For SEOgadget clients, most of the SEO work they receive from me is delivered at the end of a heavily data driven process. If you’re feeling a shift towards data driven SEO too, then the chances are using pivot tables and charts in Excel is a near daily part of your SEO consulting activity.
At some point we all have to up our game, especially with Excel and general analysis skills, so at the SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar late last year, I gave a step by step tutorial on how to make a beautiful chart based on an Excel Pivot Table.
In the last hour, SEOmoz have launched a new tool Open Site Explorer, driven by the vast wealth of data collected by their Linkscape product. I’ve been playing with the tool and I’m already excited about some of the actionable insights the tool can deliver. Here are my tips for making the best use of Open Site Explorer:
Optimise your most authoritative internal links
Photo by: m4rlonj
Here’s a quick and handy (and headsmacking) link building tool tip you should try the next time you’re link building for a client by using competitor back links data as a starting point.
We know that the “Competitive Link Finder” tool (or, “Link Intersect Tool”) offered by SEOmoz Labs offers insightful comparison on your competitors most powerful back links, with a useful notification if any of those back links are missing from your link graph. My tip involves using two tools offered by Labs to get the most out of your link building strategy.
Looking for inspiring ways to come up with domain names you’re probably never going to use? Today I learned that sellbuenosaires.com remains unregistered thanks to Godaddy’s local domain search service, GeoDomainMap.
Godaddy’s new service asks you to set a location and a keyword you’re interested in. Next, the tool combines nearby location names and the keywords you supplied and “checks the GoDaddy database of available domain names and returns those that are available”.
Sadly, the tool didn’t seem to be working quite so well for the UK this evening, though there’s still a very long list of domains ending with “SEO” available in the US for those people looking to emulate the good work of our friends at LondonSEO.
On the 24th September 2009, Google announced a revision of their Keyword Tool, the imaginatively titled “Keyword Tool (Beta)”.
As Barry reported that morning at Search Engine Roundtable,
Google has a beta version of a new keyword tool available in the AdWords console. To get to it, login to adwords.google.com, go to a campaign, click on opportunities (if you have that tab), then on the left bar, click on keyword tool. A “beta” link should be available for you to click on in the top paragraph.
You (hopefully) remember a few posts on SEOgadget discussing HTML5 and the impact that structured data will have on SEO, and if you do, you’ll remember me banging on about my hcard implemention too. I’ve been convinced for some time now that Google’s attitude towards structured HTML markup is really starting to get serious, which is why today’s news is very exciting.
On this, the last meaningful day of Summer in the UK I say, thanks be to Google for giving us their Rich Snippets Testing Tool allowing even us mere mortals to view and tweak a rich snippet result after implementing a structured markup modification on a site.
photo credit: slimygherkin
Whatever tools we have available for making sitemap diagrams and mapping architecture right now, just don’t seem to quite inspire. At least, that’s how I’ve been feeling. How do you take the site architecture design process to a more inspirational level through more creative visualisation?
Hoping to find an answer, and some sweet inspiration, I started checking out different ways to visualise and generate sitemaps on the interwebs. Along my travels I’ve found some really interesting site map diagrams and I’ve been looking at various methods to document site maps, using commonly (and less commonly) available tools.
Here’s a little taster of what’s in store for my presentation at SMX London. This tip combines two SEO tools to make one awesome SEO weapon. SEOmoz’s “Top pages on Domain” and HttpFox, a server header analyser plugin for Firefox.
Want to work quickly through a new client’s domain to make sure all their high authority (or most linked to) pages are loading correctly or are being properly redirected?
Analyse your top URLs in sequence, quickly and easily
Install HttpFox and head to SEOmoz’s Labs area*. Do a query on a domain and activate HttpFox:
There are a lot of different Firefox extensions, plugins, scripts and more for doing SEO, but which ones really make a difference? Here’s my list of “must haves” for doing SEO with Firefox.
My SEO “must haves” for Firefox
1) Firebug
Firebug is a powerful web development tool that helps you to “see” your HTML, CSS and Javascript as you browse around your webpage. It’s perfect for checking the semantic HTML structure of your site is exactly right. Clicking “Inspect” will show the exact code for the section of the webpage you’re mousing over. Really powerful stuff for making sure the changes you’ve asked for have been implemented!
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