When we talk about Seo we talk first of all about the success of a webpage or a website. In order to measure it we can use a few factors: Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Number of backlinks,…

Alexa Sparky

Alexa Sparky is the official addon from alexa. It displays the Alexa page rank and a small traffic trend graph in the status bar. Right clicking will pop-up a menu from where you can open Alexa Related pages: Traffic Stats, Related Links, Keywords,…

Alexa-Sparky

SeoQuake

SeoQuake SEO extension SeoQuake is really useful plugin if you want to research and gather data about the first results on google SERP page. It adds using for each result in google page the PageRank, number of backlinks according to Google and Yahoo.

Seoquake

SearchStatus Addon

SearchStatus – Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank in status bar and provide a popup menu to open pages on useful pages on google, compete.com, alexa and seoMoz.

SearchStatus

Keywords Addons

Keywords are the real tags of a webpage through the web. Search engines are indexing webpages and websites based on their keywords. On the other side potential visitors perform searches based on keywords. Keywords are the core of the web search.

Wordtracker Seo Blogger

Seo Blogger is a extension from wordtracker that be be extremely useful for doing a keyword research. The main benefit is the fact that it is integrated in the browser so it’s more useful that keywords tool from google. There is also a drawback, wordtracker keywords research is done on less than 100% of all the searches, so the accuracy can not be even compared with the keywords research tools from google.

Wordtracker-Seoblogger

KGen

KGen – display the keywords in a webpage ordered by weight and importance.

KGen

Server Info

Sometimes it’s important to find out where a specific site is located, who is the owner of the domain, what type of webserver is used,…

FlagFox

FlagFox – display an flag icon near the address bar, showing where the site host server is located.

FlagFox

Domain Details

Domain Details is a more advanced plugin. It can display the country location of the server, type of server and header information.

Domain Details

Web Development Addons

Web Developer is a very complex addon for web developers. You can use it for seo to perform all kind of tasks: Hide the images to see the titles, disable css to see how serach engines sees a page, display title attributes,…

Firebug is another tool for web developers, that can be used by seo professionals as well. You can use it to inspect html elements or to use the page speed plugins that will be described in the next section.

Page Speed Addons

Page loading speed is an important seo factor that is very often ignored. If the page doesn’t load in less than a few seconds you’re gonna lose almost half of the visitors.

YSlow – is an addon created by yahoo, which works in firebug and records the loading time of each component and shows a list of suggested improvements that can be made.

PageSpeed – is the google clone of YSlow. It works in the same manner and usually the suggestions that are made are the same.

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1. Company Age

You should know for how many years the SEO Company has been operating and providing SEO services. With more experience they will be more credible and will be better in their work. As they have been in the field for some years they will know of all the strategies that can be used and how effective they are.

2. Experience in your Niche

You should know if the SEO Company has experience to work in the niche market that you work in. It is always advisable to work with a company which has worked for a company of your field so that they know the details and know what will work well.

3. Testimonials that can ve verified

All good SEO companies have good testimonials and they will ensure that they tell you about it. You should know about the testimonials and you should try to talk with the clients so that they give you the correct feedback.

You should know that if past clients avoid to give you details about their ex-seo company, it means they do not have a good track record so you should take care. Every client would be more than happy to give a good feedback about a seo company, if they had a good relation in the past.

4. Portofolio

You should look at the portfolio and check for the companies they are working for or they have worked for in the past. You should see the rankings of the site which will show how effective are the SEO techniques they were using.

5. The SEO Strategy

Ask them which strategy they ar going to choose. If they are telling you they will bring lots of links submitting to directories, social media, forums or other ineffective strategies, then forget about them.

6. Pay for Results

You should try to negotiate in terms of results. The results are the ranks of your websites not the number of backlinks they would build. Offer them only a half of the pie for what they provide and the rest when they achieve what you are demanding for(the 1st, 2nd,… position in google for certain terms). If they are unwilling to accept then they know it might not be achievable.

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Sidebar Widget Preview

Widget Admin

In case you find it useful and you think it worth improving and extending it please let me know your suggestions.

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Google is the most widely used search engine, so when you practice optimization, you really want to do it with an eye toward how you’re site will rank in Google. If you can rank high for your site’s keywords in a Google search, the other search engines will generally take notice and rank your site high, too. The beauty of it is that the good search engine optimization that will help you rank in Google will also boost your rankings in Yahoo!, Bing and other search engines.

How do you use SEO to make sure searchers can find your site? Keywords. If you wrote a long article about apples, but only used the word “apples” once or twice and instead kept calling apples “fruit,” you’d probably rank much higher for the keyword “fruit” than you would for the keyword “apples.” And that’s unfortunate, if you’d really like to attract people who are Googling “apples.”

Think of the people who will find your site useful. What will they be searching for? Make sure you’re using those keywords in your content, your page titles, your post titles and tags, and you’re already making huge improvements in your on-site search engine optimization.

You can also optimize your site on the fly by adding content that targets certain keywords that are actively being searched right now. How do you know what people are searching for? Google Trends is a tool that you can use to see the top searched terms over the last 24 hours.

Google Trends lets you see the top 10 searched terms or phrases. And you can type in two different keywords or phrases and compare them to see which is searched more. This can be really valuable for someone who wants to know which keyword can better benefit a site.

When you enter the terms to compare, Google Trends gives you a handy graph showing the searches for both terms, color-coded and compared, for the last 5 years. This not only shows you which is the more searched term, it shows you trends over a long-term period.

Google Trends has another fun and helpful feature, too. Google Hot Trends lets you see the top 100 most searched terms over the last 24 hours. For some it’s just a point of interest to see what people are looking up, but for a website owner working on driving traffic, Google Trends can be an invaluable tool in the SEO toolbox.

The ability to quickly compare keywords and see what people are using Google for that day can really help you tweak your search engine optimization and get that traffic to your website.

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Initially I planned to name this post “Google changes in the algorithm to calculate PageRank”. However I decided to give it a more marketable name which will reflect more the “Consequences of the Google changes in the algorithm to calculate PageRank”. When I read in a Matt Cutts’s post blog post how Google changed the PageRank algorithm, it thought there will be some changes out there.

Before the algorithm was changed only the dofollow links were considered when the page rank was computed. Lets assume that a page of PR 6 contains 6 links of which 3 are dofollow and 3 are nofollow. Google would consider only the dofollow links when computing how much PR score will be passed by the dofollow links. That would be the PR / number of dofollow links. In our case it is 6 / 3 = 2. In reality not the entire points will be passed, some 10%-15% will be lost.

The new Google algorithm takes in consideration all the links, nofollow and dofollow when dividing the page rank of the source page. The points passed will be PR / (nofollow links + dofollow links). That would be 6 / 6 = 1(reduced to 85%-90% of course). Still the nofollowed pages will get no PR score nor anchor text relevance to the destination pages.

Obviously this move will produce big movements for most of the pages on the web. If this is the only change in the algorithm most of the pages will lose from their page rank even if they don’t contain nofollow links. After all the PR of a page is built based on incoming links. If the pages containing the back links will lose PR the destination page will lose it as well.

People used to play with nofollow/dofollow links in order to direct the page rank points(the term of link juice is also used here) to certain pages. For example wordpress plugins make the links to categories and tags pages nofollows, many sites are through this method to send the link juice to strong pages. This term is called PageRank sculpting.

Before seeing which are the sites will be most disadvantaged by this move, lets say that page rank is just one of the many factors used by google to decide which are the best results for what you are looking for. A lowered PR does not necessarily means less visitors sent by search engines.

The most affected sites are of course sites containing nofollow links. Right now I’m thinking to the following categories:

• sites based on user generated content – digg, twitter, youtube clones and many many more. Lots of web 2.0 sites contains no follow links and user generated content
• wikipedia – maybe I should put it in the above category, but since for many keywords wikipedia is the first result I wanted to put it separately. Wikipedia pages contains a list of external links at the end.
• forums – many forums shows the links from posts as no follow in order to avoid spam
• blogs – most of the blogs have no follow link comments.

Then it comes the second category of pages, which used to have their PR built by the dofollow links from the sites from the above categories. However the first 3 categories should be excluded, because they have most of the links as nofollow, they don’t really pass page rank points. The only remaining category is represented by the blogs with their in text or in context dofollow links. Since they have lots of comments the pages will lose their PR and consequently will pass less.

Unfortunatelly, Matt does not specify when this change was done. I don’t think the current PRs reflect it, but I assume the next PR change will bring some big changes.

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Google Page Speed is a tool used internally by Google to optimize their webpages, which is now made available for the public. The tool is built as a Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug. When I discovered it I was a little amused that Google is using Firefox internally instead Chrome for such purposes.

Yesterday I just gave a try and Page Speed seems to be a really useful tool. To install the tool you have to open the Page Speed Download Page and install is as a Firefox Add-On(If you don’t have Firebug Add-On install it from here).

Once installed open a webpage and go to Tools > Firebug > Open Firebug. You’ll notice a Page Speed tab in the Firebug panel. Inside that tab click Analyze Performance button:

You’ll get a nice report with all the things that can be improved:

Here are some of the tips provided by Page Speed:

• Compress images and show you how much you gain from that. You can just save the images and use them. It also gives a resized version of the images to the dimensions used in the page.
• Compress Javascript files.
• minimize DNS lookups
• put the static content to a cookieless domain.
• Combine Javascript and css files
• distribute resources on multiple domains to enable parallel downloads.

Some of the things are easy to implement, some of them requires advanced configurations(adding a cookieless domain). Anyway Google Page seems to be a really nice tool, in future post I’ll try to explain how to implement some of the tips.

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The main issue is generate by the wordpress architecture. All the maps between the permalink url and the real items are kept in the database. When a webpage is displayed wordpress has to retrieve a number of items from the database equal to the number of internal links displayed in that page.

The solution proposed by the author is to use a permalink structure that does not start with a text based variable. In the same time he blames seo experts for teaching wrong tips and tricks.

Seo experts are seo experts. Usually they will teach you how to do push your pages up in the search engines. Optimizing your blog should be only the second priority. So you have to remember to use all the time some caching mechanism for wordpress, especially when you use permalinks. You can try WP-CACHE or WP Super Cache.

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First of all they can not detect it, control it, measure it. The entire Google castle was built on the “measuring” what other pages “think” about a specific page. In simple words: back links. If links could be traded as any other resource the rich players will put lots of money in buying links. Google algorithms will be affected to some degree and the quality of the results will suffer.

The second reason for which Google don’t like it is the fact that their revenues might be affected. Most if not all the Google revenues are based on advertising. Google castle is build on the backlinks net foundation and powered by the ad marketplace they built. Content on web becomes more and more and grows much faster than the money spent on ads.

More and more people will be tempted to sell ads when they will realize that a sold link might bring more money than an embedded ad unit. On the other side people will realize that a paid link is not bringing only new visitors but an improved search engine position.

I’m sure that if there would not be the terrible punishment of losing the place in the eternal Google index the link trading would flourish. Let’s try to imagine how the world would be if the link trading would be “legal”. First of all lets assume big players will put their money in paid links and will reach the sky in SERP pages. A new job will appear called SEO profession(wait this job already exists). The site owners selling links will have more money; they will also buy links to promote their websites.

The question to be asked is “Would the paid links affect the quality of search?”. Somehow when we think about paid search we think that bad sites will reach the top just because they afford to buy more links. How is that different of what happens today? Bad sites can pay good SEO professionals to push them in the top. It’s more probable to reach the top of the engines with good SEO than with good quality.

Google already have some powerfull algorithms and it can measure and control what’s happening on web right now. Why to make the web to play by your own rules and not leave it free to control and regulate itself? The response is obvious, but is it profitable also on long term? It’s not a bet agains future, to freeze or to force the market in the direction you want, instead of adapting yourself for the market changes? How long the little site owner will agree to make 50$ a month from adsense when he can make those money from selling 2 links?

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That’s why in this post I will try to apply “military” principles to practical SEO. First of all lets’ establish very clear what we want to achieve through. Lets define SEO as a set of actions we are going to perform in order to achieve the best results we can get based on what resourced we have. By resources we can understand our time, money or other people’s time and money which can be used in a seo campaign. The results of course should be increased number of visitors and better positions in search engines.

The way you select the techniques and prioritize your tasks will bring(or not) crowds of visitors on your sites. Looking for different information about all kind of strategies on Wikipedia I came to this a set of millitary principles:

Army’s United States Army Field Manual (FM-3-0) of Military Operations (sections 4-32 to 4-39) are:

1. Objective (Direct every military operation towards a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective)
2. Offensive (Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative)
3. Mass (Concentrate combat power at the decisive place and time)
4. Economy of Force (Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts)
5. Maneuver (Place the enemy in a disadvantageous position through the flexible application of combat power)
6. Unity of Command (For every objective, ensure unity of effort under one responsible commander)
7. Security (Never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage)
8. Surprise (Strike the enemy at a time, at a place, or in a manner for which he is unprepared)
9. Simplicity (Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and clear, concise orders to ensure thorough understanding)

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Personally, I think that in most of the cases creating content for other sites than your own is a bad idea in most of the cases, but I think that squidoo is really well done from the seo point of view and it worth to create a squidoo page(squidoo pages are named lenses) just to feel the taste, and to get an idea of what user experience means.

I think there are a few things to contribute to squidoo seo success:

Classic SEO Techniques

• Squidoo is a big site. Large sites tend to go higher because they pass link juice between their pages. The main difference between a large site and a small site is … the size. In a large site you have more related content which links to each other and internal linking does a great job.

• Basic SEO page optimization through title, page, description, meta tags, H1-Hn tags.

• Articles size. Squidoo and similar sites are pursuing their contributors to add more and more content to the same page. Frequent updates and increasing page sizes convince google that something is moving there.
• Internal linking – pages are linked internally to related pages through the tags defined for each lens.
• Long tail keywords.  The recommended title for an article is of 2-6 keywords, recommended by squidoo, targeting this way long tail keywords.
• Simple Url Structure: Squidoo is using a simple url structure in Wikipedia style with no directories or sucategories: www.squidoo.com/article-name.

User experience

From the moment you join squidoo they make you feel your fingers itchy to write something on squidoo. Then they pursue you to update what you’ve written. Then to optimize it. And as you can see below they teach you how.

Squidoo is driving experienced seo contributors to seoptimize their lenses. For each article you write you have a special page where you can check the article health. This is just a seo guide written for dummies who never heard of seo so they can optimize their pages.

The optimization of the lenses includes a section for link building and social media optimization. The authors are encouraged to add links on their blogs to the articles they written and to share the articles on facebook.

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