain & Server Analysis

Dishonourable Mention

The dishonourable mention goes to SEO Submit Pro by Ned Kubica for charging $9.99 for a tool that submits your URL to Google (among others, however, let’s face it, Google is usually the first port of call). Google provide this service freely.

iPhone SEO Applications was originally published on BruceClay.com.au, an SEO services and SEO tools provider.