I’m about half way through the RankSense suite of SEO tools and am beginning to get a clearer picture of the scope of this software.  The package takes you through quite a strict sequence of events in its default “Smart Mode” which is good thing for an in-house webmaster or blog owner as it forces you to do some ground work.

A few issues I have so far however are:

1. The initial tool that analyses traffic stats to pick up keywords already being used to find a website didn’t work. The report took at least an hour to run and was full of totally meaningless keywords. I could have found the same information within 5 minutes by looking in Google Webmaster Tools or Analytics. While I agree that it’s often a good idea to look at keywords already drawing in traffic and build on them, from an SEO consultants point of view this feature adds little value for me.
2. By taking the “Smart Mode” route, you will be running a lot of reports before getting to the action. Again this is good for the novice but not for the more advanced.
3. In general, the software is extremely slow. In conjunction with point 2, this makes the whole process rather tiresome.

My conclusions so far are that this software is ideal for the in-house webmaster or blogger, but is certainly not for the SEO consultant or SEO manager of multiple websites. Web CEO remains my number 1 SEO software tool.

Web CEO discount

On the subject of Web CEO, I have received notification from the company that they are running a November promotion, starting November 12th and ending November 22nd.

The following prices are available during the promo campaign:

-Web CEO SmallBiz Unleashed- $149 USD (You Save $190 or 56%).
-Web CEO Professional Unleashed- $249 USD (You Save $230 or 48%).

If you are a professional SEO or manage SEO for multiple websites I suggest you snap up a copy here.

Read what other SEO software I recommend.

Google have just released an SEO Starter’s Guide. It’s basically a list of best practices that consolidates much of the content coming out from Google Webmaster Central.  The official line is that the guide covers “a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing”. Areas covered include improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more.

It’s basic stuff, but as I keep saying - SEO is pretty basic!!

Having worked on well over 100 sites over the years and achieving top ranking positions for some very competitive keywords, I’ve pretty much figured out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to SEO. While most of the tips you read about will help in small incremental ways, there are three big hitters that you should dedicate your time to getting right.

This post assumes that you’ve identified the keywords that you wish to target. Keyword research is an important first step so don’t skimp on the detail. You want to find keywords that have sufficient search volume but that you have a reasonable chance of achieving a first page position. This process will be the subject of a future post.

The following isn’t rocket science, but it works.

1. The page title tag should begin with your keyword

Basic I know, but I’ve rarely achieved a page 1 ranking without this very simple step. The importance of meta tags has been surpassed by other factors in the last few years, but in my experience the title tag is still of key importance to rankings, particularly of young websites under 2 years old.

2. Use the same keyword throughout your page - sensibly

I say sensibly, because your content should be well written and focused on your readers.  If the page is genuinely about your keyword subject then you will use the keyword naturally throughout the text. That’s what you’re aiming for - natural usage.  If your page is genuinely about cheese, then you will probably use cheese in the title and perhaps some sub-titles. You will use it throughout the text and probably in some other page mark-up too (such as alt tags and as the name of some images too).  You can use tools such as Web CEO and RankSense to identify the keyword weighting of your and competitor pages, and by all means use these as a guide, BUT make sure your own copy makes sense and is natural.

3. Quality inbound links must include your keyword

This is another well documented technique, but it’s so easy in practice to just concentrate on the volume of inbound links and forget the anchor text.  One common SEO technique a few years ago was to choose domain names that included your keywords. While I do not believe that this has any direct benefit on rankings per se, it does encourage inbound links to include your keyword as the anchor text which is the aim here. When you are dealing with a young site, every inbound link counts (providing it’s not a no-follow!), and choosing a domain name (and website name - note this is what we are really talking about here) that includes your keywords can be a faster way to build up inbound links that contain your keyword.

A health warning however! Domains and/or website names that contain keywords are often harder to establish as brands and are generally less trusted by consumers. Where would you rather buy a new PC; dell.com or computer-laptops-uk.com?  In the longer term you can always build up enough inbound links containing your keyword as anchor text to achieve top rankings whatever the name.

The SEO tree

Line all these three ducks up and you are on course for a page 1 rank. If it helps, imagine every single page of your website as an individual tree.

The many roots of your tree are the instances of your keyword within your page. They must be naturally occuring and evenly spread to be healthy. The strong trunk of the tree is your page title, and the leaves are the inbound links. Links that do not contain your keyword are small, where the links containing your keyword as the anchor text are broad and fuel the tree’s growth.

The most important factor in all of this is that your roots, trunk and leaves must all match exactly - they must all be the same keyword for the tree to work harmoniously and grow strong.

Let’s go crazy with this tree analogy. If you nurture all of the young trees in your website, eventually you will end up with a mighty forest. From the clouds the canopy of your forest will span a large area - i.e. your inbound links will be widespread throughout the web, drawing in clicks and filtering them down into the roots of the appropriate page.

Leaving the SEO forest

OK enough of the analogies for now.

Provided you have aligned your keywords, the only thing that will determine how quickly you get your page 1 rank is the number of inbound links that you achieve.  If your keyword is long-tail with little competition, this could be a few weeks. If you’ve chosen a very competitive keyword then the number of inbound links required will take longer to achieve. Treat every inbound link as important - don’t send out automated link exchange requests but rather craft marketing campaigns that will result in keyword rich inbound links. The techniques to do this will be discussed later.

A footnote

Some SEO folk will read this this post and laugh at it’s simplicity, but don’t listen to them - SEO is simple. I could point to many examples where my clients rank in top positions for ultra competitive keywords who have got there on these principles. OK - I’m not going to point them out publicly (I don’t want to give myself too much competition and risk their positions!) so you’ll just have to trust me. Either that or go out and try it for yourself.

I hear a lot of speculation over the optimal file size for SEO.  Just today a client who operates a popular luxury holiday website has got in touch following an unsolicited recommendation that they reduce their page size in order to achieve better rankings.

This rogue trader pinpointed the image sizes as making the pages bloated in size, as well as pointing out a small piece of Flash (used to deliver a small montage of images) as an SEO sticking point.

Despite the fact that this Dick Tracy was talking trench coat trash, file size is worth some consideration.

Firstly however I’ll tell you what I told the client.  Images and html are separate files, and Google deals with them as such.  Total page size should not be viewed as a sum total of all the files that are linked to the HTML document (hell, that would make some pages very big indeed), but rather the total size of the HTML delivered by the server to the client.

As for the Flash element of the site, it’s a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to discount this technology as search engine incompatible.  Firstly, in this instance, the Flash is delivering images which do not need to be indexed by search engines.  Flash is a fantastic technology for delivering media (just think of all the video sharing websites that use Flash to deliver movies) and is perfectly acceptable in this context.  Secondly, Google have made many announcements on their improved indexing of Flash embedded content, although that discussion is for another day.

OK I’ve got that off my chest, so let’s return to the main question.  The size of a HTML file might have an impact on SEO because a large file may indicate bloated code.  If a large HTML file is large because of huge amounts of layout coding then yes, this will affect SEO because the content is deeply buried and hard to find.  However, large HTML files that have been carefully crafted in W3C complaint code will be large because of rich juicy content.  If this content is best delivered on one page then so be it, and it will not have any effect on rankings.  A recommendation I would make is that very large pages are segmented into several pages, simply to increase page exposure in Google.

So my answer to the question is that it’s not the size that matters per se, but the motion of the ocean what’s under the ocean. It’s what makes your pages big that counts, not the fact they are big.

And a last word about the travel website.  It’s the images on this particular website that sell the product, so they need to be big and beautiful. To recommend that this website reduce the number and quality of images used shows a complete lack of understanding about the business and its customers. Tut tut tut.

I’ve been a fanboy of Web CEO for a long time, primarily for their GREAT customer service.  Recently however I’ve read the name RankSense (free trial here) everywhere - and when the very first comment on this blog suggested I try it I had to oblige.

My first impression from the RankSense homepage was that this software was going to be a flash-in-the-pan affair much as SEO Elite was a couple of years ago.  It’s that long sales-letter style website and dodgy free-trial (i.e. free, but only if you provide your credit card details - yuck) which made me suspicious.

Anyway, I got my copy.  After loading up the software my initial impressions seemed to be held up - the interface looked tailored to the amateur SEO enthusiast - not at all a consultant or enterprise solution. But looks can be misleading.

I started turning the corner when I received the welcome email.  The text shows a really strong appreciation of the role of modern SEO.  So often I read sensationalist, over complicated trash about SEO - but this was good, very good. In fact it was so good I’ve posted a chunk of it here. This link will stay up as long as the company allow me to publish it!  If these guys have truly built their product around these principles, then they are on to a winner.

The power and usability of this product started to dawn on me. I love the way that they are not trying to re-invent the wheel. While other suites pack their own traffic and conversion tracking system (as Web CEO does), the guys at RankSense have instead provided log stats and Google Analytics integration.  Where I wouldn’t use a proprietary system, I immediately linked my Analytics account to the software which doubled the reporting power.

The differences don’t stop there.  The other large suites STILL pack legacy modules, such as site submission, that just aren’t useful any more.  I’d bet that their defense would be that customers are still demanding these features - but my answer would be that they should make more of an effort to educate their customers that these practices are outdated and a waste of time. RankSense has been brave and cut the crap.

I haven’t put the software through a full set of tests yet - that’s coming over the next week as I complete some grueling client reports.  I don’t know whether some useful features are present (such as PPC campaign management which Web CEO does have) but my hopes are high that this piece of kit is going to deliver.

Why not join me in the experiment and download your trial copy now. And remember to check back here over the next week or two for my follow up reviews, or subscribe to my RSS feed and have them come to you.

Interested in other SEO Software? Read all my reviews here

This is the text of a welcome email sent when downloading RankSense. It’s good stuff, so I’ve decided to publish it here. I would recommend downloading the free trial from RankSense and receiving this email for yourself!

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Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you do a search in Google for “search engine optimization”, “seo” or any similar term you will find countless outdated articles that promote practices that are not very useful these days – i.e.  website submissions, link exchanges, altering meta keyword tags, etc.

These seemingly useful tactics do very little for the ultimate goal of an effective SEO campaign—to drive meaningful traffic.  Because search engines have changed significantly in the last ten years, many of these outdated practices are no longer necessary; while some, like the massive link exchanges are actually considered search engine “spam”. So if these techniques are not the way to higher search rankings, what then are we left with?

First, you need to think about SEO in terms of specific goals. Think of SEO as anything and everything you can do to your website or landing page to improve the number of qualified visitors who are attracted to it from search engines.

In order to attract qualified visitors, you should strive to achieve the following 3 goals:

• Goal # 1   The most critical goal is increasing your site’s visibility.  Before a user can find a website on a search engine, the search engine must find that site first!  What’s more, the search engine must also deem the site important (i.e. worthy of having a high place in the index).  At the moment, the major search engines rely primarily on a site’s incoming links. If many large sites link to your content, Google will assume your content is at least somewhat useful.  To increase your site’s visibility you must work on building quality incoming links.

• Goal # 2 - The second goal is targeting.  If you want to get more qualified visitors to your website, you must understand which keywords are bringing you the right visitors—visitors that are likely to take action on your site (subscribe to a newsletter, buy something, etc.)  A lot of people who are new to SEO or the Web just want a lot of traffic — but traffic alone will not guarantee success.  What you want is the right kind of traffic, the traffic that will take action on your site. Targeting the right keywords is the best way to accomplish this.

• Goal # 3 - The final goal that you should pursue is what I like to call the site’s presence. This involves getting as many pages as possible indexed, especially the ones that are most important to your overall goals. If your content isn’t getting listed then people aren’t going to be finding the most relevant content that you’ve created.  RankSense makes this process easy.

Three Simple Steps to Successful SEO

SEO is not just about ranking #1 for a random keyword.  Many people may tell you this, but they are missing the point.  The purpose of effective SEO is getting as much traffic for qualified keywords.  When the right visitors are coming to your site and taking action on your content, then you know you’ve accomplished successful SEO.  But how do you achieve this?  Here’s how…

Research – Try to understand where your site is right now. Are you targeting the right keywords? What’s your market? Are you missing any keyword opportunities? What are your competitors doing? Understanding what successful competitors are doing lets you learn and apply their strategies to your own site.

Create/Promote – The next step is to create an SEO plan that will get you where you need to be. This usually involves creating or reconfiguring content to attract the right type of user with qualified keywords. Just as important, you need to promote your content so that users can find it. There are a lot of tactics to do SEO properly, but here are some basics, many of which I’ve previously discussed in my SEO blog.

1. Keyword research
2. On page optimization
3. Link building and baiting
4. Blogging
5. Creating and submitting XML sitemaps
6. Social media marketing

Track Progress – The final step, and this is one that people often forget, is tracking your progress! How far are you from your specific goals?  Periodically checking in will help you understand where you are so that you can learn what worked and what didn’t, as well as those areas that you still have to work on. RankSense makes this easier, with the numerous built-in reports that will help you track your progress and measure results.

RankSense will help you accomplish all of the necessary steps needed to successfully optimize a website. It is up to you however, to strategically develop all of the content you will need to drive qualified traffic to your site.  Remember, it is difficult to attract visitors and links to pages that only feature sales pitches.  Instead, try using content pages to educate visitors and pre-sell them. I guarantee you will have far better results this way.

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Download the free RankSense trial here

There’s nothing wrong with going back to basics, and the most basic principal of SEO is that of On-Page and Off-Page. Advanced readers turn away now.

Unlike search algorithms, we humans love to pile things into clearly defined categories. It suits our tribal nature. When looking at ways to improve the search engine rankings of our websites the factors that we can control neatly fall into two camps - On Page and Off Page.

On Page factors

It probably goes without saying that On page factors are those bound up in the website itself.  We’re talking the style and validity of the code, the visible text, the link structure, the file names and the URL.  These things are all directly in our control and are things that we can change quite quickly.

Zoom back 10 years and SEO was all about On-Page factors. At the time I was happily stuffing hidden text into pages, inserting keywords into comments and littering websites with over-sized alt tags. Clients were delighted with their top ranking mini-sites and Google (or was it Yahoo! back then?) were filled with the delights of www.long-keyword-rich-domains.com/oh-yeah/.

But the situation was unsustainable, and we quickly saw a tightening of the anti-spamming rules. The new buzz word was content, albeit alongside over-stuffed meta tags. Spamming techniques lost favour, and the term black-hat was born.

With a tightening of the anti-spamming measures search providers looked for new ways in which to judge website suitability. On-Page factors now play second fiddle to Off-Page factors, but they are still an important part of the mix.

I have recently seen a niche website that was completely failing to rank for highly relevant long-tail search terms. This site is of a high standing in it’s field, but was failing to reach a broader search audience simply due to poor optimisation of On-Page factors.  The site now enjoys a top three position across 20 of it’s 30 strong target list. And all it took was about 5 hours work.

Had this site have had poor Off-Page optimisation however, it would have been a different story.

Off Page Factors

Optimisation of On-Page factors alone will not lead to kind of success without some serious consideration to Off-Page factors.  By Off-Page, we are primarily talking about the number,  quality and pattern of inbound links. All credit for this one goes to Google and the mythical PR (PageRank) which became a rather crude stamp of a web page’s importance several years ago.

Just as they did with On-Page factors, our ever resourceful SEO community quickly found ways to game the system. Link exchange networks, link farms and auto-submission software were all buoyed by the new found prominence of PR. But Google quashed most of these techniques too.

Optimising a site Off-Page is marketing, and marketing can be hard. When planning your SEO resources, dedicate time to Off-Page optimisation early and keep up the work. I am continually amazed at how quickly a well placed, on target link from an authority website can affect rankings. And for that matter, traffic.

There’s a huge amount of hot air and speculation that surrounds the various optimisation techniques - both On and Off Page. These techniques will be the subject of many future posts.

There are a few tools that I find indispensable during the course of an SEO day. I’ve tried a great many over the years but one that has stuck is Web CEO.

First let’s listed to how the company describe the product.  The marketing spiel goes something like this:

Web CEO is the most complete SEO software package on the planet; plus, our SEO software offers more for free than any other software package or suite for SEO.

I’d actually agree with that claim.  A big bonus of Web CEO is that their basic edition is free, and it’s not actually that basic.  I used the free edition for several years during my early SEO days until finally upgrading to a more comprehensive package. If you’re looking to optimise your blog or small website then the free package should tide you over nicely.

Like many similar suites, Web CEO is divided into several modules - 12 to be precise.  They range from keyword research tools to optimisation reports and rank checking.  All the staples of any good suite.

As an SEO professional, I use the following modules on a daily basis:

• keyword research tool
• optimisation reports
• Rank reporter
• link popularity reports

Keyword research goes without saying - it’s research that you need a program to perform in addition to a keen knowledge of you market and some common sense.  

I only use the optimisation reports to flag things up for my attention. They are not something I would pass on to a client (I hand write my own reports) but they can help in spotting problems quickly.  They include measures of page size, word counts and keyword density.  The software can compare these counts to highly ranked sites within your keyword group, although I would not recommend getting too paranoid about replicating these sites too precisely (see what I have to say about page size) when you could be marketing your site instead.  Nevertheless these reports will help you get the basics right.

Ranking and link popularity reports are an absolute staple.  Web CEO makes a good job of them, providing all the features that you would want and expect (for example - comparison with competitor sites).  I run LOTS of these reports every week and so far (touch MDF) Web CEO’s human emulation have never got my IP address in trouble with any of the major search engines! The export options are also useful for generating clients reports, or reports for your own records. 

So what are the other things I like about Web CEO?  First is the people behind it. I’ve never come across a more responsive software developer. These guys are proactive and always willing to jump for a customer.  They are the primary reason why I still use Web CEO today despite newer upstarts trying to bid for my affections.

The second is that it updates daily, never errors and is generally all-round reliable.

I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending that you download the free version of Web CEO - it’s a no-brainer. Whether you see the value in an upgrade depends on your intended usage.  The prices aren’t prohibitive at $199 for the SmallBiz edition and $389 for the Professional version.