Archive for SEO articles

Introducing Open Site Explorer

Feb 12010

published by Hannah in Back Links | Link Strategies | SEO | SEO Tools with 3 comments

I attended SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer (OSE) webinar last Thursday, January 28, and learned some things on how to make the most of the new link analysis tool.

If you’ve been using Linkscape you’re probably pretty happy with the functionalities that the service brings. At first glance it might seem that another link analysis tool would just be redundant and, for the most part, that is actually true. However there are some things that Open Site Explorer can give that Linkscape doesn’t really do and vice versa. In the future though Rand said that OSE and Linkscape will probably become integrated with one becoming the premium version.

One of the major difference is the number of links available per report: shows up to 10,000 links in OSE and 3,000 links in Linkscape. Note though that unless you are a SEOmoz Pro member you will only be shown details of 5 links in OSE and none in Linkscape. However, you do see the other important metrics such as overall page authority, domain authority, number of linking root domains, and total number of links including those that are “no followed”. These data are things you need to know where you stand in your link building effort, but it’s really the other data that gives you more actionable items.

According to Rand some of the things you can do with the data given by OSE include finding the following:

302 pages - What you can do is turn them into 301s
404 pages - You have to options for these pages: either put content in those pages or redirect them.
Inbound links with low quality anchor text - Contact the owner of the linking page and ask them to change the anchor text to something you prefer.
Links to competitors’ error pages - Don’t forget to analyze your competitors’ links. Do the same thing as #3 but make sure you explain to the person you are contacting to link to YOUR page, explain how linking to an error page can hurt them, and give your preferred anchor text. This isn’t really unethical since the link was pointing to an empty error page anyway.
Links to old/poor pages - Redirect these links to newer pages that offer fresh and/or more relevant content.

One other thing that Rand suggested that stood out for me was in answer to a question by one of the participants. (Sorry I wasn’t able to take note of the person’s name. If you attended the same webinar and know, do let me know.) The question was: How can we use OSE to determine what to charge our clients?

Rand suggested that you simply check out the domain and page authority of your client’s page as well as the number of links. Then you check out your client’s competitors’ pages and compare the data, after which you can do a guestimate of how much effort you need to put into link building as well as how long it will take to creep up on the competitors in search rankings.

Popularity: 3%

Social Search and SEO

Oct 312009

published by Gary in Organic SEO | Rep. Management | SEO | SEO Tips with 9 comments

So how is the social search engine relevant to SEO?
It is obviously important because we see how more and more each day search is turning into something more personal as search engines seek ways to improve the relevance of search results. What this means is that we (SEOs) should encourage clients to improve their online [...]

Google News Rank Boosters

Sep 222009

published by Hannah in Google Page Rank | News | On Page SEO | SEO | SEO Tips with 4 comments

Last time I gave some tips on how to rank better in Google News. Today I’ll be giving some more tips that are still straight from Google Developer Programs Tech Lead, Maile Ohye.
According to Ms Ohye some of the best practices you should adopt include:
Keeping the article body intact – Don’t break the article body. [...]

Ranking in Google News

Sep 172009

published by Hannah in Google Page Rank | News | SEO | SEO Tips | Search Engines with No comments

If you are aiming to rank in Google News but doing exactly the same thing you do in your ordinary websites then you are likely wasting your effort in link building. The reason for this is that for Google News there’s a different emphasis on the importance of factors.
One of the most significant difference in [...]

Observations on Google Caffeine

Sep 92009

published by Hannah in SEO | Search Engines with 4 comments

Last month Google unveiled their secret project: Google Caffeine. According to Google, Caffeine is “the next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”
This new development has created quite a stir in the SEO world [...]

Bing Ignoring Instructions Not to Index Pages

Aug 92009

published by Hannah in SEO with 4 comments

Bing has been having problems with its indexing. Just recently Brett Yount, Program Manager of Bing Webmaster Center has responded to some complaints of incidences where MSNbot disregarded specific instructions not to index certain pages.
According to mckenzie MSNbot did not follow the Disallow instruction in his robots.txt file. Another user, jiosis, complained that MSNBot ignored [...]

Microsoft-Yahoo Tie Search Tie Up

Jul 302009

published by Gary in SEO with 5 comments

Earlier this year there was a lot of talk about a possible Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. As we very well know the deal did not push through. This time we can be sure that Microsoft is a lot happier having finally inked an important deal with Yahoo.
Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a 10-year agreement stating [...]

The Power of the Hash # in SEO

Jul 172009

published by Hannah in SEO with 15 comments

Early this month I promised a post detailing the uses of the # in SEO. Here it is.
As I have mentioned before the hash is often overlooked, if at all used, by SEOs. A very unfortunate thing because it can not only help solve duplicate content issues but help you consolidate the link juice from [...]

Google Apps Out of Beta to Pave the Way for Wave?

Jul 142009

published by Hannah in SEO with 2 comments

Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs all went out of beta last week. The funny thing is that I didn’t notice it till my husband pointed it out to me this weekend, which is more proof that Alex Chitu was right when he said, “If you think there’s something missing from Gmail’s logo, enable the [...]

SEO and Web Design: The Perfect Marriage

Jul 22009

published by Hannah in SEO with 14 comments

I just finished reading Justin Brigg’s post “9 SEO Tips”. The post may have a boring title but his tips are pretty sound. I especially liked tip number 5, which tells about the power of the hash #, something frequently overlooked, if known at all, by SEO newbies. On my next post I will be [...]