AHREFS Review: An In-Depth Look at a New Link Research Tool
Last Updated on Wednesday, 1 February 2012 02:05 Written by External Post Wednesday, 1 February 2012 02:05
Website Auditor Review: A Full-Featured On-Page Optimization Tool
Last Updated on Thursday, 29 December 2011 01:05 Written by External Post Thursday, 29 December 2011 01:05
Read The Rest Of This...SEO Spyglass Review: A Brand New Link Source
Last Updated on Thursday, 22 December 2011 09:15 Written by External Post Thursday, 22 December 2011 09:15
SEO Spyglass is one of the 4 tools Link-Assistant sells (individually) and as a part of their SEO Power Suite.
We did a review of their Rank Tracker application a few months ago and we plan to review their other 2 tools in upcoming blog posts.
Key Features of SEO Spyglass
The core features of SEO Spyglass are:
- Link Research
- White Label Reporting
- Historical Link Tracking
As with most software tools there are features you can and cannot access, or limits you’ll hit, depending on the version you choose. You can see the comparison here.
Perhaps the biggest feature is their newest feature. They recently launched their own link database, a couple of months early in beta, as the tool had been largely dependent on the now dead Yahoo! Site Explorer.
The launch of a third or fourth-ish link database (Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, A-Href’s rounding out the others) is a win for link researchers. It still needs a bit of work, as we’ll discuss below, but hopefully they plan on taking the some of the better features of the other tools and incorporating them into their tool.
After all, good artists copy and great artists steal :)
Setting Up a Project for a Specific Keyword
One of my pet peeves with software is feature bloat which in turn creates a rough user experience. Link-Assistant’s tools are incredibly easy to use in my experience.
Once you fire up SEO Spyglass you can choose to research links from a competing website or links based off of a keyword.
Most of the time I use the competitor’s URL when doing link research but SEO Spyglass doubles as a link prospecting tool as well, so here I’ll pick a keyword I might want to target “Seo Training”.
The next screen is where you’ll choose the search engine that is most relevant to where you want to compete. They have support for a bunch of different countries and search engines and you can see the break down on their site.
So if you are competing in the US you can pull data the top ranking site off of the following engines (only one at a time):
- Google Blog Search
- Google Groups
- Google Images
- Google Mobile
- YouTube
- Bing
- Yahoo! (similar to Bing of course)
- AOL
- Alexa
- Blekko
- And some other smaller web properties
I’ll select Google and the next screen is where you select the sources you want Spyglass to use for grabbing the links of the competing site it will find off of the preceding screen:
So SEO Spyglass will grab the top competitor from your chosen SERP will run multiple link sources off of that site (would love to see some API integration with Majestic and Open Site Explorer here).
This is where you’ll see their own Backlink Explorer for the first time.
Next you can choose unlimited backlinks (Enterprise Edition only) or you can limit it by
Project or Search Engine. For the sake of speed I’m going to limit it to 100 links per search engine (that we selected in a previous screen) and exclude duplicates (links found in one engine and another) just to get the most accurate, usable data possible:
When you start pinging engines, specifically Google in this example, you routinely will get captcha’s like this:
On this small project I entered about 8 of them and the project found 442 backlinks (here is what you’ll see after the project is completed):
One way around captchas is to either pay someone to run this tool for you and manually do it, but for large projects that is not ideal as captcha’s will pile up and you could get the IP temporarily banned.
Link-Assistant offers an Anti-Captcha plan to combat this issue, you can see the pricing here.
Given the size of the results pane it is hard to see everything but you are initially returned with:
- an icon of what search engine the link was found in
- the backlinking page
- the backlinking domain
Spyglass will then ask you if you want to update the factors associated with these links.
Your options by default are:
- domain age
- domain ip
- domain PR
- Alexa Rank
- Dmoz Listing
- Yahoo! Directory Listing
- On-page info (title, meta description, meta keywords)
- Total links to the page
- External links to other sites from the page
- Page rank of the page itself
You can add more factors by clicking the Add More button. You’re taken to the Spyglass Preferences pane where you can add more factors:
You can add a ton of social media stuff here including popularity on Facebook, Google +, Page-level Twitter mentions and so on.
You can also pick up bookmarking data and various cache dates. Keep in mind that the more you select, especially with stuff like cache date, you are likely to run into captcha’s.
SEO Spyglass also offers Search Safety Settings (inside of the preferences pane, middle of the left column in the above screenshot) where you can update human emulation settings and proxies to both speed up the application and to help avoid search engine bans.
I’ve used Trusted Proxies with Link-Assistant and they have worked quite well.
You can’t control the factors globally, you have to do it for each project but you can update Spyglass to only offer you specific backlink sources.
I’m going to deselect PageRank here to speed up the project (you can always update later or use other tools for PageRank scrapes).
Working With the Results
When the data comes back you can do number of things with it. You can:
- Build a custom report
- Rebuild it if you want to add link sources or backlink factors
- Update the saved project later on
- Analyze the links within the application
- Update and add custom workspaces
These options are all available within the results screen (again, this application is incredibly easy to use):
I’ve blurred out the site information as I see little reason to highlight the site here. But you can see where the data has populated for the factors I selected.
In the upper left hand corner of the applications is where you can build the report, analyze the data from within the application, update the project, or rebuild it with new factors:
All the way to the right is where you can filter the data inside the application and create a
new workspace:
Your filtering options are seen to the left of the workspaces here. It’s not full blown filtering and sorting but if you are looking for some quick information on specific link queries, it can be helpful.
Each item listed there is a Workspace. You can create your own or edit one of the existing ones. Whatever factors you include in the Workspace is what will show in the results pane as factors
So think of Workspaces as your filtering options. Your available metrics/columns are
- Domain Name
- Search Engine (where the link was found)
- Last Found Date (for updates)
- Status of Backlink (active, inactive, etc)
- Country
- Page Title
- Links Back (does the link found by the search engine actually link to the site? This is a good way of identifying short term, spammy link bursts)
- Anchor Text
- Link Value (essentially based on the original PageRank formula)
- Notes (notes you’ve left on the particular link). This is very limited and is essentially a single Excel-type row
- Domain Age/IP/PR
- Alexa Rank
- Dmoz
- Yahoo! Directory Listing
- Total Links to page/domain
- External links
- Page-level PR
Most of the data is useful. I think the link value is overvalued a bit based on my experience finding links that often had 0 link value in the tool but clearly benefited the site it ended up linking to.
PageRank queries in bulk will cause lots of captcha’s and given how out of date PR can be it isn’t a metric I typically include on large reports.
Analyzing the Data
When you click on the Analyze tab in the upper left you can analyze in multiple ways:
- All backlinks found for the project
- Only backlinks you highlight inside the application
- Only backlinks in the selected Workspace
The Analyze tab is a separate window overlaying the report:
You can’t export from this window but if you just do a control/command-a you can copy and paste to a spreadsheet.
Your options here:
- Keywords – keywords and ratios of specific keywords in the title and anchor text of backlinks
- Anchor Text – anchor text distribution of links
- Anchor URL – pages being linked to on the site and the percentages of link distribution (good for evaluating deep link distribution and pages targeted by the competing site as well as popular pages on the site…content ideas :) )
- Webpage PR
- Domain PR
- Domains linking to the competing site and the percentage
- TLD – percentage of links coming from .com, net, org, info, uk, and so on
- IP address – links coming from IP’s and the percentages
- Country breakdown
- Dmoz- backlinks that are in Dmoz and ones that are not
- Yahoo! – same as Dmoz
- Links Back – percentages of links found that actually link to the site in question
Updating and Rebuilding
Updating is pretty self-explanatory. Click the Update tab and select whether or not to update all the links, the selected links, or the Workspace specific links:
(It’s the same dialog box as when you actually set up the project)
Rebuilding the report is similar to updating except updating doesn’t allow you to change the specified search engine.
When you Rebuild the report you can select a new search engine. This is helpful when comparing what is ranking in Google versus Bing.
Click Rebuild and update the search engine plus add/remove backlink factors.
Reporting
There are 2 ways to get to the reporting data inside of Spyglass
There is a quick SEO Report Tab and the Custom Report Builder:
Much like the Workspaces in the prior example, there are reporting template options on the right side of the navigation:
It functions the same way as Workspaces do in terms of being able to completely customize the report and data. You can access your Company Profile (your company’s information and logo), Publishing Profiles (delivery methods like email, FTP, and so on), as well as Report Templates in the settings option:
You can’t edit the ones that are there now except for playing around with the code used to generate the report. It’s kind of an arcane way to do reporting as you can really hose up the code (below the variables in red is all the HTML):
You can create your own template with the following reporting options:
- Custom introduction
- All the stats described earlier on this report as available backlink factors
- Top 30 anchor URLs
- Top 30 anchor texts
- Top 30 links by “link value”
- Top 30 domains by “link value”
- Conclusion (where you can add your own text and images)
Overall the reporting options are solid and offer lots of data. It’s a little more work to customize the reports but you do have lots of granular customization options and once they are set up you can save them as global preferences.
As with other software tools you can set up scheduled checks and report generation.
Researching a URL
The process for researching a URL is the same as described above, except you already know the URL rather than having SEO Spyglass find the top competing site for it.
You have the same deep reporting and data options as you do with a keyword search. It will be interesting to watch how their database grows because, for now, you can (with the Enterprise version) research an unlimited number of backlinks.
SEO Spyglass in Practice
Overall, I would recommend trying this tool out. If nothing else, it is another source of backlinks which pulls from other search engines as well (Google, Blekko, Bing, etc).
The reporting is good and you have a lot of options with respect to customizing specific link data parameters for your reports.
I would like to see more exclusionary options when researching a domain. Like the ability to filter redirects and sub-domain links. It doesn’t do much good if we want a quick, competitive report but a quarter or more of the report is from something like a subdomain of the site you are researching.
SEO Spyglass’s pricing is as follows:
- Purchase a professional option or an enterprise option (comparison)
- 6 months of their Live Plan for free
- Purchase of a Live Plan required after 6 months to continue using the tool’s link research functionality.
- Pricing for all editions and Live Plans can be found here
In running a couple of comparisons against Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO it was clear that Spyglass has a decent database but needs more filtering options (sub-domains mainly). It’s not as robust as OSE or Majestic yet, but it’s to be expected. I still found a variety of unique links from its database that I did not see on other tools across the board.
You can get a pretty big discount if you purchase their suite of tools as a bundle rather than individually
Internet Dismantling the State Church In Finland
Last Updated on Saturday, 16 October 2010 02:40 Written by External Post Saturday, 16 October 2010 02:40
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicinternet.gif); width:70px; height:73px; internet An anonymous reader writes “A Finnish secular web site that facilitates electronic resignation from the Finnish state church gained wide attention in the media
Go to Source
Google rolls out phishing URL alerts for admins
Last Updated on Saturday, 16 October 2010 02:40 Written by External Post Saturday, 16 October 2010 02:40
Google has rolled out a service that alerts administrators when the sites on their networks contain links used in phishing attacks. The [1] are being added to the [2], which Google rolled out in September. It sends email to admins of autonomous
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Top 10 Ways to Market Your Website Offline
Last Updated on Sunday, 30 August 2009 09:41 Written by a2e Sunday, 30 August 2009 09:41
If you have a website, you are constantly bombarded with information about how to promote it, from pay-per-click search engines to submitting articles to exchanging links with other sites. The sheer volume of information that one encounters when embarking on Internet marketing is just overwhelming.
As I was talking to a potential client the other day, the topic of promoting her company’s website came up, and I knew that my telling her about all of the ways to conduct online marketing would just sound like gibberish to her. So, instead I started rattling off all of the offline ways she could promote the new website. These she understood and they made sense, as she could relate them to traditional marketing techniques. It occurred to me that in our quest to be the biggest and baddest online, we often forget to use more traditional means to get the word out about our online presence.
So, here’s your checklist of the top 10 ways you can market your site offlline that won’t break the bank:
1. Collateral Materials: Print your URL and email address on all of your collateral materials, including letterhead stationary and envelopes, business cards, postcards, greeting cards, business checks, mailing labels, invoices, brochures, fax cover sheets, print newsletters, press releases, and customer feedback forms. By doing this, everyone with whom you have any contact has your website address. Many of these items pass through tons of hands, and you never know who might see one piece of your collateral material and become a customer.
2. Front Door of Your Business Location: Do you have a retail location? If so, somewhere on your front door or in the window near your entrance, place a sign that says, “Open 24 hours a day online at www.YourWebsiteName.com“. You could also add this to the permanent outdoor business sign. Let your website do your selling for you!
3. Voicemail Messages: On your voicemail message, include your website address in the content of the message, letting listeners know that they can find information about you and/or buy products and services via your website. If you have music or a message that plays while callers are on hold, incorporate your website URL into the information that they hear.
4. Promotional Items: Plaster your URL all over any promotional items that you might give away — mousepads, pens, magnets, notepads, etc.
5. Automobile: Use your car to advertise your website for you as you go to client meeting or run errands around time. Place your website URL on removable vinyl magnetic signs on the doors of your vehicle, vinyl cling signs on your back windshield, or I.D. It Plates (www.iditplates.com) on the back of your car.
6. Clothing: Have clothing printed with your web address and logo and give them to friends and family members to wear around town — baseball caps, T-shirts, button-down shirts. Or, you can give them away as prizes or promotional items. Have your friends and clients become a walking billboard for your website!
7. Media Opportunities: If you’re a guest on a radio or TV show or being interviewed by a newspaper reporter or magazine writer, make sure that your website address is mentioned. For television appearances, have the show scroll your URL across the bottom of the screen. For print media, ensure that your website address appears in your quote as a part of your business name, or in the back of the magazine in the resources section for articles.
8. Advertising: Whether you advertise in a newspaper/magazine, television or radio ad, local cable advertising, program booklet, visitor’s guide, coupon promotion, or on the back of a regster tape, make sure your website address appears. If you are listed in your local telephone directory, have your website printed as a part of your listing.
9. Guest Books: If you’re in a bed and breakfast, salon, or gift shop with a guest book, sign it and leave your website address. The guest books are usually left in public places and are perused by guests while waiting for appointments.
10.. Virtual Grand Opening: Brick and mortar businesses hold ribbon-cuttings and grand openings all the time. Why not do the same thing with announcing your new (or updated) website? You can send announcements to the local newspapers and media or to current or potential clients. I recommend that you send a postcard with the front page of your website on it, and www.webcards.biz does this beautifully!
Bonus tips:
11. Email Signature: Any time you send out an email, send it from an email address that includes your domain name (instead of your AOL or Earthlink account, for example), and create a signature file in your email program that includes your website URL. You can also create a special offer in your email signature to drive people to visit your website, like giving away a free e-course or special report. Here’s my email signature:
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Donna L. Gunter, M.Ed., Online Business Coach
mailto:coach@OnlineBizCoachingCompany.com
409-883-2148 (voice)
http://www.OnlineBizCoachingCompany.com
Get your free ebook, TurboCharge Your Productivity: 50 + Tools
To Help You Automate Your Business and Make More Profit in Less Time
Online!, at our site!
Read about running an online biz at our blog,
http://onlinebizcoachingcompany.typepad.com/online_business_coaching_/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
12. Business Name Tag: When you go out into your community or are running errands or are attending networking events, wear a custom name tag with your business website URL prominently featured, along with a catchy slogan. Your local printshop should be able to help you design a permanent name tag, or you can purchase an LED scroll message badge (Google “LED scroll message badge” for suppliers) and get noticed!
13. Outgoing Mail: Stamp your website URL (or have special stickers made) on the outside of all outgoing postal mail, and include your business card inside the envelope. Do this for both business and personal mail, as well as when paying your bills.
Don’t become a victim of tunnel vision when you’re trying to spread the word about your website. Try a few of these simple, off-line marketing techniques and get your site noticed!
(c) 2009 Donna Gunter
Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps baby boomers create profitable online retirement businesses by demystifying the steps needed to successfully market a baby boomer business online. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at ==> http://www.OnlineBizU.com
Read The Rest Of This...Url Rewriting using .htaccess
Last Updated on Monday, 7 November 2011 10:23 Written by a2e Wednesday, 22 April 2009 04:55
Url Rewriting using .htaccess good example/sites in PHP.
1)Rewriting product.php?id=12 to product-12.html
It is a simple redirection in which .php extension is hidden from the browser’s address bar and dynamic url (containing “?” character) is converted into a static URL.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product-([0-9]+).html$ product.php?id=$1
Getting The Adwords Edge
Last Updated on Thursday, 19 March 2009 03:14 Written by a2e Thursday, 19 March 2009 03:14
One of the biggest problems a new Auction site owner faces is getting established. The are many steps you can try but today we will look at just one, Google AdWords and try to give you a little edge to how you can save money while getting better exposure then if you simply stubble along the best you can on basic settings.
Any primer in marketing will tell you that the place to start is looking at who are your customers. On a general auction site you can normally rule out under-age people but then it gets a bit more tricky so common sense would be to go to the other end of the line and look who would be interested in auctions. I’ll give you a moment to think about that ………………………………..OK, so we all agree it’s EBay user :-) but how do you get at them ? Well on EBay.com you use Yahoo advertising and on EBay.co.uk you use Google. I’ll be looking at Google here because it covers the search opportunities too that are most used in the world and I don’t use Yahoo myself.
Luckily EBay.co.uk gives us a neat way to target their customers by the way of Google AdWords. The problem with Google AdWords is that unless you really understand your target and the way the system works it’s likely to cost more then the average start-up auction owner can or afford or should be thinking about paying perhaps on a leap of faith. Google AdWords should be only one of many streams you look at to see what works for you. Another specific problem for general auctions is the are a limited number of keywords relating to auction, eBay alternatives etc. In a bidding market this mean a high price is paid to just get on the ride and the ones in the front seats are paying big bucks to be the first placing. So you need an edge and here’s one idea on that theme. Why not target specific high traffic categories on you auction site. Using a spread of adverts based on your category setting. As an example we’ll select Woman’s Clothing and an example auction site is called www.myauctionsite.com.
The first thing to do is to select a number of keywords relating to our category Woman’s Clothing. Using the tools within Google AdWords you can search for the best performing keywords pertaining to Woman’s Clothing. Also make a note of the ones which have less competition then you might have thought they would have. A product I like to use for this type of research is one call Web CEO. This software does far more then the scope of this blog can do justice but it’s very good for this kind of work. The free edition is well worth having around (I’ve provided a link to this software in the sidebar). Our research found ten or more keywords we could use but we’ll use the keyword phase “low heeled”.
The are plenty more and these should be added to the general keyword list. Probably like me you thought the phase “high heeled” would be more popular but not according to this link - ttp://shoes.about.com/od/menwomenchildren/tp/10_womens_shoes.htm. I always do background research, from this I suspect the term “high heeled” would lead our adverts into other areas we may not be interested in ;-) I suspect even worse problem if we had chosen the phase “stockings” or “garters” for example.
So now we have one of our keywords what do we do next ? Well it may be a suprise but we don’t rush over to Google AdWords just yet. We head over to our web site hosting account first, I’ll assume you understand how to use cpanel or whatever admin software your host has given you. If you don’t understand have a fish around because what we are about to do is very easy and the more you know about Back-end Work the better. It will save you both time and money in the future.
When logged-in to Cpanel look for the domain and sub-domains settings. Here you choose add sub-domain and the words we use are “lowheels” or “low-heels”. It should look like this – lowheels.myauctionsite.comand point this at the root of the auction site, in our example that’s myauctionsite.com. Now we are ready to start our Google advertising and we’ll use this URL in our advert. Not in the URL where you send the visitor to ! this goes in the box above that one. The site title box – This is not a tutorial in using Google AdWords so we’ll skip ahead and people can ask question if they have a problem. This is just to show how to use that sub-domain and further sub-domains to get more value out of google. So here’ an example of what the ad might look like;
Our exercise has given us the following benefits.
-
Firstly the sub-domain gets us an higher quality score with Google AdWords because our keyword is in the URL – benefit gained ? Costs less to get higher.
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In google search keywords searched always show in bold. – Benefit gained? We added an extra bold word to our listing and that makes it stand out more.
-
The URL contains the item the searcher is looking for – Benefit gained? People click on sites they think have what they are looking for.
Notice the URL shown is not the URL you send people to, that is best pointing to the page on your site that contains the word High Heels most often. In most cases that would be a category page wouldn’t it. And that’s about it for this exercise, I hope you like it and if you do like me know, I have more to offer later.
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