I just knocked up a quick video tutorial showing an example of using Scrapebox for white hat use.   Scrapebox is a blackhat tool, but is great for harvesting potential link targets and guest blogging opportunities.

Here is a quick post on how to create Addon domains in Cpanel.  Addon domains is the process of hosting more websites on the same hosting account.  For SEO purposes, you will not be able to interlink them as they’ll all be on the same IP – but addon domains will greatly reduce your hosting costs.

First you need to find a hosting account that allows addon domains…even better if they allow unlimited addon domain and unlimited bandwidth! I use Just Host and examples are from my just host account.

1) Find your hosting account, try Just Host for unlimited addon domains.

2) Go into the cpanel and click on addon domains.

3) Add your domain and create a password for your FTP.

This has now created the addon domain in a folder within public_html/ – now to add wordpress to this addon domain.

Next go back to Fantastico and go into the WordPress Installation options.

You now need to select the folder (addon domain) where you want the new WP install to go:

Addon Domains and SEO

By default creating addon domains will produce duplicate content – your addon domain will be able to be accessed through multiple urls.

Your add domain: addondomain.com

Duplicates:

addondomain.mainhostingdomain.com

www.mainhostingdomain.com/addondomain/

etc.

Please also not that a simple redirect plugin will not fix these to create 301 redirects, you will need to jump into your .htaccess file and do some coding…this will be part 2 on this blog post for those in need. Installing a good theme like Thesis will solve some of those duplicates, along with adding the rel= canonical tag to the pages.  I have just created a couple of new affiliate sites using this addon domain technique but haven’t got around to doing the 301′s.  I’ve noticed that using a good theme like Thesis and ensuring the canonical tags are in place, it’s enough to stop the duplicate pages being indexed.

If this post is unclear in anyway try this video:

Just done a quick video showing people how to scrape Google with Google Docs and Xpath.  You don’t have to be coder to do this. Just cut and paste the Xpath code in the video description into your Google Docs spread sheet.

This is a really powerful free combination that couls have multiple uses.  You got any ideas?

Twitter can be a great social media channel for marketing, if you know how to use it.  The trick is to build followers in your niche and engage with them.  Once you have their attention you can then promote offers, link shares or simply allow them to interact with your brand.

The main way to get more followers is by following other users, done manually this approach can be very time consuming.   The other option is to buy twitter followers.  I have experimented here and generally you end up with just bot accounts following you, not real humans that you can interact with.  There are not many quality services out there to get you laser targeted followers in your niche.  The best way I have found is to use Twitter marketing tools to help you partly automate the process yourself – this gives you a greater degree of control.

I’ve currently been playing with Tweetattacks, a Twitter marketing tool.  Though it sounds like some kind of nasty hacking software or something, its actually really clever and easy to use.  This software can be used instead of buying twitter followers or manually following lots of people so they follow you back.  It basically allows you to quickly follow people in your niche, unfollow the non-followers and generally maintain your account more efficiently.

Here a video from the makers:

Tweetattacks also has a cool tweet scheduler if you want to push tweets out throughout the course of a day.  Just set the times you wish your pre-written tweets to go live and set tweetattacks free!

If writing and pre-loading tweets is too time consuming, the software even has a tweet scraper!  Though slightly blackhat, it will save you lots of time.

Some Features And Advantages of The TweetAttacks Software.

Automatically follow users that are in real need of your products and services.

Automatically follow the followers of users who are already popular in your niche.

FREE Lifetime Updates.

The most complete and powerful Twitter Software Available.

Automatically follow users with the same interest.

Follow and unfollow users using the web browser and not API to appear more natural.

Auto unfollow users who don’t follow you back.

Auto unfollow users you followed in a specified number of days.

VIP list and protect very special users from unfollowing even if they don’t follow you back.

Ignore users with no pictures and who tweet links to minimize following spammers.

Follow users from other users lists.

Follow users with your specified random number of users in a specified random time intervals.

Automate twitter marketing without getting noticed.

Build thousands of followers without worrying on API limits.

Post and schedule thousands of tweets without worrying on API limits.

Make money in twitter with or without any followers.

Reply on thousands of users looking for your offers on autopilot.

The only twitter software that DOES NOT USE THE API.Anti spammer filtering.

Protect your account from getting banned.

The tool starts at $57 to download and considering the time saving alone, is well worth buying >> www.tweetattacks.com

Google Adwords is an excellent digital marketing solution for people needing quick coverage across Google and for those who wish to complement their natural search activity by extending their coverage across a broader range of keywords. Some organisations also use Google Adwords to conduct keyword research prior to developing their natural search campaigns.

Google Adwords is a complex system that is built on the relationship between keywords, adverts and landing pages. It is advised to create groups of roughly 10-15 related keywords which are complemented by adverts that also contain elements of those keywords. Users are then sent to related landing pages. For many users, understanding the different keyword options and when to use them can be a little confusing.

Keyword types

• Exact Match – indicated by surrounding the keyword with [brackets]
• Phrasal Match – indicated by surrounding the keyword with “quotation marks”
• Broad Match – indicated by nothing – this is Google default
• Modified Broad Match – indicated by including a +plus +sign before +keywords you want to appear in the query string
• Negative Match – indicated by putting a –minus sign before the keyword

What happens if I sell Equipment for Tropical Fish Tanks?

Broad Match is Google’s default option and your Equipment for Tropical Fish Tanks keyword phrase will be displayed for people searching for Equipment for Tropical Fish Tanks. But also for Tropical Fish Tanks, Equipment for Fish Tanks and other similar phrases. This is useful for some businesses but not those who do not sell USED or SECOND-HAND Equipment for Tropical Fish Tanks. This is where Negative Match comes in – if I do not sell second-hand or used stuff I put them into my negative keyword lists. This allows me to filter out unwanted traffic that is not looking for my offering.

A limitation with Broad Match is that it is not always possible to filter out unwanted traffic because Google uses word stemming to find similar words to the keywords – fish will be interchanged with shark, shrimp, marine fish etc. To exercise more control it is possible to set the system to pick up keywords in a phrase i.e. Equipment for Tropical Fish Tanks so that your advert only appears in searches that contain this phrase – this is known as Phrasal Match. Please note that with Phrasal Match, Negative Match still filters out used, second-hand, etc. which makes this a very effective way to filter out traffic that is unlikely to convert.

A limitation with Phrasal Match is that it will not display if the words are in a different order so for a the key phrase Equipment for Tropical Fish Tanks a search on Tropical Fish Tanks Equipment will not display. I could try to anticipate the different phrase combinations but I would still most likely miss a lot of traffic. I don’t want to waste money on unrelated traffic with Broad Match so I could use Modified Broad Match i.e. Economical +Equipment for +Tropical +Fish +Tanks which means Equipment, Tropical, Fish and Tanks must be in the search query but Google might substitute Economical with its word stemming system. This is a great advancement.

Conclusions

So this is my strategy:

• I develop a targeted campaign with Modified Broad Match and related Negative Match categories
• As I get clicks I filter out to Phrasal Match and Exact Match for the high volume traffic to pin point target my audience

Remember Adwords is about the relationship between keywords, ads and landing pages. My recent article on how to refine your PPC ads demonstrates a sustainable approach to improving ad click through rates which make a significant improvement to the performance of an Adwords account.

About the author – Geoff Andrews is a prolific blogger offering current strategic Internet marketing tips  that make a significant impact to campaigns across multiple industries. Follow him on Twitter @SEM_Freak.

I have just launched my first seo tool, a simple Chrome extension which lets you see the Google Toolbar Pagerank of page, which Chrome does not offer you by default.

The extension will also allow you to quickly check some other data, like how many pages a website has indexed in Google and page speed load times.

Download and have a play.  Also look out for more SEO Tools coming soon.

Chrome Extension Home Page

SEOmoz just launched their new Firefox toolbar , and it’s looking really nice.  For anyone who is addicted to SEO, this is a fantastic tool.

So what’s new?  Well its the Open Site Explorer metrics that have been added as the main feature, Page Authority and Domain Authority – all powered by Linkscape.  These new metrics are not 100% accurate but act as good indicators to a domain’s authority.  Knowing the Moz team, these will be greatly improved over time.

Authority scores take into account all the metrics we have about a page and hundreds of derivatives of those metrics. We’ve put the scores on a classic 0-100 scale that’s logarithmic (so moving from a 50 to a 60 is much harder than moving from a 10 to a 20). Over time, these metrics will change and evolve as we get better and better with our machine learning systems (and as the engines and the web itself changes).

SERP Overlay – For the those of you who have used other SERP overlays before, you know how slow they can be providing to much data and noise.  This overlay is simple, clean with just the key metrics being displayed.   I’m now getting rid of the others…

When viewing actual sites, you can click on the ‘analyze page’ feature which is packed full of all the best metrics any seo consultant could wish for.  If you are a SEOMoz Pro Member, there is a smorgasbord of data to dive into with one click.

There is some great page level data too, like the text to code ratio:

‘Page Attributes’ also gives the page load speed, a factor everyone is fretting about now as it’s a ranking factor.  The SEOMoz home page loaded in 4.62 seconds I am told, could be faster!

Some other tasty features:

• Switch user agent to Googlebot – see your site as Google does. Turn off Javascript and you can get a good overview.
• Don’t load images – Turn them off too and see the bare bones.
• Nofollow highlighter – very useful.

In conclusion, this is an awesome new tool from the SEOmoz team and I’m glad they have moved their focus away from SEO consulting to work more on these types of tools.

Google is definitely working hard to stop us seo consultants from doing are work.   Google is pushing down organic search results for certain queries – this reduces the impact of organic SEO and allows Google to make more money from advertising.

I was just looking at the SERPs for ‘newcastle airport parking’, thinking an easy #1 position could be obtained.  Below the 2 ppc ads are the local listings…

Not only is the whole of the top fold Google ads & local listings (on my laptop), but scrolling down shows Newcastle Airport with a double indented listing.  Even if I got a #2 position, it’s so low down the page it would hardly get any traffic.   This type of SERP highlights the importants of Local SEO.   I believe Google will try and return more local listings for queries, before they introduce local listing ads into this 10 pack.

Just watched this amusing video from Matt Cutts (head of Google webspam), on how to link build.  He looks a bit uncomfortable at the start as this is an area he does not like talking about, knowing the SEO community could jump on him.  The video does give good examples of how to link build naturally, but some points weren’t great:

add a funny picture to your blog…

If only life was that simple

Related Posts/Pages

Authority Directory List

This is a quick post on something I have been noticing with some of my clients keywords.  Bing responds well to aggressive SEO tactics i.e.  link building fast and sitewide links, not really appreciated by Google. 

If you have been building links aggressively and not appearing in Google for your terms, you may have tripped one of Google’s anchor text filters.  Go to Bing and search for your keywords.  If you are ranking well, then it is an indicator that you may have been overly aggresive and tripped one of Google’s filters.

Try this niffty tool to compare Google and Bing search results (click on image):

If you think you may have a penalty and want to check, just send me your url and I’ll give you my opinion.  I have seen a fair number of different types of penalties and can spot the problems pretty quickly, and advise on the best ways forward.

References for Google Penalties

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-a-google-penalty-and-an-example-from-the-field-of-real-estate

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-ways-to-diagnose-a-google-penalty/10566/