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.

Okay, there are a million paid tools and services out there supplying a dizzying array of SEO data to help your efforts and fill you in on the competition.  Truth be told, not everyone needs that or can afford it, particularly in this economy.  So in the spirit of running a lean, mean organization (hey, I have one of those…) I figured I’d start a series of tips that anyone can use for free to assist in their SEO efforts - thus, ‘SEO on a Nickel’.  ‘SEO on a Dime’ might sound more catchy…but it also sounds twice as expensive.

This one’s largely explained via video screen capture and uses only three things:

• Google (perhaps you’ve heard of it)
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• SEOQuake

Beyond that, all you need is a computer and an internet connection to start gathering competitive information on what content your competitors have that’s attracting links, or what tactics they’re using.  Enjoy.

Is there anything better than finding free SEO tools that are REALLY valuable?  Well, winning the lotto might top it, but not by much.  Okay, I might need a life, but I have found a couple cool tools lately that I thought I’d share.

Majestic SEO is the first one.  An awesome database of links over time that can show you how your links have grown, or how your competitors’ have grown.  This can be some excellent intelligence to gauge the aggressiveness of your competitors and diagnose the tactics they’re using.  I’m still digging into all of the ways to leverage this tool, but thus far, it’s one of the most impressive free tools I have found.

Buzzstream is the other tool.  To me, one of the most inefficient tasks in SEO is trying to track your communications, particularly with all of the different methods of communication these days.  While it may not solve every issue in tracking your communications, it goes a long way towards documenting and categorizing your link building opportunities.  I’m just beginning to wade into using this, but the prospects are pretty exciting thus far.

Okay, keeping it short tonight…err…this morning.  Happy SEOing…