Archive for SEO Tools articles

Introducing Open Site Explorer

Feb 12010

published by Hannah in Back Links | Link Strategies | SEO | SEO Tools with 5 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: 16%

Burning to Move In: FeedBurner Goes Google

Apr 292008

published by Hannah in News | SEO Tools with No comments

Ok I’m not that dense. I’ve known that Feedburner was bought by Google mid last year. I am after all a Feedburner user and loooove Feedburner. So what am I talking about?
Recently Feedburner announced that finally they are “movin’ on up”, meaning they’re starting the Feedburner-Google Account integration. Yipee yay! Do not too get too [...]

Search Engine Snippets

Apr 242008

published by Hannah in News | SEO Tools with 1 comment

Yahoo’s at it again. Just a few days ago they announced that they’re implementing changes to their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms so don’t be surprised if you see some changes in your Yahoo results rank. Hopefully the changes will be good for us. ^_^
On Google’s side things seem to be a bit quiet except [...]

Rank Checker Review and a Short Lesson on URLs and Domains

Apr 162008

published by Hannah in Firefox | Phoenixrealm | SEO | SEO Basics | SEO Tools with 3 comments

Been trying out Aaron Wall’s new Firefox extension, Rank Checker, and it works really well. If you want to have no problems making it work though let me remind you of the difference between a URL and a domain.
We all know that the URL of a website is its HTTP address. For us that would [...]

SEO Your Images: Enhanced Image Search

Mar 162008

published by Hannah in SEO | SEO Tools with 3 comments

We already know that ALT tags should be used for relevant images (I say relevant because you can skip putting ALT tags for images placed in your page for purely aesthetic and/or organisational purposes such as borders). However, what many neglect to do is to take advantage of Google’s enhanced image search. The enhanced image [...]

Cool Plug-ins from Joost’s Mailing List

Mar 82008

published by Hannah in Blogging | SEO Tools | Wordpress with 2 comments

I haven’t really had time to go over my mail these days and my inbox has A LOT of unread mail (not to mention the unread categorised mail that goes directly under their labels). As you know I subscribed to Joost’s WP and SEO mailing list and reading all the backlog at once is actually [...]

Webmaster Tools Content Analysis Feature

Feb 92008

published by Hannah in SEO | SEO Tools | Website Design with No comments

For those who haven’t noticed or did notice but didn’t use the new features that came out last December here’s a quick overview on the Content Analysis feature. As the name suggests the new feature is very useful at analysing the content of your website. So what exactly does it analyse? The content analysis feature [...]

Options for Removing URL from Google

Jan 252008

published by Hannah in SEO | SEO Basics | SEO Tools with 2 comments

I don’t know how I missed Matt Cutts’ video on Webmaster Central Blog on removing your content from Google. Anyway it’s not too late to give a summary of the talk especially since it is very useful.
There are several options for removing your content from Google although not all options are very good. Dan, [...]

SEO Tools – The best of the bunch

Apr 102007

published by Gary in SEO Tools with 17 comments

Different Search Engine Optimisation tools hold different meanings for different web masters and bloggers, and it is really difficult to compile a list of “the best SEO tools”. Still, most of the SEO requirements are generic in nature, for instance, your typical Search Engine Optimisation campaign entails:

Optimised source code
Keyword analysis
SEO-optimised content
Meta tags analysis
Search engine submissions [...]