Living in California, we’re always taught to be prepared for the Big One.  Being prepared is our only defense to the inevitable.  However, the next big earthquake can still be 100’s of years from now (crossing my fingers it actually is) but on the internet everything changes quickly, as we learned a few months back with Google’s new Panda update.

Here are some helpful tips on how you can be better prepared for Google’s next Big One AKA “The next Panda Update”.

1. Google Targets Web Scrapers

If your website relies on any web scraping technology, you can expect to be hit. So clean out the garbage and tight down on only good content.

2. Good quality content will not be affected

Make sure you’re writing interesting content, something that has your viewers coming back to your site.  Share quality graphics, pictures and useful information. You want to make sure people are browsing your site and getting a good experience from it, not dumping it right away and moving on to another site. Just give people what they want and you should see good results J

3. Excessive WebPages

A lot of times we get out of control with the excessive pages we have on our site. Take a look and ask yourself… “Do I really need so many pages on my site?”  These pages can be poor quality ones and will bring down the ranking of your site.  Simply merge other pages, eliminating the worst ones and create a better looking page.

4. Is your site trustworthy?

Would you leave your kids with a babysitter you just met, that works out of a cheap motel? Probably not, or at least I hope not!!  Well that same concept applies to websites and the trustworthiness they portray from their page.  When you visit a website, you want to make sure it has trustworthy material and that you feel assured any info they have from you will be safe.  Make sure your site is giving off the right trustworthy confident image and not a sketchy one that keeps people away.

5. Double Trouble

Make sure you’re not duplicating anything on your site.  Sometimes this is accidental but can give you a big headache down the line if it isn’t taken care of properly. Having duplicate content can really hurt your rankings, so when cleaning up your site make sure you’re not duplicating anything and if so, clean it up!

6. Bounce Rate

Look through Google analytics for pages with high bounce rate. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.

When will the next major Google update happen?  Nobody knows for sure but one thing is abundantly clear, search engines are getting better at determining quality. Stop focusing on tricks and tactics to rank your website and refocus on making your site the best it can be and you will be well positioned for future changes.  Keep yourself informed and up to date with all the new changes and the next time around you shouldn’t feel too much of a shake.

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PPC is an important strand of your web analysis. One of the cool things about PPC data is that you don’t need a lot of history to draw conclusions from it – a few weeks is enough time to give you an idea of how well a campaign is performing.

Google Adwords data is included in your Google Analytics data and includes metrics like click through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). Google recently released AdWords API v201101, which allows you to more efficiently run reports, as well as implement campaign experiments and other recently released advertising features at scale.

But how do you track success after PPC visitors are on your site? What metrics should you investigate to ensure that you are getting high quality traffic and capitalizing on opportunities to convert?

For these types of performance metrics, you need web analytics! Here are 4 important metrics you should review on a daily basis to evaluate PPC campaign performance.

1. Conversions

It pretty much goes without saying that conversions are the best metric to determine how a PPC campaign is performing. You should have your web analytics set up to record both online conversions (newsletter subscriptions, content downloads) and offline conversions (phone calls, offline campaigns).

To track online conversions, configure your web analytics to record a conversion every time someone arrives on a specific URL. In the case of web forms, this URL would be something like a thank you or confirmation page. For downloads, you might need to add a piece of tracking code that will register the download as a pageview.

To track offline conversions, see one way of doing this in our previous post on Measuring Success of Offline Campaigns in Google Analytics. There are plenty of other solutions out there for tracking other offline conversions (e.g. by telephone) which will integrate directly into your web analytics program so you only have to access one dashboard.

2. Bounce Rate

A bounce is when someone lands on a site and leaves without viewing any other pages. Your bounce rate will vary for each campaign. A high bounce rate may be an indication that your content is not relevant or engaging to visitors.

3. Pages Per Visit

The interesting data comes from a very low or a very high number of page views. Very low could mean that visitors are not finding content useful or interesting, and have resigned to go back to search results to find a more relevant page. A high number of page views could mean either you are producing interesting and engaging content (look at time spent on page for engagement), or that the visitor cannot find the content they are looking for.

In both cases, review the relevance of the page content to traffic-producing keywords, and make sure the information people appear to be seeking is on the landing page, or a click away.

4. Average Time on Site

It goes without saying that a higher time on site is better than a low one. Extremely low (0-1 second) — There is no way to read a page’s content in this amount of time. If there are a lot of visitors spending less than a second on the site, it may be the result of one of two things:

•         Invalid clicks – Check with your PPC platform to ensure you are not being charged for these.

•         Slow site load time – May cause people to get frustrated and hit the back button before ever arriving on the landing page.

Low (less than 15 seconds) — Generally, those visitors who spent 10 seconds or less on a site quickly decided that they were in the wrong place. This may be because at a first glance they didn’t find any relevant information, see their keywords anywhere on the page, or were confused by the landing page’s layout.

Look at these 4 web analytics metrics and you will have a better idea of your PPC performance. Once you have gathered enough data to draw conclusions about which parts of your campaign work well and which don’t work so well, you can start implementing small changes and tracking the different outcomes. By taking this methodical approach you should be able to optimize your campaigns to get the best ROI.

Written by Kirsty Lee of We Are Cloud. We Are Cloud produce the SaaS Analytics solution Bime.

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A little bit of research will reap large rewards when deciding on what keywords to target for your website or blog. It may be just a difference of a few words that will take you from a low ranked site to a high ranked one. But the key is finding the right keywords. Follow these tips to find the best keywords and ultimately increase your web traffic by connecting with targeted traffic.

The More Specific the Better

Be smart and specific with the keyword you go after. A contractor in California will benefit little from using ‘contractor’ as his keyword. Once you add a location and specialty, he will have much greater chance to connect with those looking for his service. So, ‘Bay Area general contractor’ would assuredly produce better results.

Use Available Tools

Many sites offer keyword search tools for free. These include Google’s Keyword Tool and SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. There are other paid versions that may be worth the cost for a subscription. The paid sites are not affiliated with a search engine and may be the superior choice.

Relevant to Overall Goal

If you have not already focused on a specific goal for your site and business, now is the time to spell it out. Write it on paper and then evaluate whether your keyword options will lead you to achieve this goal. As you match the best keywords to the goals you have in mind you will have a more cohesive strategy. Also, the relevancy of the keyword will be easier to determine if your goals are clear.

Check out the Numbers

Looking into the popularity of the search terms will help you determine what niche to target and whether your search terms are too narrow. You want to make sure that enough people are conducting searches with your keywords to make it worth your while. In order to not be too specific but at the same time specific enough to reach your niche market, a look at the numbers is your best tool.

Not Just a Word

We talk of keywords, but frequently it’s the phrase that we really want. You will want to hone in on all kinds of phrases that someone could use to reach your site. Along with the rest of the research you are conducting, you will be able to weed out the non-contenders and determine which phrases will best suit you.

My Name is Lance Williams and I am what some might call H.A.D.D. (Hobby Attention Deficit Disorder) I love everything from rock climbing and snowboarding to building websites and searching for the Best moisturizer for men.

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As you know the title tag is one of the most important on-page ranking factors for a webpage. So it is unfortunate that I constantly see people stuffing a few keywords into a title tag and then calling it a day.

Bellow are a few best practices that hopefully will remind you to revisit those title tags and make sure they are doing their part!

#1 Put your most important keywords FIRST.

You should be able to work at least two to three keyword phrases into a title tag. Make sure they appear by order of importance. I have seen the simple change of keyword order make a huge difference in a sites ranking.

Think about the word order, proximity of keywords and repetition. I hesitated to put repetition in because it is so often abused. However, if you use a keyword at the start of a title tag and then work it in at the end that can be a good thing. Just don’t over do it!

Also, make sure you are using singular and plural versions of keywords where it makes sense.

#2 Move your Company Name to the end.

To be honest, I usually tell clients to include the company name at the start of their description tag and not to waste the space in the title tag. However, this is not a hard and fast rule and if you are a “known” brand it can help to have your name in the title. I rarely find it beneficial to start a title tag with your company name unless that pages main goal is for branding.

#3 Avoid stop words

Try not to use stop words like “and”, “a”, “the” etc. in your title tag. They are just skipped by Google so only use them if you have to for readability. However, if you are clever you really shouldn’t need to use them.

Make sure to you use dashes “-“ or pipes “|” to separate content and it will take up much less space and still aid readability.

#4 Keep it brief

In general about 65 characters “including spaces” is about the max you want for a title tag. Google will start to truncate your results after that anyhow. Simply paste your title tag into Word, highlight it and it will tell you how many characters “including spaces” you are using.

#5 Stay focused

While a homepage can usually target several keywords effectively, most internal pages should only target a specific category or product. When you are writing your title tags make sure to stay focused on the topic at hand and not to go too broad.

Bonus: If users don’t click you have failed

Always remember the end goal of a title tag is not only to rank you but to entice a user to CLICK! Think about your title tag like an advertising headline. Would you be grabbed by a headline of just keywords?

Experiment with your title tags and se what gives you more traffic.  Do you have free shipping, price match guarantee or something In Stock that’s hard to find? Make sure to try working that into your title tag and or description.

I hope these quick tips got you thinking about your title tags again. It’s a great idea to review your title tags every few months and make sure you are getting the most out of them.

Feel free to add more tips in the comments.

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Yahoo recently launched a new service called Yahoo Clues. Yahoo Clues is a free service that gives you keyword trends and demographics data on specific search queries. The service is still in beta but shows a ton of promise and features that others..Cough..Google..Cough..doesn’t have. Let’s dive into some examples of the service.

Growing up with three younger sisters I know that “American Girl Dolls” are big deal around the holidays. You can see the trend line spike right around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. While this information is helpful it’s not nearly as powerful as the demographics data they give.

Demographics

You can break down searches by Age, Gender or Both. You can see here that a whopping 42% of the traffic is from the 35 to 44 year old range. Once you click on a specific data set Yahoo Clues will tell you some additional searches they made. This is very interesting because you can see that right after they search for the company they start to search for coupon codes and free shipping. If you were selling these you would want to make sure you coupon codes were getting spidered by Google and if you offer free shipping put that in your title tag.

Income

You can also click on income groups and see what additional searches they made. Notice the higher income group is no longer searching for coupons but they are still looking for free shipping.

Location

You also have the ability to search popular search locations. Yahoo mentioned that they take into account population size when weighting the results so that the same large states don’t show up first each time.

Clicking on a particular state will give you the breakdown of search traffic by city.

Search Flow

Search Flow is another really useful tool that allows you to see the search terms people are typing before and after their query. This is very valuable information that will allow you to search where your customer has been and where they going.

Yahoo Clues gives you information that will help develop a more complete picture of your customers. By finding out how specific age, gender and income groups search you can become a better marketer to each group. Yahoo Clues is still in beta but it holds tremendous promise.

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eBay is a popular way to earn a living, or even just a side income, from the comfort of your own home.  Because selling on eBay is easy enough that anyone with a computer and a digital camera can do it, a lot of people have sold on eBay at least once.  While sellers range from virtual garage sales — folks just wanting to get rid of their old stuff, and make a little money in the process — to full-fledged Power Sellers, with an eBay store and is just trying to make a little extra income on the side.

Regardless of whether your online store is big or small, however, a well designed eBay store is important.  A lot of eBayers still are not utilizing the store pages that eBay allows each seller, not to mention many people’s listings still appear plain and lifeless.  The availability of these tools are some of the advantages to selling on eBay, and can impact how professional you appear to your buyers, so be sure to make use of them.

But eBay shop design is about more than just your store’s appearance.  Writing your listings and your store pages to attract keyword searches, originating from search engines as well as from inside eBay, can be the difference between high bids and low ones.  If you have ever searched for something to buy from Google or Yahoo, you probably noticed that eBay auctions frequently make the first page or two of search results.  eBay is a strong domain, with new content, and search engines love serving up these results. Wouldn’t you like to be one of those lucky sellers?  Follow these SEO tips for improving your eBay store, and next time, you just might be.

Use keywords in your listing pages. Let’s start with listing pages first, since that is the most basic part of any eBay store.  Many sellers write one or two lines of description, and that’s it.  If you want your listing to get attention, however, be sure to describe each item in full, being sure to use keyword phrases that folks shopping for that item might use to search.  This approach might require a little research and more careful writing, but believe me, it’s worth it! Check out Google Adwords Keyword Tool, or even Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast Tool. If users are searching for it on Google, they’re likely using similar terms on eBay too. With the right terms you can kill two birds with one stone.

Utilize your About Me page and store pages. Even a basic seller gets an About Me page where you can write about what you sell… making sure to use lots of keyword phrases, of course.  In addition, with a seller’s subscription you get several store pages.  Whether you write these pages yourself or hire an SEO writer to create them for you, make sure that you optimize them to pick up search engine traffic paying careful attention to how Meta title data is pulled and making sure to add keywords in this section. Of course, remember the usual character limits with regards to Meta titles, pay attention to keyword density, etc…

Write reviews and guides on eBay. While not directly related to eBay store design, writing reviews and guides is another great way to increase traffic to your online shop.  These short content pieces will list you as the author, which will direct visitors to your eBay page.  In addition, they establish you as an authority on the subject, which helps you to generate a loyal customer base.

Create links to your eBay store. Another factor in search engine optimization is the number of links heading back to your page.  As a seller on eBay.com, you already have an advantage, as eBay is an extremely strong domain.  But you will also benefit your individual store by writing good content for your personal blog and other sites online, and linking back to your store within the content.  You can also hire someone to write the content and generate these links for you, but it is important to be sure they are quality links contained within quality content. Using social media marketing can be helpful in drawing traffic and links as well, albeit no-follow links.

As you can see, there are a lot of things to consider when designing an eBay store, from the quality of the content and the appearance to the store, to the number of links pointing to your store.  A successful online shop requires more than a slapdash effort, so make sure you plan your store’s design carefully!

About the Author

Vern is a blogger and avid writer. He’s well versed in the world of SEO and eBay store design too. You can often find him attached to his laptop in a Starbucks near you!

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White hat SEO  (search engine optimization) is the perfect choice for you if you DO NOT want to risk potentially fatal blows or doing things unethical, and could even get your site banned from Google.  In fact, for most companies and businesses it is the only method of search engine optimization you should ever use.
I personally, have never gotten any of my sites banned from Google, but I could imagine the amount of distress you would go through.  Furthermore never outsource to SEO companies that use blackhat methods.

But, hey this article is about white hat SEO.  In this article I want to cover some convention, l and maybe some unconventional methods you could use in order to boost your sites rank in the search engines. For starters you are probably going to want to use a good CMS (content management system), such as WordPress to make adding, and removing changes that much easier for you.  (see 5 Must for SEO with WordPress).

WordPress requires minimal technical know-how and is pretty simple to use.  Along with WordPress, more and more webmasters are opting to use Joomla  (see Joomla for CMS)

So you have got your CMS and everything installed, now it is time to get real traffic to your site.  I don’t mean spending $5 on eBay for some robot traffic, tricking people into clicking on your site, or any methods of fake traffic generation.  You are going to need to apply real white hat seo techniques if you are seeking “real” visitors.

Beginner White Hat  SEO

Article Marketing.  Unless you have been living in a cave the first thing people learn about white hat seo is article marketing.   You are going to create an article with your keywords in your title, description, and have a decent amount of keyword density, and also have your anchored text pointing to your site with your keywords in it.

Forum Marketing. Another thing people commonly do is find a variety of forums that are related to their website and answer questions.  They will then leave a link in their signature with their website. Again, they will have their keywords in there with a backlink to their website.  Furthermore, a lot of people are actually hiring people to answer questions in forums for very cheap.  This is not my favorite method, but I guess it can work for many websites.

Blog Commenting.  Leave quality comments and drop your links in the comment where they are necessary.  Leaving nice post, great job, ect. are not good comments.  Actually taking the time to read their post and leave an intelligent comment for them (is a great idea).  Better yet, when you leave a comment; I want you to imagine that it is your blog, and you wake up and read your comment.  Would you accept it, or just delete it as spam.  Seriously, do it and it will help you A LOT.

Link Exchanges. Again, not my favorite, but I guess for some it might work pretty good.  Basically, send an email to a webmaster stating that you will add their site on two of your sites in exchange that they will link to your site.  Or you can offer a reciprocal link, but these are off lesser value in Googles eyes.  The only time I really use a reciprocal link is when it is a really authority site, and I will benefit more from it.

The four above are what I call “basic white hat seo tactics.”  Below are more intermediate link building tactics that you should be using.

Intermediate White Hat SEO

Guest Blog Post.  You can find a lot of places around the net, such as myblogguest.com which is a network of sites and blogs that are looking for guest post.  I actually used this method to get in contact with the webmaster here .  You could tailor an article on something pertaining to your site and then leave a backlink to your site for reference.  Along with that you might want to make a couple of good articles, but in one of them actually have your keywords in the title for maximum benefit.  Along, with that you could always ask for a link in their blogroll.  Don’t be afraid to ask for a link and a lot of times if you run a quality site people will help you.

Video Marketing. Creating videos on YouTube are going really good these days, as well as a  handful of other popular video websites.  Create a couple videos with your keywords in them and leave a link on your “about you page” and in your description.  Most importantly, you can use a number of the free tools on the net to stamp a box on your video with an active link.  Don’t forget that you are going to want to comment on others videos, as well.  You can even contact people, and ask for link exchanges and guest post through these video sites.

Social Media.  This is a topic that I could write forever on.  Social media could be anything from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, or the other 50 million social networks on the internet.  For example, on these you would setup fan pages (not on Twitter).  You could auto feed your post, articles, pictures, ect to all go to these networks.  This is an endless way to create an endless amount of authority backlinks to your site.  Then you are going to want to participate on these networks.  Better yet, outsource people to do it for you.

Directory Listing. This is a commonly overlooked tactic that you should be using if you are not already implementing into your seo tactics.  There are a handful of great authority directories that you will want to submit your site to, such as, Yahoo directory, DMOZ, JoeAnt, business.com, botw.org, v7v, Aviva directory.  For a full list please see this awesome list of strong directories.

These next tips are going to be some methods that you probably haven’t heard before are great white hat SEO tactics.

Advanced White Hat SEO

ScrapeBox. This is a tool that I use (it can be used as a black hat tool), but I do not use it that way.  It allows you to autocomment on millions of blogs at once.  However, I use it for the function of researching my competitors to see where they are getting backlinks from.  You can generate a huge list of good blogs that are relevant to your site, and request guest blog post and even leave quality comments.  A good tip is take all the top 20 for various keywords and generate a massive list of sites you could then “link prospect” to get backlinks to your site.  ScrapeBox seriously has saved me hours and hours of time!  You could do it my hand, but it worth it.

Blog Post and Reference. Another great tip for you is to have a blog on your site, and write quality content.  In your blog post reference sites that your competitors are getting links from.  Now right a really good tidbit about them along with a link pointing to them.  Now here is the kicker.  You are going to want to contact them through their “contact us” page and provide them with the link you used to link to them.  Ask them if they will give you a link to your homepage.  Nine times out of ten people will add you to either a blogroll or area on their site.

Google Search. In this method you are going to use the advanced functions in Google to help find other sites in which you can contact to get links from.  You can either approach them with guest post, blog post and reference, ect.  I use these methods all the time and it has really helped my seo a lot over the years.

•     intitle:add+url “keyword phrase”

•     intitle:submit+site “keyword phrase”

•     intitle:submit+url “keyword phrase”

•     intitle:add+site “keyword phrase”

•     intitle:add+your+site “keyword phrase”

•     intitle: directory “keyword phrase”

•     intitle: list “keyword phrase”

•     intitle: sites “keyword phrase”

Pack all these methods into one and do them naturally and your site will be thanking you!  Your site does have to be optimized correctly if you want to see real results.  That you must do extensive keyword research to insure you are not wasting your time.  There are a lot more methods that you can use in order to get good quality backlinks to your website.  I am interested to see what methods you guys/girls are using to help your sites rankings in Google.  Please do share with us, or if there is something you would like me to elaborate on, please speak up

This article was written by Garen Arnold, who is a graphic designer out of Kansas City, Missouri. Garen provides people with the Best Web Hosting Service by using his expertise to help people choose the best web hosting service for their business.

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Earlier this week Google began to allow its search engine users to utilize and test the new Google Instant.

Google Instant is a new feature to Google’s search engine system, which allows you to save time by searching more quickly than the previous design, by instantly giving you results as you type out what you are looking for.

It does this by monitoring how fast you are typing on your keyboard in real time, as the average time between key strokes is only 300 milliseconds, now even if you are a slow typist, as Google Instant loads results on to the screen, while you are typing you will already be scanning the results, thus allowing you to keep narrowing down your search without having to run a normal new search all together.

Typically the human brain processes visual indicators, such as scanning the instant search results, in around only 30 milliseconds, so while you type at an average rate of 300 milliseconds, your mind has already glanced over the new results and you’ve already decided to keep adding words to the search phrase, or have already clicked a resulting entry and are done with your search.

I’ve ran some personal searches with many different phrases and it does appear to be quite a bit quicker to find what I am looking for, according to Google’s own page about Google Instant, by predicting your search results before you even finish typing, let alone press enter or the search button, it is saving you around 2 to 5 seconds per search.

There are additional ways to speed up your search process as such as; the ability while typing in your search phrase, Google loads a prediction list of additional recommended terms, simply press the tab key for the recommendation to be appended and you can still keep typing after that, you may also use your arrow keys to control how it behaves with the corresponding results, including pressing the right-arrow to actually just go to the first result that is found (double or triple pressing required).

Here are some quick facts about Google Instant:

• The typical searcher took more than 9 seconds to enter search phrases.
• Google has seen some searchers that took up to a minute and a half to type their search phrase
• If everyone used Google Instant worldwide, estimations are that this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second!
• 15 new technologies contribute to Google Instant functionality.

Just in case you dislike the new Google Instant, rest assured, you surely can disable it, and return to the normal, previous Google Search, that you are used to using, you can simply visit your Google Preferences page and set the option to disable it.

This new instant search results technology is likely to make a big impact on people’s search behavior, once the general public has begun using it on a regular basis, it very well may lead to changes in Search Engine Optimization Strategies, be sure to keep a close eye for new search behavior in your niche.

You will also find more Frequently Asked Questions on Google Instant’s Introduction Page.

Let us know your thoughts on Google’s new Google Instant!

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With today’s technology there is no excuse for being caught flat footed by a competitor’s big moves. The following list of sites and techniques will arm you with everything you need to stalk keep a close eye on your competitors every move.

Before you go all Austin Powers, take a second to think about who or what you should be spying on. A good technique is to head over to LinkedIn or Crunch Base and search for a rival company. Make a list of their important employees and their positions. I just recently read an article where a company was following around rivals key sales people and watching them check into locations on foursquare or Twitter (with geo location turned on). They would then use that data to determine which clients the competition’s sales people were talking to. Pretty sneaky indeed! You would be surprised how much info an employee might give out over Facebook or other social media channels.

Website Stalking

“I always feel like somebody’s watching meeeeee”.… Umm yeah, it’s ChangeDetection.com. These guys have been around since 1999 monitoring changes to webpages. For the low price of free you can be alerted to any changes your competition makes to their page. This sure beats obsessively checking their page 5 times a day but who does that anyway

Also, if you are already using Google Reader you can now subscribe to updates from pages that do not have RSS feeds. So it is very simple to keep tabs on important changes to webpages.

Use the Way Back Machine to look at changes to a website over time. What you are looking for is changes they made that have stuck around. If they kept the change it probably had a positive impact.

Social Media Stalking

Social Mention is a real-time social media search engine that also includes social media alerts that can be emailed to you daily for any search phrase. The search results display a ton of data including which social media sources are generating the most buzz. You can even drill down to see conversations from specific sites as well as the top usernames at those sites.

This is a great way to see which channels are working best for your competition or brands. You can also reach out to power users in the various networks you find. For good measure you can download all of this information to a csv/excel file!

The search results can be a little slow to load and I do not really trust the sentiment calculation they use but overall this is an amazing site to collect free information.

Topsy is a social media search engine with some great sorting options so you can see conversations by the hour, day, week and month. A really nice feature of Topsy is that you can search within a specific domain or a specific Twitter account etc. Example:  “site:domain.com” or you can do “site:domain.com from:TwitterUsername” and it will search for those specific Twitter conversations.

Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create your own custom “buzz” page around any topic. Each source they display has its own box that you can toggle off or on under the available sources menu. Bookmark the page and it remembers your settings. This is a great way to have the information you need, displayed in a clean and efficient manner.

How Sociable measures brand visibility across the web and assigns a score to each channel such as Facebook or Twitter etc. It is very simple to use and compare yourself to competitors to see which channels you need to improve in. You can also setup email alerts which is handy.

Check User Names is a great service but one sneaky way to use it is to enter in known usernames of your competitors and or their employees. The service quickly checks over 160 social networks to tell you if the name is available. Keep track of all the taken names and you can see where your completion is engaging on the web and where you can go to follow/friend them from an account they won’t suspect.

Google Stalking

As you know Google is a great source of information. Make sure you are getting the most out of it though. Using the new left menu updates, discussions, blogs, and news sections are really great for staying up on the latest information. Being able to sort by hours, days, weeks, and years is also a really nice way to filter out old information.

Example Search – [domainname.com -site:domainname.com] So that you show mentions of a site from external sources.  Or add (&as_qdr=d (past one day) to a query string to get searches in the past 24 hours.

I have read that people search for PDF files on competitors sties hoping to find something juicy but it is a harder one to get results on. Try something like (site:domain.com filetype:pdf “plan” OR “roadmap” OR “timeline” OR “strategy”)

Google Alerts is a very simple way to spy. Simply tell Google what you what to be update about and how often and it will email you whenever there is new information. You can also create an RSS feed with it as well.

I suggest putting quotes around your “keyword phrase”. Pretty much any search you can do on Google you can setup an alert for. So get creative.

Google Ad Planner will give you estimates of unique visitors, their interest, keywords searched and sites they also visited simply by typing in a competitors URL.

Google Insights & Google Trends are a great way to track brands over time.

You can input a URL into the Google Keyword Tool instead of a keyword phrase to see what keywords your competition focuses on.

Also, if you enable it you can use Google Analytics Benchmarks to compare your site to similar sites in your niche although the data is anonyms.

Stalking Demographic Data

It is always nice to get an idea of your competitor’s demographics as well as your own. Use the sites below to develop a profile of your competitions customers. You can learn their gender, age, race, education level and even salary ranges for free.

Quantcast
Compete Site Analytics
Alexa

Keyword Stalking

Before you start an SEO or PPC campaign you need to know what your competition is doing in both of these areas. The tools bellow will help you to see which keywords your competitor is running advertisements on Google and what keywords they rank for organically.

Keyword Spy

SpyFu

SEM Rush

iSpionage

These sites give limited data for free but offer a lot more for monthly subscriptions. They all really do the same thing so find the one with the best info for your niche and start spying.

SEO Stalking

The two best things you can and should be doing to stalk the competition is to go to Yahoo site explorer (download the csv file) and the Open Site explorer from SEOMOZ and to grab all of your competitors backlinks. Use this data to snipe links from that they have that don’t link to you. I recently mentioned how to do these in a previous article.

Honorable Mentions

Below are some sites that are really good but you should only focus on them after using the other services I mentioned.

Kurrently is a real-time search results from Twitter and Facebook. The conversation stream updates live which is really nice for following a trending topic. It also enables you to control the flow so you don’t get overwhelmed.

Besides having a killer domain name Twazzup is another real-time search service worth giving a look. You can follow a conversation stream and see how the top influencers are for that particular keyword. If you hover over a particular user it gives you their stats, location etc. without having to click on anything.

BackType is another good place to find conversations and influencers of a competitor’s domain.  In that past they had more functionality but they seem to have scaled back the free version of their service.

You can also, type a rival’s Twitter name into Klout and it will tell you who they influence and who influences them.

Ok by now I am sure you are itching to begin stalking. If you know of any great sites or techniques I didn’t cover be sure to leave a comment and if you if found the post helpful be sure to stalk follow us on Twitter @authoritydomain and RT.

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One of the first things I do when conducting an SEO site review is to check a sites major keywords VS its top ten competing sites in Google.

Two recurring problems I find are a lack of keyword rich links from unique domains or way too many keyword stuffed links being built. Both of these situations can wreak havoc on your search engine rankings.

People spend a lot of time picking out the keywords they want to rank higher on Google. However, they usually assign arbitrary goals for how many links they need to acquire for each keyword.

This is a huge mistake but one you can easily avoid or correct. There are many free tools that can get you the information you need I recommend http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/ but there are plenty of others out there.

Both tools are free although you need a paid account to get all of the data from Open Site Explorer but the free data is available instantly and easily exportable to excel.

Simple Steps

1. Make lists of the top 10 Google results for your major keywords.

2. Run one or both tools on your own site as well as your competition. Make sure you filter out internal links. (Open Site Explorer even has a way to filter out no followed links which is nice)

3. Once you have your list, filter out duplicate urls. Google is not going to count 500 links from the same site. So the best way to do this is to act like site wide links are all just one link for our purposes.

4. Sort your anchor text by unique occurrences and be sure to count things like “SEO” and “seo” as the same word. (Do not worry about capitalization)

You should now have everything you need to compare your anchor text density to your competition. This is great information because these sites are already doing well for the keywords you are targeting. The perfect anchor text density is whatever Google is already showing you it likes.

This will eliminate you simply guessing how many links you need for each keyword. However, there are a few things to watch for. Sometimes you will see people ranking with very few keyword rich links. So they may have a super low density and still rank. In these cases just build up links slowly but don’t worry if your density is 6% and there’s is .02% etc.

Sometimes nobody in a niche is actively building keyword rich links and you can reap the rewards. You just don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb and have your anchor text density be 45% while everyone else is in the 3 to 10% range. The key is to have a natural looking anchor text keyword profile.

All links are not created equal so if you are in a situation where you cant have too high of an anchor text density to be successful make sure you use POWERFUL links for that keyword because you won’t be building as many.

Do not worry about having a high density for your company name or url. That is actually pretty normal and can help bring your other anchor text densities down to a natural looking range.

Use your discretion because each niche will have wildly different acceptable percentages but whatever you do, stop guessing when it comes to anchor text density and develop a customized strategy.

Bonus

The list you just put together is linking to your competition. Why are they not linking to you? Simply run their results VS your domain’s backlinks and now you have a highly relevant list of sites to target for link building.

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