by Michael Cropper | Jan 14, 2012 | SEO |
In this how to guide, I am going to walk you through how to create your own interactive Google Maps which look great. You can see an example of one that I did for SEO Conferences 2012 which is shown below. The map below is what you will end up with after running through this step by step process.
View SEO Conferences 2012 by Michael Cropper in a larger map
Step 1 – Go to Google Maps
Visit http://maps.google.co.uk/
You will need to be logged in to run through this process using your normal Google account.
Step 2 – Click on “My Places” link
Step 3 – Click on “Create Map”
Step 4 – Enter your map description
Make sure you select the correct privacy settings for you map since this will determine who can / cannot see the map you create.
Now next you have two different options on how you want to create your interactive Google Map. The first option is using their user interface which is quite useful for the simple maps you want to create. The second option is to create a KML file and upload this so the map is created automatically, although this option does require some reasonable programming skills to be able to do well.
For this guide I am going to be running through the simple user interface provided by Google for creating these maps since this is what most people will require. For anyone looking for more details on KML files and how to implement then have a good read through Google’s KML tutorial since this provides sufficient information for you to be able to create your own scripts. Once you have created the script then click on the “import” button in the screenshot above, where you will be presented with a screen for uploading your newly created KML file.
Step 5 – Find your location on the map
Anyway, for this tutorial your next step is to find your location that you want to pintpoint / create on your new Google Map. You can do this either by navigating to the correct location as you would normally use Google Maps, or you can search for a specific location as I have in the screenshot below (don’t worry, when you search, this won’t lose any of your map information that you have previously created).
Step 6 – Create a point
Once your location has been identified, then you can do what you like here. There are several options available to you including creating a specific point on the map (ideal for actual places such as a hotel / bar / restaurant etc) or you can create an area using a polygon.
Below is the step to create a specific point on the map which is achieved by clicking on the small blue pointer icon (top highlight), then clicking the location on the map where you want this item to be placed (bottom highlight), which in turn opens the main box up where you can enter some details about the map (middle highlight).
You can enter details in normal text or rich text which can include colourful text, bullet points, hyperlinks and images. Once you click on the “Ok” button, the point you have just created will be added to your map permanently.
Step 7 – Personalise your icon
The little blue pointer is a little boring. So it is easy to create your own image which can be personalised to whatever you like. Simply click on the small blue pointer which is highlighted below to reveal more information how to do this.
Once you click on the button above, you will see the other options for pointers that are available for you to use. Alternatively you can create your own images and use those by clicking on the “Add an icon” link. I would always prefer to use your own personalised images opposed to the ones provided by Google since you can brand these and make them look far better.
When you click on the “Add an icon” link, you will be asked to provide a link to the image that you would like to use. The image is not stored with Google, so you will need to upload this to your web server for this part to work correctly.
Once you have provided the URL for the image you want to use then this icon is then added to your “My icons” section so you can re-use this again if you need to add many of the same images for different places. The image will also now be added to your point that you created on the map earlier, instead of showing the original blue pointer.
If you are interested in doing something more than just a point, then have a play around with the different options available. Click on the polygon icon shown below to use different options. The available options are for drawing a line, drawing a line along roads and drawing a shape, all of which you can then to the same process as described above to personalise the information and icons etc.
Step 8 – Repeat
Repeat steps 5 to 7 until you have added all of the different items on your interactive Google Map.
Step 9 – Share your new map
Now you have created your amazing map, tell the world about it!
Simply click on the small chain icon shown in the screenshot above (top left highlight) and select how you would like to share your newly created map. Either just email them the link through or embed the map into your website / blog like I did at the start of this blog post.
It’s as simple as that! Go and have a play and create some great content for your website visitors and customers.
Image references
Here are the images I used to create the different icons on the interactive maps and for the images within the HTML of the information for the points.
by Michael Cropper | Jan 14, 2012 | SEO |
As an SEO working in house or agency side there will be a time when you have to assess a website after it has been re-designed to ensure the rankings remain steady. I have put this SEO checklist together to help with this process and to ensure some of the obvious checks aren’t overlooked.
Throughout my career as an SEO I have been through a lot of full website redesigns and each has gone smoothly without impacting the rankings, some of which included a full change of URL structure across hundreds of thousands of pages. This basic SEO checklist has helped the rankings remain steady throughout the various website redesigns, so hopefully they will be of some use to you as well.
I have created a Google Doc listing all of these checks so that you can go through them one by one and tick off each page when checking through the new website. I find this process to be extremely valuable and systematic to ensure all of the key SEO areas of the site haven’t been accidentally damaged during a redesign.
Google Doc: SEO Checklist for Website Redesign (Please save a copy for yourself)
Here is a quick screenshot of the SEO checklist, but I do recommend reading the comments below as they explain what each section on the spreadsheet means.
SEO Checklist
Robots.txt
Ensure the robots.txt hasn’t accidentally noindexed the entire site. If the site was using the robots.txt file prior to the redesign, then check this is still the same as it was previously (unless it was wrong in the first place!). It is also possible that certain pages or directories may have been accidentally noindexed so keep an eye out for this too.
Meta Robots Tag
Following on from the above, it is also important to check all of the main pages throughout the site to ensure a “index, follow” tag hasn’t accidentally changed to “noindex, follow” as this would be really bad. The two characters that can bring your site to its knees, ‘no’.
URL Structure
Very important to check that the URL structure throughout the website hasn’t changed for some reason. When developing code for large scale websites it can be very useful to append certain identifiers to make URLs map to certain scripts which then parse the URL and get the information from a database. For example www.website.com/pageone-identifier.html where any URLs containing ‘identifier.html’ would be passed through to a certain script which would get the content for ‘pageone’.
So keep a close eye out for any changes that could have been done here. Even adding one single character to a URL or making one of the characters uppercase will impact your rankings, since as far as Google is concerned those are totally brand new URLs which have no relation on the old ones.
If it is required that the URLs change as part of the site redesign, and this can happen, then it is important that the old URLs are 301 redirected to their new URLs so that the site is still benefiting from any back links that have been generated to those pages. I have worked on websites where it was required that hundreds of thousands of URLs needed changing as part of the redesign and can confirm that as long as all of the 301 redirects are in place then everything will go smoothly. Just make sure these aren’t accidentally a 302 redirect though!
On this note, it is also possible that during the redesign that a chain of redirects could emerge meaning the old URL would 301 to an intermediate URL which would then 301 to the new URL. This is to be avoided and there is generally very little need to do something like this. Use a tool such as Fiddler to see what is happening.
Header Response Codes
This one is very unlikely to crop up during a website redesign, but it is worth checking to be safe. Since header codes can be altered to say whatever you like, then it is quite possible that a 404, 500 or 503 header code could be returned whilst the page content is still being displayed.
If something like this did happen I would find it difficult to believe this got accidentally introduced since it would take someone to actually program this into the code to be altered.
As I say, very unlikely to happen, but worth checking since things may look ok on the surface but underneath the site is actually telling Google to go away.
301 and 302 Redirects
This check partially follows on from checking the URL structure, since if something has been altered it is important to be using 301 redirects instead of 302 redirects. 301 redirects pass all of the Google Juice to your new pages, where as 302 redirects don’t.
It is also possible that during a website redesign that redirects could have been randomly introduced in the site. In Microsoft ASP and ASP.Net, the command ‘Response.Redirect()’ uses a 302 redirect by default which can cause a few issues. So if your site is being designed in either of those languages then this may be a thing to be aware of.
Mixed Case URLs
Generally mIxeD cAse URLs work on database driven websites which isn’t great for SEO since that is creating an awful lot of duplicate content for Google to hopefully handle correctly.
It can be useful to check all of the URLs on the website to see if they also work when replacing a lower case character with an upper case character. Personally I prefer to 301 all upper case URLs to their lower case versions to avoid any potential duplicate content where as showing a 404 page would also suffice.
Unique Meta Titles
It is quite possible during a website redesign that all of those fullyoptimised meta titles that you worked so hard to create have suddenly disappeared. Luckily you have kept a record of what they were (haven’t you?) so you don’t need to worry too much there. Best to check over all of the pages on the site to make sure some of your top performing pages haven’t accidentally lost their meta titles.
Canonical Tags
This is one of the areas where I have seen the most issues during a website redesign and an area I would pay most attention to when doing your SEO checks. One area where the canonical tag implementation can fail drastically is when a script in the background can be accessed viamultiple URLs, for example www.website.com/search?product=something and www.website.com/catalogue/something.
It is extremely important that this doesn’t get messed up since it can mean you are telling Google that the correct page is actually a copy of a page that is on a sloppy URL (such as a search URL) or worse, that it is a copy of a page that doesn’t actually exist.
Also keep an eye on what the correct version of the URL should be. Should it have a trailing slash or not? Whilst Google is pretty good at realising a URL with/without a trailing slash is ultimately the same content, I would still prefer to explicitly tell it so (or even 301 to the correct version).
I have seen it happen where the canonical was set incorrectly which happened to be a search URL, so the page still displayed the same content and luckily Google just began showing the search URL in the search results instead of the friendly URL. Whilst this ins’t great it is good to know that Google does handle this correctly without any negative impact. I would still prefer to get things right first time though.
One final thing to test with canonical tags is how the tag behaves when adding a parameter to the end of the URL which could be a page number such as ?page=2, although I will cover pagination in more detail later.
Google Analytics Implementation
Quite a simple check is this one, but if Google Analytics has been missed off during the website redesign then you aren’t going to be aware of other mistakes that may have happened either.
Boiler Plate Text
Another quick check, but it is important that large chunks of boiler plate text haven’t been randomly added throughout the website. I haven’t come across any times where this has happened but worth keeping an eye out for.
Hidden Text
It is a common technique to use ‘display:none’ then expand the section of text when someone clicks on a ‘view more’ link or similar. So one thing to watch out for is trying to limit the use of this where possible. It is a technique that Google are reasonably good at identifying when it is used for spam and when it is used for genuine purposes but personally I would aim to have things visible on the page both from an SEO point and a user experience point.
In addition hidden text can be found during a website redesign if there has been Multivariate Testing installed at the time. Since some MVT packages actually hide sections of the page and display them only to certain users then this is something to watch out for if using MVT.
Order of HTML
This is a bit of an old skool obvious thing to watch out for, but make sure that all of your important content is as high up in the HTML as possible. Don’t go filling the top of your HTML with crap, instead get all of yourmain content up there. It is possible to do clever CSS trickery by floating columns in a table left or right so that within the HTML the important items are at the top of the page but for the user the item is visually in a different area.
Font Styling
Since heading tags are designed for headings (no surprise there!) then you will find that it is quite common for developers to use them a lot which is great for the user. SEO wise though we want to be making sure that odd titles aren’t being wrapped in heading tags, such as “Look Here” in a H1. Instead we need to be making sure areas that need to look like a H1 are styled using CSS and not heading tags.
Internal Link Anchor Text
Quick run through the main pages on the site to ensure the internal anchor text hasn’t been drastically altered. We wouldn’t want to be telling Google that every page on the site is about ‘click here’.
External Links
Quick check for external links and to make sure they have the‘nofollow’ attribute on any links that you don’t want to pass any Google Juice.
AJAX and jQuery Implementations
Google has been indexing pages controlled by JavaScript for a while now, although I always prefer to make sure there is a clickable link in place so that Google can definitely find all the pages on the website. It is possible to mark up links so that a user with JavaScript turned on will still get the cool user experience and at the same time have a clickable link for when a user (or a search engine) doesn’t have JavaScript turned on.
IFrames
I have never come across a website that has found a good reason to be using iFrames so I don’t think this will happen much. But best to double check nothing has been put into iFrames (or normal frames for that matter) since Google finds it more difficult to stitch things together.
Duplicate Content
It is possible that duplicate content has been added as part of a website redesign so that more content is easily accessible for the user. SEO wise though we all know that duplicate content is a bad thing for Google. So always have a quick check for any possible pieces of content that have been duplicated across several pages.
Legacy Back Link Redirects
This is one of the areas that is often forgotten about during a website redesign since it is not something that is visible on the front end and often the redirects were put in place a long time ago and have been forgotten about.
Legacy back links can be a great source of getting additional Google Juice instead of funneling it all to a 404 page. So when the website is redesigned then it is important to be able to check that these redirects are still in place.
An example of where this is extremely important is if the whole websites URL structure changed at some point in the past as in the example earlier. If those redirects were forgotten to be carried across then you could potentially be loosing all of your Google Juice from links that got built up to your old URLs for the past X years.
Added Or Removed Links
Check to make sure no large chunks of links have either been added or removed from your key pages. It is possible that the new logic in the website can not put all of the link in places where they used to go. If this happened then you may find that a lot of your site is no longer crawlable. Whilst Google still knows of these links, it is like telling Google that those pages are not important any more.
Alt Attribute Text
This is a basic really and whilst some SEOs say that it is important and some say it isn’t. Personally I would rather put something in and it be ignored by Google than exclude something with the possibility that it may not be helping. Check to see if all important images have relevantALT attribute text, so not something like ‘Picture’.
Rich Snippets Markup
If you are using any of the Rich Snippets markup that Google offer then you will already know how long it can take before Google decide to pull their finger out and show them in the search results. So if you have got them in there already then please make sure you check they are correct before launching a new redesign of the page. If you lose them now then it may be several months until they reappear, if at all.
The same goes for the new authorship markup.
Paginated Content
A lot of larger websites have paginated content for product listings so check that all of the paginated pages are crawlable via a static link, check they are all indexable (ie, they aren’t ‘noindexed’) and check that their canonical tag has been implemented correctly. Too often the paginated pages can end up messing up the canonical tag implementation which will ultimately chop off a lot of pages from your site for Google.
In addition, the new “rel=next” and “rel=prev” markup from Google should be there. If it hasn’t been marked up yet, then what are you waiting for? If you have already marked this up then best to make sure it is still there.
Social Sharing Buttons
Ensure any social sharing buttons that were on the old site are still on the new website. Social is extremely important for SEO these days so it is important to make these buttons as prominent as possible.
Summary
I am sure there are a lot more site specific things to check when undergoing a site redesign, but above are some of the key areas I tend to focus on. I hope they are of some use to people going through the process and make sure to check any other items that you have developed previously.
Once you have put your brand new site live, then keep a close eye onGoogle Webmaster Tools to spot errors that may have been missed. Google Webmaster Tools can be a great source of fast information to identify problems, for example if you suddenly see a massive amount of URLs that are ‘restricted by robots.txt’ then the site may have been accidentally ‘noindexed’
by Michael Cropper | Jan 14, 2012 | SEO |
There is a lot of different discussions around the web about whether you should use a Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) or a Directory when scaling a website up into multiple languages or countries, so I am going to give an overview of the pros and cons for each method.
The main question many people ask is that when moving into a new market is which should be used to get the maximum benefit? A country code top level domain or a directory?
Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD)
A country code top level domain is a domain that is bound to a specific country, such as .uk for United Kingdom, .au for Australia, .cx for Christmas Islands, .fr for France, .th for Thailand etc.
Pros of Country Code Top Level Domains
- Clear signal to Google who the website is targeting. There is no ambiguity, when Google looks at your website www.example.com.au it is clear that the website is targeting Australian users. Usually in Google Webmaster Tools you can set which country you want your website to target, when your website is on a generic top level domain such as .com. Although when your website is on a ccTLD this information is not available since Google assumes (correctly or not) that you are targeting customers within that country.
Screenshot below showing generic top level domain settings in Google Webmaster Tools where you can set the country you would like to target.
Where as when you look at the same information in Google Webmaster Tools when you are on a ccTLD such as .uk this is what you see
- Another benefit to having a ccTLD is that some users in certain countriesprefer to buy from those domains. For example people in Australia are extremely patriotic and prefer to buy from .com.au domains (company in Australia domain). Where as in somewhere like Thailand, people prefer to buy from a .com domain opposed to a .co.th (company in Thailand) domain since there can be a lot of poor quality websites on .co.th domains. So Thai people believe .com businesses will provide a better service or product. This isn’t always the case and there will always be people with different preferences, so when moving into a new market it is essential to do your own research into what would work best for your business.
- It is a lot easier for a user to link to www.website.co.th than it is for a user to link to www.website.com/th/. By making this process simpler then it could lead to an increase in natural links for your website.
- By having several country code top level domains it is possible to occupy more of the search results pages for branded search queries. For example if someone searched for “your brand” then it is possible that your .co.uk website, .com website and .co.th websites could all rank. Google is no where near perfect when it comes to language differentiation although it is getting better.
Cons of Country Code Top Level Domains
- The obvious one here is that it kind of limits where you can operateyour business. If you are on a .co.uk domain, then it is unlikely that you are going to rank well in other markets due to how Google perceives ccTLDs as shown above. That said, if you have plenty of local links say from .fr domains, then Google isn’t going to totally ignore them. It is likely going to ignore the ccTLD and change its mind and say ‘even though the domain is a .co.uk domain, this website has lots of links from .fr domains, so it must be relevant for French users too’ as shown in the image below. I have seen a lot of random and non relevant websites on other ccTLDs rank in strange places in the past, but I would put that down to Google’s poor algorithm.
- One potential pitfall of using a country code top level domain is that all of the links from your main aren’t fully being utilised and there is no history to your new domain. That said, what most larger websites tend to do is link all of their ccTLD domains together so that each page in a different language links to all of the other languages, so www.website.com/en/pageone.html would also link through to www.website.com/fr/pageone.html, or www.website.co.th/pageone.html and www.website.com.au/pageone.html would like together and vice versa.
- To successfully launch a new language / localised website then it is important to consider what marketing budget is available to really push the new website. It does require significant effort to launch a new website into another market so think carefully about the options. If the website is simply being translated in the hope that some traffic will magically appear then a ccTLD is probably not the best option, instead just use the main domain with the new languages in a directory.
Language Directories
The second option when scaling a site up into multiple languages is to use a directory for each language such as www.website.com/fr/ for France (or French) and www.website.com/th/ for Thailand (or Thai). One important point to think about here is if you are targeting a certain country or a certain language, or both?
Taking French as an example, if you are only targeting France as a country then you will be missing out on a massive market from other French speaking countries and this can be quite big. There are 28 countries around the world where French is a national language which include: Belgium, Benin, Burkina-Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, France, Gabon, Guinea, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mali, Monaco, Niger, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Switzerland, Togo and Vanuatu.
Another option here is to target both language and country by providing a full localised directory such as www.website.com/ca-fr/ for Canadian people who speak French and www.website.com/be-fr/ for Belgium people who speak French.
Pros of Language Directories
- One of the main pros to having all new languages in a directory is that all of the inbound links to your website will flow through to the new language pages. That said, this would also happen when linking your different ccTLDs together correctly although is it not fully known if both of these methods would pass the same amount of Google Juice through.
Cons of Language Directories
- One of the potential pitfalls of having languages in a directory opposed to on a ccTLD is that Google could confuse the site as being a total mess in multiple languages. Although this isn’t likely to happen and you can set each directory to be targeting a specific country within Google Webmaster Tools as shown above.
- It is possible that for branded search queries that you will find your main pages ranking in the incorrect language which isn’t a great user experience. For example if someone is searching for “your brand” from France then it is very likely that the main English website will rank since the English page has far more Google Juice strength and it can be difficult to get this correct.
- The issue of what content you should display on the ROOT of the domain, www.website.com? Should it be English or one of the other languages? Then this takes you into the realm of potentially redirecting users either based on the IP address or on their language settings from the browser. Bearing in mind that the incorrect language could also show as a snippet in the search results which would dramatically reduce the click through rate.
- If you are thinking of automatic redirects for users then you may havepotential Google Bot issues with cloaking. There is no clear info from Google as to what is best here and they have even totally contradicted their self several times on this issue. There is also the possibility that if the automatic redirects haven’t been set up correctly that you could accidentally block Google from accessing most of your website. For example since Google Bot always crawls from America then you wouldn’t want to be redirecting Google Bot to the English page all of the time since it would never discover any of the other content!
- People within the market you are entering are likely to link to the main website and not the localised directory, for example you will find a lot of people would link to www.website.com opposed to www.website.com/th-th/ which could hinder how well the language directories rank within the local search engines.
Summary
There is no quick win to breaking into a new market and there are a lot of pros and cons to each of the different methods, country code top level domains and directories. Personally I would prefer to use ccTLDs where possible if there is going to be a real push into that market.
If you are just thinking about translating and not promoting then it is a waste of money, similar to buying a phone and expecting it to ring on its own! Nothing worth while is easy, so it is going to take considerable effort to break into the market.
You may have noticed that I have not mentioned the option for sub-domains within this post and that is because I don’t like sub-domains 
But if you are interested then I am sure you can pull some of the above points for/against sub-domains too.
Hopefully this has provided you a wide range of information on the topic and will help you decide what is best for your website.
Here is a summary table outlining all of the different points listed above
by Michael Cropper | Jan 14, 2012 | SEO |
Whilst I would love to think I knew the full 200+ signals being used in Google’s ranking algorithm, I don’t think I would quite get to 200 on my own. I am asking for help from the SEO community in this post to share their knowledge on how Google rank websites.
This post is designed to list all of the possible data sources / signals Google could be using as part of their ranking algorithm. My feeling is that if they have access to data, then they will be using it in someway or another. Weather this is to help boost websites or to flag websites as spam and demote them. We aren’t going to be discussing the actual weight Google is giving to each of the different signals (that can be for another post ), just to see if we can get all 200 (or more) signals theycould be using.
I have broken down the main areas to help categorise the different signals. Anyone who can add to this list will get a link back to their blog (as long as you don’t have a spammy website!) since this is my way of saying thanks for contributing.
Anyone wishing to contribute can add a comment to this blog post and I will update the blog post. When commenting please state;
- What piece of information Google could be using
- How they would judge / rank this information (I.e. how does this show quality or not?)
- Where they would get this data from
- Any relevant official sources of information to support your theory
A few of the easy ones have already been put in I want this post to be generated by the SEO community to see how many we can get between us all.
So lets get started then!
On Site Signals
- Meta title
- H1 & heading tags
- Keywords within the text
- Amount of useful text when subtracting templated information and adverts
- Phone number, which signifies that the website is a genuine business
- Amount of unique images which cannot be found anywhere else
- Amount of unique high quality content
- Is there regular fresh content appearing on the website?
- Internal linking
- Site speed
- Image ALT attribute
- Amount of adverts on the page & how much useful content is left once the adverts are removed
- Video markup
- Microformats and rich snippets such as hreview or hrecipe
- IP C class and location of server
- Content above the fold VS content below the fold
- Top level domain
- How long the domain has been owned by the current owner, not just how long the domain has been registered to ‘someone’
- Keyword over usage or keyword stuffing (negative factor)
- Cloaking (negative factor)
- Hidden text (negative factor)
- Duplicated content from external websites
- 301 redirect flags such as redirect chains (301 –> 301 –> 301 –> Final destination), redirect loops or redirects ending on a 404 page.
- Keyword rich URLs opposed to page numbers or product ID’s
- Number of crawl errors found when crawling the site
- Does the HTML conform to W3C standards
Off Site Signals
- Anchor text for inbound links
- Number of linking root domains
- PageRank from inbound links
- Followed / Nofollowed attributes on inbound links
- Number of mentions (ie, ‘website.com’ without an actual link)
- Total number of external links in addition to linking root domains
- Surrounding text on external links
- IP C class of linking websites
- Existence of a Google places profile
- Link profile of competitor websites
- Age of the back link
- Link growth rate and how fast links to certain pages have gained links
- Evidence of paid links
- Selling ‘followed’ links to other websites (negative factor)
- History of comment spamming on forums, blogs or other link spam (negative factor)
Brand Signals
- Does the website have a brand logo which appears throughout the website?
- Does the brand logo appear anywhere else on the web?
- Does the website send out branded emails to its customers? This data could be gathered by analysing gMail accounts.
- How many gMail accounts are receiving, opening and engaging with emails sent from this brand website?
- Does the website have a LinkedIn company page with real people working at the company?
- Search volume for branded keywords and brand name
- Presence of a physical address on the website
- Age of the domain
- Number of branded external links
Social Signals
- Does the website have a Twitter account?
- Does the website have a Google+ brand page?
- How many Plus 1’s does the website/web page have?
- How many Facebook fans does the brand page have?
- How many people are Tweeting about the website?
- How many Twitter followers the website has
- Surrounding text of links in tweets
- Number and rate of growth for page views and replies on social media pages
- Presence of user generated content (UGC) on the website
- Growth rate of social media mentions, such as a slow growing amount of mentions or a large outbreak
Other Signals
- Is the website advertising on AdWords?
- Is the website advertising on Google Display Network?
- Is the website listed on any official business websites such as Business Link or Yell.com?
- Does the website have a physical address?
- Is there an email address where customers / website visitors can contact the owner?
- Click through rate (CTR) from the search results
- Bounce rate from the search results
- Review rating of the website / business on third party websites
- Google seller reviews for eCommerce websites
- Quantity of pages in Google’s index
- History of past penalties for this domain (negative factor)
- History of past penalties from this owner of the domain (negative factor)
- History of past penalties for other domains from the same owner (negative factor)
- Amount of time spent on the page / site
- Number of page views per visit
Please add your comments so we can get this list full. I would be surprised if we couldn’t fill this list with all the knowledge out in the SEO industry.
Contributors
Michael Cropper – SEO and Internet Geek (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165)
Felix Lueneberger (9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 86, 87, 88, 89, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170)
John – Forest Software (18, 51, 52, 53)
Sean – http://01100111011001010110010101101011.co.uk (19, 54, 55, 20, 21, 22, 171, 172, 173, 23)
Jeremy Quinn (24)
Brahmadas from SEOZooms (25, 26, 174, 175)
by Michael Cropper | Jan 14, 2012 | SEO |
Here I am going got talk through some of the Excel plugins I have found very useful for SEO tasks. Best thing I can advise is to get them installed and give them a go for yourself. The three plugins to look through today are;
- Regular expressions plugin for Excel
- SEO Tools plugin for Excel
- Excellent Analytics plugin for Excel
Regular Expressions Plugin for Excel
Link: Regex Plugin Excel
This can be a great plugin when working with large data sets within Excel as it allows you to use all of your normal regular expressions to find the data you need. See this site for a regular expressions cheat sheetfor reference, alternatively if you aren’t too familiar with regular expressions then I suggest reading the following tutorial.
There is not much more to say about the regular expressions plugin for Excel apart from that you can filter out a lot more than you can using the normal string matches which Excel has be default. It can be a lot easier to get the information you require.
SEO Tools Plugin for Excel
I briefly mentioned this in an earlier post about why programming is an essential SEO skill but I wanted to expand on the amazing excel plugin which is SEO Tools by Neils Bosma and why you need to be using this if you aren’t already.
Below is a screenshot of the additional tab you get in Excel once you have installed the plugin (60 second install, follow the instructions in the ‘read me’ file!)
So what are some of the cool things you can do with SEO Tools once it is installed? Well an awful lot actually.
Check the HTTP Status of pages
Simply add a lot of different URLs in column A then use the function=HttpStatus(A2) to find out if it is returning a 200, 404, 503 etc. This can be a really useful tool for both SEO since Google Webmaster Tools reports on errors for your site for a long time, often when these pages are actually no longer showing any errors. So it can be a good method to list all of the URLs which Google Webmaster Tools is showing as errors and double checking these to spot the real pages that are showing as errors.
To find this function you can simple click on the ‘onpage’ button highlighted and select the HttpStatus() option from the list
Filter through back link targets
Lets say you have a list of websites / webpages you want to target for back links but it isn’t easy to figure out which ones to target first. From a large list, it is important to be able to filter through these to identify the best websites to contact first. There is no point in contacting poor quality websites first!
Maybe you want to prioritise websites to contact who have “SEO” in their meta title and have a page rank of at least 1
Identify popular content on competitor websites
How about trying to identify which content is the best on competitor websites? Maybe a competitor has a blog or a content section which you can easily scrape all of their URLs from. Simply go to Google, view 100 results and search for “site:blog.website.com” then use Scrape Similar to get all of the URLs where you can paste these into Excel.
Once you have all of these URLs then you can check how popular they have been on the social media channels. In the screenshot below I have pulled a few of my blog posts and identified how many tweets they have had recently using the =TwitterCount(A2) function from SEO Tools.
Whilst I am not a massive fan of copying off competitors (I believe you should be doing your own thing far better so they are copying off you!) this can be a useful tool to get a rough idea of different content that people are interested in. It could even be a good guide to identifying your own ‘linkable content’ since Google Analytics can only show the amount of traffic that each of the pages gets.
So looking at the above screenshot, if those websites were for competitors then I would think about doing a post about how to see competitors social media link statistics since this has gained the most traction.
Website Scraping with XPathOnURL
This is one of the most powerful bits of SEO Tools and one of the best bits with this Excel plugin. I am not going to go into too much detail here about XPathOnURL since this is a full blog post on its own. To give you an idea of what it can do though it basically scrapes certain bits of the HTML that you need such as “get me all the links on this page” which would translate to “get me all the HREF attributes within all of the <a> tags on the page”.
This tool can be extremely useful when scraping websites for certain pieces of content / information etc. Have a play, see what you can do.
Excellent Analytics
Link: Excellent Analytics
This can be a really useful Excel plugin for SEO since it allows you to export all the data you need from Google Analytics straight into Excel. So no more exporting large data sets then matching up the relevant data with a =VLOOKUP() function instead, just get the precise data you need from GA straight into the adjacent column in Excel where your other data is.
I am not going to cover this in a large amount since it is quite self explanatory, it pulls in data from Google Analytics based on all the normal segments, filters and visitor data you are used to using via the normal Google Analytics dashboard. Simply link up your GA account with the plugin and away you go. Below is a screenshot showing one of the user interfaces.
On larger websites which 10’s of millions of page views per month you may have noticed how slow Google Analytics is to do anything, so this can help speed this process up for extracting the data you need.
Summary
These are the three essential Excel plugins SEO I use on a regular basis. I have found them to be real time savers for various tasks as outlined above so go and give them a go.
If you have any other excel plugins that you use for SEO then please leave a comment.
by Michael Cropper | Jan 14, 2012 | SEO |
Here I am going to show you how easy it is to create your own embed code for either your widgets or infographics you have created. They are an essential tool if you want to help build natural links.
This is what the final piece of code looks like to a user, with the images / info graphic / widget above and the text to embed this below.
Click below to embed the above image into your website
So how do you do that? Well it is quite simple really, just a few bits of HTML and JavaScript will enable you to create a box with your embed code in so people can place your images / infographics / widgets on their site with that all important link back to your website as the original source.
The first step is to include the image on the page you are wanting the embed code to be one. Once you have done that you simply add the code below to your HTML and tweak the relevant bits which will be explained in a moment.
Complete Embed code:
<textarea style=”height: 44px; width: 300px; margin: 2px;” onclick=”this.focus(); this.select(); _gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘Infographic’, ‘Click’, ‘guerilla-marketing-infographic’]);” rows=”2″>
<img src=http://www.michaelcropper.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/guerilla-marketing-at-its-best-in-manchester.jpg width=300 height=300 />
<br>
View full image
<a href=http://www.michaelcropper.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/guerilla-marketing-at-its-best-in-manchester.jpg title=”Guerilla Marketing Manchester” style=”color:#0000FF;text-align:left”> Guerilla Marketing Manchester</a>
</textarea>
So if we take a look through each of the different sections to explain what each part does.
Step 1 – Create a text box
Create a text box on the screen which is 44 pixels high, 300 pixels wide and has a bit of a margin. This section also has some JavaScript so when a user clicks (onclick section) the text box then the text is highlighted (this.focus(); this.select() section) which makes it easier for the user to then right click and copy the text. In addition, the code below also has an event tracking Google Analytics tag which means that when someone clicks the text box an event is fired off to the Google Analytics account you have installed on the page which says “someone has clicked an ‘infographic’ which is called ‘guerilla-marketing-infographic’ “
Below the code is what the code actually creates, the text box (although yours will be empty to begin with until the next step.
<textarea style=”height: 44px; width: 300px; margin: 2px;” onclick=”this.focus(); this.select(); _gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘Infographic’, ‘Click’, ‘guerilla-marketing-infographic’]);” rows=”2″>
If interested, read full details about Google Analytics event tracking, but in summary is _gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘category‘, ‘action‘, ‘label‘]);where you can choose the category, action and label you want to use.
Step 2 – Add the Image
You’ve got something to embed right? Well this is the next step, place the HTML code of your original image / infographic / widget in between the <textarea> and </textarea> tags. One key thing to note though is that you need to replace HTML characters such as < and > with their HTML code equivalent. Take a look through a full list of HTML codes for reference. It can be a bit of a pain to do this, but hopefully you don’t have much to include here!
<img src=http://www.michaelcropper.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/guerilla-marketing-at-its-best-in-manchester.jpg width=300 height=300 />
Step 3 – Add the Link Back to You
Here is the most important part, adding a link back to your website as the original source of the content. Same rules apply as in step 2 where by you need to replace the HTML characters with their HTML codes. The great thing here is that you can choose the anchor text which is used when people are linking back to you.
View full image
<a href=http://www.michaelcropper.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/guerilla-marketing-at-its-best-in-manchester.jpg title=”Guerilla Marketing Manchester” style=”color:#0000FF;text-align:left”> Guerilla Marketing Manchester</a>
I have seen some people include cheeky links within this section previously which link back to one of their key pages they want to rank with the best anchor text. Whilst this isn’t a bad idea, personally I would only add it where relevant. A lot of people will likely remove the link anyways, but it is certainly worth a try
Step 4 – Drive Traffic to Share Your Content
Now comes the easy bit! Go out there and tell people about the great content you have just created. If the content truly is great then it is going to make people want to embed this item in their own websites and tell their friends about it naturally.
Here is what the final piece will look like when a user embeds the code in their own website:
So there we go, simple as that! Now time to go and create some great content and promote it well. For anyone who is interested in what the massive gorilla is, then have a read of my guerilla marketing Manchesterpost.
Here is one we use in our info graphic series for A day out on the District line in London. Great option for promoting some great content.
Note: You may also need to wrap ” ” quotes around some of the HTML tags within the embed code itself. Strangely when I was creating this post additional quotation marks were being added around the IMG SRC and A HREF attributes causing invalid URLs, so if you come across this then just tweak accordingly.
Thanks a lot Mick!
No problem:-)
Nice checklist.
I would like to keep this table on my post notes, will really helpful for any post that i update.
Glad you found it useful. Feel free to keep that on your post for reference
Great check list,. I found the checklist what i needed.