In a world of Panda and Hummingbird, it is getting more and more important to get your on-page SEO right. You might have a fantastic outreach, a great PR campaign, and link profile, but if you don’t optimize your site, you will have a hard time landing top positions in the search results. To help you do it, I have compiled a list of top 25 free tools that can help you with on-page optimization.
Keyword Research1. Google AdWords Keyword Planner:
TechCruch reports that Google has acquired Gecko Design, the firm responsible for the mechanical design of the original version of the fitness tracking device Fitbit.
Gecko Design was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Google reportedly acquired them to help with its Google X special projects laboratory. In addition to working for Fitbit, Gecko Design has also worked with high-profile clients such as Aliph (Jawbone), Dell, HP, Slingmedia, and OLPC.
Here is what the President of Gecko Design had to say about the acquisition in a statement posted on their home page:
This is an incredible opportunity for everyone at Gecko. We are very excited and honored to join Google(x) and work on a variety of cutting edge projects.
We have enjoyed working with all our clients. Words cannot express the level of appreciate we have for your support throughout the many years that Gecko’s doors have been open.
Google X has spawned some of Google’s most ambitious projects, such as Google Glass and its driverless car program. With Gecko Design on board, Google now has the product design talent to help bring life to new hardware.
Rumors have alleged that Google has been shopping around for Jawbone or other wearable device makers, but it appears that Google has instead opted to acquire a design partner used by these startups.
Google has yet to release any details regarding their deal with Gecko Design.
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What if you owned a paid directory site and every day you received emails upon emails stating that someone wants links removed. As they stacked up in your inbox, whether they were pleasant or they were sternly demanding you cease and desist, would you just want to give up? What would you do to stop the barrage of emails if you thought the requests were just too overwhelming? How could you make it all go away, or at least the majority of it?
First, a bit of backgroundWe had a new, important client come aboard on April 1, 2013 with a lot of work needed going forward. They had been losing rankings for some time and wanted help. With new clients, we want as much baseline data as possible so that we can measure progress going forward, so we do a lot of monitoring. On April 17th, one of our team members noticed something quite interesting. Using Ahrefs for link tracking, we saw there was a big spike in the number of external links coming to our new client's site.
When the client came on board on two weeks prior, the site had about 5,500 links coming in and many of those were less than quality. Likely half or more were comment links from sites with no relevance to the client and they used the domain as the anchor text. Now, overnight they were at 6,100 links and the next day even more. Each day the links kept increasing. We saw they were coming from a paid directory called Netwerker.com. Within a month to six weeks, they were at over 30,000 new links from that site.
We sent a couple of emails asking that they please stop the linking, and we watched Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) every day like hawks waiting for the first link from Netwerker to show. The emails got no response, but in late May we saw the first links from there show up in GWT and we submitted a domain disavow immediately.
We launched their new site in late June and watched as they climbed in the rankings; that is a great feeling. Because the site was rising in the rankings rather well, we assumed the disavow tool had worked on Netwerker. Unfortunately, there was a cloud on the horizon concerning all of the link building that had been done for the client prior to our engagement. October arrived with a Penguin attack (Penguin 2.1, Oct. 4, 2013) and they fell considerably in the SERPs. I mean, they disappeared for many of the best terms they had again began to rank for. They had fallen to page five or deeper for key terms. (NOTE: This was all algorithmic and they had no manual penalty.)
While telling the client that their new drop was a Penguin issue related to the October Penguin update (and the large ratio of really bad links), we also looked for anything else that would cause the issue or might be affecting the results. We are constantly monitoring and changing things with our clients. As a result, there are times we do not make a good change and we have to move things back. (We always tell the client if we have caused a negative impact on their rankings, etc. This is one of the most important things we ever do in building trust over time and we have never lost a client because we made a mistake.) We went through everything thoroughly and eliminated any other potential causative factors. At every turn there was a Penguin staring back at us!
When we had launched the new site in late June 2013, we had seen them rise back to page one for key terms in a competitive vertical. Now, they were missing for the majority of their most important terms. In mid-March of 2014, nearly a year after engagement, they agreed to do a severe link clean up and we began immediately. There would be roughly 45,000
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What if I told you I could teach you to write the perfect headline? One that is so irresistible every person who sees it will click on it. You'd sign up immediately and maybe even promise me your firstborn.
But what if I then told you not one single person out of all the millions who will click on that headline will convert? And that you might lose all your credibility in the process. Would all the traffic generated by that "perfect" headline be worth it?
Help us solve a disputeIt isn't really that bad, but with all the emphasis lately on headline science and the curiosity gap, Trevor (your faithful editor) and I (a recovering copywriter) started talking about the importance of headlines and what their role should be in regards to content. I'm for clickability (as long as there is strong content to back the headline) and, if he has to choose, Trevor is for credibility (with an equal emphasis on quality of the eventual content).
Facebook is the future of Internet advertising. Or so you might have heard.
While it seems that everyone else’s ads are generating revenue, your ads sit there on the side of the page—unclicked like an ignored friend request from that person you barely even knew from high school.
What is going on with your Facebook campaign? Your ads go unnoticed, people bounce off of your landing page, and your value proposition seems to offer no value.
You wonder: Do companies actually make money with Facebook ads? Is this all a lie?
As you read case studies about success with Facebook ads, you may want to drag Mark Zuckerberg by the hoodie to your office and show him what exactly is going on with your particular campaign: The ROI is not case study worthy, in fact your ROI isn’t even positive.
If this sounds like you, then you are missing a vital link about how advertising on Facebook works. Here are the most common reasons why your Facebook campaign is failing.
You are Advertising on Facebook Like it’s a Search EngineAs someone who reads Search Engine Journal, you probably know how to make Internet advertising produce the business results you want on Google AdWords. AdWords has been around since 2000, so you have had some time to experiment with the system and learn how to use it effectively for your specific business model. You know about keeping your ad Groups tight, using negative keywords, and sending users to the right landing page.
However, when you take what you learned from AdWords and try applying it on Facebook the results are disappointing. This is because you are trying to advertise on Facebook like it is a search engine, while your potential customers are using Facebook like the social network it is.
Facebook Users Browse While Google Users Search With a Goal in MindPeople use social channels like Facebook with different intent than they use search engine channels like Google.
You need to match the intent of the channel with your advertising campaign’s strategy.
When users search on Google they have a specific intent in mind, which often boils down to knowing, going, or doing. Each one of these intents is a type of question which requires a specific answer:
Knowing looks for more information on a product, service, or person.Going looks for a destination (like typing in Search Engine Journal into the search bar).Doing looks for a place to make a transaction or other conversion.If everything works as it should, Google is there to provide the link to the exact answer the user is looking for. Your ad on Google should be as relevant to that specific intent as possible. In fact, when you get down to it, Google’s whole ad system is based on relevancy to your specific query, Google just calls it a quality score.
If you read Google’s own help section it states:
“having a high quality score means that our system thinks that your ad and landing page are relevant.”
The following is an example of a Google AdWords campaign that answers my specific query intent well. Let’s say I am your average customer and I am performing a doing search looking to buy a Celtics jersey:
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As much as content and advertising agencies would like you to believe it, content produced by a business doesn't just go viral on it's own. There is often something that pushes it really, really hard when it first goes live which gains momentum, and eventually the content is spread far and wide enough that it doesn't need you to push it anymore. Those of you who have read Good to Great may be making associations with the flywheel principle, but that's a post for another day!
In this post I want to talk about one of the ways you can give your content a nudge in the right direction and get more people looking at it: Facebook advertising.
I won't go into too much detail on the basics of Facebook advertising; there are lots of resources and posts out there which do this. Instead, I want to dive straight into the methods you can use to promote your content to an audience on Facebook.
One of the advantages of using Facebook is the fine level of detail you can go to in terms of targeting an audience. In my opinion, this is one of the areas where Facebook is actually better than Google when it comes to advertising. They have so many options when it comes to targeting your audience:
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Do you want a free tool that tracks your organic search rankings in Amazon? Yes? You're in luck.
I am going to show you how to build your own organic search rank tracking tool using Kimono Labs and Excel.
This is a follow-up to my last post about how to rank well in Amazon, which covered the basic inputs to Amazon's ranking algorithm. It received a lot of comments about my rank-tracking prototype in Google Docs; the Moz community is overflowing with smart people who immediately saw the need for a tool to track their progress. As luck would have it, something in Google Sheets broke the day after I published, so I had to replicate the rank tracking tool in Excel using the SEOTools for Excel plugin. The Excel tool is a low-setup way to record your progress, but if you want to track more than a few terms, it is very laborious. I've since built a more (but not completely) automated, scalable way to track rankings using Kimono Labs to scrape the data and Excel to run the reports.
(Shout out to Benjamin Spiegel for turning me on to Kimono Labs through an excellent Moz post.)
Pros and cons of rank trackingThe death of Google rank tracking has been widely reported, so I feel compelled to review why Amazon rank tracking is both useful and a terrible KPI.
Amazon rank tracking is great because
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