SoloSEO

Announcing LiveTwitting.com

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 8th, 2008

LiveTwitting is a new way to cover conferences, events, and meetings using Twitter and LiveTwitting.com. With the ease and simplicity of Twitter, you can cover sessions just like before but now in real time.

A few simple commands like ON, OFF, and SPEAKER will let you collect and organize the information for reposting on your blog, website, newsletter, etc. Here are the commands that you can use, after you’ve followed @livetwitting.

You can even take the live RSS feed and link to it (or pull from it) on your blog or website. Here is a fake event that shows how it can be organized, all from using the commands above: LiveTwitting of PubCon 2007: Online Reputation Management.

The whole idea was bred on Twitter, starting with @LisaBarone asking if she should do the next session live with Twitter or not. @DannySullivan responded and said she should but there needs to be some tools to collect and organize the LiveTwitting. I (@mdjensen) told @DannySullivan I’d be interested in working on making that happen. Danny had some great ideas and we brainstormed together, and now have LiveTwitting.com! See, Twitter has its usefulness!

We’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, etc. Send me (@mdjensen) or Danny (@DannySullivan) an @reply and we can talk!

Add comment Visited 95 times May 8th, 2008 Michael D Jensen

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IndexRank - A New SEO Metric of Indexing Rate

Posted by Michael D Jensen on November 5th, 2007

How do you measure the success of your content strategy? How do you compare your website’s growth with your competitors?

Enter, IndexRank. IndexRank is a new metric to summarize the indexing rate of your site. If you constantly add content to your site, big or small, your IndexRank will be higher. If you only periodically add content to your site, your IndexRank will be lower. The metric is based on an algorithm that makes use of time specific indexing data from Google to indicate (on a 0-10 scale) the indexing rate of a website. Hat tip to Aaron Wall for a great post about the value of this data.

Below is a snapshot of the IndexRank of several sites. Read on for an analysis of each site, and why their IndexRank is where it is.

Sites such as TechCrunch that create lots of content will of course be indexed more by the search engines, and this is reflected in the IndexRank. ColbertNation.com is a fan blog of Stephen Colbert, and content is added on a daily basis, although not to the same levels as TechCrunch. Bill Slawski has a great SEO blog, but with only him contributing to his blog every couple of days, he doesn’t get indexed as much as sites above him in IndexRank. A newer site, such as Gooruze.com has a lower IndexRank because it is new, but as it continues to create more content on a consistent basis, its IndexRank will continue to climb. Paul Allen (not the Microsoft guy) has a great blog, but only posts to his blog every now and then.

How to Use IndexRank

One of the best uses of IndexRank is to compare yourself with other sites, like your competitors. First, visit the Check Your IndexRank page and enter your domain name in the first text box. Then find a few competitors and enter their domain names in adjacent text boxes. (To find a quick list of competitors, search with your top keywords and select the top few domains that rank well.) The IndexRank of all of the domains will give you an idea for how your website is positioned with your competitors in terms of content growth. Remember, IndexRank must be acted upon to be useful, don’t just stare at it, improve it with action.

How Can I Improve My IndexRank?

If you find yourself lacking in IndexRank, the best place to start is by creating content. Start a blog and motivate yourself to write every day. Write articles, news, tutorials, or informational pages and post them on your site. Pay for content to be written for your site on a consistent basis (2-3 articles a week is a great place to start).

21 comments Visited 3366 times November 5th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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SEO for the Rest of Us - The SoloSEO.com Newsletter

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 2nd, 2007

This morning we sent out our first SoloSEO newsletter. Our newsletter’s main title is “SEO for the Rest of Us”, and anyone interested in learning and doing SEO, from beginner to professional, can benefit from the content we deliver.

The newsletter format is composed of a fresh new article (”Freshly Squeezed”), an SEO question and answer discussion with our readership (”Stump the SEO”), an article from the blog archives (”From the Vault”), details or discussion on new SEO tools (”Your SEO Tool Belt”), and a list of links to great SEO related articles published by others in the industry (”Super SEO Articles”). We also have a 5-minute SEO tip in the sidebar of the newsletter.

If you’d like to subscribe to our newsletter, which we foresee going out about once a month, use the following form to sign up instantly. No spam, no reselling, just a great SEO newsletter.

If you have any suggestions for what you’d like to see in the newsletter, leave a comment or email us at newsletter[at]soloseo.com.

1 comment Visited 1423 times April 2nd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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SEO around the globe

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 19th, 2007

SoloSEO has been quite a surprise. When we launched last November, we had no idea the draw a stand alone SEO system would have, nor the level of interest it would generate. It has been truly a whirlwind. We did some quick figuring the other day and discovered that domains from over 40 different countries are currently using our site to SEO their sites. It is also surprising Germany and Russia are the top two, since the site is only being offered in English, and not localized for any other foreign language. There was no way to predict this amount of international interest. Of course we are thrilled to see so many from all over the globe interested in what we are doing, but we now feel pressure to address the SEO needs of site owners who can’t read English, and provide them with the SoloSEO tools in their own languages.

Personally, international business is a big passion of mine. My graduate work was done at Thunderbird, a graduate business school located in Arizona which focuses only on international business, and is ranked by U.S. News as the top school in that speciality. After graduating I was hired by a firm located in Utah, which sold a mineral in over 50 different countries. I was given the title of Global Marketing Director, and put in charge of overseeing the foreign markets, both in managing the distributors and determining our global marketing strategies. It was a wonderful time, doing what I had gone to school to do, international business. I loved the travel and the many countries I got to visit. In a typical year I would visit half of our distributors in 25 + countries, traveling about half the year. It was horrible on my social life, but I personally learned a ton about the world of international business, and how to ask where to find a bathroom in many foreign languages.

When I eventually decided to go out on my own and do the entrepreneur thing, I had hoped to continue with my international life. I started a consulting company with a partner, and we attempted to assist other companies on how they could expand their business operations into international markets, but this proved to be a tough sell. Many of the companies we met with thought we were too young, with too little international experience (5 years) to be consultants of anything, and especially in international business. Eventually, with my international dreams dashed, I had some technology built by a company I was attempting to represent in Japan, and started an online technology company that transfered digital files overseas for processing. This company became the extent of my global business aspirations and I was severely disappointed. But at least I got to be an entrepreneur, and I began to focus my attention on making a living in other ways. I decided it was time to put food on the table and take care of my families financial needs, but I hoped for an opportunity to “go global” in the future.

Michael and I originally met during the development on the first online company, and we struck a bond/partnership. 7 years later we have now launched other technology companies, all of which are focused on delivering online services to domestic clients. And this was also the original design behind SoloSEO. We just felt is was important for domestic site owners to have all the SEO tools they need, all in one place, so they could make SEO a less painful process. We knew others were probably struggling like we were, and they just wanted to optimize their site, to hopefully attract potential clients who were searching for their products. It was our hope the launch of SoloSEO would address the SEO needs of many domestic site owners, little did we know the international excitement which would grow quickly. Soon we had requests from the UK, Spain, Germany, among others for potential strategic partnerships, and international site owners, from many non-English speakers were signing up for the service. It was quite hard to believe, but here we are, and we are now trying to best capitalize on this interest.

So, as of last Friday, I have been here in Tokyo, Japan meeting with potential partners to hopefully offer our SoloSEO tool set in Japan (which is why my Japanese business card is included as the image above). I truly love Japan, I love being here. I lived here for a few years, over 20 years ago, and I studied Japanese in college, so I have grown to love the Japanese people, the culture, the language, the business methods and the food. Japan is as unique as any country on earth, but much more civilized, and perpetually polite and proper (and safe) than all others, which is also what I like about Japan. If you get a chance to visit Japan, you must take it, you will not regret it.

So in this post, I guess I wanted to say “thank you” to everyone who has made this trip to Japan possible, and I hope there will be many more international trips possible in the future. The growth and success of SoloSEO is remarkable, and we hope future international partnerships will contribute to our growth, which will continue to ensure that SoloSEO is always on the cutting edge in providing the best in SEO online tools. We assuredly continue to provide our clients with the most efficient and effective SEO tools available, no matter which country they are living in, or which language they speak.

Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu.

I’ll be back home Thursday, I hope the weather will be sunny and warm. I need to golf soon.

1 comment Visited 1508 times March 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Overture Keyword Tool Resurrected, 3 Source Keyword Tool is Back!

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 8th, 2007

Overture’s Keyword Tool was declared dead by many, then Yahoo said it wasn’t dead yet, and now I can confirm it has been resurrected. Before it took FOREVER to load, and would often time out. Now, it runs like a charm. But don’t use it there, you can access not only Overture’s Keyword Tool from SoloSEO, but also WordTracker and Google Adwords, SIMULTANEOUSLY. Is that cool or what. You don’t even need an account from WordTracker, and you’re not limited to a measly 100 words either.

Try a free trial of SoloSEO, and if anything use it for the sweet keyword tools and keyword manager. This is what it looks like:

In case you’re wondering, before it was only 2 sources as Overture’s keyword tool was dead. Those funny little icons might need some explaining too. The > Play one is to re-run the keyword query (it’s all AJAX, pretty slick) and the + Add icon is to add it to your list (you can add as many as you want without leaving the page, AJAX again, real slick). The 5 bar icon is for popularity. Instead of those obscure numbers that come with Overture and WordTracker, we’ve normalized popularity of keywords to a 0-5 scale (yeah, that’s sweeeeeet). When you save keywords to your keyword manager, it saves the popularity with the keyword. Then you can use those keywords in other tools quite easily (like our keyword ranking reports that run weekly or monthly straight to your email box).

Try SoloSEO!

1 comment Visited 1723 times March 8th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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New Competitive SEO Report at SoloSEO.com

Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 20th, 2007

Watching your competition is an important part of SEO and it can take quite a bit of work to stay on top of it all. We are excited to announce that SoloSEO now includes a powerful Competitive SEO Report to compare your SEO statistics and rankings with your competitors. The report is included with a membership and can even be run during a free trial of SoloSEO.

This competitive SEO report will run each month and results are sent to you via email so you don’t even need to log in after you set up the report. The report is easy to start, just fill in a few keywords and the domains of your competitors.

Once you set up the report it runs in the background, so you can continue using other tools in SoloSEO. After just a few minutes you will get an email with the completed report.

The report has three parts: 1) SEO Site Statistics, 2) Feedback on your statistics vs your competitors, and 3) Rankings of you and your competitors.

SEO Site Statistics

This report compares backlinks, pages indexed in Google and Yahoo, PageRank, and Alexa Rank. The backlinks (as reported by Yahoo) give you an idea of how you compare with your competitors in terms of quantity of backlinks. The quality of your backlinks, as well as topic relevancy and anchor text will need to be looked at separately to get the full picture (SoloSEO includes tools for this too), but this is a general metric for knowing the popularity and connectivity of a site. The pages indexed is a nice way to compare the size of your site with your competitors. More unique and quality content will always help, so this gives you a way to gauge on what you need to more effectively compete. PageRank is somewhat useful as a gauge of the quality of a site, but is by no means the all-important factor to worship in SEO. PageRank updates also only occur every several months. Alexa Rank is a gauge of the traffic your site is receiving, and like PageRank is more of a general metric than a golden Willy Wonka ticket.

Some general feedback, suggestions, and even congratulatory statements are given for each part of the SEO Site Statistics section, which is intended for beginner SEOs and non-SEOs to get an idea for what the numbers are saying to them.

The rankings of your site and your competitors are displayed for each keyword, giving you a quick and easy way to check how your site ranks versus your competitors. For now the chart uses Google for rankings, although this may expand in the future.

We are very excited about this report and the opportunities it affords you. We have been having fun running the report internally for our own companies. Having the report automatically run each month and emailed is a great feature that makes it even easier to keep track of it all.

Two other reports are also available in SoloSEO, the Keyword Rankings Report and Keyword Competion Report. The Keyword Rankings Report can now be set to automatically run weekly and monthly, which makes it even easier to keep up on your rankings for important keywords.

Try the new Competitive SEO Report, and other powerful SEO tools today by signing up for a free trial or by logging in to your account!

2 comments Visited 3620 times February 20th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Out SEO Your Competition

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 19th, 2007

We all know SEO assists a site to perform better in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but the reasons people SEO can differ. Some just want to share their knowledge with the world and aren’t selling anything, (like in informational blogs), some want to rank as an authoritative site to increase the revenue in their AdSense campaigns, and some want to find new clients through organic search, or do better in their PPC campaigns. There are also some that are motivated by all or a combination of these motivations. For me personally it is the opportunity to find more clients, and to out-compete my competitors for those clients.

In the introduction to his seminal book On Competition, Michael Porter (recognized Harvard professor and expert in competitive studies) states:

“No company, and no country, can afford to ignore the need to compete. Every company, and every country, must try to understand and master competition” (Porter, 1998, p. i).

I come from a primarily business background, and have spent a good bit of time studying competitive analysis theory, or the use of different analytic tools to attempt to understand, predict and prepare for the strategic adjustment competitors are most likely to implement in the marketplace. It is truly a fascinating area of thought. However, each of these competitive analytic tools requires considerable amounts of time and research to make them worth anything, and even when the analysis is complete, it can only provide the researcher nothing more than a more educated guess as to what a competitor might do. Some widely used competitive analysis tools used today include: SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), Competitive Array, Game Theory (very interesting), Five-Forces, etc., just to name a few. There are even many firms that will perform the analysis for you, using a variety of these tools for a fee. Dun and Bradstreet offers small business firms information about their competitors for a fee, $9.99 per firm, for a firm analysis, $24.99 for an industry analysis and $65 for various marketing lists. Despite the inherent weaknesses of these various analysis tools, innumerable firms continue to spend all kinds of resources to run these analyses in hopes of putting themselves in a better competitive position.

Now on to why I love the online competitive world… There are certain SEO tools and techniques which provide us the opportunity to really know what our competitors are up to online, with real data. The SEs (Search Engines) have already aggregated the data, and using these SEO analysis tools properly can drastically reduce the ability of a competitor to surprise you, or make huge moves online unnoticed. Not to mention this real data reduces the need of firms to “make educated guesses” as to what their competitors are really up to. Online, the competitive marketplace is more transparent than offline, and with the increased competitive information comes the increased importance to be more competitively astute and responsive. So once competitive trends are discovered, firms need to react more quickly to address these trends, to stay ahead of the curve, and remain competitively viable. This is done by using other SEO tools which assist your site to become more competitive online, specifically in the SERPs. SoloSEO was built to not only to provide competitive intelligence tools, which efficiently watch industry competitors, but to also offer effective SEO tools, allowing firms to improve their online competitive position.

This week we will be launching a new service, which will make the competitive intelligence process more convenient and streamlined for our subscribers. We are very motivated to assist our clients become more aware of their competitors more quickly, and assist them improve the competitiveness of their sites with effective SEO tools. Please stay tuned…

Add comment Visited 1520 times February 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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The Missing MyBlogLog Tools - Get More from MyBlogLog

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 16th, 2007

The Missing MyBlogLog Tools, created by SoloSEO.com, give you a new way to harness the power of MyBlogLog. These tools let you compare and find contacts and communities in a new and powerful way. Our tools go beyond the basic searching and browsing available at MyBlogLog by relying on the networks created between MyBlogLog users and Blog communities.

These tools will help you to find contacts to add and communities to join, plus compare visitors and community members of your blog with other blogs. The following tools are available for your enjoyment:

Compare Blog Visitors
Ever wondered what other blogs your visitors are reading? With this tool you can compare your visitors with another blog’s visitors. Up to 130 of the last visitors are compared from each blog, and MyBlogLog members in common are displayed. Go »

Compare Your Contacts
See what other contacts your friends, industry leaders, and fellow blog readers have that you share and that you don’t have added yet. Just plug in your screen name and someone else’s. Go »

Compare Community Members
With this tool you can compare your MyBlogLog Community members with another community, and view members common between both blogs as well as members unique to each blog. Go »

Common Communities between Contacts
If you need help finding communities, see what communities your contacts share! This tool lets you choose up to 20 contacts to compare common communities, and gives you a link to quickly join the communities! Go »

Show All Visitors
Most blogs just show 5-10 MyBlogLog visitors, so usually that’s all we look at. This tool lets you see the last 130 visitors to all of your communities, all at once! Go »

Add Missing Contacts
Even with 20 or 30 community members, it is hard to keep track of who you have added as a contact. This tool lets you quickly see who in your community have not been added as a contact yet. A link to add them quickly is included! Go »

We hope you enjoy The Missing MyBlogLog Tools and that you can find some interesting comparisons, new contacts to add, and new communities to join.

If Yahoo/MyBlogLog is reading this, these tools would be great to implement as a part MyBlogLog. All we ask is for 1% of your acquisition price or a free trip to Yahoo headquarters.

If you have suggestions for other “missing tools” for MyBlogLog, please leave a comment or send us an email. We also have a poll to vote for your favorite Missing MyBlogLog Tool. Enjoy!

18 comments Visited 5502 times January 16th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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New SEO Tool - Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 8th, 2007

Last week we announced a new tool every day (except New Year’s), and we thought we’d kick off this week with one more tool announcement. We just finished the “Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer”, and are excited for you to start using it. This tool checks the backlinks for your site (or any site), and then displays the actual link text (anchor text) used for the links.

Why is knowing the link text helpful?
The link text, or anchor text, is an important aspect of the “link vote”. When someone links to you, the search engines see it as a vote of approval of sorts. In order for the search engines to understand your page better, they consider the text that a user would actually click on, and extract any semantic value. They also consider the text of the URL, at least to a small extent. This text is then used, along with the content found on the page being linked to, to help the search engine consider you for placement for that keyword.

Googlebombing uses this same principle. If a lot of links use the same or similar keywords as the anchor text, that is an indication to the search engines that the page is related to that topic or keyword.

It’s cool and all, but how can I use it to help my SEO?
When you are link building, you are trying to obtain links to your site from others. If you are requesting links, it is best to have a pre-formed link to help the webmaster giving you the link to install it properly with the right word and spelling. If you find links that have spelling problems or perhaps are off-topic or just too general in the link text, then there may be opportunities to request the site owner to change the link text.

This tool is just one of many tools of a complete suite of SEO tools to help make your SEO easier.

Try a Free 2-Week Trial »

7 comments Visited 2714 times January 8th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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New SEO Tool - Search Engine Viewer

Posted by Michael D Jensen on January 5th, 2007

In SEO we spend so much time improving our rankings, getting links, optimizing content, and watching competitors (all good things), but it is easy to neglect optimizing the actual listing of each page in the search engines. The “Search Engine Viewer” is just that tool. And more than just showing you how it looks, we tell you what needs fixed!

Screenshot

Obviously what your listing says has a bearing on whether you get selected out of the list of results. Your title alone can make or break the decision. If your title is okay, but your description is irrelevant (or lousy), the potential customer is going to choose another link.

A very common problem with websites is the use of the same meta tag description in every page. Although the search engines don’t always display the meta tag description (they will use excerpts from the content body or from an open directory listing), it is important to make it relevant and unique for that page. The Search Engine Viewer tool compares your meta tag description to your other pages, and alerts you if it is not unique. The title is also checked for uniqueness.

Google only shows a limited number of characters in the title and description, so it’s a good idea to try to keep your title and description within these limits. This way you can control exactly what is being shown, without it being cut off.

We have found this extremely useful for our own sites, discovering several meta tag descriptions that were using the default description from our home page!

We hope you have enjoyed the new SEO tools this week (Dead Link Checker, XML Sitemap Generator, and the Top Subpages Tool). We just finished one more tool and will announce it on Monday, so check back next week for another handy SEO tool!

In the meantime, if you haven’t tried SoloSEO, you’re missing out! SoloSEO is a do-it-yourself SEO solution, providing all the tools and reports you need to do SEO for yourself or your clients.

UPDATE: We are pleased to announce Michael Gray of Wolf-Howl.com has just posted a review of SoloSEO on his site, you can read his full report here. I had the opportunity to meet with Michael briefly at PubCon, and both Aaron and I consider Michael as a foremost authority on the current state of SEO, and visit his blog frequently. We have already discussed the contents of Michael’s review and plan on addressing his suggestions in the near future. Thanks to Michael for his time, insight and willingness in reviewing SoloSEO.

Try a Free 2-Week Trial Now! »

2 comments Visited 2229 times January 5th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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