Sheer SEO : Specialist Search Engine Optimisation Tools

I recently came across a great suite of search engine optimisation tools for both SEO specialists and newcomers alike. Search tools such as:

Current & Historical Search Engine Positions - Ongoing reporting, with graphs, of the search engine rankings on both Google and Yahoo for each keyword or keyword phrase you specify.

Main, Current & Historical Referrers - Current & Historical Referrers shows the number of inbound links to your website for Both Google and Yahoo with historical reporting of your inlinks over a user-defined period of time. Main Referrers shows the links to your site ordered by PageRank. This report details the URL of the linking page, the PageRank, the link text, the target URL and whether the link is nofollow or not.

Current & Historical Social Reports - Shows your status on Digg and Delicious both currently and over a user-defined time period.

Single, Double and Triple Keyword Density - Reports the number of occurences for keywords and keyword phrases of every page on your website.

Current & Historical Indexed Pages - A useful SEO tool that displays the number of pages currently indexed on Google and Yahoo with historical graphing.

Current & Historical Supplemental Index Ratios - Shows the percentage of pages on your site that are found in Google’s main and supplemental indexes.

Backlinks Watchdog - A superb SEO tool that monitors, on a daily basis, inbound links to your site and reports to you of any change in a links status.

All these search engine optimisation tools (and probably more to come) can be found at SheerSEO.com - online SEO software that specialises in tracking SERPs, PageRank and more. Give it a test drive by signing up for a free 90 day trial account. I definately suggest that you add Sheer SEO to your search engine optimisation arsenal today.

Add comment May 17th, 2009 at 12:19am E-gain seo uk

Some Nice SEO & PPC Goodies

SEO Book have released a bunch of online marketing tools and goodies for all you SEO and PPC peeps out there. These include a PPC strategy flowchart as well as some SEO tools and links to conversion tools & advice

As far as PPC tools go, you may want to check out our very own UK localised PPC tool which allows you to generate multiple keyword phrases targetted by geographical area (ie: North West), by county (ie: Lancashire), or by town/towns, with exact match, broad match and phrase match targetting of your keyword phrases.

November 9th, 2008 at 01:21am E-gain seo uk

Should it be SEO UK, seo uk or SEO uk?

Depending on how capitalisation is used in your search query you may see different results. Try the three ’seo uk’ variations above and see for yourself where our website ranks for each search term. Surprisingly the variation in capitalization can account for a shift in as much as 5 or 6 places in the results.

“Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.” - [ http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=searchguides.html&ctx=basics&hl=en ]

It seems that this no longer holds true and that Google searches are indeed case sensitive, for the time being at least, but why? Is it simply a glitch in the algorithms? or a brave move by Google to allow more websites to benefit from better SERPs visibility based on capitalization variation?

Maybe the latter sounds a little too far-fetched, but why should Google not offer different results based on capitalization. It’s already happening with localized and personalized results? After all, who really wants to go back to the days where, for any query, a different handful of websites dominated the SERPs.

It would be really nice if Matt Cutts or someone of a similar standing in the SEO community could present Google’s take on this matter.

Add comment October 8th, 2008 at 09:24pm E-gain seo uk

Google Kills SEO Ranking Analysis Tools

Anyone in SEO worth their pay may have, this week, noticed that Google has been changing the code used to display their search results. Unfortunately these changes, and repeated tweaks to the SERPS code over the past few days, have had the knock on effect of wiping out a good portion of the web-based search ranking analysis tools, as well as some locally run ranking software.

SEOBook are one of the first to report that they have recently updated their online rank checking tools SEO for Firefox and Rank Checker and according to Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com “Both should work as of now, and if any more SERP changes happen we will try to update the extensions as soon as possible.”

The changes however do beg the question. Are the SEO community, and their tools, responsible for so many requests on Google’s servers that they need to take action or are we looking at a simple backend HTML layout update?

The very act of querying Google with automated software is wrong, and according to Google’s webmaster guidelines…

“The sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express permission in advance from Google. Sending automated queries absorbs resources and includes using any software (such as WebPosition Gold) to send automated queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage ranks in Google search results for various queries.”

So, was it a simple backend update that caused a blip or a deliberate attempt to slow down the SEO community. Lets hear your thoughts?

Add comment August 24th, 2008 at 12:24am E-gain seo uk

Google Insights for Search : Marketing statistics for all

I have been playing around recently with Google Insights for Search, a brand new search data analysis tool for search marketing specialists.

Just like Google Trends, this new Google search marketing tool offers seasonal and historical trends with search volume shown distributed across regions and cities. Google Insights for Search however goes even further by allowing you to narrow search data to specific categories, location subregions and even user specified date ranges.

Once your search parameters are defined Google Insights for Search not only presents you with historical trend data and regional interest statistics but, in a similar manner to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, also offers you the top search terms related to your query and a list of the hottest related rising searches.

As wonderful as this search marketing tool is, I do however have to question the validity of the representation of the data. For example: A search for the term ‘Gifts’ with the filters of United Kingdom / All Subregions / Last 12 Months / All Categories produces the following demographics.

Compare this to the same search on Google Trends and the data starts to get a little confusing.

As you can see from the Google Insights for Search results it appears that the Isle of Man may be a market worth exploring for our particular term. For those who are not familiar with the Isle of Man - it is an island nestled between England and Ireland with a population of around 75,000 people. Approx 1/100th of the population of London.

But wait a minute? Google Trends is highlighting Scotland as a popular search market for our term! Both tools, by default use the broad matched version of a keyword so where does the difference in statistics lie?

All-in-all a wonderful search marketing tool, which is still in Beta, so possibly the results may be distorted at this time.

Add comment August 7th, 2008 at 02:04pm E-gain seo uk

SEO and the importance of 503

Today I arrived at work to find one of our, externally hosted, clients plummeting down the SERPS for terms that they would normally rank very highly for. As we always employ an ethical approach to our SEO campaigns I was a little bewildered by this sudden drop in rankings and decided to investigate. After a brief search through the Google results, there was the answer in the returned search listings.

Could not connect to database

This was the description on the returned results for our client’s website.

It would seem that when the site was last crawled the database was down and the client’s developer had returned the afore mentioned error message with a 200 OK header. So instead of our nicely optimised pages the search engines found zero relevant content and a server response header that said ‘Yeah sure! This is fine, this is what we want you to see’.

So what should we really be doing if a database connection fails?

We should be looking to our SEO friendly 503 (Service Temporarily Unavalable) header to let the search engines�know that there is a problem and to come back later. For details of implementing the 503 header there’s an excellent tutorial at http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/503-service-temporarily-unavailable.html

Dont get caught out. Check your SEO procedure for handling failed database connections and make sure you use the 503 header.

Add comment July 14th, 2008 at 02:29pm John Hill

Ignoring The Basics In The Rush To Embrace Web 2.0

With the immense hype surrounding web 2.0 are many companies ignoring the basic principles of creating websites?

More often than not, the web agency or web designer is at fault by trying to create something which is impressive to look at and, in an effort to embrace the web 2.0 ethos, has features that probably only 1% of site visitors will use. This can often result in having a badly designed website that is difficult to navigate and probably results in your customers moving on to the next website.

Lots of websites which use customisable features fall into this category where over 90% of the users will never use these ‘great’ features available to them. The development time for the extra features are often relected in higher costs for the client - resulting in very little ROI, if any. 

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen held a presentation on this, highlighting some of the facts about our headlong rush towards Web 2.0. He warned that the desire to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served.

E-Gain like many other web agencies use good practices include making a site easy to use, integrate good search tools where necessary, use jargon free text, usability testing and consideration to the design even before the first line of code is written.

Always ask yourself if you really need those extra features built into your website, and will the majority of your website visitors use or benefit from it?

Add comment June 24th, 2008 at 11:53am E-gain seo uk

Websites Continue to Take a Larger Share of the Retail Pie

With the credit crunch biting hard, economic slowdown and falling retail sales it is encouraging to read today that online retail continues to grow, with this years online retail spend expecting to grow by 32% compared to offline retail sales which expect to see a minimal growth of 1.2% according to the European and UK internet consultancy group Verdict Research.

Online retail is currently worth around £20bn, an estimated 7% of overall retail spend and by 2012 Verdict forecast that this figure will rise to 14% or around £45bn.

With shoppers increasingly turning to the internet as an effective means of seeking out bargains and low-priced products, will an online retail presence become the difference between commercial success or failure? And will online apathy lead to a retail sales disaster?

1 comment June 19th, 2008 at 04:01pm E-gain seo uk

SEO and TLD’s

THere is an interesting post over at Search Engine Journal by Ann Smarty regarding ‘How Much Is a Top Level Domain SEO Worth?’

A wide range of comments have been received and it is interesting to read other peoples perspectives on domain usage from an SEO perspective, particularly with the American (primarily .com etc) vs other parts of the world (.com & localised domain usage).

Domain usage is an often under-used part of SEO, particularly the usage of localised vs global domains, and I would recommmend that any up and coming SEO spends some time understanding the nuances of domain usage from an SEO perspective.

To read Anns full post, click here

Add comment June 8th, 2008 at 07:32am SEO UK

Search Engine Usage stats by country

I recently had to do a load of search engine usage research for a potential new client opportunity. Such information seems hard to come by, so for others in the same predicament I have added these to the blog in the hope that other marketeers, may be able to utilise this in some form.
Google as predicted has pretty much market dominance across the ten countries profiled, however the surprising statistic was that Yahoo came below both MSN and Yandex in terms of percentage (as a total/number of countries - it should also be added that Yandex only appears in one country - however it accounts for 45% of internet searches). Visually this could be represented as follows:

Total usage for profiled countries:

Google: 73%
Yahoo: 4%
MSN: 5%
Yandex: 5%

These figures were obtained as below from the following data, for the following countries, UK, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Bulgaria and Russia:

Add comment June 3rd, 2008 at 03:56pm SEO UK