What The Hell Am I On About?

Well there’s more to SEO tracking than just you actual rankings (arguably). There’s link popularity (how many inbound links you have) and the construction of your code, as well as what directories you’re included in, DMoz for example. As well as those things you need to stay on top of exactly where your links are coming from, and whether or not anyone else is copying your content, which could (potentially) lead to a duplicate content issue.

Here’s What You Can Do

I’ve compiled a list of 5 ‘essential tools’ to help you stay on top of things such as the above.

Website Grader

In my opinion one of the number one best tools out there at the moment for diagnosing your site’s SEO effectiveness, websitegrader.com takes into account a great deal of factors including which directories your site is listed in, what it’s PageRank is, how many inbound links it has, what it’s traffic ranks are, and many many others in order to come up with a final score out of 100 for your site that generally proves to be pretty accurate in terms of how well your site is “SEO’d”.

Link Diagnosis

LinkDiagnosis.com is a tool which I have mentioned in the past, and for good reason too. I use this tool very regularly to analyse both the quantity and the quality of inbound links to my site(s). It produces a number of data charts and graphs that show the distribution of PageRank across your inbound links and gives various metrics and comparisons that can really help you asses which links are giving you the most benefit. In addition this is a great little tool for spying on where competitors are getting their links from.. and then stealing them ;)

Bad Neighborhood Link Checker

Another one which I’ve mentioned previously, this tool is (in a way) the opposite of Link Diagnosis. Rather than analysing your inbound links and which are helping you most, it analyses all your external links and flags potentially harmful sites that you’re linking to. It looks out for things like blog-spam (high keyphrase or link density) and use of adult or pharmaceutical phrases within the page copy. If you want to avoid a PageRank penalty this a good place to start. Remember, if a site get’s penalised and you link to it, then you could be too!

Marketleap

A real golden oldie, Marketleap has been around for years and still provides excellent essential data to its users. Marketleap gives you counts for both search engine saturation and link popularity, but the real winner for me is that it tracks your progress over time and produce and updated graph every time that you run a report so that you can actively track and record your number of inbound links and indexed pages over time.

CopyScape

This is the daddy when it comes to hunting down thieves. All you have to do at CopyScape is put in your URL (or any) and hit search, which enables the flux capacitor and a number of other highly secretive devices and sets into motion one of the greatest contraptions in the history of man. (not really)

CopyScape scans the web for other websites which contain your text, the search results are ordered in descending order by the number of identical words found on the page. This is both sneaky and brilliant because it doesnt just find direct rip offs, it also finds any people who have tried to copy your text and then edit it slightly. It’s tricky to explain, but give it a whirl and you’ll see what I mean in an instant.

But There’s More

So many more, but these are the most effective that I’ve found, and incidentally the ones which I use most often. What great SEO tools have you found recently? Any which should really have been included here? Drop me a line in the comments!

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So lets get started!

After running all my reports from the previous post I move swiftly on to (and from) Google Analytics. I say swiftly because it is just that, generally speaking not a lot of time is spent on Google Analytics just because it provides a lot of basic information that is available in more detail from other stat software. If you don’t do any other stats, Analytics is a great one to have because it does give you a very good general overview. I find though, that the information is too basic (at least for my needs).

Where Analytics comes into its own though, is with ecommerece tracking. Analytics provides a really great overview of online sales, revenue generation, adsense campaigns, and conversion rates from both key phrases and specific search engines. If your site has an online shop, the value of having Analytics installed multiplies by a factor of ten. Make sure when installing though that you use the new ga.js not the old urchin.js – especially when wanting to set up ecommerce tracking.

Once I’ve had a brief skim over Analytics I move on to the part of SEO statistics analysis that I hate most; error reporting. This is basically checking for parts of the site that are either not there, or not functioning correctly, and are causing the search engines problems when spidering. Needless to say, fixing these problems nine times out of ten is just as big of a headache.

Sometimes websites just go wrong, pages disappear, dynamic scripts are executed wrong, and databases re-arrange themselves before shooting off to the pub for a quick pint. There’s no real way of stopping it from happening, so the best thing to do is accept that its going to happen, be ready for it, and check for these errors on a regular basis to catch them out early.

Our first stop on error reporting will be with Xenu. When search engines look over a site, they send out a spider. Its called a spider because it follows the web (the world wide one) and explores all the links it finds and follows them too, clever eh? So a spider is basically a script that tests every link on your site.

Xenu is a free program (windows) that is your own personal spider, you can fire it up, tell it what site you want it to look at, and off it goes with its 8 furry little spider’s legs. Xenu reports any broken links or images found, so basically any tag with an src or href attribute. Once its finished munching on flies and other such spidery things, it offers you a report, which will tell you where all you’re broke links are, and where they’re coming from. That was the easy part, now go fix them.

The second part of error reporting consists of using Google Webmaster Tools, which is possibly my favorite SEO statistic tool.

Hit the diagnostics tab and have a look at any errors that are coming up. Xenu looks at broken links to your site that are inside your site, Webmaster Tools looks at broken links to your site across the entire internet. This is done when Google ‘crawls’ the net. If a spider whisks round one website then a crawl is basically a really big slow version that does ALL the websites. As such you have to wait for these errors to come up, you cant test for them using independent software.

Errors will come up most frequently in this context when a page on your site no longer exists, now, if this is a product that you no longer sell then thats fine, just leave it and eventually Google will realise that the page is gone, and stop trying to find it. If its a page that has changed name though, you need to fix it.

For example, mysite.com links to yoursite.com/you.htm but a few months later you decide that you want to change that page name to you-are-great.htm – you upload the new file, and delete the old one. The new url for that page is yoursite.com/you-are-great.htm – but I don’t know that, and neither do the 6 million other sites that are linking to that page, so you need to apply a 301 redirect to tell Google where to go. More on 301 redirects at a later date.

Now that the error reporting is done, we can get on to the slightly more interesting side of Webmaster Tools, statistics!

Webmaster Tools gives you 2 little tables that I could not live without. ‘Top Search Queries’ and ‘Top Clicked Queries’.

Which basically tells you; out of all the searches that your site ranks for, what terms are searched for most often. (your most valuable key phrases to target) and which search terms that you rank for get clicked most often. If you’re ranking number 1 for a term that gets searched for a lot, but your site is never getting clicked on – you need to go and find out why that is! I could spend hours writing another post on this alone!

But for now, we will keep it just about the stat packages, and I may explore that avenue here at a later date. (I feel like I’m using the words ‘at a later date’ rather a lot at the moment!)

Was this helpful to you? Have I missed any stat packages that you’d recommend? Drop me a line in the comments!

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My first port of call in the morning is a lovely little program called Web Position Gold, which despite not being the most aesthetically pleasing piece of software, allows me to track an (almost) unlimited number of key phrases, through an extremely large number of search engines, and regional search engines. Though admittedly Google is pretty much the only one that really gets a look in.

Upon completion it provides me with a summary of my SERPs, and a graph to indicate search engine saturation and visibility.

Very nice.

It then provides me with a breakdown of every key phrase that I am tracking for that particular domain, where it is currently ranking, what page it is linking to, and where it was ranking during the last time I ran the report.

This is by far the most essential internet marketing tool that I use, and I could not survive without it. You can’t optimise for keyphrases if you don’t know where they rank!

My next port of call for a client in the morning is to have a look at their traffic report for the last 2 months. Traffic reports aren’t only a good indicator of how well your site is doing from one month to the next, they also provide a good benchmark for how many effective links you have coming into your site that are actually being clicked on a followed, and show seasonal peaks and market trends very well. My package of choice varies for this one as the information is pretty basic at best, but AwStats is my first preference, or Google Analytics if AwStats data is unavailable.

The next big ones to hit are your Search Engine Saturation and Link Popularity reports. I obtain these from MarketLeap and find that they provide really good and accurate results, though there are various other web applications that perform a similar process. The search engine saturation report provides detailed information about how many pages of your site have been indexed in Google, Msn, and Yahoo – while the link popularity report scans these same search engines for inbound links to your site, then gives you the grand total! One thing I particularly like about MarketLeap is that they give you a trend graph for both of these reports, providing you (and your clients) with a good visual representation of the site’s progress over time.

Thats all for today, stay tuned for next time – when we hit the glories of Webmaster Tools, Spidering your site, and Analytics data!

John

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