Rockin’ SEO Blog - SEO Tools

Social Media Marketing is an important tool not just in organizing your social life but also in SEO purposes. You can get inside Social Media Marketing sites to promote your site so that you will achieve a wider audience for your campaign. This week, Rockin SEO will reveal top 5 topics regarding Social Media Marketing and Social Media Search.

Sphinn

Sphinn is probably the best site that can be used by any SEO professional or rather someone who is concerned with social marketing. Sphinn is the first social media search engine and can also be used in networking with fellow users. These two main functionality of the site are what makes it work. Sphinn also gives credit to popular articles that are most searched and viewed by its users.

Flickr for marketing

In hindsight, Flickr is primarily a social photo sharing site wherein users can upload their pictures to be shared with their friends and other contacts. Now, Flickr can even be used in social marketing because of its strong following. Probably one of the factors why Flickr is very popular is its tie up with Yahoo. Once people search Yahoo for images, it searched the Flickr database. This enables the users and their photos to reach a wider audience.

Ongoing SEO implementation

Companies who use SEO usually just stop with the monitoring when the project has already been implemented and has reached the final phase. This is a wrong move because the implementation would have to be carried out to the evaluation and assessment whether the campaign was effective or not. Ongoing SEO implementation is important because it will eventually help in the spotting of mistakes and factors which are not benefiting the campaign.

Google’s Firefox extension

In this new Firefox version, the Google extension have the following added functions to it. This include: viewing paid and organic search results as they appear in different cities, viewing paid and organic search results as they appear in different regions, open all results from countries, cities and regions in multiple tabs for easy comparison, viewing paid and organic search results from a specific IP address and viewing paid and organic search results from any US ZIP code.

Stumbleupon

Like any other Social Media sites, Stumbleupon is a great tool that you can use to bring in traffic to your site. But if you misuse it, you will probably get banned from it and be a liability instead of an advantage. With Stumbleupon you can expand your network and share your site to millions of existing users.

Top Ten Items in SEO and Search Marketing

Habits of effective PPC Managers
There’s really no denying that it really takes a lot to be an effective and highly successful PPC manager. In this article, 6 common habits that are evidently found many successful PPC managers are discussed. These 6 habits are growing your keyword list, testing and tweaking, keeping a campaign diary, leveraging your web analytics software, eyeing your competition and staying informed of advertising policy updates and other search publisher news.

Brand awareness is great SEM
In this article, it is said that brand awareness is what fuels SEM. The writer argues that there are many things that traditional marketing and SEM don’t come in good terms about but one of the common links that are unifying both marketing techniques is brand awareness. The public is getting wiser by the minute, they do not only go to the popular sites or the sites which are most frequented by other people, they usually go to proven and established sites because their trust levels toward these sites are greater.

Great traffic trackers for your campaign
When it comes to SEO and SEM, the main determinant of how efficient and effective your over-all campaign is through the traffic that is being coursed to your site. Daily monitoring and live tracking is very important. To help you out with live traffic tracking for your site, there are three free tools that you can use which are SiteMeter, GetClicky and BLVD status. SiteMeter is considered as the simplest of the three free tools, giving out basic information about traffic to your site. On the other hand, GetClicky and BLVD status are more advanced tools, offering traffic analysis to the users.

How to do an SEO audit
An SEO audit is a much needed undertaking for any SEO practitioner. This is done to discover and potentially troubleshoot problems in your site. A framework in doing an SEO audit is given in this article and it covers everything from the title page to the big four factors of SEO which are URLs, site architecture and navigation, product label pages and site latency. Tools to help out in doing an SEO audit is also ennumerated.

Sources of duplicate content
Most SEO practitioners try to shy away from duplicate content as much as possible because having something like this in your site will spell SEO and ranking problems for you. But what some SEO practitioners don’t know is that there are many sources of duplicate content online. Here are some sample tell-tale signs that you can pick up in order to know if a content is a duplicated one: if the content has any type of disclosure or disclaimer, words that occur in your web template, navigation, footer, sidebars, your last name and address and contact form.

Do you think you have too big of a company for SEO?
Most large companies often think that SEO is just for small and medium enterprises so they don’t usually bother with it. In a perspective of an SEO consultant, SEO is equally important for a large company who has an already established brand name and a small company which is struggling to make a name for itself. If you want to convince a big company to do SEO, you must present them with the results. This is a tried and tested formula that will surely work in convincing them to incorporate SEO in their marketing plan.

Social Media’s history
We all know how prevalent Social Media is today but how it exactly went from being a never heard of term before to being incorporated in our everyday lives now is quite a mystery. In this article, the history of Social Media is discussed which points its roots back at the 1950s. This historical timeline threads through telephone phreaking, bulletin board systems, commercial online services, world wide web, instant messaging, P2P, social networking and real-time statusphere.

Writing for people, not for search engines
This golden advice reiterates that even SEO practitioners should keep their focus on ultimately writing for people and not for search engines. Most SEO sites are being written for the sole purpose of rising up the rankings of search engines but this should not always be the case as people are the ultimate end users of SEO sites and not search engines. It’s okay to make your site SEO ready but also keep in mind that you are also catering to people and not just search engines.

Bing controversy
It surely doesn’t take long for new things especially new tools which are being introduced over the internet to be criticized and be in the middle of a controversy. Not even two weeks into its launch, Bing (the newest search engine developed by Microsoft) is being hounded by complaints that they manipulate the search engine rankings to bring in higher click through rates.

SEO tools that you probably aren’t using now
This list summarizes the little known SEO tools that most people don’t know about. These tools include Google Insights Bookmarket, Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin for Google Analytics, Robots.txt Generator, SearchBot Plugin and Disabled Personalized Search Plugin. All these tools are also free of charge and can bring in great advantages for your SEO site.

Top Ten Items in SEO and Search Marketing

Brand PPC’s real value

Some companies who are doing PPC are actually shying away from using brands because they think that using generic keywords is a more feasible option. The main reason behind this way of thinking is that they think that if they use their company name or brand name, it will not bring in new customers since the only people who will be searching for them are the old customers. But contrary to this misconception, a lot of internet experts believe that using brand PPC will actually increase a website’s exposure and the brand keywords are actually cheaper which will bring in increased return of investment.

Bing vs. Google

Microsoft recently launched their own search engine named Bing to rival industry dominator Google. But Microsoft do not entirely propose that Bing will kill Google, in fact the company has been adamant about stressing the fact that Bing is a competitive product, much more competitive than Live Search. The author who tested Bing is very satisfied with the results, but some of the searches are surely right on Google’s position as number one. To put all the rivalry aside, Google is the lead of the pack, closely followed by Bing and Bing is trailed by Live Search. Bing in turn closes the very large gap between Google and Live Search making competition closer and tighter.

CAPTCHA

In this article, the number one problem tackling many website owners and developers are tackled, which is CAPTCHA. We all know that in SEO, it is all in vain unless the customers will do action like completing an entry form or purchasing something from the site. This is where the problem of CAPTCHA enters, this acronym stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

7 Easy Wordpress steps

The author of this blog post has recently been affected by a virus that went straight to his Wordpress account. Some of the measures that Wordpress users should do to be in the defense side against these attacks are given. Some of the areas that you need to look into are robots.txt files, protecting wp-config.php file with .htaccess, password protect the wp-admin directory, delete the admin user account, restrict erroneous log in attempts, wordpress firewall and WP security scam.

Social media relationships

Social media sites are really flowering in the internet. The main purpose why these sites were put up were to let old and new friends reconnect with each other. But the problem starts when your own family members like your parents start creating their own accounts and adding you up as your friend. I know that this is completely acceptable and it is a nice thing to know that the older generation is now adapting to what the new one is raving about. But there has to be some sense of awkwardness when it comes to these thing. This article advises that there are some things that you can do to make sure that you avoid these awkward moments.

Why should you use Twitter

There’s really no denying that Twitter has taken the whole internet and social media world by storm. Every person on Twitter probably has a different reason why they became a member of it. This blog post tells us 33 reasons why people use Twitter. Some of the reasons included in this list are employee tracking, market research, competition, branding and promotion to name a few.

Goals for link building

In the whole link building process, you should have formulated your own goals on why you want to do it besides getting all the links that you can possibly get your hands on. In this article, there are so much more reasons there is behind link building. The reasons highlighted in this site are broaden the keyword relevance, increased targeting, steady rankings, increasing market awareness, move from 2nd to 1st page rankings, own your own brand name, naturalize your link profile, get new pages, show results quickly and improve geo specific rankings.

Classic SEO articles

In this blog post, 6 topnotch SEO articles are highlighted. These are the best of the best and the author even goes on to saying that every SEO practitioner should read these articles. The top 6 are Successful Site in 12 Months in Google Alone, SEO is Easy? Let’s Look at the Hard 5 Percent, Filthy Linking Rich and Getting Richer, 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity, Spam Guide for Raters and Hilltop in Plain English.

Increasing local presence

Some SEO experts think that going global is the way to go if you want to increase traffic and brand awareness but a recent look on localizing a website’s presence is now making waves. Here are some ways given in the article that you can do if you want to increase your website’s local presence: claiming your business listing with Google, Yahoo and MSN, getting listed in local directories and search engines, getting listed in the yellow pages and creating local citations with third party data providers.

Online resources for the digital enterprise

This is considered as a master list when it comes to different online resources which are great if you are a digital enterprise. The tools listed are categorized into general site research, site technical stats and performance, domain tools, social media monitoring, general SEO analysis, keyword cloud and density tools, keyword analysis and suggestion tools, external and internal linking analysis, visibility/ranking tools and miscellaneous tools.

Top Ten Items in SEO and Search Marketing

Affiliate Links and Ethics

A lot of ethical debate is spawning out of affiliate links being featured in blogs and Twitter. While some might argue that this is purely excusable because really, once you put up stuff in the internet, it’s free for everyone to copy or link to. But, some bloggers have been waging the ethical debate saying that if you want to copy a link and make it as one of your affiliates, you have to do so with the expected amount of transparency and exercise full disclosure over doing so.

New things at Google’s Searchology

During the past week, Google introduced 3-4 new things in its Searchology brand. These new inclusions in Google’s ever-popular search engine includes: having suggestions under the assumption that the user mistyped or misspelled what he wants to search for, having mid-page breaks of other suggestions and the ‘did you mean…’ line found on the top of the page if Google thinks that there’s a more correct term for what you typed.

Statistical research and local search rankings

A study done by Brian Carter involved taking top three keywords from his clients and entering them during the following factors: reviews, number of incidences, photos and videos, user content and webpages and for the destination URL Brian tested them out on the following criteria: inbound links, page rank, number of pages in a site and number of incidences of parts of keyword in homepage title tag. The results of his study are as follows: more reviews have better rankings, and the correlation between inbound links and number of pages in a site are very weak.

What all SEO Rocket Scientists should know…

These three things are: starting out with a plan, thinking like a buyer and breaking all the rules in SEO. Furthermore, the article gives more rules to be successful in the SEO game and these are: writing for the web isn’t as hard as it seems, some gurus are more interested in your money and not teaching you how to succeed, absorb what makes sense, read and just write. The last tip that the write gives is to just unplug it and take some well-deserved rest.

7 deadly sins of social media

This insightful article shares that there are seven deadly sins when it comes to social media. These seven sins are: vanity, envy, lust, anger, sloth and greed. In order to stop committing these seven deadly sins, you have to exercise the following; balance, connecting, generosity and transparency.

Free tools for your site

We all want to have everything’s that’s free. Fortunately, this also translates in the free tools that your site can use in order to make sure that you are in good company. The three tools mentioned in this site are: domain neighborhood checker, backlink history and checking top pages. The bottom line is that you should be able to find a good neighborhood for your site, so you should definitely stay away from bad neighborhoods in the internet.

Golden rules in link building

We all know that link building is one of the top priorities that you have in SEO. The popularity of link building was known to have been a cause of Google’s introduction of PageRank. The golden rules in link building as stated in this article are as follows: relevant page and in-content links, domain trust, natural anchor text distribution, nofollow, juicy page, don’t spam and don’t buy links for PageRank.

The relation between link building and picking up a girl

This funny article shows us the link between link building and picking up a girl. In line with this, it gives a crash course on the different aspects training a link builder. Furthermore, the link building approach is likened to a woman, under the following premises: it is entertaining and memorable and finding a golden link can be incredibly sexy.

Discounts and promotions in link building

The recession has hit even the SEO world as discounts and promotions are being offered up by sites who want their links to be advertised in another site. Some of the directories offering discounts are UK Small Business Directory, RubberStamped, Avia Directory, Greenstalk and Global-Weblinks among many others. If you want to score discounts in link building, this is the one article that you should check out.

One link building secret that no one listens to

A lot of link building how-to-lists have been populated over the years but this article shares an insightful take about one link building secret that no one listens to. The thing is the author gets asked a lot of times on the top secret when it comes to link building but the truth is, there are no secrets whatsoever.

Top Ten Items in SEO and Search Marketing

Checking out the competition

In SEO, checking out your competition is essential to your over-all campaign. Basically, there are two questions that should be answered by your research about your competitors and these two questions are: what are the things that your competitor does that are more successful than what you’re doing and which new tactics being employed by your competitor that you can also use to have effective link building?

Where to promote your blog’s RSS feed

Any blogger should know that promoting a blog’s RSS feed is very important. The main question is to where should these feeds be promoted? This article gives 8 prime spots to promote your blog’s RSS feed. These spots are: RSS autodiscovery, subscriber count, call to action, big orange feed button, email form, welcome message before posts, call to action after posts and content links.

SEO in financial websites

Any website can make use of an SEO campaign and financial websites are not immune to this. Credibility is very important in building a solid group of clientele and your website has to have lots of this. If you have a finance website, it is best that you are specific with your services and allot a page for each of your services. By doing this, you will have better chances of improving your website ranking because your services are very specific and categorized well in separate pages.

Link building from A - Z

This resourceful article gives a list on what link building is all about using all the letters of the alphabet. The writer of the article argues that you will see a lot of numbered lists about link building, so he used the alphabet as a kind of code so that SEO practitioners can remember everything they need to know about link building.

In-depth review of Keyword Discovery

This article presents statistical and graphical data to support the hypothesis that the program Keyword Discovery is making the wrong keyword suggestions. It is very important that in using keyword research tools, one must use his own common sense, research and knowledge because these tools are merely making suggestions based on automated data which of course, can also have its own share of errors.

Comparing link power between two sites

For all those who have been very curious in determining or comparing the link power of two sites, then you should read this article as it presents two ways to do so through the use of majestic SEO or SEOquake Firefox addon. These two sites have the ability to empirically compare the link power of two websites providing utmost advantage to you over your competitors.

Are web directories, a thing of the past?

Other emerging web directories like Google and Wikipedia are gaining more popularity by the minute. This means that old web directories such as DMOZ are now getting less and less used by people. This prompted DMOZ to publish a blog demanding respect, and in answer to that blog post, this piece was written.

How to use Google Talk effectively

Google Talk is a new instant messaging program powered by Google. It is a heavy favorite among users and in order to effectively get the most out of it, this article provides four ways on how to do so. These four ways are: using Google Talk as a translator, using it as a live chat client, using Digsby which is an add-on application which enables users to integrate other IMs with Google Talk and using gTalk sidebar which integrates Google Talk with Firefox.

How to be successful in YouTube?

This blog post written by Sheena Melwani, who herself is considered very successful in YouTube shares her insights on what is the recipe for success for videos posted in this website. Sheena highlights that videos should elicit a reaction to be popular. Success in YouTube can also be accounted to the use of the different elements in the site.

Ways on how to identify link prospects

Links are important in SEO and this blog post gives out 17 ways on how you can identify link prospects. Several tips given include: linking out to known link sites, bookmarking, promoting in Twitter and getting links from sites which have the similar content to your site.

Top Ten Items in SEO and Search Marketing

The connection between an IP address and SEO

The term IP addresses seems to be very intimidating especially if you don’t have a particular experience when it comes to web hosting. IP address is a specific location that is given to a website by its hosting company. IP addresses are unique just like any other normal home address or e-mail address that we have. This article tackles the influence that IP addresses have to SEO. It differs in whatever which way you choose to look at it, but it definitely has significant impact on SEO.

Internet Marketing Skills that should be natural to any expert

This article gives a rundown on the top 11 internet marketing skills that should be natural to any expert. These skills are: XHTML and CSS, Search engine optimization, Pay per click marketing, analysis, usability, complete sentences, RSS and feeds, blogging and media, e-mail marketing, Statistics 101 and Marketing.

The link between SEO and Social Media

The terms SEO and Social Media are sometimes used interchangeably. SEO is linked in social media in such a way that without social media sites, SEO will surely suffer. Getting links is important in SEO and this can be done through many social media sites. Through social media, the makers of SEO will know their target audience well through analysis of user behavior used by popular search engines.

Google and sitemaps

Google recently conducted and completed a study about sitemaps during the WWW 09 Conference held in Madrid. The study’s aim was to measure the extent of the use of sitemaps in Google. Some of the interesting facts lifted from the study are 35 millions sitemaps were built as of October 2008, these 35 million sitemaps have billions of URLs in them and most popular sitemaps use XML, Unknown, URL list, Atom and RSS.

Ways on how you can use Google Calendar as a Productivity tool

Google Calendar is useful enough as it is. But this article presents more ways on how this program can be used as a productivity tool. The ten ways highlighted in this site include: using Gears so you can use Google Calendar offline, integrate with Gmail, integrate with Facebook, get to know more features of this program like calendar notifier and the milk, use Google calendar beautifiers and alternative management.

 Updates on Google Adsense policies

Updates on the Google Adsense’s policies were introduced this week. Some of the additional policies include banning sites which are: pornographic in nature, uses mature and violent content, content which promotes racism, excessive profanity, stolen or hacked content, content with drugs or drug paraphernalia and sales of beer and tobacco among others.

A look at shortened URLs

This article tackles the rising popularity of programs which offer to make your URLs shorter. Thanks to the number of characters restriction in Twitter. If you are entertaining thoughts on shortening your URLs, this article suggests that you do it on your own instead of employing a program to do it for you.

Pitfalls of small business when it comes to making their website

The common pitfalls of small businesses when making their website are as follows: they hire cheap designers, they hire some unknown person they know to make the website, they reinvent the wheel on the navigation of their site, the website they make have identity crisis, no call to action, they are led to believe that their site can be the number one website, copy content from another site, not search engine friendly, excessive advertising, link out to everybody and poor domain choices.

Sites that Small Business should go into

Small business usually doesn’t have the capacity and budget to hire big and popular consultants to help them with their websites. Due to this a small business owner should be creative enough to think of ideas that he can use to help his website. Four top sites that small business owners can use to help them out are Yahoo Answers, Twitter, Wordpress and Flickr.

Sources of link intelligence

As SEO practitioners, we all know that links are very important in any site so that it can improve the rate of traffic to your site. It is important that you find sites in which you can get popular links to be used in your site. Different sources for link intelligence are: Google, Yahoo Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, SEOmoz Linkscape and Alexa among others.

Alternative Keyword Suggestion Tool

Keyword research is very important in SEO and this is the reason why a lot of keyword suggestion tools are very popular right now. One specific keyword tool is reviewed in this blog and that is Actual Keywords. It is a newly launched keyword tool which offers list of keyword phrases and full package for popular phrases, free of charge.