Archive for September, 2007

SEO Link Info Bookmarklet

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

The number of outgoing links of a page is a crucial factor for the link juice this site is passing to you. So, when buying or trading links, you should evaluate the number of external links. I love this small “bookmarklet”, which I have sitting in my bookmark toolbar ready to be used with a single click. Just add the following link to your bookmark folder. The bookmarklet will display the number of internal and external links of the actual page.

 SEO Link Bookmarklet

Worst name for a club. Ever.

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

This is hilarious. Don’t know what’s going on in there and I don’t wanna know!Dingleberry's

Don't forget the natural links

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Even if it’s a good thing that most SEOs concentrate on building links by negotiating link exchanges, buying links or asking people to link to their sites, natural links might be the most underestimated type of link.

Optimize free links

While webmasters are more than happy about people voluntarily linking to their site they take them for granted and think they can’t do anything about them or even optimize those links. Which is not true. While you often can’t change the anchortext (the keywords) of those links, you can still optimize these links to gain even more traffic for your site. The key is changing the way you normally think about linkbuilding. While you normally choose an anchortext that fits the keyword you are targeting with your linked page, you have to think the other way around, when it comes to natural links. You need to take advantage of the keywords that the people used to link to your site and probably adapt the text on your page to fit this keyword as well.

Keywords in the URL

A lot of natural links might come from post in forums and weblogs. Often forum software just displays the URL of the linked page as the anchortext. This is why you want to have your main keywords in the URL or probably even in the domain name. More sophisticated forums and blogs might pull the title tag from the linked page when inserting the post into the database. If you properly on-page optimized your page you are good, since you already have your keyword in the title of your page.

The interesting part

Besides URLs or title tags people might also link to your page by using individual keywords. Those links can be an undiscovered treasure for SEOs. People might used completely different keywords to link to your page, then you yourself use on this page. These keywords can be synonyms for the keywords you target or even your keywords in another language. Just think about a Russian site linking to a English site related to cars. Would they use “Cool Cars” as the anchortext of the links? Most probably not. They would naturally use the russian translation. These are the links you want to identify and these are the keywords you prbably want to put into your page along with the existing content. While the anchor text of the link alone is a very important factor to rank for this keywords, actually having the keyword on your page will most probably give you an additional boost in the SERPs. So, here’s the basic idea of optimizing natural links.

  • Take a look at referring websites
  • Identify the anchortext
  • Decide if you want to add this text to the linked page
  • Put the text into the linked page
  • Enjoy your additional traffic

To wrap up this post, I have another tip. Spare yourself the time to optimze for “click here”. You will never push Adobe from their No. 1 postion ;)

Get those Diggers to become your friends

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Friends are important to have. Especially if you want to push the important news on your poker page at Digg. So, go out and find people who don’t already have lot’s of friends. Those guys are most likely to be very grateful and befriend you in return. Bang! Another guy who will be more then happy to digg your news items right after his good old buddy (you!) posted it.

Show filtered graphs in Google Analytics

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

I have always been annoyed by GA not updating the graph at the top of the screen, when you filter a result. For example I filter for “widget” in the keyword section to see all the keywords having “widget” in it. Now the graph doesn’t change, it still shows the graph for ALL keywords.

Fortunately there is a way to show filtered graphs. Just change the date range you display slightly by1 day or so. And there it is… You have a graph showing only the traffic the “widget”-keywords generated.

Here’s a small step-by-step how-to. Sorry for not having changed the language from German to English ;) The graphs don’t differ so much, because I filtered for a keyword, that generates most the traffic for this small site.

google-analytics-filter-1.png

The unfiltered keyword stats.

google-analytics-filter-2.png

Now I have filtered the keywords down to all “widget” keywords. The graph still shows all the keywords like in the first picture.

google-analytics-filter-3.png

Now change the date range.

google-analytics-filter-4.png

Here you go… Filtered graph. Doesn’t look too different from the unfiltered graph, because “widget” seems o be the main keyword for my page ;)