Jon Bishop » SEO

Competitor Website Reports and Analytics

Jon Bishop — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 07:05:48 +0000

Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something on the Internet is to check and see how other people are already doing it. Here is a small collection of tools I use to learn more about other websites. You should obviously already be using Google Analytics on your own site on top of whatever other tracking scripts you are using. This is just a list of tools you can plug any web address into and learn all about that site. Each tool does something a bit different so explore and play around a bit.

Traffic and Visibility

Alexa.com
Alexa provides information about websites including Top Sites, Internet Traffic Stats and Metrics, Related Links, Online Reviews Contact Information and Search Analytics for SEM and SEO optimization.

Compete.com
Compete helps you benefit from click-sharing by providing free services that create a more trusted, transparent, and valuable Internet.

quantcast.com
A new breed of measurement service helping buyers and sellers quantify the characteristics of digital audiences against which they can activate addressable advertising solutions.

quarkbase.com
See people, traffic data, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more about websites.

Xinureturns.com
Check PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, Rankings and more.

SEO

Open Site Explorer via SEOMoz
Linkscape provides link data never available before on over 41+ billion URLs across 366+ million domains.

Term Extractor via SEOMoz
This tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines. It applies certain weights to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it thinks is a targeted term.

Website Grader via HubSpot
Free SEO tool that provides an Internet Marketing Report for your website.

SEO Analysis Tool via SEOWorkers.com
This SEO Analysis Tool is to help you analyze and measure the ranking potential of your web pages.

MarkosWeb.com
A web service that collects and analyzes any data about domains and keywords they are optimized for.

Keyword Monitoring and Discovery

KeywordSpy.com
SEO & PPC Keyword Research software tool, that unveil your competitors’ most profitable Ad copies & keywords.

SpyFu.com
Spy on your online competitors. Download competitors keywords and adwords.

SEMRush.com
SEMRush.com is a another great competitive research tool.

Social

Blog Grader via HubSpot
Blog Grader provide a free tool to grade your Blog and provide recommendations on how to improve its effectiveness.

HowSociable.com
HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.

SocialWebsiteAnalyzer.com
Monitoring the social presence of your website on the top 20 social media websites.

Speed and Other Site Information

BuiltWith
Web technology information profiler tool. Find out what a site is using.

Web Page Analyzer via Websiteoptimization.com
Calculate page size, composition, and download time.

Readability.info
Readability.info offers readability scores, style, grammar, school paper analysis, readability scores (Kincaid, ARI, Coleman-Liau, Flesch, Fog, Lix and SMOG) for Web pages.

If your favorite tool isn’t listed please share it in the comments.

SEO and Flash

Jon Bishop — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:06:00 +0000

Can search engines read flash? A lot of people think that because flash is a program running on a website, it cannot be read by search engines. This is true to some extant however that does not mean there aren’t methods to make your flash movies Search Engine friendly. In fact Google CAN index your flash movies. In “Google Can Now Index . . . Flash!An Interview with Michael Marshall by Robin Nobles” (here), they discuss how Google indexes your flash movie and different things the author can do to help the process.

There are also other methods you can use if you want to be sure all search engines are indexing your flash movie. I use SWFobject. Here’s a brief explanation of how it can be used with some examples.

So first thing you need to do is upload swfobject.js to your website and link it in your header somewhere:

Then you need to create a div tag with all the default contents of the flash movie. What your going to do is over right all of the data inside of that div tag when you load your flash movie.
This is what the search engines will read

View Live Tutorial

And your done! So here's the result:

And here's what you see if you don't have javascript or Flash Player:

And here's what the search engines see:

Not too shabby.

The cool thing about all of this is the code is valid HTML and XHTML 1.0. There are also a bunch of other cool features with swfobject so explore their website and have some fun.

Now there has been some discussion on whether or not the content in the div tag that is being overwritten might be looked at as spam by Google at some point. So far it hasn't been a problem and as long as developers don't abuse this we should be good well into the future.

So go off and have fun with flash. Make many websites and flash intros to your hearts content (if your into that sorta thing). The future of flash looks brighter every day.

SEO for the Non-Techies

Jon Bishop — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:28:00 +0000

These are just a few ideas to get you started. Any true SEO expert will tell you there is a lot more that goes into it including but not limited to incoming link monitoring and maintenance, following Google’s new search engine patents, optimizing for keywords, etc.

So there are 3 main things to remember when optimizing your website:

1) Choose appropriate keywords:
This includes making sure you have those keywords in 3 different places; your site content, your Meta content, and your incoming links. Also don’t use your keywords too much, this is known as “stuffing”, but too little and Google won’t index your site properly.

2) Friendly URLs:
The following is BAD:
mysite.com/index.php?car=jeep&type=wrangler

This is GOOD:
mysite.com/jeep/wrangler

The difference is easy to see, one is easier to read for both humans and search engines. Also it is a good thing to be specific, so use your keywords in your URL where you can.

To accomplish this most people use Mod-Rewrite (Google it). Another alternative is to use a Content Management System for your website that will automatically create friendly URLs for you. I use PHPwcms but other good ones are Drupal and Mambo but I found mine at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/.

3) QUALITY incoming links to your site
This is the most important in my opinion and usually the hardest to pull off.

Basically the idea is Google will boost your site up on the rankings if you have alot of incoming links from sites similar to yours. This does not include link compilation sites and Google might penalize you for this. Usually the best thing to do is contact the administrators of similar sites and request an affiliate link in exchange for a service or a back link. Another good strategy is to put out press releases with your sites link in it.

Extra Knowledge:
So if you can’t tell, Google is the most popular search engine out there getting roughly 91 million searches per day. That’s a little less than half of all searches done daily. So it’s usually best practice to optimize your site for Google. If you want more information just contact me through facebook and I can give you some extra pointers.