Press This – WordPress Tools

“The ‘Press This’ function allows quick posting and publishing through the use of a special web browser favourite. You can create a shortcut to allow use of “Press This” from the new post screen. You then activate the function when browsing by selecting the favourite from your web browser favourites list.”

via Press This

The ‘Press This’ tool from WordPress allows me to record interesting post/articles that i see around the web. However by using this tool I have caused some offence to some visitors of my site due to feeling of copying work from other sites online.

This wasn’t my intention and I have since removed the post that had been causing these issues. The reasons for using the ‘Press This’ tool in this way was allow for a resource of useful articles for myself online. Following the comments submited to my site I will rethink the next phase of this blog.

Presentation Skills for SEO

Good presentation skills are essential in the SEO industry. As well as the multitude of conferences that feature so prominently in our industry, we are also often called on to present SEO clearly (and favourably!) to potential clients and skeptical CEOs.

Having submitted an ambitious number of pitches to SMX London, several of Distilled attended an excellent seminar on presentation skills last week. I want to share a few of the things that we learnt, as well as some further thoughts we’ve had on the subject since then.

First and foremost, three nuggets of practical advice from the presentation last week:

1. Devise a good presentation

We were taught about the GOER model, devised by a presentation guru called James Caplin. I suggest you go and read more around it, but here’s a brief run-down…

• Goal – take time to learn exactly what you and your audience want to achieve from your presentation. The best way to do this is to pick up the phone, go for a coffee, go for a stroll or whatever and just ask them.
• Outline – brain dump everything you could ever possibly want to talk about around the subject and then dig through it, picking out the bits that correspond with what you learnt in step one. My advice on this is be ruthless. You’ll know more than you could possibly talk about so don’t try and cover it all; there’ll always be other opportunities.
• Elaborate – Pick out an outline from the ruthlessly thinned brain dump above and then get creative. Give yourself time to daydream about the best possible things you could say in this presentation and work them into the outline. The more individual your presentation, the more chance you have of delivering something really special.
• Refine – Time for the red pen. Remembering that less is more, go through and refine your presentation so that everything in there deserves to be.

2. Think about your audience

Audiences come in all shapes and sizes, but it’s worth bearing the following in mind whoever you’re presenting to.
Apparently, there are four types of people that make up an audience. We were advised to try and cater for all four categories in our presentations. Which one are you?

• Participation – these people want to put their hands up, be asked questions and just generally get involved. Even rhetorical questions will do the job.
• Personal – these people love to feel like they’re connecting on a personal level. Walk around, tell a story or paint a picture on how the stuff you’re talking about affects them.
• Scientific/factual – graphs, statistics, diagrams: you know the score.
• Observe and reflect – these folk won’t get involved or interact; they need time and space to take on board what you’re saying before they risk a response.

As well as these four groups, we also learnt about the three ‘representational systems’ you might find in an audience. You can take a test here to find out which of these you are.

• Visual – respond to words like see, look, watch, picture, glimpse, etc. Use phrases like “I see what you’re saying.”
• Auditory – respond to words like hear, say, click, voice, ring, etc. Use phrases like “that rings a bell.”
• Kinaesthetic – respond to words like touch, handles, throw, shock, grip, impact, etc. Use phrases like “That feels about right to me.”

3. Get confident

We learnt quite a few tips on how to get confident before and during presentations. My favourite is a subliminal message you can send to the audience by pointing to yourself when you use a word describing something positively. For example, if you were to say, “Reputation Monitor is just so fantastic,” point to yourself (it doesn’t have to be that obvious) when you say the word ‘fantastic’. Sounds a bit far fetched? Maybe, but I think it’s worth a go. Particularly as so many of you are fantastic.

How important is content?

As with online, content is hugely important in a presentation. However, the style of your presentation is just as, if not more, important. We’ve all attended presentations, in SEO or otherwise, that are chocka-block full of excellent content but that are so poorly presented it’s nigh on impossible to stay focused and take anything away. Similarly, I can think of several presentations which I’ve enjoyed immensely at the time but, in retrospect, taught me very little. I’m not saying we should all take crash courses in bullsh*t, but it’s definitely worth appreciating how far style can go towards making or breaking a presentation.

SEO Presentations

Finally, I want to talk about these points in relation specifically to our industry, whether you’re doing the keynote at SMX or persuading your CEO that SEO isn’t snake oil. Let’s run a link building presentation through the GOER gauntlet.

• Goal: Find out what your audience wants from this link building presentation. If it’s SMX Advanced, you don’t need to explain why links are important; if it’s a potential client, there’s every chance they won’t even know what a link is.
• Outline: You’ll know more about link building than you could possibly imagine. Get it all out of your brain and onto some paper and now, based on what you learnt in ‘Goal’, go through and pick out the really useful stuff. Build a presentation around those points; they’re the important bit, after all!
• Elaborate: Got a personal story about link building? Or an original idea about it? Make sure you make space for this in your talk because it’s probably what your audience will remember you for.
• Refine: Be realistic. There’s no way you can talk about all those link building techniques in a 20 minute slot. Focus on precisely what you want to cover and do it well.

You’ll often have to cover a lot of technical information in these presentations. For those of you that fall into the ‘scientific/factual’ group above, taking in this information is a walk in the park. For the rest of us, it can be a bit of mission. Take time to put your tech stuff in a format that works for all – use big, clear diagrams and, if possible, illustrate each key point you make. SEOmoz is actually a great source of examples for this. How often does Rand use some kind of diagram or chart in his Whiteboard Fridays? And who will ever forget Googlebot?

It’s also important to use specific examples in these kind of tech/jargon-heavy presentations. For example, if you can show your audience a real life example of link building in action, they’re much more likely to believe you and recall what they’ve learnt once the session is over. In the same way, you should offer further resources for those skeptical audience members in group 4; give them something to go away and think about.

Lastly, this isn’t about presentation skills… but while I’m here, don’t forget to make the most out your presentation: do a follow up blog post about it and link to your slides; make sure you blog about anything new that was thrown up in the presentation and, if possible, contact anyone that spoke to you about your session.

via Presentation Skills for SEO

The Social Media Marketing Blog: Social Network Shorthand

Have you ever needed a quick analogy in a business or social situation that helps you explain what a social network concept is? I know I have – many times.

One of the most common questions I get is “What’s Twitter?” And I’ve witnessed many experienced people explaining Twitter in more than a few sentences. I know, it’s ironic that it’s difficult to explain it in fewer than 140 characters. One of my descriptions is: “it’s like group IM, a water cooler and market research, wrapped up in one.”

But beyond that, when people begin comparing social networks – or more importantly, questioning the use of each – how can you discern them in a way that people can undertand quickly and easily? This is especially important, given that Facebook is becoming more Twitter-like.

While it’s possible to have a profile on many sites, I concentrate my efforts on the triumverate of social networks – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. In order to help you understand how I interact on each, I previously published a posted called How I Think About My Social Networks.

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in <140
Here’s the best way I’ve been able to describe the difference in each platform and how I use them:

LinkedIn is the business meeting; Facebook is the hallway conversation; Twitter is the cocktail party.

For me, LinkedIn is my most professional of networks, where I have my work experience and connect with other people on a professional level. On Facebook, it’s more of the interaction between meetings, where we’re free to share information on a professional and personal level. And on Twitter, it’s a free-for-all.

One interesting observation, though: increasingly, these sites are becoming more similar to one another. LinkedIn has applications and groups (Facebook, anyone?) and Facebook now has an interface that asks “What’s on your mind?” (Twitter, anyone?). It will be interesting to see how they continue to differentiate themselves.

Do you have a better description of social networks? Are there any trends that you’re noticing? Drop a note in the comment section and let’s see the magic happen.

via The Social Media Marketing Blog: Social Network Shorthand.

Two new improvements to Google results pages

Today we’re rolling out two new improvements to Google search. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions — both of which help guide users more effectively to the information they need.

More and better search refinements

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need. Here’s an example (click on the images in the post to view them larger):

Let’s look at a couple of examples in other languages. In Russian, for the query [гадание на картах] (fortune-telling with cards), the algorithms find the related terms “таро” (tarot), “ленорман” (lenormand) and “тибетское гадание мо” (tibetan divination mo). In Italian, if you search for [surf alle canarie] (surf at the canary islands), we now offer suggestions based on the three most famous Canary Islands: “lanzarote,” “gran canaria,” and “fuerteventura”:

We are now able to target more queries, more languages, and make our suggestions more relevant to what you actually need to know. Additionally, we’re now offering refinements for longer queries — something that’s usually a challenging task. You’ll be able to see our new related searches starting today in 37 languages all around the world.

And speaking of long queries, that leads us to our next improvement…

Longer snippets

When you do a search on Google, each result we give you starts with a dark blue title and is followed by a few lines of text (what we call a “snippet”), which together give you an idea of what each page is about. To give more context, the snippet shows how the words of your query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold.

When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page. Below are a couple of examples.

Suppose you were looking for information about Earth’s rotation around the sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the sun. So you type all of that into Google: [earth’s rotation axis tilt and distance from sun]. A normal-length snippet wouldn’t be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics. In addition, the extra line of snippets for the third result shows the word “sun” in context, suggesting that the page doesn’t talk about Earth’s distance from the sun:

Similarly, if you’re looking for a restaurant review that covers all the parts of the meal, longer snippets can help:

But don’t just take our word for it — try it out yourself with your favorite long, detailed query.

These are just two recent examples of improvements we’ve made. We are constantly looking for ways to get you to the web page you want as quickly as possible. Even if you don’t notice all of our changes, rest assured we’re hard at work making sure you have the highest quality search experience possible.

via Two new improvements to Google results pages

Why SEO is an important facet of Online Public Relations

I was recently involved in a conversation regarding the best fit for brand reputation as many legacy PR agencies were arguing that this function should be purely a PR activity rather than a combined, holistic approach to brand reputation. I hadn’t really thought more of that conversation until recently, whilst evaluating potential companies from which to buy a new kitchen from.

As with most people, our purchase process began with research. A simple search for kitchens was the starting point for the purchase, and a number of initial organisations were shortlisted for further evaluation. In the end we decided to bring a couple in for further discussion including Company A. Company A came into present their product and service, and after a 5 hour sales process we ended up suggesting there was a reasonable likelihood of further progress. That was until further evaluation was undertaken regarding Company A.

Company A brand search results

Such a search however produced a wide range of results, both from generic promotional activity such as Local Directories to the usual republished press articles. However it was the overwhelming response from a number of high profile forums which was the major factor that started ringing alarm bells. It is generally accepted that people only naturally leave comments when they are unhappy with a product or service – however the extent of the feedback was surprising to say the least.

The first 5 results post brand were all review forums, all containing 98% negative feedback regarding the organisation of which 50% contained the term ‘Do not touch this organisation at any cost’ (or variations thereof). Many traditional PR responses are often tailored to one-off responses – however online these responses can manifest themselves within the online brand space for a significant period of time, and can (and do) have a significant effect on both click through rate and ultimately the number of conversions. According to a recent report by Microsoft 9 out of 10 people use the internet for shopping and as a result ignoring these search results is just something that cannot be ignored.

It is therefore surprising little further activity has been reviewed in the circumstances. Certainly PR has its place to play in the whole remediation of this process particularly as the tone of the response in such a circumstance is crucial – and a dearth of 10 best types of kitchens type articles is not the type of response mechanism one should be considering in these circumstances. Instead one should be focussing on:

• Identifying the most vocal contact points. Identify if any brand advocates do exist in these areas. Understand what people are writing about you, and whether there is any truth in what they are saying (honest appraisal is the best approach here)
• Formulate a response where applicable. I would always suggest engagement with a PR Practitioner in these instances as you should only be correcting fact, not entering into a slanging match as this is only likely to compound the problem. Be personable and where applicable personalise this to the target audience – don’t standardise a response – people can tell a mile off.
• Get an Online PR campaign under way. Wires such as PRNewswire are great at hitting touchpoints like Reuters, Bloomberg, Topix and the Press Association (amongst others) – however again it is imperative, you have a good story not just an advert. Keep this regular, a simple one-off will not suffice
• Utilise internal assets. Many organisations have group websites, microsites, subsites etc, all of which could be optimised in their own right in response to such issues. This could allow you to dominate a greater proportion of brand search space than just the typical 2 results (+ sitelinks)
• Engage with social media if applicable (Obviously this will be more applicable to some brands than others), but sites such as Twitter are very quick to respond to breaking news and very viral in nature.
• Work with brand partners. Some of the best instances of such partnerships of this can be found in open source programming areas with hosting providers such as Rackspace providing hosting to PHP.net – saw one recently between Total Jobs and the Home Learning College as well). Often (not necessarily in that last example), these partners can aid with promotional opportunities.
• Don’t forget your PPC. For example, blagger.com (one of the examples in the image above, runs PPC ads at the bottom of the page. Content Network targeting would allow you to run ads on these sites, which via site-targeted would allow you to respond directly to these instances (indirectly)

There are a number of other small things that could be done in these instances, however the main point of this is leaving such feedback to stagnate is not necessarily the best approach. It IS affecting brand perception, it IS affecting your conversion, and it IS affecting your bottom line

Can you really AFFORD to leave it alone?

via Why SEO is an important facet of Online Public Relations | Holistic Search Marketing | Internet Marketing Consultants.

PPC Cannibalization : Are you paying for free traffic ?

What is PPC Cannibalization ?

PPC cannibalization occurs usually when you have strong organic search engine ranking and you are running a PPC campaign on top of that. It’s the % of organic clicks you would have had but that you ended up paying for because the PPC campaign attracted the click.

You may have heard that running both increases the % of searchers going to your website and that it is basically a good thing. It’s sadly not always the case, but you can measure that, at least, and it’s one of the best things you can do to optimize a PPC campaign. The basic problem is, a % of the traffic you would get for free is becoming paid traffic, and that messes up the ROI of both the SEO and the PPC campaign. Knowing exactly where to put your SEO and PPC money for the best ROI is an admirable advantage in the SERPs war.

Avinash Kaushik suggests in his book: “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day” a method to measure cannibalization. You can either pause some Ads Groups of your PPC campaign and then measure Key Performance Indicators of the organic traffic during a week and then put the Ad Groups switch to On and measure the difference in the organic traffic. Or, you can even stop PPC completely for a week and do the same thing. The difference between the 2 weeks of results is what is called cannibalization. Try to choose a week that you do not expect to be affected seasonality (don’t use Christmas week, for example).

Using this method you have a way to calculate the real return on investment for your PPC campaign. Let’s say your PPC and organic campaign convert at 3% on your brand name keyword. After having made the blackout test, you realize than you lose 35% of your organic traffic on this particular keyword when the PPC campaign is on. To make thing simpler, let’s assume you get 1000 visitors a week by organic (when PPC if off) and 500 visitors from PPC in a week on that keyword. The average CPC of this particular keyword is 1$ and the average conversion worth 50$ in revenue. Doing some basic math, here is the real cost of your PPC campaign.

ppc-cannibalization1

You can see from the table that you are making less profit by doing PPC on this particular keyword, even if you are generating more conversions. You may want to go that way because more sales can equal quantity discounts for you and end up with more profit. But usually, you are wasting money pursuing this kind of strategy, and you should move your PPC budget towards more profitable keywords (like ones you don’t rank on organically).

via PPC Cannibalization : Are you paying for free traffic ?.

Big Brand Media Wants A Google Bailout

It seems like almost everyone in Big Business is looking for a bailout these days. That’s certainly true of several big brand media companies who, according to an AdAge article today, have told Google they deserve higher rankings in Google’s search results. Not only that, but one executive has also labeled the rest of the content-producing web — including bloggers like us — as “parasites” who “benefit disproportionately” from Google’s ranking algorithm.

This collection of media companies, AdAge reports, includes The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc, Hearst, ESPN, and others — all of whom belong to Google’s Publishers Advisory Council.

(Did you even know Google had such a council? The article describes it as “a small, invitation-only group for professional publishers to pow-wow confidentially with the search giant.” Cue small publisher anger in 3…2…1.)

The big media companies’ complaints include:

• Google’s search algorithm in general, which they say “penalizes paid content”
• PageRank specifically, because it places too much of an emphasis on links
• The appearance of Google’s search results, which hurts big brands because every result looks the same

AdAge says the publishers are pushing their Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), a machine-readable language for indicating copyright permissions that online crawlers can understand, as a means to gain leverage on Google. But Google’s Josh Cohen recently dismissed ACAP:

“Acap only addresses the small minority of content owners and [it has] major technical issues. We can’t accept it in its current form. There are a number of challenges with Acap.”

The irony in all this, of course, is that Google’s so-called Vince update earlier this year supposedly promoted big brands that have more trust and authority than their smaller counterparts — something that should clearly benefit the complaining members of the Publishers Advisory Council.

Steve Rubel has already done a fine job of refuting the argument that big media is any more deserving of high search engine visibility than blogs just by virtue of their size. And at least one publisher quoted in the AdAge article recognizes that the media companies themselves are at least partly to blame for any lack of visibility in Google’s search results:

“They don’t owe us that we show up a particular way. They do publish a whole lot about how to make your site show up as much as possible. If people haven’t taken action on it, that’s their own damn fault.”

Indeed. It was just two weeks ago that I wrote that the Fortune 500 is “largely invisible” in natural search. Perhaps the big media companies should be asking an SEO consultant for bailout help, not Google.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

via Big Brand Media Wants A Google Bailout

5 Ways To Find & Acquire Customers On Twitter

Emerging platforms create new opportunities to find and acquire the lifeblood of your business—customers. Twitter is the breakthrough product of 2009 because of its unique ability to create lightweight and fluid conversation—in near real time—around just about any topic.

Let’s look at 5 ways you can leverage the platform to build your business:

1. Twitter Search (The Big One)

Twitter is fast becoming a lead generation nirvana marked by anxious customers looking for real time answers and active feedback about every product and service imaginable. How do you utilize this trend to grow your business? Two words: Twitter search.

Search is not yet fully integrated (http://search.twitter.com) into the Twitter experience (though it’s coming soon) however the potential as an acquisition engine is tremendous. Twitter search represents a near synchronous half loop of customer intent that not even Google captures today. How do you complete the loop to fully realize the value? Whatever product or service you market there is likely someone talking about it right now on Twitter.

Find these customers by searching the most relevant keywords associated within your market. Thereafter, join the conversation by sending a useful message that contains relevant information.

There is a fine line between being attentive to the needs of the customer and acting like a stalker. Be helpful. Be courteous. Don’t be too pushy. For example, when responding to a customer question, offer this, “I noticed you had a question about X. Check out this link, it might help.” Simple and direct.

The rate at which you receive a reply is proportional to how much value you create for the customer. Take time to craft a thoughtful response—it pays.

Client side tools like TweetDeck also can help you stay on top of the massive streams of information on Twitter. The standardized tools Twitter offers are not going take you and your business to the next level. Upgrade.

2. Find the Influencers in Your Vertical

One of the better ways to find and acquire customers on Twitter is to route through influencers. They are the gatekeepers that own the attention pool you covet. Co-opt their streams by inserting useful bits of information into the conversation (i.e. a link to an item, a fact about the topic, or a short anecdote).

It might seem futile to offer random suggestions against the wind. It’s not. Your opportunity cost is always time yet when a Guy Kawasaki or a Jeremy Schoemaker messages you back it’s more than just a message. It’s a signaling mechanism to an entire micro community that you are legit.

Standing on your soapbox and blindly tweeting ultimately won’t cover much surface area for your business. How does one identify the influencers? Generally, though not always, the number of followers an individual has on Twitter is proxy for their sphere of influence.

Another way to identify influencers is to search on Google Blog Search or Technorati for the highest trafficked blogs in your vertical. See if those folks have an account on Twitter. If they do, follow them and track what makes them tick.

3. Profile Bio

This one is easy: create a contextually relevant profile bio. Do you sell baby cribs? Then make it evident by stating what makes you the world’s expert in the baby crib trade.

It’s important to understand potential customers on Twitter will take the time to read your bio if you offer them something timely, interesting and helpful. It’s their way of pre-qualifying you.

4. Grab a Relevant Twitter Domain

A contextually relevant Twitter URL is an a powerful way to build
trust with potential customers. For example, if a user tweets, “I am looking for a new baby crib any ideas?” Who is she going to respond to? Twitter user Tcvtex99000 or BabyCribExpert? You decide.

5. Twitter URL On Business Card/Email Signature

Make sure you attach your Twitter URL to both your business card and email signature. It’s amazing how many customers you interact with on any given day via email. Take advantage of this immense pool of liquidity by making your Twitter URL as easy to find as your phone number.

via5 Ways To Find & Acquire Customers On Twitter – ShoeMoney®.

Top WordPress Resources to List Your WordPress Blog & Build Links

I have written many times in the past about the importance of listing a blog in various authority blogging directories. And although a good deal of the lists out there can be overwhelming (I’m currently putting together a filtered list of the top blog and RSS directories on the net since the New Media 55 is very outdated), there are some blogging directories which carry high value and tend to only list quality blogs. But what about those which only list WordPress blogs?

WordPress is the premier blogging technology on the web, so if you’re using WordPress you’re already working smart. If you’re using WordPress and your blog has an exceptional feel, tone or design, take full advantage of the opportunities which a business blog powered by WordPress can bring you by submitting your WordPress powered blog to these handful of sites which only feature WordPress blogs.

WordPress.org Showcase

WordPress.org Showcase : Probably one of the more valuable locations online to list your WordPress blog, the WordPress Showcase features user submitted and approved WordPress Blogs, the best of the best so to say, with voting and rating enabled listings. The Showcase is hosted on WordPress.org, one of the top authority sites on the Internet, and is linked to directly from the WordPress.org homepage.

As you may imagine, the WordPress Showcase is highly selective, and limits itself to WordPress powered sites and blogs which are :

• Using WordPress in a unique or innovative way.
• Attracting tens of thousands of regular readers.
• Being written by someone famous or especially notable in his or her particular field.
• Representing a notable organization, government entity, or corporation as an official blog or web site.

While only a relatively small number of submissions are eventually added to the WordPress Showcase, a number of exceptional sites and blogs are added weekly.

WP Count is another showcase type gallery where blog owners can submit their blog to be featured on the WPCount homepage and archived in their categorical library. If you have launched a new redesign, this is an excellent authority location to try and get it featured, and get some nice links 🙂

We Love WP is another gallery of WordPress powered sites, showcasing WordPress blogs in blog style archives. In order for blogs to be considered for We Love WP, the site has to be WordPress powered with an original design or a completely original modification of a free or premium theme design.

Submit to WeLoveWP or browse their Archives (note, the last archive was from December 2008, so it does not look like the site has been updated much over the past couple of months, hopefully this post will get them going again).

[Note : The following sites are not of the same quality of the three above, but I felt they should be mentioned in all fairness]

WordPress Garden is another gallery of WordPress powered sites, which seems to be updated not very often, and is run by Sadish Bala, who also owns WPRocks.com. Again, it may be worth the submit if it wakes up Sadish and he starts running and editing the site again.

Digging into more of the traditional web directory feel, WordPress Blog Directory may be powered by PHP Link, but could be a place to list your WordPress Blog. WordPress-Directory is another basic web directory with only a handfull of listings, the internal pages are ok, with some categorization, but the site could use a facelift and some TLC.

Are there any other WordPress only blog directories which you recommend? Please feel free to share them in the comments below.

via Top WordPress Resources to List Your WordPress Blog & Build Links

Crawl Your Site for Broken Links, Errors and Duplicate Content

One very overlooked part of the entire SEO mix is making sure that your site does not have broken outbound (or internal) links which either link to error pages, or do not work at all. Furthermore, if your site delivers error pages or links to non-existent pages or files on your server, then search engines like Google are going to consider your site as being “under construction“, therefore not being useful or relevant to the human user.

Your site can have all of the optimized content, titles and headers in the world, but if it is not functioning correctly, then it will not rank to the best of its ability. Working on client SEO accounts, I have run into numerous issues where fixing some internal broken links, outbound links and making sure all of the files on the server are working have boosted a site ranking from pages 3 or 4, to page one.

My favorite tool for checking this information is Xenu’s Link Sleuth.

Xenu is usually the first step I take in on-site SEO research and identifying issues. I like to get these issues tackled from the beginning and when working with an IT team on a client project, handing them a 10 page error report usually puts them in their place, and show’s them that you’re serious about your technical SEO.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria.

Xenu spiders a website in a similar fashion that a search engine will and delivers a report which looks at :

• Broken links on the site which send the spider to error messages
• Duplicate content issues such as similar title tags and URL structure
• Broken files such as images and multimedia content whcih are not loading correctly
• Images which do not include alt attributes (which can be helpful to SEO)
• Identifing files and images which may effect page load time
• Links to server redirected pages or 301 redirects which you can change on your site to link to the real page instead of the redirect command

In addition to checking for links via Xenu’s Link Sleuth, I also recommend doing a basic duplicate content and header error diagnosis. Sure, if you are using Google Webmaster Tools, this can be done easily, but we always don’t have access to Google Webmaster Tools, especially when working on 3rd party sites or performing competitive research.

One free tool which can be used to check for common duplcate content issues is the Virante Duplicate Content tool.

Virante’s tool diagnoses the following :

• Common www vs non-www duplicate content issue by checking the headers returned by both versions of the url, the current cache in google, and possible PR dispersion.
• Common default page error where both the / and /index.html (or other default page) return 200/OK headers.
• Incorrect 404 pages which deliver a 200/OK Header and,
• Supplemental pages in the Google index

By using tools like these to identify errors on your website, you can enhance your SEO and rankings substantially, especially if you have any critical errors which are keeping your site from ranking properly in the search engines.

What are some of your favorite tools for checking broken links, files and duplicate content issues? Please feel free to share them in the comments

via Crawl Your Site for Broken Links, Errors and Duplicate Content