Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog
Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog |
| Two New Plugins Worth Checking Out from Linkshare and EzineArticles Posted: 18 May 2010 07:00 AM PDT
As I mentioned before, I’m a big fan of plugins. They help me manage and run Wordpress more efficiently and GTD. I’ve got a list of SEO Plugins for Wordpress, which is on living URL (hmm… 2008. Guess I need to update that…). Last week, I came across two new plugins that are different. I think they really help Wordpress take a big step forward. One is from EzineArticles and the other is from Linkshare. For those of you who might now know, EzineArticles is an article-marketing website. You upload articles to their system with two goals in mind: syndicating your content to gain links and hosting content on another site. Both goals ultimately help you gain an additional position in the SERP’s. Now they’ve made the process easier with the EzineArticles plugin. Once the content is in your Wordpress system you can submit it directly to Ezinearticles. Is it huge time saver? No. But if you run multiple websites and submit multiple articles per site each month, it adds up. I wish I could embed the video explaining it…but I can’t, so you need to head over to EZineArticles to check it out. The next plugin comes from Linkshare. It lets you add affiliate links directly from your post page instead of having to go to Linkshare and build the link. You will need to get a feed token from Linkshare before the plugin will work, but it’s easy to apply for. Once you have it, get the Linkshare Plugin and you’re ready to go. If you are working with merchants who allow deep linking, you can even deep link. Personally I wished they allowed you to do a bit of link masking. Unlike Lori Weiman, I think link masking is a smart, long-term strategy for affiliates. Either way, the plugin makes your life a little bit easier. I wish other affiliate networks offered these types of tools. I found one for CJ, but the installation required some additional software on the server. I was never able to get it to work properly. Advertisement: Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts. #6 This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.  Related posts:
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| Interview with Chase Granberry of AuthorityLabs.com Posted: 17 May 2010 08:37 AM PDT
The following is a sponsored post. For this post we’re going to be talking with Chase Granberry of AuthorityLabs.com. For my readers who don’t know you, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and some of your SEO related experience? I’ve always been an Internet geek. I love the potential the web has to offer and really realized this potential when I was in college. I saw how the Internet could make advertising much more relevant & flexible for consumers, while improving accountability for advertisers. When I graduated, I took a job at a commercial printing company to help them develop a site to sell business cards, letterhead, postcards, etc. That’s when I was first exposed to SEO and analytics, but I didn’t quite realize my love for data until my next job. I wanted to get some sales experience under my belt so I went to work in sales at a niche ad network. Once I got clients, I had to help them understand how their spend was improving traffic & sales. Although reporting could do that, I went further: I would also dig into their analytics & set up reports to pull insights out of those campaigns on their end. That’s when I really realized I loved looking at that kind of data. After that, I went to work for myself, doing pretty much anything internet oriented I could find a client for. I ended up finding a few clients needing SEO work, which is when I realized there wasn’t a decent way for me to track rankings. So you’ve launched a new website AuthorityLabs.com. Tell me what service you offer there? Basically AuthorityLabs is a web-based rank checker with a lot of bells and whistles. Since I had a few clients that needed this information, I looked for something that was web-based, provided daily data, & was white-labeled. There wasn’t anything I could find that fit the need, so I found someone who could help me build it. From the beginning, we wanted to build an app which was simple & accessible enough for the small business (from a pricing and UI standpoint) but that was also scalable enough to be useful for agencies with lots of clients or for enterprises who needed to pull insights out of lots of data. Google is leading the search engine progress with results based upon your location and personalized results. Many people have made the claim that ranking reports are “dead.” What do you say to that claim? They’re definitely not dead, just as this isn’t a side project anymore. The need is still there. I don’t see it going away anytime soon. With personalized results affecting all Google users, there’s no way to reliably check rankings manually (sometime even adding &pws=0 to the URL doesn’t work). Localization seems to only affect the local packs currently. If you’re searching for a keyword that is locally targeted, you’ll oblivious get a local pack and results targeted to that location. If you’re searching for a keyword that has the potential to be locally targeted (ie: ‘real estate’ vs. ‘real estate phoenix’), the local pack is thrown and targeted based on your IP, but the regular results aren’t. It’s been interesting because we have a lot of customers across the world and our data has been accurate for them despite our IPs being in the states. Eventually this may be something we have deal with, but we’ve got plans to be able to handle that. Something I notice with a lot of other commercial rank checking tools is they don’t deal well with images, local 7-pack or 10-pack results, videos and other universal results. How does your system handle that type of data? For Google, we count any universal results as an entire position when calculating rankings. We’re also pulling out any universal results appearing on a serp. So, if you have keywords throwing news and image results, you can see that in AuthorityLabs. The idea here is that, if you have a lot of keywords throwing video results, for example, you should be doing more and optimizing for video. We’re also pulling out whether the local pack appears on serps and the associated rank (whether that be A, B, C, etc.) if the page or domain you’re tracking was found within those. Before this interview you gave me access to the system. I set up a few keywords (see screen shot below), and I see you are tracking results daily. Generally I don’t recommend that my clients or anyone else look at things on a daily basis–unless traffic or orders has dropped off. I recommend looking at average results over weekly or monthly intervals. Do you think there’s any value in looking daily or do you recommend looking at the bigger picture? We definitely recommend looking at the bigger picture and just updated our graphing library to help with that. You can view longer periods of ranking data and set rolling averages for that data. Since ranking data can fluctuate quite a bit and average data over a period of time really helps you understand long-term trends, we wanted to provide daily data so you can have enough points over time to get a more valid average. Google recently updated webmaster central to give you more data about ranking positions and CTR. Sometimes the data looks good; other times it just looks weird. What’s your opinion of the data and how people should use it. No data is perfect. If you have multiple analytics packages installed, or you’ve got AdWords connected to GA, you’ve experienced this. They’re collecting so much data for these new reports in GWC, they have to normalize and extrapolate a lot of this stuff from logs. Depending on how they do that, you get different numbers. Even with this data, you should be looking at trends & relative figures vs specific numbers. Something to note also … I’ve noticed how they may be actually calculating ‘rank’. For instance, if you search for ‘puggle,’ you’ll get image results first. Then hover your mouse over the first web result after that, it should look like a link directly to that site. Then right click on that link and you’ll see it switch to something starting with google.com with a bunch of variables. The one to look for is &cd=6. It looks like they’re counting the first web result as 6th, which isn’t really representative of where it appears on the page. I’d like to see that counted as 2nd. In GWC, you’ll want to start by looking simply at impressions over time. If you’re doing things right, your imps will increase before your clicks do. Organic imps = rankings = clicks = conversions. You gotta get those imps before you get anything else. Some other things to look for in GWC are keywords you’re getting impressions from but not many clicks. This could indicate a title issue and/or opportunity. Depending on your rank for those impressions, it could also indicate an opportunity to rank better more easily. If you’re getting imps for a term where you’re ranking on the the second or third page it means two things: 1) that terms gets a decent amount of search volume & 2) you’re already moderately relevant for that term so getting on page one or in the top 5 is probably a lot easier than going for another term you’re not ranking for at all. I’m really glad Google is starting to be more open with this type of data, though. WMC has an API, so hopefully this will be available via that … but we’ll see. Some of their API’s haven’t been that useful to date and you can’t even get ranking data in the CSV export from WMC. Let’s change gears from SERP’s and talk about backlinks. You told me that you recently added backlink data from Majestic SEO and Linkscape. Do you think time is running out on reliable free backlink data, and how is that going to change the industry? Who knows how long Yahoo!’s Site Explorer will be around. Hopefully Bing keeps this data available. People pay for products like LinkScape or MajesticSEO even now with Site Explorer available. If Site Explorer gets shut down, you’ll see a lot of people move to these paid products. Budgets for SEO are increasing and people with quality products / services will definitely see the benefits of this, but expectations for this type of data will increase as well. I think you’ll see more competition emerge for link data as the industry grows, especially if Site Explorer dies. The SEO industry is full of free tools because SEOs are a technically capable bunch and tend to be very willing to help each other out, let alone the industry as a whole. Link data, though, isn’t cheap to get, as you have to index the web. It’d probably better for Cuil if they get out of search and into link intelligence. Since we’re talking about change, let’s make a prediction. What are one or two things you think people should pay attention to that are going to become more important in the next few years? Link data is still one of the most important ranking factors. But, as content gets easier for everyone to publish, you’ll see other types of citations start to affect search results. Links are citations that affect web results. Local results are affected most by business citations from around the web. Social citations are pretty much the same thing and can serve the same purpose. If I were a search engine I’d be looking at establishing relevance with a combination of link and social citations. There’s a lot of hype around social media. Most of it’s bull shit, but there’s also a lot of potential in it that hasn’t even been realized yet. I think a lot of this innovation will come from search. All right, let’s wrap things up. What do you think are some of the best ways people can use your website AuthorityLabs.com to get the most out of it and improve their rankings and traffic? It really depends on who you are and what you’re doing. If you’re a business that’s trying to get into SEO, AuthorityLabs is great for tracking your most important terms within campaigns because you can see when you start to ranking in the top 100 results and monitor that progress over time … even before you’re getting any traffic from those terms. If you’re an agency, you can use AuthorityLabs to make the process of reporting on SEO campaigns almost effortless. If you’re an enterprise, it’s great for pulling insights out of lots of ranking data and managing campaigns across a team or even vendors. There’s a lot of flexibility in how you set things up. Thanks Chase for taking the time to talk to me. The preceding has been a sponsored post. Find out more information about sponsored posts. Advertisement: Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed! #5 This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.  Related posts:
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