aaron dalrymple dot com

I’ve mentioned that, while I provide them, I am not a huge fan of ranking reports for SEO programs. Most Recently here: The Future of SEO Services. So, I decided to come up with a pro and con list.

Pros:

• Can chart progress of an SEO program over time.
• Illustrates value of SEO to clients/boss.
• Can track important keywords against competitors.
• Tracks ranking of your brand name and its variations.
• Can highlight site issues due to design changes, links, keyword changes, etc.
• Can help identify pages that are not ranking for targeted keywords.
• Can be a great addition to an overall report package - along with traffic and conversion data.

Cons:

• Easily manipulatable by which keywords you decide to “track”.
• Weighs each keyword equally - which can be deceiving to clients/boss.
• Can over value the importance of rankings to clients/boss.
• Rankings change daily. Getting bogged down in the details of why a single keyword changes by one or two positions is usually a waste of time.
• Different data centers can produce widely different results.
• Will increasingly become irrelevant with localization and personalization of search results.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few… Anything you can add? How do these pros and cons stack up against each other?

*For a great comparison of ranking report software, visit Matt Diehl’s post here: 3 Rank Reporting Softwares Reviewed.

Tagged as: SEO, SEO Tools, search rankings, pro con, ranking reports

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Wordtracker, which has a great keyword generation tool that a lot of SEMs pay for, has recently released a new free keyword search tool that’s great for a quick keyword lookup or for those who don’t have the need for a full-blown keyword generation tool.  It’s very similar to the old Overture Keyword Suggestion tool that only seems to work about 1/3 of the time anymore.

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Tagged as: Search Engines, Yahoo, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, Optimization Tips, SEO Tools, overture, keyword generation, wordtracker, keywords

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Gets you some free SEO tools from Jim Boykin and We Build Pages here:

New Free SEO Tools from WBP - Sweet! - Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog

Great link bait, Jim.

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Yahoo, SEO, Online Marketing, Link Building, SEO Tools, SEO Tools

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If you mange a small site that doesn’t update daily, or several of them, and want an easy way to generate a quick Sitemaps.xml file to upload to Google, try this online tool. I ran across it when trying to generate a sitemaps file for a small website from my laptop. Plug in your info and the tool will crawl your site and create the file, which you can then save and upload to Google.

Not using Google Sitemaps? Here are some reasons why you should be.

Here is the link to the tool:

Unlimited XML, Text, HTML Sitemap Generator - XML Sitemaps
*note: I’m in no way associated with this company or their products.

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO, Optimization Tips, SEO Tools, sitemaps, google sitemaps, sitemaps.xml, sitemap.xml, xml, sitemaps generator

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I’m often asked, “how do you keep up with search engine marketing?” “Isn’t it always changing, how do you know what to do?”

There’s so much free search engine marketing info, both natural and paid, on the web via newsletters, blogs, etc. that I usually don’t find it necessary to pay for informational products related to SEO.

Tools are another matter; for instance, Word Tracker is well worth the $254 yearly fee. However, for most industry information, I’ve found that reading newsletters, blogs, and occasionally browsing the forums keeps me in tune with what’s current in the industry.

If search is not the main focus of your job though, keeping up can may be a daunting task. If that’s you, here is a short blogroll (list) of the search and/or marketing blogs that I currently follow:

Bloglines Blogroll

There are thousands more, but this selection has a good mix of authoritative voices as well as others who closely follow the industry and post on what’s being discussed. If you would like the OPML file for these feeds so that you can track them yourself or add them to your feed reader, you can find it here: www.bloglines.com/public/aarondalrymple - choose the “Export Subscriptions” link on the bottom of the left hand column to add it to your own RSS reader.If you feel the need to pay for a subscription, you should check out Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News, it may be the closest to a “one-stop” resource available:
www.searchenginenews.com

In the past week I’ve also run across two fantastic, free, in-depth guides on search marketing. One focuses on natural search and one on paid search marketing.

Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing - DM News

Defining Search Engine Relevancy - SEO Book.com

As far as forums, there are two that I actively troll. I’m not a big poster to the forums, I did for a while but it takes too much valuable time and sucks me into too many of the debates/arguments that seem to dominate the boards at times. If you need some info you can’t find anywhere else, though, you can usually find an answer in the forums. Just make sure you use the forums search function first and only post a new thread if you can’t find it already discussed. If not you will be nailed by the forum junkies that insist on taking time to tell you that you’re wasting their time by posting a question that has already been answered.

Here are the two I watch:

webmasterworld

searchenginewatch

Have a great 4th of July!

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Yahoo, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, MSN, WebMasterWorld, Optimization Tips, SEO Tools, Blogging, search engine marketing, Search Engine Blogs, Search Engine Guides, SEOBook, DMNews, Search Engine Watch

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I get a lot of questions from clients about redirects.

• How do I move my site to a new domain and keep my search engine rankings in tact?
• I’m going to take down some old pages/sites, will this affect my rankings?
• I’m redesigning my website and my directory and/or page names are changing, will the engines just point to the new pages?
• How can I tell the engines to send all my traffic to my home page?

There are answers to these questions, but first I usually say something like, “Are you sure you want to do that?” The reason I ask is that often times the pages or sites that the company wants to get rid of are older pages that have great link reputation and are well “aged” in the engines – they get crawled a lot, have a high Page Rank, etc. Plus, more content is usually better; can the pages be repurposed?

After assessing the need for getting rid of pages or moving domains or changing the page/directory structure (which are all valid and necessary in a lot of cases), using a 301 redirect is usually the answer. A 301 redirect won’t get you in trouble with the search engines as some redirects, like a meta-tag refresh, can. It tells the engine that a page has permanently moved and asks if it would please start indexing the new page in its place. It’s the safest way to change page names, domains, directories, etc. when changing these elements of your website. If you’re deleting an old mini-site or set of pages, you should consider redirecting each page you’re deleting to a similar page on your new or main site.

The next question is, naturally, “how do I do that?”

Here are some good sources that I’ve com across recently on redirects, 301s and how to implement them:

Steve Hargrove - How to redirect a web page, the smart way - added 6/20 

Wikipedia - URL redirection

TamingTheBeast.net - Giving search engine spiders direction

SEOBook - .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO: Guest Post by NotSleepy

Bruce Clay, Inc. – Sorting out Redirects

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Yahoo, SEO, Online Marketing, MSN, Ask, Link Building, Optimization Tips, SEO Tools, 301 Redirect, URL Redirect, Redirect, Bruce Clay

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Jim Westergren has put together a fantastic link building guide in what is an example of a fantastic link building technique: great content! It really is a good guide on something that still mystifies a lot of web masters and even SEOs, how to acquire high quality links that don’t risk your positions in Google and the other engines.  It’s a great guide for beginners as well as folks who have been doing it for a long time and need a refresher or some new ideas.
Here’s your link, Jim:

Link Building Guide

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO, Online Marketing, Link Building, Optimization Tips, SEO Tools, Jim Westergren, link building guide

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I ran across a great article today that explains the benefits of using Google Sitemaps as an SEO tool.  I’ve alluded to using Sitemaps as an SEO tools in other posts, but this article does a great job of explaining the hows and whys.  Sitemaps has gone from a simple submission tool to a tool that allows one to glimpse at how Google views your site.  You’ll need to “verify” your site with Google before all of the tools will work, but this can be done pretty simply, if you need your webmaster to do it you can just pass on a meta tag snippet to him/her and they can stick it on your home page for you.

The most valuable tools in Sitemaps, I think, is the ability to see what keywords Google thinks your site is about, it’s a bit limited naturally - Google wouldn’t want to give up too much info, and a series of tools that allow you to identify if Google is having problems seeing/crawling your pages and which pages. Also, at the WebmasterWorld Conference this year the Sitemaps team indicated that Sitemaps users may be notified if their site has been banned or penalized by Google if it appears that they may inadvertently be doing something that violates Google’s guidelines. That may be worth the price of admission alone, which is free by the way.

SiteProNews: SEO With Google Sitemaps

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO, Online Marketing, SEO Tools, Sitemaps, Google Sitemaps

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Just announced today - Google has released a “tool” that allows you to chart keywords over a given period time by their search volume along with cities, regions and languages; all plotted with news stories that show you haw these events have affected the search volume. Pretty interesting. The best part is the ability to search multiple items and have them charted against each other. Google states that the data should be taken with a grain of salt:

“Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.”

At any rate, it makes for some interesting exploration. For example, let’s say I wanted to know why I saw an increase in traffic for a site selling Hawaii hotels, but sales actually dropped… By typing “Hawaii” into the tool I would see that traffic spiked on May 4 when a story came out about Hawaii failing to receive a tsunami warning due to a power outage.

Play with it here:
Google Trends

Also see Barry Schwartz’s post:
Fun With Google Trends

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO Tools, Google Trends

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Matt Cutts, Google employee/blogger, is reporting that Google will begin notifying SOME webmasters of penalties they may be receiving from Google for spammy content, thus keeping their sites out of the Google index.

I think it’s a great idea from Google. And they way Matt explains that some, not all, sites will be notified makes perfect sense.  I would imagine, though, that there are so many unintentional mistakes that webmasters make that it will be impossible for Google to actually notify all well-meaning webmasters and/or police who gets notified and who doesn’t… It’s technically just a “test” right now and it’s a great move in the right direction.

The notifications will come via the Sitemaps interface, which has evolved from a simple submission tool into a full-blown webmaster toolkit.  Matt and some folks from the Sitemaps team did a great presentation on Sitemaps at Pubcon last week in Boston.  If you’re not already using the Sitemaps interface, you ought to be.  Note, however, that Matt states that this is just a test and, “if you don’t see a message in Sitemaps, it doesn’t mean that there’s not a penalty. Right now, we’re not telling every site that has a penalty about it. If you bought the site 3 months ago and still aren’t seeing any pages in Google, it’s possible that it does have a penalty.”

Here is Matt’s post:

Notifying webmasters of penalties

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO, SEO Tools, Google, Matt Cutts, Sitemaps, Google Sitemaps, Pubcon,

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