SEO

SERP Rank Tracking Tools and Expert Opinions

As an SEO, it is a critical part of my job to show clients how their SEO campaigns are performing. More times than not, the performance of these campaigns is judged pretty much solely on the positions of keywords in the SERPs that I am targeting for the client’s website. Many SEOs will argue that search engine rankings are not the be-all-and-end-all of an SEO campaign and that they are actually becoming less relevant altogether. I hold this very opinion and this is mainly down to the increased appearance of blended search results (i.e. search results containing news snippets, images, videos, shopping snippets, etc). Even though this is the case, the fact of the matter is that clients want tangible results; results that they can see business from.

I’ve put together, with the assistance of my SEO sidekick, Liam McCarthy (he’s going to hate me calling him that!), a list of some of the different tools, both paid and free, that we have used in the past to check keyword positions in the SERPs. I will also be explaining some good ways in which you can gain a more accurate representation of the performance of your search engine campaign. On top of this, I have called in the help of Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO, Simon Penson of Zazzle Media and Magnus Simonarson of ConsultWebs.com to share their thoughts on the topic. Thanks guys!

3 Great Website Architecture Tools for SEO

A solid website architecture is one of the most important factors toward enabling the search engine bots to crawl your content correctly. Site architecture comprises of how the different pages on a site are structured, linked together and the content that the pages comprise of. At the most basic level, your website should have a structure that allows the search engines to effectively access the different webpages on the site in order to consume the content within them.

I have talked a lot about the necessity of effective on-page optimisation recently and ineffective website architecture is a problem that I come across all too often. With this in mind I have decided to share some of my favourite tools that help identify site architectural problems. Some of the tools are free and some are paid for, so you can decide which ones are relevant to you and make the most of them.

Xenu Link Sleuth

This free crawler tool is one of my personal favourites. Xenu Link Sleuth allows you crawl your website and find a whole host of issues. The software is ran off your desktop, so you need to install it on your computer and is really quick at carrying out its’ tasks. Here’s what you can do with Xenu Link Sleuth:

On-Page Optimisation with a View to the Off-Page

On-page SEO is a topic that is widely discussed and it seems that everyone has differing opinions upon what works and what doesn’t. I thought that I would share my experience from the SEO campaigns that I have worked on and found success with. As well as this, I have combined the comments of industry experts to provide you, my lovely reader, with a guide to the best practises of on-page optimisation.

Ever since the introduction of Google+ it seems that Google have went crazy over social signals. Facebook ‘Likes’, ‘Tweets’ and ‘+1s’ all play a huge part toward your website’s search ranking so it would be foolish not to take this into account when doing the on-page work. What I mean by this is that you need your website to be ‘social ready’ in order to encourage or at bear minimum, enable the user to share your content. This, amongst many other factors plays a huge part toward the success of your SEO campaign.

What is the Best Way to Optimise a Web Page?

This is a question that is asked again and again by anyone looking to get their website ranking well within the search engines. The answer to this question, however, is always changing due to the consistent evolution of search engines and the algorithms that they use to ‘rank’ webpages. Not only this but we have to take into account many external factors that have an effect on a website that in the past we would have not considered as part of the on-page SEO process. For example, the different markup languages that have an effect on how our webpages are displayed when they are shared on social sites or simply how they appear in the SERPs.

I must mention Rand Fishkin’s article on ‘the perfectly optimised page‘ back in 2009 which looked at the best way to perform your on-page work at the time. This article now looks to follow on from a lot of the points that Rand made with some new factors that need to be took into account.