Getting Your Copy

Both the Advanced Link Manager and the Advanced Web Ranking  programs can be downloaded from  www.advancedlinkmanager.com.   The package includes all three version of the programme - standard, professional and enterprise.  This will be a review of the standard version.

Installation

Hats off to Caphyon for providing Linux, Mac and Windows versions of the software.  We have only tried the Windows version installed on a Windows 7 Ultimate laptop and the installation was straightforward and fully compatible with the latest version of windows.  The installation took less than five minutes after the download had completed.

The Results

1.       Advance Link Manager
Once the application loads all you need to do, if you skip the tutorial, is click on Project then new project.  Enter the domain name you want to work with and select the search engines you want to check.  The application seems to have every search engine you have ever heard of and some that you haven’t.  This may be overkill as most people in the UK will only be interested in Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Once you have done that click run and the application does it’s magic.  I ran it on a site that is about 2 years old with a lot of content and a lot of links - it took about an hour for the task to complete.

So what do you get.   One of the most powerful features is the ability to identify new link sources and to send link request e-mails from the application and track the responses.  This tool can be used as a very powerful competitor analysis tool allowing you to identify and replicate a competitor’s link profile.

One feature that I really like is the link development graph which shows how your link profile develop and grow over time.

It also has a useful broken link checker to find links on your site that are not working.  This is probably in the nice to have category, but it is a nice addition to the package.

2.       Advanced Web Ranking
Again all you need to do with this application is click on new project.  This time you have to select the search engines - sensibly only Google, Bing and Yahoo are selected by default.  However, it is possible to add more search engines - again they have included practically every search engine that you have heard of then some including the new Google caffeine.  One word of caution the default search engines are the US versions, if you are based outside the US you should change to your local versions of Google, Yahoo and Bing.

You then have to add your keywords and there is a nice integration with Google suggest right there in the application itself.

Finally,  enter your domain names yours and your competitors, which is a nice feature, and click OK.  You are then promoted to give your project a name and your rankings are checked.

The results are comprehensive to say the least and you can cut the data in a number of different ways using the built in reports.  These include: Visibility Reports, Keyword Analysis Reports, Search Engine Rank Reports and Keyword Ranks.  If you are doing creating these on behalf of a customer there is a built in FTP client in the professional version that allows you to upload them to a web server for your customers to view online.

Overall

These tools are a must have for anybody that is serious about SEO and value their time and doesn’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time doing low level SEO tasks and manually monitoring and recording results.   In terms of cost the tools represent excellent value for money.    The standard version of Advanced Web Ranking and Advance Link Manager  is only $99 and this is a great way to try out both tools if the 30 day free trial does not provide you long enough to trial them.  However,   the best value for money option is to go for the bundle to get both standard versions for $149 - saving $51.   If you use these tools in earnest you will probably soon outgrow the standard versions fairly quickly and it is advisable to review the feature comparison charts for both Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager.  The price for the professional version of both programs starts at $199 and both can be bought as a bundle for $299.  The enterprise version starts at $399 and is $599 for both applications bought together.

Find out more about both products on the Caphyon website.

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• May 2, 2008 -- SEO 102: Article Marketing (8)
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• March 6, 2008 -- SEO 101: Meta Keywords and Descriptions (6)

Online readers are not tucked up in bed reading your website with a nice cup of hot chocolate with all the time in the world. They are:

• Annoyed
  On-line readers are often annoyed by the struggle to find the information they need. There are confusing menus, distracting adverts and weird layouts.
• Uncomfortable
  They may also be uncomfortable with tired eyes from staring at the screen for too long or trying to access the web on their phone.
• In a hurry
  Web readers are often in a hurry with a few minutes snatched during a lunch break, for example, to find the information that they need to know.
• Confused
  The people visiting your site are often confused as they do not know where they are. They may not have arrived at your home page and followed the journey you planned for them. They could have popped up absolutely anywhere.

How to Write Online

To address the problem outlined above you need to consider the following when writing for the web:

• Appropriate Headings and Summaries
  These must accurately reflect the content and include the either the key message or a summary of the article.
• Use Plain English
  Your sentences should be short, jargon free with a simple structure. For example:

“It would be appreciated if all those who choose to comment on this post would be create a Gravatar for themselves.”

Compared to

“Commenters please create an avatar using Gravatar“

• Gain Credibility and Trust
  Your readers are sceptical as they know that anyone can create a web site in a matter of minutes. You need to build credibility and trust with your audience.
  1. Provide the author’s name and information about the author
  2. Make sure there is real address, e-mail address and phone number
  3. Write material that is factually correct.
  4. Use all the tips in this guide.
  5. Every single page needs to tell the reader who owns the website and what the purpose of the page is. Remember a visitor may pop up anywhere on a web site and will not always start from the home page.

  You also need to consider other areas that are nothing to do with writing. These include the site design, layout and ease of navigation.

• Help Skim Readers
  The majority of reader will skim a page first. If you have an article which is three hundred words of dense text, then the chances are they will hit the back button. Remember your site is just one click away from the rest of the web. To help skim readers you should provide clear headings, summaries, break up the text into paragraphs with meaningful subheadings and use link formatting that stands out.
• Search Engines
  To help people searching the web you should write unique content and restrict each page to a specific topic. This will help the search engines to categorise your page and help the searcher find what they expected. Content is an important aspect of search engine optimisation.
• Accessible Content
  Accessibility is about making your website available for any reader regardless of their abilities, disabilities or the device they are using to access your site. Not everybody is using that latest version of Internet Explore and not everyone has 20:20 vision. This is quite a big area which I will cover later, but from a writing perspective you should check that your pages look OK in a variety of different web browsers with a variety of different window sizes.
• What Next
  On many pages you will just expect a reader to read the content, but what then. Think about what might be an appropriate next action. Suggest some more pages to read, suggest they buy a product or service, fill in a form, or perhaps make a comment. If you liked this article or have anything to add, leave a comment below : )

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Networking is essentially making friends for mutual success and like in the real world there are some people who are cheats and exploit these relationships without giving much back - luckily it is usually quite easy to spot people like this.

I would recommend finding a forum in your sector and joining it, but think about what you want to get out of it and what you can give back. For UK webmasters I would recommend a webmaster forum that I am a member of UKWebmasterWorld and of course this blog is a community too with six (wow) members. Be warned, dropping a comment on a forum or a blog with the sole purpose of prompting you or your site and never visiting again is “cheating” and a form of spam, remember to give something back.

Of course there are now the social networks that support your real world networks and bridge the gap between the real and the avirtual, the two bigs ones in the UK are facebook.com and linkedin.com

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Anyway, this is  his Digg site, notice all the links to his other social network  sites - Facebook, Flickr, Myspace etc.  Should be easy enough to copy.

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Adwords is an extremely effective way to market your web site online and get immediate results and it only costs £5 to get started. However, care needs to be taken as it is possible to blow an enormous amount of cash if you are a newbie and configure your campaigns incorrectly – you have been warned.

This short guide will provide you with ten top tips for managing your Google Adwords campaign.

1. Set a daily budget, this is a safety valve and will stop your campaign costing you a small fortune. Start small say £10 per day.
2. Remember you have to bid for position, so set a cost per click that gets you above the fold i.e. in the top 5 otherwise you will get very few clicks.
   
3. Measure conversion rates. The Adwords system provides a small piece of code that you can put on your website to measure conversions and will give you a cost per conversion.  It is even better if you can work out the value of a conversion. You can also integrate this with Google Analytics, but that is the subject of another post me thinks.
4. Target Long Tail keywords. According to the Adwords system it will cost you £3-£6 to get your site in the top three for “Home Information Packs” and several visitors per day, but this search “cheap home information packs” will be much cheaper per click, more targeted and will convert better if it is applicable to you. The volume of searches and traffic will be much lower though (too low for Google to provide useful data), the other thing to consider is the geographic terms such as “Home Information Packs Bolton”
5. Optimise your titles and your descriptions. You should create multiple ads for each keyword you are bidding on. Click through rates improve by including the keyword in the title, description and the URL as these are highlighted when the search results are changed. You can automate this by using this curly brackets in the title and descriptions to return the search term e.g. try {KeyWord: Home Information Packs} as the title.
   
6. Optimise your landing page. Many people do not realise that Google monitor the relevance of the landing page. For example, if you are bidding on the keyword “Home Information Packs” and the landing page is about Energy Performance Certificates you are going to pay more per click for a given position. This might involve the creation of specially written landing pages.
7. More advanced users may want to experiment with a/b testing.  This allows you to set multiple landing pages and compare which converts visitors to customers the best.
   
8. Use the Adwords data to feed into your organic search engine results.  If a keyword is converting well for Adwords start optimisting your web site for these words to improve your organic rankings and to reduce the cost per click - remember point 5.
   
9. Apply the your knowledge to alternative contextual advertising systems such as Overture, MSN, Mirago and Miva. (I have found the conversion rates for the last two to be poor)
10. A significant number of clicks will be fraudulent clicks, so consider installing click fraud monitoring scripts. I have managed to get money back from Google using these scripts.
11. Try to calculate a value for each conversion and adjust your budgets accordingly. E.g. If you are making £100 and spending your £10 daily budget by lunchtime, consider increasing it.
12. Monitor at a keyword level and adjust your bids accordingly. Consider removing poor performing keywords.
13. Compare conversion rates between the content network ads and the Google search results ads.
14. Some will create a whole site excluded from the orangic results just for adwords traffic as it makes it easier to measure conversion.  These kinds of sites would use different e-mail addresses and different phone numbers to faciliate this.
    

Good luck - let me know how yo get on.

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Link Building

Marketing articles you have written is probably one of the best ways to get hundreds, if not thousands of one-way back links to your site from all across the Internet, not just from the article directories that you submitted them to. Article marketing helps with your websites optimisation as well so be sure to include this added value in as you decide how much time you plan to spend on writing articles. Of course it takes a little bit of time to write articles for this purpose, but you must look at is as an investment for your future and the benefits it will bring to your site. The articles don’t have to be like the loooong essays we used to write in school, when you are the author, you’re in control. Your article could be about your own opinion on a subject or just you simply telling the world about one of your own experiences or pretty much about anything you like!! (within reason of course).

The trick to getting the hundreds of back links is to write articles that have information in them that is new and fresh to readers. Everyone in your niche will want to use your good article on their site or blog and will in turn be giving you the link love we all need to help us rank better with our websites.

It’s Only As Hard As You Make It?

The chances are the products or service you are trying to sell or the reader base you are trying to grow will relate to what you already know and you will be able to just sit down and start typing an article out. When you get started writing your article, you’ll see the article take shape and come to life and can easily spruce up any areas of it that you see necessary as you write. Even if you’re not sure where you want to put a certain sentence but you know you want it included somewhere in your article. Type it out on the page before you forget it and build on it. Think of what else needs to be introduced before and after the sentence and soon you will have a well thought out article to start article marketing.

The way I write articles is pretty simple. Think of it as making a cake. You add layers to build up the cake right? Well the same principal applies with writing an article. Sure, you may go and edit it a few times to get it the way you want it but that’s only natural. Even the best authors have to go and change words about.

Become Established

You can make yourself appear to be an expert even if it is your very first article. Just because you know it’s your first article on the subject doesn’t mean anyone will know. Take a look at Ezine Articles, they give you an expert author status with your first published article so readers who found your article by searching Google are naturally going to want to go to your website as soon as they see you have one at the end of your article. You could turn that visitor who found your topic on the article directory into a RSS subscriber to your blog just because they like you and believe in what you are writing about.

Give your article the edge by putting a controversial spin on your writing that you use for article marketing to get some controversy going. Using your articles to spark the interest of readers is the best way to get someone to your blog to make a comment, and you can bet they will tell someone about it, which is all free advertising for you and your blog or website. This could be considered as “Link Bait”

When I say add a little controversy, I don’t mean writing an article slating someone or something that is Taboo. That could literally come back to haunt you in a bad way.

Article Targeting

If you are doing or planning on doing affiliate marketing, take the time to write an article on each of the products offered so that you can gain the links from those pages and to let people know that they can buy the products directly from you. Buy the product if you have to so that you can write a review of it to submit to article directories. Again, these are easily spun up to make a few articles that you can submit to the top article directories. Remember if people like you, they will want to buy the products and services they need from you instead of going elsewhere.

I once owned a “TV Blog” where I literally just wrote reviews on the TV’s that were out at that time. You would be amazed on how influential I was with people buying TV’s. It got to the point where I would literally have TV manufacturers call me up to ask me if I wanted to test a new TV for 30 days or so.

Can’t Write, Won’t Write?

If you are simply poor at writing, don‘t give up on article marketing just yet!! There are loads of ways to gain exposure from articles without you having to lift a finger. Just find someone else to do it! If you find yourself having mental blocks for words or you find that it is just to time consuming for you to do it, hire a ghostwriter who will do all the work for you. All you have to do is proofread it before submitting and come up with your own resource box. You can always take the ghostwriters copy and add to it if you want more information in the article. You can put in anything you would like but at least you have the ghostwriter’s work to start with similar to an outline, except most of it has already been written.

There are loads of excellent freelance writers out there and just for 2 or 3 pence per word who will write a really good article for you as a starting point. You can find these people pretty much anywhere, in forums, project sites like Guru.com and so on. You don’t even have to tell them what you will be doing with the copy they will be doing for you, you just need to have them write it and then tweak it for article marketing at will.

Syndication Tips

How many article submission sites should you submit to? Well that depends on how well your content is written. If you have excellent content you will only need to submit it to the most popular directory for your targeted niche and you will be given loads free links from the other webmasters and bloggers that like your content. The best thing to do is only submit each article you write to one article directory like ezinearticles.com or whatever one you prefer to use.

If you want to submit the article to more than one directory, you can always take your one article and spin it up so that it offers unique content in a different way and with different phrases. It’s not that hard to take one article and quickly turn it into 5 or 6 really good articles all with different outlines and wording. Then you can continue on writing articles on the other areas of your niche and do the same with them.

Topic Ideas

Look at your site and decide what pages you want to get more traffic to and write about whatever that page is about. It’s not hard to come up with ideas and topics for articles when you look over your website to see what information you are offering your readers there. Just elaborate on one of your products/services or tell some “teaser” information to get them to click on your resource link for more good quality information on the subject.

Don’t stop Writing

Never stop writing articles for marketing purposes. As you add new pages to your website or blog, write an article about it to submit to the article directories. This is the best way to stay on track with your article marketing and you should always have good information inside your article and on your site as well. You’ll soon find many of those people who found your article and then clicked through to your site will become regular readers who have bookmarked your site or subscribed to your RSS feed.

Read more from Kingpin on his search engine marketing blog.

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Squdioo Home Information Packs lens  and my SEO lens.  This is my Zimbio HIPs site.

Have a play and let me know what you create.

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1. Google
   Google Webmaster Tools allows you to see problems Google has identified with your site, upload site maps and most importantly of all allows you to see what keywords are returning your website in the Google search engine results and which bring you traffic.
2. Yahoo
   Yahoo call their webmaster tools Site Explorer, which is not as comprehensive as Google’s offering but allows you to add your site map and check out how Yahoo sees your site. To get the additional functionality offered by Google you have to pay £49 per year for upto five domains.
3. MSN
   Microsoft call theirs Webmaster Centre and it is the weakest offering of the three, but it does allow you to upload your site map; to see your top five pages and lets you know whether the Microsoft Search spiders are being blocked from accessing your site.

I wasn’t planning to write about statistic packages as I am planning to write about these in a future post, but as Google offer one of the best for free I thought I would mention it here - Google Analytics.

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• May 2, 2008 -- SEO 102: Article Marketing (8)

Ok, so this is great for finding RELEVANT blogs, forums and directories that will pass link juice to your site, but how can you use it on your site. If you have any internal links that do not convey any meaning e.g. Read more, more, continue, next, numbers, dates, home you can make them “nofollow”. You need to make sure that you don’t orphan any important pages i.e. make sure that the search engines can get to these page. One way of achieving this is to create a site guide in the footer with more meaningful links. For example, the “Home” in the menu on this site is “nofollow”, but there is a link in the footer to the homepage using the following anchor text “The Hip Zone” which is not much better I know but you get the point. There might also be pages that don’t have much content that can safely be orphaned, such as you privacy and terms and conditions page. (That reminds me I need to create these for this site).

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From a search engine optimisation perspective it is advantageous to get your keywords into your domain name as this will help your rankings and it helps the users too. For example, Dermot over at Home Inspections Chester chose www.homeinspectionschester.co.uk as his domain name; it is pretty easy to work out what Dermot does and where, from just the domain name. It also contains three of his target keywords (home, inspection and Chester) and if you type these three terms into Google guess which site comes first. Bingo!

I have been watching the 2008 SEO Contest with interest and it is interesting to see the domain names that the participants have chosen. if you try this Google search seocontest2008 you will notice something about domain names used by the competitors. The last time I looked 8 out of the first 10 results returned have the target keyword (seocontest2008) in the domain name.

Read the rest of my SEO lessons

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