How important is acquiring new business?  For these clients it was very important.  Important enough to spend time  ensuring time and money spent on  changes they make to their websites are going to result in  increase business. Each of these  clients had used more than a few of the well publicized  seo tools out there in the past with limited success or no results.

Enter SEOtool to save the day!

Following  will simply be graphics from 2 of our clients  detailing increases in rankings and traffic after they began utilizing our SEOtool.   I could fill up pages and pages with this type of information, but for now here are 2.

I think it will be fairly obvious WHEN they began using our SEO tool and also what the  positive takeaway for our clients has been.

Example Client 1 Increase in total rankings:

The Same same client above  also enjoyed this  Increase in Traffic as a result of the above increases in search phrase rankings:

And the 2nd Client Example :

Increase in total number of organic search rankings after utilizing our SEO tool.

And This Client (as do all SEOool clients) enjoyed the increased benefits of these rankings in the form of Increases in Traffic

These are just 2 clients of many that have all used SEOtool in the manner described in my previous post about the how to use SEOtool to realize the full potential of your website.

How it happened was pretty straightforward.  SEOtool Runs and shows the website owner what they need to change. The changes were made and more rankings were secured and thus rankings and  buying and revenue generating traffic increase.

SEOtool makes it easy.  Our clients know what to change, when to change, and how to change to achieve  revenue driving results.

Next up: Evaluating some E-Commerce Sites running Popular E- Commerce Platforms, How SEO Friendly is your E-Commerce Platform?

SEOtool will open up the gate and let those buyers find your website so they are able to spend money with your company.

SEO tool enables online businesses to do the following:

1. Increase existing search engine  rankings plus
2. Increase the number or total volume of keywords in the first 2 pages of Google and Bing/Yahoo! resulting in
3. Substantial Increases In Traffic and Sales for your business

I wouldn’t blame you for thinking to yourself: “I’ve heard that before” or “That sounds great but I know its not that easy.” Actually it is JUST THAT EASY with SEOtool. SEOtool bores deep into any website and then pulls out and lists,  in an easy to understand manner, nearly every technical roadblock that your site has put up in front of the search engines.

*This is important*

These roadblocks are what potentially  stand between your company  and your  goal of  taking advantage of the tremendous amount of targeted buying traffic  generated every day by people looking for your products or services.  I guarantee  your company is  missing substantial amounts of business because your site is simply not as well optimized as your competition.

To say it another way: Your own site is probably blocking new customers from buying from you.

Our Solution is SEOtool

How to use  SEO tool in a few quick steps.

1. Create an SEOtool Account
2. Add a website to your account to analyze
3. Click Run Analysis
4. Click View Report to Open the Report Console

Easy Right?  So far so good.  Now for the fun part!

Follow these steps

1. After Opening the Report  pick an issue, any issue to work on first.   Many people simply start with things they know they can easily fix.  So in this  example we will look at the issue Missing H1 tags. (There are many more but this is one we can address quickly)

2.Click on that issue (whatever it is)  and get a view that shows every URL with that issue, or download  list of pages or URLS  that are effected by that negative issue.

3. Using the generated list of pages in the report  as a guideline and the solutions provided within SEO tool for your problem issue,    You are now empowered with a powerful  project management list to begin working on.   Create H1 Tags for the effected pages and get them uploaded to your site.

This is just a basic example how to utilize SEOtool to  implement a  solution that can have very positive effect on search rankings thereby increasing your sales or leads.

SEOtool uncovers  nearly all of  your site’s on page  technical issues and lays them out for you to take action on, but the basic principle is always the same.  Run report, View problem areas and fix them.

We do webinars by invite only  a few times a month for people to get a more detailed look at the SEO tool and all it can provide to website owners.  Contact us for an invite.

Next Article:Examples of  Client Results with SEOtool

The annual IRCE 2011, Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition takes place June 14th – 17th in San Diego, CA. The 2011 IRCE theme is “E-Commerce Shifts Into Overdrive—the Race Is On”. The SEOtool demo is free for attendees of the conference and will demonstrate how e-retailers can use SEO tool to help their online business increase traffic, leads and sales.

Internet Retailer Chicago 2010 (IRCE) just ended and there was an underlying concern with some of the retailers we met with at the show.  Traffic for SOME general retailers who sell thousands of products and SKU’s from a variety of manufacturers is down – sometimes considerably.  Invariably, we would ask the client if they have seen a substantial drop in traffic for their product/item pages from organic search – and the common answer was “Yes! How did you know?”  This is a direct result of the “Mayday Update”.

If your business pulls item and product descriptions directly from a manufacturer and serves that exact content on your product pages, with literally no unique enhancements, then you are likely a victim of the Google MayDay update.  A retailer has to create a unique value proposition and consumer experience for their own brand — and not merely regurgitate the manufacturer’s information to the human visitor.

Watch the following video from Matt Cutts, Google Webspam Engineer, which gives a high-level overview of the MayDay Update:

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

•    This is an algorithmic change & a deliberate update that has been tested & vetted by Google
•    It’s permanent & not temporary — helps Google assesses which sites are the best match for long-tail queries and offer value to the human visitor
•    MayDay has nothing to do with Caffeine Update — completely independent
•    Add great content & make your site an authority at the product detail level (aka “long tail”)
•    Over 400 changes per year to Google algorithms (quality changes, tweaks, adjustments, etc)

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

Invest the time, energy and resources into tweaking your Meta tags and product descriptions for these long-tail page types so that they are unique to your business and not an exact duplicate from the manufacturer – which is most likely shared by your competitors.  Uniqueness and market differentiation appears to be a fundamental factor in the Mayday update — where Google is showing preference to those retailers who have their own unique value proposition and unique product descriptions that adds value to the human visitor.  Think about duplicate content and how that is occurring across your site, your competitors and the manufacturers of the products you sell.  It can be equated to the thin-affiliate model – the original source of content wins while the “copycats” are often omitted from the main index.

Programmatically tweaking and thus scaling your unique product &/or SKU descriptions is a great way to move your site back in the right direction, if you’ve seen a considerable drop in Google organic traffic — primarily for long-tail keywords.  By leveraging a powerful SEO technology, you can extract all your pages and then begin scaling your product-page template optimization at a database level — combining formulas with manual optimization.  Do you facilitate on-page product ratings or product reviews from your customers?  Does your CMS intelligently cross-promote similar products the customer may wish to purchase?  These are all ways to ensure uniqueness at the product-page level.

As we’ve discussed in the past, long tail keywords are most heavily influenced in SEO by relevant, unique on-page and site structure elements.  “Head” or “Mid-Tail” keywords are influenced by unique, relevant on-page attributes but heavily influenced by external and internal anchor text links.  You have to differentiate yourselves — or fall victim to the permanent algorithm updates of MayDay.

In Part 1, we highlighted some of the key takeaways from the Enge-Cutts SEO Interview as it related to Crawling, Indexing & PageRank.  In this Part 2, we will visit some of the primary SEO answers from Google regarding duplicate content, 301/302 Redirects, use of the rel=canonical tag, faceted navigation, Session IDs.  As you will quickly see, or may have already realized, SEOtool not only identifies these types of problematic, site-wide SEO issues but also provides actionable metrics for SEO execution!  Sit back, enjoy the summary and feel free to leave a comment and participate in the discussion!

Part 2: Duplicate Content, Redirects, Site Navigation & SEOtool’s Application to Automated SEO Analysis

Topic: How to Best Handle Duplicate Content

My overall advice is that it helps enormously if you can fix the architecture upfront…….If you are not able to do a 301 Redirect, then you can fall back on rel=canonical……..But if (webmasters) are able to fix in the site architecture, that’s preferable to patching it up afterwards with a 301 or a rel=canonical…….to call (rel=canonical) a poor man’s 301 is not a bad way to think about it.

It goes without saying that for separate websites, duplicate content can be a significant deterrent in organic rankings.  More specifically, for internal site duplicate content, the number one way to avoid ranking problems is to structure your site architecture in a way that forces your pages to serve preferred URLs.  Thereafter, a 301 then use of rel=canonical is the next level of defense.  SEOtool not only identifies site-wide and page-specific duplicate content (titles, descriptions, H1s, etc) but it also objectively evaluates the use of internal redirects (301/302) to ensure proper directives are given to search engines for maximum SEO benefit.

Topic: Sites that use Session IDs

Don’t use them.  Not just from a search engine point of view, but from a usability point of view as well.  Users are more likely to click on links that look prettier, and they are more likely to remember URLs that look prettier………if you can get by without Session IDs, that’s typically best………multiple versions of pages would get indexed with different Session IDs.  It’s always best to care of it on your site so you don’t have to worry about how the search engines take care of it.

Again, duplicate content and usability become a major factor with Session IDs.  It is critical that site owners fix the problem at an architectural level and serve to both search engines and users, unique relevant content that doesn’t cause confusion or duplicate versions of the same page living under different URLs.  SEOtool is designed to unearth such conditions, while our hands-on, expert SEO consulting provides relevant solutions for both short & long-term benefit to organic rankings.

Topic: Faceted Navigation, URL parameters and Site Hierarchy

Faceted Navigation in general can be tricky…..you want each page of content to have a single URL if you can help it…….you can make it so that the hierarchy of how your think things should be categorized is enforced in the URL parameters in terms of position……this can help some search engines discover the content a little better.  It is also weird on the search engine side if we have to click through seven or eight layers of intermediate faceted navigation …… each of those clicks is an opportunity for a small percentage of the PageRank to dissipate.

Faceted navigation can almost look like a bit of a maze to search engines……..that can be tricky in terms of the algorithm determining the value add of individual pages….limit the number of lenses or facets by which you can view the data…..that can be helpful and reduce confusion…..if there are a large number of pages that we consider low value, then we might not crawl quite as many pages from that site……reduce the amount of multiplied paths and pull it back towards a more logical path structure.

Bottom line, if your website is overly complex and provides too many options to both the user and search engine, odds are you are going to have a difficult time being competitive, including organic search.  It’s critical that websites allow search engines to get directly to unique, relevant content and avoid layers upon layers of navigation or sorting filters (category, price, size, color, quantity, etc).  While these are important options, enforcing architecture rules that serve only one URL for the type of content found is ideal.  SEOtool is able to aid website owners in identifying problems with such multiplicative pages, or duplicate content — leading to specific strategies to fix such problems through our consulting.

Every now and then, the search industry gets some very useful and definitive answers from the leading search engines — the Cutts-Enge interview is one of those times.  There is no question that link building and social media are competitive trump cards for online advertisers in very competitive search markets —- but this extensive interview confirms that website architecture and site-wide content practices continue to strongly influence rank order and a search engine’s ability to not only crawl and index pages, but also algorithmically rank content.

If your business seems to have hit a glass ceiling in natural search or has seen its organic traffic on the decline — contact us today to learn more about the significant benefits SEOtool can yield and the actionable metrics it can provide to your business through ongoing, automated SEO analysis.

Eric Enge recently interviewed Matt Cutts (Google’s SEO mouthpiece & head of webspam), successfully getting answers and confirmation on how Google handles things such as crawling & indexing, redirects, poor site architecture, and duplicate content — to name a few.  Below, we will recap key takeaways and provide commentary on how SEOtool identifies these issues and gives website owners specific details on SEO issues native to their site(s), its architecture and on-page optimization.  This blog post is Part 1 of 2 in our analysis of the interview transcript.

Part 1: Crawling, Indexing, PageRank & SEOtool’s Application to Automated SEO Analysis

Topic: Duplicate Content’s Impact on Crawling & Indexing

Typically, duplicate content is not the largest factor on how many pages will be crawled, but it can be a factor. My overall advice is that it helps enormously if you can fix the site architecture upfront.

Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and then we discover that the two other pages were duplicates of the third page. We’ll drop two out of the three pages and keep only one, and that’s why it looks like it has less good content……..the fact that you had duplicate content and we discarded those pages meant you missed an opportunity to have other pages with good, unique quality content show up in the index.

If you can reduce your duplicate content using site architecture, that’s preferable.

There is a strong, recurring theme straight from Google’s mouth — focus on your site architecture, both at a site-wide and page-level — this is the sure fire way to avoid crawling, indexing or duplicate content problems — and the place to strike gold in your competitive landscape!  SEOtool was designed with that exact vision in mind — to remove the guess work and hunches of ongoing SEO site analyses through machine-driven, objective analysis at an architecture & on-page level.  This interview 100% validates what SEOtool was built to do and IS DOING for current clients!

Topic: PageRank Distribution & Sculpting

Site architecture, how you make links and structure appear on a page in a way to get the most people to the products that you want them to see, is really a better way to approach it than trying to do individual sculpting of PageRank on links.

I feel like if you can get site architecture straight first, then you’ll have less to do, or no need to even think about PageRank Sculpting.……in my experience, PageRank Sculpting has not been the best use of peoples’ time.

Noticing any redundancy here?  Site architecture is the primary theme of the interview!  Google recommends you focus energy on perfecting your site architecture for PageRank distribution & consequently crawling potential (see below) — rather than sculpting PageRank via nofollow or other tactics.  Again, SEOtool is THE cream of the crop from a SEO Site Architecture analysis platform!

Topic: Crawling Theories vs. Reality

There isn’t really such a thing as an indexation cap.

The number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank.

There is the concept of host load. The host load is essentially the maximum number of simultaneous connections that a particular web server can handle……..Your site could be on a virtual host with a lot of other web sites on the same IP address. In theory, you can run into limits on how hard we will crawl your site…….that can then set some sort of upper bound on how many pages we are able to fetch from that host.

Following a SEOtool analysis, we’re able to identify not only PageRank distribution across the site, but also where the website inherently has crawling and structural issues that could hinder a search engine’s ability to fetch & index important, unique pages.  The custom consulting we bundle into the SEOtool subscription can identify any structural issues preventing the optimal rate of crawling (or PR flow), host load issues that may exist for your site, including bad neighborhoods, cross linking issues and other factors at an IP or DNS level — but even more importantly, give you and your team specific solutions to resolve your greatest SEO deficiencies and ranking problems!

In Part 2, we’ll recap and connect the dots on duplicate content, redirects, site navigation and how SEOtool unearths these issues via actionable metrics.

It’s a gratifying, motivating and humbling feeling when independent & authority sources (like Cutts & Enge) validate what you’ve built and the vision you have for client-driven innovation.  The interview between Eric Enge & Matt Cutts could not have been a stronger validation of SEOtool and the consultative approach we take with our clients!

If you would like a demo of SEOtool, please contact us to learn more.

Wishing all of our current SEO Tool clients a peaceful and relaxing weekend.

While it would seem everybody that’s anybody is out at SMX West cavorting with Matt Catts and the other engine reps, we’ve been here serving our clients, one at a time. Isn’t that what it’s all about anyway, when you are in the service industry at least? Aren’t we supposed to serve our clients and only one at a time? It’s an amazing feeling to be able to give each of our SEO Tool clients my undivided attention during our monthly consulting calls. I’m able to listen to their concerns based on solutions they’ve implemented and on the most recent SEO Tool reports and provide them with 100% customized solutions that take into account their specific business needs, target goals for each site they own and their current technical and copywriting human resources.

Ya know, this is starting to sound more and more like the post I put up earlier this week about being the most efficient seo consultant in the world. Oh wait, that’s right, we meant to do that all along. So as we wrap up another week full of amazingly productive meetings and email exchanges as well as seeing some very nice 1st position rankings for several of those customers, I’d like to encourage you to take a look at your current seo consultant and ask yourself the following question. Does my seo consultant leave me with that oh so fresh feeling after he hangs up or am I more overwhelmed and lost that I was before the call? If you’re feeling lost then maybe you should sign up for one of our seo tool webinars so you can see how refreshing this world of seo can be when you have the right tool.

Enjoy your weekend, I know I will.

I can’t tell you how often I get asked the following question…

Can’t I get all of the information that SEO Tool provides from other tools on the market?

Day in and day out people ask me about how SEO Tool stacks up against Web Position Gold and Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer and on and on the list goes. The question in and of itself is indicative of the level of knowledge the asker has about seo in general as well as their knowledge of the most popular tools and apps in the seo marketplace.
In order to answer this question and have a sense of finality I need to break SEO Tool down into its core and begin to educate everyone on what it does, how it does it and how that is similar or different to other tools in the marketplace. Now that’s a pretty tall order and is going to take several posts to tackle but this post will kickstart the process.

SEO Tool vs Web Position Gold

Web Position Gold is seo software that is downloaded and runs on your own computer. WPG (as its known in the industry) is good at one thing and one thing only, running keyword ranking reports. It has a built in scheduler and you can customize the look and feel of your ranking reports and deliver them to clients with ease. That’s what made WPG so popular with seo’s back in 1999, it made them look good, plain and simple.
WPG also has a feature called Page-Critic where it will analyze any single page you give it and tell you what’s wrong with it from an seo perspective. But there are two gaping holes with the page-critic service.
1.) The tests they conduct are out of date and provide no actionable metrics.

2.) The tests are run on a single web page without comparing that page to the rest of the site… as such, it misses out on the single largest seo issue in existence today, duplicate content!

SEO Tool on the other hand not only analyzes every page on your web site for 65 different seo factors (in a vacuum – so to speak) but it then compares that page to every other page on your site for those same factors. SEO Tool provides comprehensive duplicate content reporting, in fact we don’t even call it duplicate content, it’s actually non-unique content. Some of the items we report on are non-unique Titles, non-unique Descriptions, non-unique Keywords, non-unique H1 tags, and the list goes on.

The other key differentiator is that SEO Tool does not run ranking reports for your site. You do not put your keywords in SEO Tool. In fact, there are very few pieces of external data at use in SEO Tool and none of them (yes I said none as in zero, zilch, nada) are used in our algorithms.

Little More Background on SEO Tool

Back in the day, 1999 to be precise, I had a dream. Not a Martin Luther King Jr. kind of dream but a dream none-the-less. My dream was to build a suite of tools that took all of the guesswork out of SEO and told you what needed to be fixed. Over time that dream became a vision and SEO Tool represents the incarnation of that vision. My vision expanded based on real world questions that clients needed answers to yet the seo world answered inaccurately and ineffectively for a number of reasons. Below you’ll find the questions every seo client needs answers to and should never allow their consultant to say “I don’t know” or “that’s a great question, let me get back to you on that”.

1. What are the top 3 seo issues I need to address on my web site?
2. How long will it take to fix those issues?
3. What do I need to do to fix them?
4. How much will it cost to fix them?
5. When will my rankings increase?

Every seo consulting client I’ve ever had has asked those same questions and often times over and over.  Of course those serve as the framework for our seo consulting services. It just so happens that these questions are also the questions that SEO Tool answers efficiently and accurately every time one of our seo clients runs an analysis of their site.

I know I’ve kind of left this post hanging a bit and haven’t told you how SEO Tool is different than Google for Webmasters and all of the other seo apps and services out there but that will be coming soon. For now, its important that you know and understand what SEO Tool is rather than what it is not.

My Vision Became TDM’s Vision

Lifecycle graph of seo consulting time and effort traditionally and using the seo automation of SEOTool.

In closing, I want to make it perfectly clear that my vision is now Triangle Direct Media’s vision. Every person at TDM firmly believes in every product and service that we offer and are committed like no other firm to deliver results that impact your bottom line. I can’t be more proud of my teammates Scott, Janna, Anthony, Derek, Keith, the other Jason, and the list goes on… for not only sharing my vision but for teaching me about teamwork and elevating my own seo game. I’m delivering the highest quality of seo services of my entire life and for a fraction of the cost I used to charge. The amount of time it takes me to deliver that higher quality of work has also been reduced by 90% as a result of SEO Tool and the TDM SEO team. So now I can firmly say that the TDM SEO team is represented by the green graph above instead of the red graph, and if you’re a client then you know what I’m talking about.

SEO Tool decreases the amount of time it takes to accurately quantify and prioritize seo issues but also the amount of time it takes to implement seo solutions.

Many seo consultants swear that their job can never be automated because there are simply too many moving parts and variables that have to be taken into account. These same consultants also cite the fact that no piece of software can ever replace the emphasis they place on their client’s business objectives or create custom seo solutions specifically geared towards those business objectives.

First and foremost, there is certainly some truth in what you’ll hear in the seo grapevine. However, there is also a lot of misunderstanding about automation and what can and should be automated. The most time consuming parts of seo are as follows…

• SEO issue identification
• SEO competitive analysis
• Post seo solution implementation quality assurance

These particular areas of seo consulting represent 80% of the work most seo firms deliver. So if a seo consultant claims to have your business objectives as their primary motivation, then why would they spend 80% of your time and money just figuring out what’s wrong with your site?

SEO Consulting is A Lot Like Getting Your Car Fixed

Let’s say Bob takes his Nissan 350z to the local auto mechanic because his engine is making a horrible squealing sound and he doesn’t know why. When Bob gets to Handy Andy (the local mechanic in our analogy) he tells Andy his car is squealing and demonstrates the sound for Andy. Andy says okay, it sounds bad but I have a good idea of what is wrong with it so let me take a look at it and I’ll call you with an estimate of the repair costs. Within an hour Andy rings Bob and tells him he needs a new a/c belt and its going to cost approximately $250.

Bob “sounds great, when will my car be ready for pickup?”.

Andy “She’ll be ready by 4pm today”.

Bob “Alright, I’ll see you then Andy”.

In this analogy Andy is the seo consultant. Andy hooked up Bob’s 350z to his diagnostic machine and gave it a once over to make sure the machine had diagnosed the issue properly, and within 5 minutes he knew exactly what was wrong with Bob’s car. All Bob cared about was getting his car fixed, he didn’t care about how long it took Andy to diagnose it, he cared about the solution and he was willing to pay for the solution.

I think its fair to say that today’s automotive vehicles are a bit more technologically advanced than the average website so if there are diagnostic systems for our cars then why wouldn’t every seo consultant / mechanic use an automated diagnostic system for your website? Well, that’s the question we’re asking people and so are our clients. SEO Tool automates the diagnostic portion of seo so we, as seo consultants, can focus on crafting a unique solution to each of our clients instead of making excuses for why their sites aren’t ranking month after month.

Don’t get me wrong, this post isn’t meant to slam seo consultants (at least not the good ones). We firmly believe the cream will always rise to the top and the top seo consultants are the ones that will get the most out of SEO Tool because they focus on results and know you’re paying them for results, not troubleshooting.

No one knows exactly when Google will fully launch the Caffeine update that they’ve been talking about since August 2009. At least one data center went live with the update before the holidays, but Google didn’t want to hear too much complaining about lost holiday sales, so they decided to wait for the full launch until January or February.

Which means that it could be fully integrated into the search results very soon.

Are you ready?

The two major changes with the Caffeine update, according to Google, are:

1) Live results, specifically from social media channels and blogs, will be more prominently displayed.

Does this mean that blog feeds, Facebook updates, and Twitter updates will make it into the first page results? Or does it mean that link building through fresh content sites will become even more important to the search results? The answer is yes to both.

2) The speed of the site will factor into the organic rankings. Google wants its users to have the best experience possible, so site speed will play a more prominent role in their organic ranking algorithms.

There are a lot of ways to link build through social content marketing and methods to better optimize content on a website, but how exactly do you make your site load faster? Well, that’s where SEO Tool (our proprietary SEO platform) can help. Excessive code bloat, poor practices or whitespace on a page can slow down users and search engine spiders. Do you know if your code structure is positively or negatively impacting Google’s opinion of your site? Do you know what the average load time is of every page on your site? Do you know which pages are using gzip compression and which files aren’t using compression? Do you know how long it takes your homepage to load on average, over a long period of time (say 6 months)?

SEOtool can identify how many pages on your site are infected by Low Text-to-Code Ratio, Excessive JavaScript in the Head, Excessive JavaScript in the Body, Excessive Page Size, Excessive Whitespace, and of course, Slow Loading Pages.

If you’re not sure if you’re site is prepared for the Caffeine update, maybe it’s time for us to run a site-wide analysis. For a free demonstration, contact an SEOtool representative today.