Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

You can’t pinch your pennies enough these days, or pinch them at all if you’re working with a broken hand as I am…ANYHOW, I figured it was about time for another quick hitting edition of SEO On A Nickel - so all of my penny pinching fans feel free to rejoice! No lengthy diatribe, typing with one finger doesn’t lend itself to verbose blogging.

What I want to cover today is extremely important. If you’ve never really laid out a strategy for your SEO work, or you’re just getting started, it’s extremely important that you assess your current state, and the state of those pages occupying the SERPs you desire.

There are some sweet paid tools that will do this for you - like SEOMoz Labs’ Linkscape Visualizer. This very succinctly details how you stack up to a competitor.

We've got a ways to go to catch SEOMoz...those rascals!

If you’re not familiar with SEOMoz, they have their own metrics (thus the names), but the basic concepts from this can be done with other tools to give direction to your SEO efforts.  Some things to look at, and the tools to compare them:

• Inbound links - Yahoo site Explorer is the easiest tool for this task.  Look at the link profile of the ranking page, as well as the domain.  The page may have few links, but might be ranking out on the strength of internal links from a very powerful domain.  Also, be sure you compare apples to apples, having 50 links from the same domain is far different than 50 links from unique domains.  If your links all come from only a few sites, you’ll want to add that to your list of priorities.
• Trust - This is a bit more difficult, but if you have MORE links than a competitor, trust could be an issue.  Link Diagnosis will show you the Google PageRanks of sites linking in.  If you have a bunch of PR1 and PR2 pages and your competitor has a few 5 and 6s…it’s time to get some more authoritative links.
• Internal links - Site Explorer works well for this task, too.  Are you getting the most out of your own site?  Sometimes just by optimizing internal links you can make a major move.  If you see a target page is lacking in internal links, start there.

Essentially, if you perform the above tasks and make yourself a checklist, you can figure out your greatest deficiencies before moving forward.  If you’re trying to save a few bucks in your marketing efforts, this will definitely be a step towards efficiency.

I find a lot of small businesses and some SEOs get really locked in on the big fish in their SEO efforts once they do their initial on-site optimization.  This can be troublesome only because those big fish can take a long time to reel in, and it’s good for the ego (or job security in the monthly report you turn into your boss) to consistently get some small wins and move the needle of qualified traffic.

Fortunately, you don’t need to start from scratch with these efforts, you can use some available data to make some quick changes and nail down some more long tail traffic.  Here’s how:

• Hop on your Google Analytics
  • Go to traffic sources > keywords
  • Expand your results and export to a CSV
  • Open it up in Excel and sift down until you find terms that you are NOT targeting - select and copy
• Head out to the Google keyword tool to see what you might be missing
  • Select filter my results and be sure to choose “Don’t show ideas for new keywords” (we only want to see the terms we are currently getting traffic for)
  • Be sure to use “exact” when using the keyword tool, this tends to give you more accurate results for SEO purposes

• Select some promising targeted long tail terms and run them through a rank checker tool
• Check your results and see if you have items ranking anywhere from 3-2o, and which page is ranking, THESE are the low hangers (remember being on page one is NOT enough to get traffic)
  • Before you start wildly changing your pages, make sure you aren’t going to do anything that sinks an existing ranking, like dropping an important keyword out of a title tag
  • Once you’re safe, soup up your on page factors (add a picture with an alt tag, fix the page title, add some more keyword phrases, do some internal linking, etc.) and watch your traffic increase!

I’m back…did you miss me?

After a recent broken hand (I’m still in a cast) my blogging has come to a screeching halt.  But I’m toughing it out tonight and firing out a quick post to highlight a couple of extremely cool, and more importantly FREE, tools for keyword research.  So let’s get to it.  Without further adieu…

Free Keyword Research Tools!

Wordtracker SEO Blogger - This handy plugin from Wordtracker makes keyword research for blogging a snap.  Opening alongside your browser window you can do your research while blogging, save keyords as you research and make sure you’re using the most popular keywords as you go.

Microsoft Ad Intelligence - This Excel plugin provides some unprecedented tools in the world of free keyword research.  Granted, Microsoft doesn’t have much in the way of market share these days, but they offer trend data on keywords over days and months, recommended and related keywords and a ton of other awesome features (like demographics!).  I can’t recommend this one enough.

Microsoft says you are most likely a guy if you're reading this.