SEO Tools

Looking for Local Search Tips – Get Listed!

November 25, 2010, by 3 comments

Getlisted is a free tool that aims to open up the influencers behind Google Local/Places. Its currently focused on the US market but has a tool in Beta for the UK.

For those of you who dont already know about this. Google Local (now known as Google Places) takes what was a pull-out map and listing that adorned the top of the first page for lots of local keyword searches i.e. ‘web design leeds’ and integrates this information directly into the organic listings. Google Places identifies a places listing through the use of a Google Maps style pointer next to each listing.

These are important as they now take over many local SERPS.

The good news is its free to add your business – this is also a bad thing as theyre going to get masively competative very quickly.

You’re probably asking so how do i get a top place in Google Places? Well that brings me back to Get Listed. Unlike traditional SEO which is link and anchor text focused, Google Places is Citation focused. This means Google actively seeks out mentions of your brand on review sites, blogs and more and collates them into a position score which in turn sets your position. The Get Listed system seeks out such sources and gives you an oportunity to introduce them to your customers for impartial citation.

Obviously some people are trying to game the system however these are pretty easy to spot (singler user, single login, same ip across multiple users) and the related systems are working hard to clean them up.

Give it a go.

How to Get New Domains Indexed in Hours

November 19, 2010, by 17 comments

I’ve been playing around with various combination’s of tools and techniques looking for a way of getting new domains indexed in Google as quickly as possible and I think I’ve found a great and super-simple solution that you can use to give your brand new website a head start. This technique works in under 6 hours (usually) and has been tried and tested on a number of brand new domains, and uses some of the tools previously posted on this blog!

OK to the ‘tutorial’

Firstly make sure you have some unique content posted to your host and make sure the domain is propogated.

Next use the Bulk Ping tool – just enter your domain (no sub pages needed)

Next use tool 1 and 3 from this list, entering your brand name (not anchor text) in the relevant boxes. This quickly gives you 2500 (ish) branded do and nofollow links form various domain info pages which are in turn automatically pinged.

…that’s all there is to it.

Did You Know that the Old, More Reliable Link Diagnosis Classic is Still Online

November 19, 2010, by 2 comments

This is a great tip from Jim, a Link Ninja at BC (where i work). If like me, you’ve moved away from using Link Diagnosis because you find the all singing and dancing web 2.0 interface buggy as hell (read unusable) then you’ll be glad to know that the old link diagnosis interface can still be accessed via classic.linkdiagnosis.com. It still requires you to download their toolbar (and give away your surfing profile) however this is a slim price to pay when you consider Link Diagnosis is a half decent rival to Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and SEMRush.

Good tip Jim!

Easy Link Building with Tineye – the Copyscape of Images

November 17, 2010, by No comments yet

I’ve just been introduced to a service called tineye.com which could be a great link development tool for anyone who uses original graphics, charts and artwork on their websites. Basically Tineye.com operates similarly to copyscape only for images.

You upload your sourcer image and Tineye.com scans its database of sites revealing 3rd party sites that are using your image.

Then all you have to do is contact the webmaster to ‘negotiate’ your citation/credit which you rightly deserve.

The system is pretty intelligent catering for scaled, rotated and flipped images which is really neat (OMG did i just type ‘neat’… right thats it no more American TV for me).

njoy!

Mass Bulk Ping Tool – What Is And How To Ping Online

October 26, 2010, by 16 comments

By having your link building efforts indexed and attributed by Google you can accelerate the results achieved from your efforts. The problem to date (at least for me) has been how to achieve this. Sure you can link to your links from authority blogs but what if you have a hundred or so links to ping?

Thats where pingdevice.com comes into play

This excellent bulk ping tool is a free alternative to paid services like the ScrapeBox blog pinger tool and pings services including: Weblogs.com, Blo.gs, Technorati, Feed Burner, Syndic8, NewsGator, My Yahoo!, PubSub.com, Blogdigger, BlogRolling, BlogStreet, Moreover, Weblogalot, Icerocket, News Is Free, Topic Exchange, Google Blog Search ,Spinn3r, Bloglines, AideRSS, SkyGrid, Bitacoras, Collecta, Audio.Weblogs, RubHub, GeoURL, A2B GeoLocation, BlogShares without the need for you to fill in any captchas etc.

Amazing stuff.

What is Ping?

A Ping is basically a notification to the search engines and other broadcast media i.e. RSS sites etc that something has changed on a page. Built into wordpress is a Ping service that does this for you every time you add in some new content.

You can use a ping service like the Bulk Ping tool discussed above to not only repeat this process manually, but also ping other content i.e. new links created, articles published, old content updated etc.

Professional SEO Site Audit only $199… by Amazon?

October 20, 2010, by 1 comment

From a Tim Critchlow re-tweet it seems that Alexa (aka Amazon) have produced a site auditing tool that produces reports covering:

  • Reachability
  • Onsite Links
  • Robots.txt
  • Redirects
  • Server Errors
  • Reputation
  • Anchor Text
  • Broken Links
  • Duplicate Content
  • META Tags ???
  • low word count (aka supplimental fodder)
  • image ALT attributes
  • Session ID’s
  • Too many links
  • Image descriptions (alt again??)
  • heading recomendations (aka semantics)
  • dead end pages
  • page not found (repeat of broken links?)
  • SEM
  • Link Recomendations
  • Crawl errors
  • Speed Analysis

…WOW! this tool might actually be worth the money tho it will need extensive testing and comparrison against our tool suite to see if its worth it. Fingers crossed its a fire and forget report you can run in the background without much admin.

Updated: DOH forgot the link alexa.com/siteaudit

&pws=0 Firefox Plugin

October 8, 2010, by 1 comment

If you’re like me and are forever apending your searches with the query string addition &pws=0 to ensure that you’re seeing googles unfiltered, unpersonalised results then you probably need this plugin.

Close Firefox, unzip it and run the EXE.

Now and forever more searches will be appended with &pws=0 automatically.

JOY!

Credit Michael Duz

Google Keyword Tool Abandons Long Tail

October 8, 2010, by 4 comments

Marty has confirmed that the ubiquatous Google Adwords Keyword Tool now no longer shows long and medium tail terms. This is pretty damaging for SEO’s who often rely on this tool for keyword research and as a way of gaining insight into a market. Luckily Marty has put together a list of alternative tools for us to use (paid and unpaid).

Guess its time to look for alternatives to long-standing Google tools as they seem to be systematically being removed from popular use.

DIY Automatic Link Building Tool

October 4, 2010, by 1 comment

I discovered this script which replicates the functions of my earlier auto link building tool post. This is great as it gives you the control over what sites are submitted to. So if you’re looking to provide your own service then this maybe the auto link building tool you’ve been looking for.

I’d appreciate it if anyone uses this tool and has some good links to be added that you submit a comment so everyone can benefit.

tool code:

auto-link-building.php

Free Auto Link Building Tools

October 2, 2010, by 10 comments

For what it’s worth these two automated link building services will create pages on all of those domain reference type pages (approximately 5000 in total) i.e. Alexa.com and things like that. If you’re into brand protection or want to build links that are mainly references to the domain name then these tools might be just the thing you’re looking for.

Simply enter your URL into each, press go then when you wake up on a morning they’re done (and pinged which is a nice touch!)