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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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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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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However PageRank represents only one from the 200 Seo Factors used by Google so you don’t have to rely only on it to appreciate how your site is going on. I’m happy with the PR improvement because I had some doubts and thought google simply devalues .info websites.

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You have to be carefully who you are linking to because it happens for sites to change their profile. In most of the cases old expired sites get brought by people who drive them using black hat techniques in spammy sites which finally gets banned or penalized.

Links to banned or penalized sites might induce a penalty for your own site and this is named bad neighborhood.

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backlinkwatch.com – is a back link analyzer. It’s the best free tool I encountered. It shows the number of backlinks and then displays them in one table along with the important information:

• anchor text of the backlink
• total external links found on the webpage giving backlink.
• pr of the webpage giving backlink(seems it doesn’t work for the moment).
• the type of the link follow/nofollow

Website Grader

website.grader.com – analyze a website based on about 50 variables and display a detailed report. It also display a total score. The report contains:

• On-Page SEO: Metadata, Heading Summary, Image Summary, Readability Level;
• Off-Page SEO: Domain Info, Google PageRank, Google Indexed Pages, Last Google Crawl Date, Traffic Rank, Inbound Links, Displayed in major directories
• Blogosphere: Technorati Rank
• Social Mediasphere: The delicious and digg bookmarks
• Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads: Feed added to Bloglines reading rss engine
• Competitive Intelligence: Display the ranking in google SERP for what they think are the most strong keywords.

DiagnosticoWeb

diagnosticoweb.com – It checks a few factors of a website. You can see:

• Basic WebSite / Domain Info: Page Loading Time, Whois Info, GoogleBot Last Visit, MSNBot Last Visit, YahooBot Last Visit, Technorati Last Update;
• WebSite / Domain Ranking: Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, Technorati (Blog) Rank, Quantcast Rank, Compete Rank;
• Search Engines Result Position (SERP) in Google, Yahoo, MSN for a specific keyword.
• If the site is listed in Major Internet Directories
• Back Links and Outbound Links: Google Backlinks,Yahoo Inlinks, AllTheWeb Links, Altavista Links,Backlinks from .gov site, Backlinks from .edu site, Outbound Links, Internal Links
• Indexed on Google, Yahoo, MSN Search Engines
• Home Page Metadata: Title, Description, Keywords

Google SERP Multi Country Rank Checker

Google Serp Multi Country Rank Checker created by allno1 Is a SERP checker. You have to provide a link and a keyword and it will display a result with the position in the Search Engine Results Page in google for each country flavor.

Seo Rush

semrush.com – is not just another seo tool. Using SemRush you can have an overview about google traffic, competitors, Adwords keywords and potential ad/traffic buyers. I don’t know how they gather the data, I think they are using adwords api. The site is nice an clean but the reports are, at least for me, hard to understand. The thing I think is useful are the keywords by which you site can be found and their position Search Engine Results page. In order to see more than 10 results you need to pay a monthly membership fee.

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• Unique Accurate Titles – everyone already knew that the titles are crucial fo on-site optimization:
  • titles must describe accurately the page content
  • unique title tags for each page
  • the titles should not be too long
• Make use of the “description” meta tag - Google might use them as snippets on the SERP pages. There was much debate if description meta tag is important or not. Many people were saying it’s totally ignored by Google. It seems that’s a myth busted. Like in the case of the titles descriptions must be:
  • Accurate
  • Unique (generated is not manually written, but you should not use the same meta tag description for all the pages)
  • It’s not mentioned in the document, but I would add that it should not be too long. the maximum size should be the one that can be displayed completly as a snippet in the SERP page.
• Use friendly URLs. I read in another post from google a few weeks ago, that they are not recommending anymore the usage of rewritten url. Still in this guide they advice to:
  • use relevant words in urls
  • have a simple directory structure without nesting too many directories
  • have only one url for the same content, avoid duplicate content and if necesary and use 301 redirect to preserve the uniticiy of the pages.
• Make your site easier to navigate
  • creating hirearchies(eg: http://www.cars.com/cars/audi/)
  • use text for navigation links and avoid javascript, flash, … so the content could be seen by the search engines.
  • Use “breadcrumb” navigation – i’m not sure if this advice is to have a site more user friendly, or it is really an iformation used by search engines
  • Use both HTML and XML sitemaps – I’m not sure why both of them will improve the results
  • Consider what happens when a user removes part of your URL – showing 404 error if the page does not exists or redirecting it to the most appropiate page
  • Add usefull information on 404 page(dispaying home page, suggesting possilbe pages and usefull information). You can also embed google 404 widget to provide helpfull suggestions form Google Webmaster Tools
• Write usefull content:
  • Write easy-to-read text
  • Focus on the topic, group and divide text in paragraphs
  • Write unique content
  • Write content for users not search engines
• Anchor text should be
  • descriptive
  • brief
  • visible
  • should be used for internal links as well
• Use of H1, H2, .. H6 heading tags without using them excesively
• Image optimisaztion:
  • Use descriptive and concise filenames and alt text for the images
  • Use alt text for images used as links
  • store the images in their own directory (e.g. /images)
• robots.txt should not be used to hide sensitive information;
• make use of nofollow attribute tags

Check the google document for more details.

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… or Google Products Optimized for Google Algorithms?

I just read an interesting post about the first results in google when searching for blog. Not only that the first results were from google products, but there is no reference to Wordpress or TypePad in the first 10 results. Some people think google is changing their algorithms to promote their own products. I personally don’t think that google changes algorithms to promote their own products. I think is the other way around. People working at different  google products knows google algorithms and knows how to optimize their products better than everyone else simply because everyone else doesn’t know how google algorithms works.

I don’t think is fair to have a competition on a market delivering content between 2 categories: people knowing google’s secret alghoritms and people guessing the algorithms. Moreover, It’s hard for me to imagine that someone can think that a company being involved in search and delivering content will not promote its content using its search.

I think one lesson for SEO experts would be to keep an eye on products delivering content like Blogger, Google Knol, Youtube,… to see how they are changed and SEO optimized. They will have a lot to learn from this.

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This is the list with SEO advices which might make your life easier if your competitors will follow it. I hope my competitors will notice it, will read it and will apply this wise SEO advices gathered by humanity while the the time passed. Make from this list the 10 commandments for your competitors and your success will be guaranteed.

1. Submit to as many as possible directories. This will make competitors wasting the time and money with trivial ans useless tasks instead of concentrating on major useful SEO techniques.
2. Count the keyword density  and keywords placement for each article you publish. If it is 2% make it 3%; if it’s 3% make 7%, then count the first 150 words and insert the keywords again. The check again the keyword density. This will make them wasting precious time.
3. Write and publish content on other sites instead of your own. Article directories are one option, but now you should use extensively squidoo, hubpages and of course the last entered in the club, google knol. Go and grab as many keywords on those sites and on similar sites even if for some of them the links are no follow.
4. Spam forums and blogs with useless and unrelated comments. This will boost your traffic. Be prepared with a hosting solution to support high peak of traffic coming from forums and blog comments. Ignore that many of those links are nofollow, search engines must take them in consideration.
5. Read this only if you are a beginner. Most of the people knows that Google and most search engines ignores meta tags. However, if you haven’t heard about it until now, then start creating meta tags for all of your pages and take a special care to new pages to add the best keywords to them.
6. Friendly URLs. Now that Google decided that he prefers dynamically urls instead of static urls, you have to allocate more than 50% of the time should be used for optimizing the urls using rewrite instructions.
7. Don’t forget artificial ways to generate incoming links. There are many spiders, bots crawlers and all kind of tools doing dirty jobs for you.
8. Spam the social bookmarking sites. Better, hire someone to spam them and use your budget use that. To be sure it will be the most effective use the same title and the same text in all of social bookmarking sites to ease the Google job to detect it as an unnatural and spammy incoming links campaign.

And a few general rules:

1. Content is not the most important thing. The most important thing are the unnatural backlinks. Use most of your time and money to build artificial and useless links instead of building content for your site.
2. Instead of wasting your time to get 1 good backlink try to focus on getting 1000 useless links.

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