Competitive Intelligence in SEO & Social Media

Understanding thy competition is a golden rule in any kind of business, ranging from online marketing to politics to running the local mom & pop corner grocery store.

I would like to reprint some competitive intelligence tactics that I previously put together here on Search Engine Journal that will also be helpful.

Understanding what your competitors are doing online is a must and absolute priority when launching a new website that is entering a competitive space and also when established websites want to keep an eye on their competition. By knowing what your rivals are doing in their SEO and social media space, not only will you have a better knowledge of their online marketing strategy, but you can also emulate what is working for them, and generate internal ideas to stay proactive.

Furthermore, by understanding what your competition is doing in terms ofon-site SEO, link building, social media marketing, developing third party properties and other search marketing tactics; you can also identify potential new threats which are making it up the rankings and also unearth tactics which are working from them (or not working for them), that you can improve upon, and thrive from in your overall marketing strategy.

And doesn’t everyone love playing spy every once in a while?

Identifying the Competition

The first step in identifying your online competition is checking out the search results for your most popular keywords. Do not look only at keywords which drive the most traffic, but also your longtail keyterms and also the keyterms which convert the most sales, leads or phone calls.

By comparing the sites which you compete with in these various groups of keyterms, you will more or less identify different styles of competition that you can learn from and monitor. Here are some types of sites which may not appear for your basic keyterms in the serps, that you need to monitor.

• Affiliate sites are your competition. Not only sites which run the affiliate ads of your rivals, but also your own affiliate ads, because if they are ranking above your company’s site, they are taking money out of your pocket (or the search division’s pocket) by driving traffic and sales that you should be driving. Furthermore, affiliates don’t have to deal with internal regulations and beauracracy, so they can more or less get away with more tactics like publishing loads of content, paid linking, and taking full advantage of the social media outlets your management or PR division is not letting you tackle. Affiliates are the ninjas, mercenaries and dark armies of your industry, learn from them.
• Offline competitors sometimes don’t do the best SEO, maybe they just launch a flash site or brochure page and don’t rank at all, but they may have an advertising agency with a massive creative team building up their social media presence, hold contests or sweepstakes, build up Facebook followings, have a massive PPC budget and spend a lot of money on site advertising and sponsorships. By monitoring what the do in online advertising, you can identify keyterms and copy which work for them in their PPC campaign and also find out the sites or networks where they are serving graphic advertising, and contact those same networks about striking a deal which will assist with your SEO or linking. If your competition is serving ads there, then those sites hit your target market.

On-Site Competitive Intelligence

Now that you have identified the sites you need to monitor as part of your competitive intel strategy, now start looking into the on-site factors which help them rank in the search engines. You may find not only what they are doing right, but what you are doing wrong. When performing a competitive intel report, I suggest including your own site in the report and even having a third eye, like an SEO consultant or internal staff member, do the research on your own site.

• Site URL Structure : By tracking the URL structure and file naming structure of competitors, you can determine the best route to gain a competitive advantage over other companies.
• Site Development and Coding Structure : Which language is the site being coded in. Are there any conflicts in programming language or separate IP’s? This information is vital to SEO competitive intel.
• Use of Analytics : Is the competitor tracking user behavior and referrals via Google Analytics, Hitbot, Omniture? Looking into their analytics systems help give an idea of how much information they are capturing from their visitors and how advanced their internal tracking is – which may define how advanced their SEO team is.
• The directory files and URL structures of listings pages : This will be used to determine which techniques these competitors are using for their individual pages, their content, meta and URL structures, and how these reflect in the Google, Yahoo and MSN rankings.
• Page Title and META Title Review: Page titles are one of the most influential HTML elements used in an optimization campaign. Since the optimization of this variable is connected to rankings and actual links in the Search Engine Results Pages (or “SERPs”), an analysis has been conducted to provide which sites use a preferred title structure and which just use repetition of their company name.
• META Tag Review (Description / Keywords): META tags have limited relevance to rankings, but do play a part in that search results often feature the META Description tag. Knowing this, an optimized description that instigates action from the searcher is preferred. Further, integrating the targeted keywords allows for them to be bold or otherwise emphasized in the listings – which helps to convert more clicks in the SERPs through to the optimized site.
• Navigational System Review: Search engines spider, or seek out new content based on the links they find to resources on a page. Navigation systems are the most consistent manner for building internal link popularity, so research evaluates the overall strength of these systems used. For example, a Flash based navigational system is horrible for SEO, whereas consistent keyword driven links with keywords integrated are optimal.
• Broken Links : If a site has broken links, broken files or lists non-existant pages, then Google will lower the ranking of that site because the engine believes that the site is under construction. Run a link check using Xenu Link Sleuth to see if your competition is overlooking such linking and internal navigation issues.
• HTML Code Validity: Using the W3C Validation tools, your competitors’’ web sites have been reviewed. This allows the engines to promote sites that deliver a consistent and predictable user experience. Run each site through the validation tool, and reported back the number of errors noted.
• Design & SEO Integration: Similar to the internal navigational structure, the use of some HTML elements are preferred over others for SEO purposes. Our research and analysis of competing site designs have been provided in this document.

Offsite Competitive SEO Elements

Not only do onsite tactics assist with the ranking of a website, but sometimes more importantly offsite tactics can benefit the competitive advantage to boost a site from the bottom of the front page on Google, to the top three traffic driving positions.

By monitoring offsite SEO tactics, and social media tactics, you can get a rounded feel for the link building strategies your competitors are using, their participation in blogs, sites they may own which are harnessing social media equity and directing it to their main site, if paid linking is working for them, and how they’re doing on Delicious, Digg and in vertically targeted social networks. All of these factors have a direct influence on search engine rankings and you will not only learn what your competition is doing, but what they are not. And by identifying these holes, oversights or even genius ideas… and applying them to your marketing strategy, you can further excel within your industry.

• Local Listings : Determine the local SEO listings that your competition has made on Yahoo Local, Citypages, BOTW Local, MSN Live and other local search engines or local profiles. These differ from the results shown in organic web search sometimes and can be an indicator of local seo techniques used or overlooked by the competition.
• Number of Inbound Links: Using Yahoo! Site Explorer, report on the number of inbound links to each of the analyzed web sites. As a rule, the more links and the more relevancy – the better. Search Engines like Google use inbound links to help shape the overall level of authority of a web site.
• Linkbait or Viral Marketing : How are these competitors building links? Are they running link baiting programs and actively having articles submitted to Digg & StumbleUpon? Are they using any Viral Marketing techniques like videos, widgets or badges which link back to them and assist with their rankings. Dig into their campaigns to find out what they are using, and monitor the social networks to identify future social linking campaigns.
• Social Media : Do they actively use social media to market their business? Does their company have a Wikipedia page? How do they rank for their own brand name and are social profiles served in these results? Have they even secured their brand across social networks? Do they distribute online video? This research will help determine a social media plan and also identify competitive advantages that you can use to your advantage.
• Blogging : Do these companies blog and who is doing their blogging? Are the blogs on a subdomain, a whole other website or in an internal directory file. How often do they post? How many subscribers will they have? This information will assist you construct your blogging strategy and possibly unearth some ideas.
• Paid Link Research: It is difficult to say with certainty that an inbound link has been purchased. There are however signs where common systems like Paid Directories and Link Networks are used on a site. Research of inbound, paid links to your competitors from sidebars, ads on newspaper sites or bad paid linking in footer links may give you some insight as to which anchors they are targeting and what is working for them.
• Site visits and Traffic : Using a mix of data from Alexa, Compete and other web traffic estimation tools, estimate the traffic of the competitors in terms of visitors, time spent on site, top referrals and other information driven by third party tools.
• Page Rank and other Metrics : Compile a list of competitive metrics including Google PageRank, SEOmoz PageStrength, Delicious Bookmarks, StumbleUpon voting, Google Page Indexing, Google Competitive Indexing.
• Competitive Rankings : Last but not least, run a ranking check using a search engine friendly software for each of the terms which you have determined for targeted SEO keyterms via your comeptitive research. Check the rankings for these sites and terms in Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Bing and maybe some engines which are used specifically by your industry.

This may sound like a lot of information to monitor, and you’ll probably want to add more industry specific metrics to your research dependent upon how SEO savvy your market is. But in the long run by documenting this information now, and revisiting it once a quarter, you will have a pinpoint idea of the tactics your search rivals are utilizing, what they are not, and even what they are picking up.

If you need any help with the tools needed to perform a lot of this research, please contact me via email or Twitter (in my profile box at the top of this post) or check out our SEO Tools post for some ideas.

Are there any other competitive intel tactics you recommend? Please feel free to share them in the comments below.

Google To Phase Out Old Keyword Tool In Exchange For New Version

If you try to access Google’s external keyword tool, you may notice that you are sent to the new keyword tool Google began offering in September 2009. A Google spokesperson told me that they are now encouraging users to use the new tool over the old tool and have decided to direct a portion of those users to the new tool.

I asked Google if they plan on phasing out the old tool. Google told me that the old tool is still available from the new tool via a link at the top right that reads, “previous interface.” Google told me they do plan on phasing out the old tool for the new tool, but would not give me an estimated date for that to occur. It is my understanding that Google wants to wait to hear any feedback prior to making that decision.

The new external keyword tool is still available to any user, without a login required, but there is an immediate captcha that is required before you utilize the tool. There was an captcha on the old tool as well.

Here are screen captures of the new and old tool:

New Tool:

Old Tool:

Google Starts Displaying Pages Similar to Search Results

Google has just launched a new search feature that aims to help you easily find new websites that are similar to the ones you are familiar with and are related to the subject that interest you, particularly for your current search session.

The new feature called “Pages similar ” makes the Google search feature “similar” more prominent and visible on your search results. You can find a box just below the search results page containing list of links that point to, well pages that are similar to the current search results that Google has yielded for your search terms.

The links listed on this Pages similar box are alternative sites that you won’t normally check they don’t directly answer your search query but then again the site may contain contents that would otherwise be useful to your current search.

Google gave the following example illustrating Google’s Pages Similar to feature.

For example, with the recent earthquakes around the world, many of us have been looking for international relief organizations. We knew that Direct Relief International has been actively involved in Haiti, so we started off by searching for [direct relief international]. The first result on the page linked us to the Direct Relief website, where we found many ways to help in Haiti. But what if one wants to support several organizations? If you click the “Similar” link that’s on the same line as the “www.directrelief.org/” URL, you’ll find other nonprofits that are also involved in relief efforts.

We’ve offered a “Similar” feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible. Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently. Starting this week, for queries where similar sites are likely to be helpful, we’ll display a list of “Pages similar” at the bottom of the results page. For example, this is the list of sites similar to Direct Relief International:

ROAS and Launching Better PPC Campaigns

Return on Ad-Spend, or ROAS, is a metric calculated by dividing the revenue generated from an ad campaign, by the cost of that campaign. It can be applied to any sales situation that has an advertising spend, even a bake sale:

Lets say your mother gave you a pan of brownies to sell at the bake sale, but it costs $50 to get your booth and marketing materials set (we’ll call $50 your ad-spend).

If your brownies manage to produce a total revenue of $50, you’ve broken even, or gotten a full return on your ad-spend.

If you had made the brownies yourself, and they’d cost you $50 to make (we’re talking primo brownies here), then your total investment is actually $100, but ROAS only takes into account ad-spend. So in the same situation you’re still getting a full return on your ad-spend, just not a full return on your investment.

A handy exercise to go through with new clients before you launch a PPC campaign is to calculate the potential ROAS of the keywords you’re targeting.

There are a few unknown, and a few fuzzy variables – we’ll have some tools to help us come up with potential traffic and potential costs, but we’ll have to use some educated guessing to come up with reasonable estimated ranges of conversion rates and click through rates – in truth, the conversion potential of your keywords, through your ads, to your landing pages, for your clients products, are up to you and your marketing team.

Calculating ROAS:

In order to calculate a predicted ROAS in PPC advertising you need to know the revenue that each conversion brings for each product you’re marketing (which could be associated with the keyword, or ad-group level), the potential cost of the campaign, and a half-decent guess at what kind of a conversion rate you might achieve. Once you know what a conversion is worth, all of the info that you need is available in rough form from Yahoo and Google’s keyword tools.

Yahoo give us the estimated number of clicks and cost per click (CPC) for a keyword so we can calculate the expected cost of the campaign per month. Adwords give us approximate search volume along with the estimated CPC, which we can use to determine a rough estimate of traffic at different click-through-rates, and what it will cost us. If we supply a hypothetical conversion rate to calculate conversions, and we know the company’s revenue from each conversion, we have what we need to calculate ROAS. So like I said, it gets fuzzy, but it’s still half-decent for predicted information.

These simple equations are expressed like this:

To further the confusion of the ROAS metric, it is commonly calculated in two *different* ways. One way subtracts the PPC ad-spend from the revenue right in the calculation, the other way does not. Let’s look at each equation and how to interpret the results.

Method one:

With method one revenue of $100 and an ad-spend of $100 would produce a full return on ad spend of %100. So with this method of calculation seeing 100% ROAS simply means you’re breaking even. A 50% ROAS would mean you’re only recouping half of the ad-spend you’ve put out. With this equation in a situation where you have $200 revenue and $100 ad-spend, doubling your ad-spend is expressed as an ROAS of 200%.

Method two:

In this formula the cost is subtracted from the revenue, forming a profit metric that is relative to the ad campaign. Plugging the same numbers into this, $100 ad-spend with $100 cost, break-even comes out to 0% ROAS. With this equation, in a situation with $200 revenue and $100 ad-spend, doubling your ad-spend is expressed as and ROAS of 100%.

Be sure you know which type of ROAS you’re looking at, because obviously the interpretation is different for each.

The basic approach of pre-checking keywords for ROAS can help you launch campaigns that stand a better chance of being profitable quickly, rather than analyzing data after some time (and some money!) has passed. It can let you know going in, all else equal, approximately what costs-per-click should stand a good chance of performing well. The problem is, all else is never equal.

A number of variables affect your ROAS, and tweaking CPC is only one part of a comprehensive management approach. Some argue that ROAS should only be used as a general indicator because it is too broad in scope, and doesn’t take into account the overall costs of sales.

Remember from the bake-sale, if you’ve got extra costs external to ad-spend (like $50 worth of primo brownie ingredients), your ROAS metric is never going to reflect true ROI – only somebody who is familiar with overall costs associated with a product or service can really interpret ROAS calculationsfor that product or service. ROAS is not the same as ROI.

As long as you keep it in perspective of larger ROI influences, ROAS as a guide to see how each variable affects profit margins can be quite interesting to look at. For those account managers that understand both their products and the metric well, there can be a benefit to being able to monitor ROAS at each level of a PPC campaign over time.

Search Engines and Optimization

Search engines, search engines, search engines….Who knows which one to optimize for? Why does everyone behave so silly when it comes to search engines and optimization for a particular engine or keyword even? As most know, Google is the flavour of the month. It appears that everyone is excited about it. What about the other engines? Did someone forget that they exist?

Because Google is the leading engine, this years “in engine” , word of mouth spreads, more people use it, website owners begin optimizing for it and SEO goes nuts. How easily we forget, that only a year or so ago, Yahoo was the leading search engine. Which one next I wonder?

I think it is quite humorous that people have become strung up about one particular engine and one method of advertisement because they do well for a short period. By a short period, I mean a year or two. This is short when your running a business over decades. Google changed their algorithm end 2003 and sent the world a shockwave. Someone forget to tell these many upset businesses and website do it yourselvers, that relying upon one method of advertisement is not good business practice. If that’s the extent of business knowledge , then some businesses are in lots of trouble.

Florida (Google HQ) decided to change their system. As a result, many website owners, who had paid thousands of dollars or suffered thousands of man hours building a website came unstuck. Why? Because all of their efforts were built around the characteristics of one system. Who did they blame? SEO’s, Experts, Copywriters, Link Building Companies, Google or anyone who would listen – often the media. Someone forgot to tell them that Google is a business, and if your manipulating a website within their search engine rankings, your messing with their business. Keeping this in perspective, only those negatively affected are crying to the press. Those businesses or individuals who gained rankings as a result of this change, strangely enough, don’t have anything negative to say.

I think the moral of the story is, people need to stop attempting to over optimize a website and never concentrate on only one source for rankings. Website owners need to focus on reality and market their websites across as many engines as possible. It is also necessary to keep a focus on what you are trying to achieve. Essentially, a website to attract visitors and stimulate their attention for your information and products.

Written By: SEJ

Advanced SEO Requires Good Analytics Information

Good quality analytics (such as Google Analytics or another paid analytics software packages) provides good and very useful information. If you pay attention to it you could very quickly increase the overall efficiency of your website. You just have to look at the numbers and list to what they tell you. The proof is in the pudding as they say and if you ignore your analytics information you could be missing out on a great deal of potential business and traffic.

Here are some basic areas for you to review in order to find any holes in your website and to help you decipher data that you learn from your analytics:

Conversions: In case you don’t know, a conversion is a completed action on your website, such as lead, sign up, sale, etc. The most important factor (I think) to learn from your analytics software is the conversion data. Understanding and learning about how and where you conversions come from can help you make much more educated and better SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing decisions. I can’t tell you how many people I still speak to think that the best goal for an SEO campaign is rankings or positioning. Sorry to break it to you, but it is not. Increasing conversions (and visitor growth) should be the starting goal(s) of your SEO and search marketing efforts. I won’t get too deep into that as that is not the main point of this post J

Bounce Rate: Whether you are looking at this overall or down to a single page if your bounce rate is really high try to figure out what is turning people off from that web page. It could be a variety of things depending on your business so take a deep look at your page. Is it too much info? Or a lack of info? Do you have too many ads on that specific page? It could also be a combination of all these items. It might just be that your page needs to have a serious over haul. Bounce rates vary for each client and industry but understanding what yours is and try to improve your bounce rate is very important.

Visitors: When you start to really get into advanced SEO techniques you will need to understand even more so where all of your visitors are coming from. Visitor quality is just as important as visitor growth. You never want to rely on just one stream of traffic because if that stream dries up so does your business. You have to understand where your traffic is coming from because often times it might be from an area that you least expected it to come from. Analytics information allows you to find new locations along with locations of where you might be able to place yourself to find new traffic.

Keywords: Analytics information will tell you what keywords your website traffic is using to find your website. This is a potential to really open things up for you as you grow your business online. As new keywords develop you can capitalize by finding new variations on those specific keywords and using them throughout your website. You have to look at your analytics information very closely otherwise you won’t find those windows of opportunity to help improve your SEO and overall search marketing efforts.

Analytics keeps your approach to marketing your website efficient and smooth. It is all about finding opportunities that could already exist right in front of you. Data and information that you can get from your analytics allows you to find those areas where you can really maximize your efforts in the online world.

Author:

Nick Stamoulis | SEJ

SEO: To Outsource Or Develop In-House Resources?

Online marketing is complex, and it seems that the number of factors you need to consider to make sure you have the optimal strategy is only increasing. Therefore, it might be tempting to conclude that SEO, or more broadly, online marketing, is something that needs to be outsourced. There is certainly a strong case to be made for hiring external expertise, but outsourcing your SEO strategy completely does have some disadvantages. On the other hand, bringing people in-house has some advantages, but requires in-house people to stay current with developments in the industry. Today’s column will investigate the pros and cons of each approach, and the case for doing a bit of both.

The outsourcing option

Whether outsourcing is best for you depends on your situation. Here are some of the pros and cons of taking this route:

Pros:

• Expertise. It can be easier (sometimes much easier) to find someone who has the expertise you need now.
• Leverage industry exposure. SEO consulting firms have visibility into many different projects across many different types of sites. This breadth of experience is very difficult to recreate in-house.
• Persuasive power of an external authority. In my last two columns I discussed how important it is to sell management on the benefits of investing in SEO. Management may simply by more willing to believe the advice of a recognized industry authority over their in-house people.

Cons:

• Lack of understanding of the internal company environment. Any external organization, no matter how skilled, is simply not going to understand your company as well as someone who lives and breathes your company culture every day.
• Less committed. SEO consulting firms are likely to have many clients. Losing one client is not desirable, but it is not a disaster either.

The in-house option

Here is a brief look at the pros and cons of hiring your own internal SEO talent:

Pros:

• Internal expertise. Consulting relationships are often designed to be temporary, and once a consultant is gone, so is a lot of the knowledge gained around a search marketing campaign. Of course, employee relationships come to an end too, but usually not as often, or as quickly, so the knowledge is retained by the organization for a longer period of time. If you have more than one internal SEO resources this risk is reduced even further.
• Better positioned to sell internally. Somewhat paradoxically, external authority can be helpful in selling the benefits of SEO, but an employee is in a better position to sell to many different stakeholders within an organization. There are many groups that are impacted by SEO, and they all need to be sold on the process.

Cons:

• Potentially more expensive. You can hire a consultant and engage only a portion of their time, but an employee generally requires full time work and benefits.
• Scarcity of top talent. You may need to train your in-house talent, because many of the top SEO consultants are making a lot of money, and bringing them in-house to work for you could cost you more than you might be willing to pay.
• Learning on the job. A corollary to the prior point is that to keep costs down you may need someone to learn the necessary skills on the job.

The argument for doing both

While there are compelling arguments for both outsourcing and hiring in-house talent, there are also some strong arguments for doing a bit of both. Given the challenges of staying current with developments in SEO and online marketing, consulting with a firm or individual who makes a living doing just that can be a big advantage. The consultant’s ability to work on different sites and with clients who have a wide range of needs can be a pretty compelling advantage.

On the other hand, hiring an in-house SEO position has advantages as well. As outlined above retaining knowledge and expertise, and the ability to sell across multiple departments in the company can be a huge benefit.

Of course, the needs of every organization are different, but SEO and online marketing are must-haves for your organization. For many, the best choice will be to decide on what expertise is essential to have in-house, and make a plan to build it or buy it. Then, supplement that with external expertise to make sure your in-house team can leverage all of the expertise of external SEO professionals.

SEO: To Outsource Or Develop In-House Resources?

Online marketing is complex, and it seems that the number of factors you need to consider to make sure you have the optimal strategy is only increasing. Therefore, it might be tempting to conclude that SEO, or more broadly, online marketing, is something that needs to be outsourced. There is certainly a strong case to be made for hiring external expertise, but outsourcing your SEO strategy completely does have some disadvantages. On the other hand, bringing people in-house has some advantages, but requires in-house people to stay current with developments in the industry. Today’s column will investigate the pros and cons of each approach, and the case for doing a bit of both.

The outsourcing option

Whether outsourcing is best for you depends on your situation. Here are some of the pros and cons of taking this route:

Pros:

• Expertise. It can be easier (sometimes much easier) to find someone who has the expertise you need now.
• Leverage industry exposure. SEO consulting firms have visibility into many different projects across many different types of sites. This breadth of experience is very difficult to recreate in-house.
• Persuasive power of an external authority. In my last two columns I discussed how important it is to sell management on the benefits of investing in SEO. Management may simply by more willing to believe the advice of a recognized industry authority over their in-house people.

Cons:

• Lack of understanding of the internal company environment. Any external organization, no matter how skilled, is simply not going to understand your company as well as someone who lives and breathes your company culture every day.
• Less committed. SEO consulting firms are likely to have many clients. Losing one client is not desirable, but it is not a disaster either.

The in-house option

Here is a brief look at the pros and cons of hiring your own internal SEO talent:

Pros:

• Internal expertise. Consulting relationships are often designed to be temporary, and once a consultant is gone, so is a lot of the knowledge gained around a search marketing campaign. Of course, employee relationships come to an end too, but usually not as often, or as quickly, so the knowledge is retained by the organization for a longer period of time. If you have more than one internal SEO resources this risk is reduced even further.
• Better positioned to sell internally. Somewhat paradoxically, external authority can be helpful in selling the benefits of SEO, but an employee is in a better position to sell to many different stakeholders within an organization. There are many groups that are impacted by SEO, and they all need to be sold on the process.

Cons:

• Potentially more expensive. You can hire a consultant and engage only a portion of their time, but an employee generally requires full time work and benefits.
• Scarcity of top talent. You may need to train your in-house talent, because many of the top SEO consultants are making a lot of money, and bringing them in-house to work for you could cost you more than you might be willing to pay.
• Learning on the job. A corollary to the prior point is that to keep costs down you may need someone to learn the necessary skills on the job.

The argument for doing both

While there are compelling arguments for both outsourcing and hiring in-house talent, there are also some strong arguments for doing a bit of both. Given the challenges of staying current with developments in SEO and online marketing, consulting with a firm or individual who makes a living doing just that can be a big advantage. The consultant’s ability to work on different sites and with clients who have a wide range of needs can be a pretty compelling advantage.

On the other hand, hiring an in-house SEO position has advantages as well. As outlined above retaining knowledge and expertise, and the ability to sell across multiple departments in the company can be a huge benefit.

Of course, the needs of every organization are different, but SEO and online marketing are must-haves for your organization. For many, the best choice will be to decide on what expertise is essential to have in-house, and make a plan to build it or buy it. Then, supplement that with external expertise to make sure your in-house team can leverage all of the expertise of external SEO professionals.

A New Feature-Rich SEO FireFox Addon: SEO Doctor

SEO Doctor is a newly launched FireFox addon that has tons of useful SEO features; I am looking at only a few of them below (to see the more detailed overview, check out Vladimir’s post).

Status Bar Stats

One of the first features you’ll notice on installation is some cool SEO-relevant stats that loads (on request) in the browser status bar while you are browsing the pages. The numbers displayed stand for:

• SEO Score represents the result of on-site optimization analysis of the currently viewed page (the flag icon will give you an idea of how well you are doing)
• Flow shows how much of the Page Rank has been preserved on the site.
• Links shows number of external links/total links on the page.
• Visits show estimated number of daily visitors for the site (requires Compete API);
• Nofollow icon allows you to instantly highlight all nofollow links on the page.

Now Research Everything in Detail

Inspect Page Links:

Clicking on the status bar stats will reveal a panel containing all the page links. The good thing is that if you have the panel open all the time, it will display links for each new page you land on:

Each link displayed has its count and percentage of total number.You can also export the data to a CSV file.

Evaluate On-Page SEO:

The STATS tab in the same panel allows you to diagnose the page. It evaluates the following criteria:

• Image ALT tags;
• Meta tags;
• Heading tags;
• Number of links;
• “Indexability” of the page (absense / presence of any meta tags preventing proper indexing);
• URL structure;
• Page Rank flow:

Each sections expands with the details:

Take advantage of Menu options:

Right-clicking on the status bar numbers allows to quickly access quite a few useful tools and resources:

• Domain registration details
• Google indexed pages
• Yahoo backlinks
• Alexa ranking
• Compete visitors
• Quantcast visitors
• Google website trends
• Link diagnosis
• SEMRush analysis
• IP neighbors
• Open Site Explorer
• Back Tweets

Configure the Options

The tool also allows to set a few smart options that include:

• Ignore www. prefix on domains instructs SEO Doctor to treat www and non-www versions of the domain as a same site for purposes of calculating external links
• Show stats on document ready will attempt to show the stats even before the document is fully loaded (for the impatient ones)
• Ignore links containing keywords is for filtering out links in calculations, for example those that appear on the page only for logged in users etc.
• Compete API key will allow you to retrieve daily visitors metrics.

Looks like an awesome tool, doesn’t it?

Google Caffeine Unofficially Live on 80% of Google Data Centers?

An updated WebmasterWorld thread has many convince webmasters and SEOs saying Caffeine is live in the majority of Google's data centers. Senior member, whitenight said:

For the UNOFFICIAL record, I'm calling Caffeine UNOFFICIALLY launched.

Why?

** It's on 80% of all DCs.
The remaining 20% have been getting Caff datasets flickering for the past 24-48 hours.
The "old" SERPs and Algo are now the minority.

** At the time, I couldn't be bothered to post and then argue with the masses,
but the INFRASTRUCTURE (NOT datasets) has been fully live and operational for ALL DCs for about a week and half now.

since testing the INFRASTRUCTURE is far more complicated than observing datasets, you'll forgive me if i don't give any practical examples... other than pointing out i've given past examples of how ANYONE can do this on their own in the earliest Caff threads.

Got all that? But another senior member, walkman, said that although it may be on 80% of the data centers, maybe the 20% of those data centers that it is not on get's more traffic? I don't think it works that way... But he said:

I agree that it's on almost all but strangely I have checked on google.com, www2 and www3 with several googledance tools and in my own area and I don't see it there. Maybe those 20% of DCs without the caffeine are getting more traffic?

It has been a really long time since Google or Matt did a post on Matt's blog or Google's blog about the status. Maybe it is a good time to just check in and say, here is where we are and where we see we are going in the next 3 to 6 months? Or maybe SEOs and webmasters should stop obsessing over it?

Google’s Facts & Stats

Pingdom, the Internet monitoring company, has shared a timeline of events & acquisitions, facts, figures that display almost everything big that Google has done, over the years. They have covered Google’s Indexes, Search stats, Google’s Revenues from advertising and other products,etc… and everything is displayed in the image below :

Complete On-Page Seo in 12 steps

Though many Search Engine Optimizers may disagree, On-page SEO is very much important. The need for extra on-page optimization is surely a debatable topic. Considering the search volume provided by the other search engines like Yahoo,Bing and ASK and their priority towards on-page factors, i’d say on-page optimization is a must. SEO For Google mainly consists of relevant off-page optimization mainly consisting of link-building but this is not the case with its competitors.

Relevancy according to Yahoo mainly includes Authority, trustrank and ofcourse on-page content.following are the tips and techniques to be considered while optimizing your pages so as to rank better for the respective keywords :

1) Keyword In URL :

Having your keyword in the URL can have the best influence for ranking for that particular keyword.

2) Keyword in Title :

The

3) First Priority :

Search engines read a page from the top left to the bottom right, place the Keyword within a

tag to the top left such that it will be the First words that the spider would read.

4) Last Priority :

So also place the Keyword in the bottom right corner.e.g. in the copy right text,i.e.© All rights reserved ‘Keyword’.

5) Html Tags :

Search Engines also give priority to text with the ,, tags. You may place your keyword within these, but be very sure not to overdo it. Having it once in each is more than enough.

6) Inclusion Of Images :

You ’should’ include images in your content,though search engines are not too smart with them’ images can be used for your benefit. They are even included in the ‘Google Images’ index thus driving you traffic from another source. Make sure the name of the image file is your Keyword,e.g. ‘Keyword’jpg. Also include the ‘alt’ attribute within the tag which will contain your Keyword i.e alt=”Keyword”.

7) Keyword Density :

Maintain a moderate level of keyword density, there is no prescribed amount that is deemed best but make sure you don’t overdo it. Many people say keyword density doesn’t matter but actually it does. Google Webmaster Tools itself gives significance to keywords based on their density.

8′) Keyword Proximity :

Place your keywords intelligently. Don’t keep a keyword 5 times in the first 50 words and 2 times in the next 500 words, that would be really stupid, its best to evenly place them across the content.

9) Internal Linking :

Linking to other pages within your domain wrapped within relevant keywords is a good practice for healthy on-page Seo. These inner links are known as deep links and internal linking has many benefits, i.e. (a)Reduces the bounce rate (b)Directs search crawlers to your inner pages thus helping some pages get indexed. (c) Acts as a low priority backlink highlighting the keyword wrapped.

10) Titles For Links :

How the ‘alt’ attribute is used for images, similarly the ‘title’ attribute is used for links within the tag. It provides some kind of hypothetical authority to these links and strengthens the keyword significance for the link if the keyword is placed within the ‘title’ attribute.

11) Meta Description :

Who says this isn’t important? The meta description is the description of the page mentioned in the SERPs(Search Engine Results Page). Keep the word count below 160 characters and place the keyword not more than 3 times. As per Matt Cutt’s last notice, Meta Description has no influence on SEO whatsoever. Make this description look genuine and not spammy as this is what will convince the users to click on the link leading to your site from the search engines.

12) NO Spam :

The last and the most important point. Your content is made for humans and not bots, don’t make it look even a bit spammy. You can compromise Seo but never compromise quality.

The best on-page Seo is the one that would not at all be visible to th normal visitor but would easily grab the attention of the search crawler. These are all the points I can get as of now, if there are any you would like to share you are welcomed to place them in your comments.