The year 2010 so far in search and digital marketing

Structured data and social media are the two major trends (in my humble opinion) to impact upon search and digital marketing so far this year.

I've posted just the once this year, I'm not proud about it, so i thought, 'what have i missed in online marketing and SEO this year?' and was it anything important?

So I've had a look, and put together my highlights of the first six months of 2010, this is in NO way comprehensive.

22nd Jan - 'Event' markup in Google's Rich Snippets. This was also followed by 'microdata' in March and 'recipes' in April. My only blog post this year explains what rich snippets are - and although these three updates are not mind-blowing the continued use and expansion of structured data in search is my first trend of 2010 and a big change that websites need to embrace.

28th Feb - Facebook was added to Google's real-time search. This relates to the second major trend of 2010, not real-time search but the rise of social media in digital marketing. Originally launched using Twitter (of course) amongst others, Google's and Bing's real-time search pushes social media further to the forefront of digital marketing. Watch a good video about real-time search and the history of SEO on SEOmoz.

8th April - Digital Economy Act 2010. Hastily whizzed through parliament before government was dissolved for the general election, this is about regulating digital media. Specifically this covers how internet service providers (ISPs) must provide a list of people believed to have infringed copyright seemingly based on self certification by the copyright owner and ISP. There is no clear indication of checking the validity of evidence against these infringements so leaving the act open to potential abuse and limitation of civil liberty.

Do you feel represented?
(img source - bitter wallet)

7th May - New look Google. On a lighter note, Google has had a spring clean. Amongst other things what this may do is expose the extent of universal search to more people, making it all the more important to sort out those blogs, news articles, images, products. Like with the rise of social media, digital marketers have just been given more reasons why they should have their search fingers (that's the index on the left hand) in many pies.

11th June - Caffeine indexing system. Caffeine is Google's new search index. This is what it looks at when you type a keyword in and press 'search'. Caffeine apparently searches everything quicker through it's novel structure including real-time web, video, images, news. It will be a few months before we see if there's any direct impact on SEO but it does seem to back up the importance of the trends I mentioned earlier of structured data and social media.

15th July - iPad released. Could this reinvent the world as we know it? No. But i thought I'd mention it as websites race to get themselves iPad ready and EVERY competition at the moment offers one as a prize.

Soon - Google image search update. This doesn't seem to have taken effect yet for me, but apparently was launched recently and is "more intuitive and gets the user the answer a lot quicker". I know a number of sites where images are as important to their users as the text, but this has never been reflected in search. I hope this changes that, but we'll have to wait and see.

And let's not forget - The mobile web. Everyone i know (apart from me) has an iPhone or an Android powered phone. The mobile web is coming of age (sorry for the oft-repeated cliche but i honestly think it's justified this time) and those sites that cater for mobile users are going to have the edge. Especially sites which provide content relevant to those of us on the move - like sport results, restaurant listings, pub quiz answers etc.

With all this excitement and technological invention it sounds like SEO just got complicated. But i don't think it has, all these things are just important to bear in mind. A firm SEO footing is still good content, quality and quantity of links, relevance to your users and then you can look at reaching your audience in as many ways as possible.

The ultimate SEO link building strategy from Blog Action Day

It was Blog Action Day '09 yesterday and to take part bloggers are asked to write a post about, in this case Climate Change, including the words "Blog Action Day" and a link somewhere to www.blogactionday.org.

However as an internet marketing blog I’m writing a post about how change.org (the company behind Blog Action Day) has created the ultimate link building SEO technique.

Backlinks from authority sites

In one single day they are getting 12,023 (as of 08:30 16/10/2009) backlinks from a variety of blogs. And not just any blogs, they include Number10, Google Blog, Mashable - "12 of the world's Top 100 Blogs" according to their website.

In terms of the power of those links, they are hitting both quantity and quality.


Links in context

Blog Action Day are specifying that you write a post on climate change. So most of those links will be from sites talking about different aspects of climate change.

The context of the copy around a link is an important factor in search engine ranking of keywords so this will help blogactionday.org appear higher for "climate change". In fact at the moment they are at the 6th result on page 2 of Google - which is good for what I imagine is a hugely competitive keyword (and they were the 10th result on page 2 yesterday so moving up).


What have they missed?

Link anchor text

They could have done even better with this SEO technique by specifying the link anchor text. Anchor text is used by search engines to define the content of your site - you only have to do the old "click here" trick to find Adobe Reader listed at the top of Google (because most people link to Adobe with "If you need a PDF reader, click here").

They could have even provided a selection of options. For example:

Please help Blog Action Day conquer Google for all the most important Climate Change keywords. Please make your link to this site consist of the words "Climate change" "Carbon Footprint", "Environment" or "Sustainability".

Unique URLs

The URL blogactionday.com will move on next year and push a different subject, in the past it's looked at the Environment and Poverty.

So all this association of subject, anchor text and context mentioned above will vary each year. This means that blogactionday.com will start to list in the search engines for "poverty", "climate change" etc. The unique pages on blogactionday.com devoted to that year's subject will be deleted or updated with the next year's topic.

If instead each year they were to create a unique sub-domain, i.e. climatechange.blogactionday.org, and then push links to this, they would have a site devoted to climate change that would continue to exist even when blog action day had moved on.

It would also have keywords in the URL - another important SEO factor. Both the uniqueness of the URL and the specific focus of each sub-domain would help to propel the site to number one in Google for ALL keywords as opposed to doing reasonably well for most but not amazingly for any and to start to lose all that power the year after when they change their website.

I do realise however that Blog action day isn't just about their website though, but the discussion (or dare I say 'wave') ALL OVER the blogosphere, and for that it's an awesome idea.

If you would like to read similar posts actually about Climate Change, as opposed to a ramble about their internet marketing strategy, from some of my colleagues at UBM, please click on any of the links below:
Brian Sims, John Welsh, Ron Alalouff, Phil Clark, Grahame Morrison, Rob Enslin

Related posts
Monitor the online buzz around your brand (May 2009)
5 steps to improve your online presence (Feb 2009)
How to measure the effectiveness of your SEO (Jan 2008)

Monitor the online buzz around your brand

How to ensure you know what people are saying about your brand in social media, and what you can do to influence the conversation.

This was the title of a panel debate about buzz monitoring at Internet World 2009. Chaired by Tom Nixon of NixonMcInnes, with his colleague and two other speakers whose names I can't remember, one from Huddle, one from Attentio.

ENGAGEMENT

Get EVERYONE in your company engaged. Get everyone monitoring your brands, or the brands relevant to them. The more eyes you have out there the more you will pick up and the less you will miss.

Some tools to help you monitor your brands

• Google Alerts - Type in a search term, such as your brand, and set up an email alert or RSS feed.
• Twitter Search - Search for terms and brands to find real time discussions on Twitter.
• Google Trends - Monitor regional interest in topics and their appearance in Google News.
• Technorati - Search the blogosphere for your terms and brands. Google Blog Search also does this, although not quite as well.
• Trendpedia - Free tool from Attentio who was one of the speakers. Not sure of effectiveness but worth a play.
• Company Buzz - Application on LinkedIn. Essentially it's just Twitter Search.
  

Tools to aggregate some of this content to you

There are lots of tools to monitor buzz but having to go from one to the other every day would be very time consuming so there are a variety of methods to get this information to come to you.

• Email alerts - this is part of Google Alerts and obviously lets you get the information to your inbox. Any RSS feed can also be set up as an email alert with a variety of tools, Feedburner is a good one.
• RSS readers - most if not all of the tools above output RSS feeds of your results. You can plug these into a reader such as Netvibes and iGoogle.
• Addictomatic – This is an RSS reader with a difference. It's automatically set up to look at a number of sources and tools. Just type in your brand or terms, here's one I made earlier for number 1 breakfast spread, Bovril.
  
• RSS manipulation - you can combine, change, filter and do pretty much anything with RSS feeds using Yahoo Pipes. It's not that simple for non-techies though, here's my short demo.
  

Things to bear in mind

A pack of fags

A mammal

• Setting up an alert for a brand which can also mean something else may bring irrelevant results: For example "Camel" can mean the cigarettes and the mammal with a hump.
• You could therefore nail it down by searching for "Camel cigarettes"
• Or look for buzz where both the words "Camel" + "smoking" are used
• And don't forget there may be other non brand names you can monitor, such as your CEO's name, any campaigns you are running, competitions you are doing, anything else about your brand that might be being talked about.

RESPOND

1. If someone is interested in your product, the sales team can act on this and chase.
2. If there are problems or issues with your brand then the relevant people can address these. Such as customer services or your technical support employees.
3. People like to know they are being taken care of.
4. Respond with AUTHENTICITY and have a clear consistent VOICE
5. Be INTERESTING, USEFUL and HELPFUL
6. This is a representative of your brand talking, don't reflect badly on the brand by being petulant or of no use.
7. Also remember that it's just people you are talking do, ditch the sales and marketing speak, be yourself.

Related posts
YouTube, Facebook, BBC, Reuters discuss social media (Feb 09)
Stop pop-ups popping up, online advertising needs to evolve (Nov 07)
Aren't Google Alerts clever? (Nov 07)

5 steps to improve your online presence

Just written an article about 5 simple steps to improve your website's ranking in Google.

There's also the same thing arranged in a graphic.

Enjoy!

BBC increase most read stories to top 10

Shock horror! The BBC has changed it's top 5 most read to a top 10. OK, really it's not that exciting despite the fact that many SEOers and usability people tend to hang on the BBC website's every move.

I can understand why, they have the space, it encourages click-through, increases average page depth per visit. An easy decision really, wonder why they took this long?

Not quite sure why they haven't changed the most emailed to a top 10 yet though, maybe they're worried about people manipulating it, like me!

The "most popular stories now" as of 3.20pm 17th February 2009*
The top 5 most emailed	The top 10 most read

*And in the time it's taken me to write this post it's gone back to a top 5 again, how very strange, maybe it was a glitch? They really should make it a top 10 though, take this fumble as fate.

*And it's back to top 10 again as i write the following morning (18th Feb). Email still top 5.

Update: A few days after writing this post I heard the BBC's head of editorial development, Pete Clifton, speak at a conference and he stated the BBC's current aim of trying to increase time on site through user involvement and related stories - which explains this.

Related posts
Online popularity culture is killing good journalism - writing content for the benefit of most read and most emailed widgets
Feedjit widget provides your site's most popular pages

Get a list of how all your pages rank in Google

Discover what order your pages rank in Google using the following search operator (type this into the Google search box):

inurl:domain site:domain.co.uk
Example: inurl:bbc site:bbc.co.uk

The order is not completely accurate but it does highlight which pages on your site are the most valuable.

I discovered this tip on a fantastic post on SEOmoz (with a very dodgy buzzwordy title) which provides an easy to tick off list of 10 SEO improvements you can make to your site.

The use of this Google operator in tip number 2 is so that on finding your top ranking pages you can place internal links on them to provide some link juice to lesser ranking pages. However there are many other reasons why this information may be useful to you.

How to optimise your PDFs for SEO

Optimise PDFs for search engines, much as you would any other page on your site. PDFs are returned in Google search listings just like HTML pages.

Here is a simple guide to optimising PDFs, to summarise:

• Keyword optimise, keep relevant, as you should any page on your site
• Text can be indexed, images can't, keep it texty
• Ensure PDF is not duplicate content
• Set a reading order
• Hyperlink to the PDF on your site with the PDF title
• Hyperlink within the PDF with relevant anchor text
• Include a company footer
• Input meta data - a step by step guide to inputting PDF meta data
• Ensure the file size is not to big
• Relevant file name - although not mentioned in this guide, choosing a relevant, clear file name is also important. This will become the URL (i.e. www.site.com/my_guide_to_scratching.pdf) so if it is obvious this may encourage clickthrough from search engines. It will also help you find the file in your back office and analytics!

Related posts
Tips to optimise videos - SEO
Growing strange cacti - a keyword optimisation test

Google's link: operator not an accurate backlink checker

Don't use Google's link: operator to get your backlink count. Use Yahoo Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools.

This may be due to my own SEO naivety but up until recently I trusted the link: operator from the standard Google search to be providing me with a list of mine (or my competitors') backlinks. However I read the following on SEOmoz today:

"...Google made their link query useless in 2003 and MSN disabled theirs earlier this year."

I recoiled in shock that nobody ever told me this and set out to find out the truth.

The official word on this from Google's Matt Cutts reinforces the pointlessness of the Google link: operator:

"The link: command has always returned a small fraction of the backlinks that Google knows about, mainly for historical reasons (e.g. limited disk space on the machines that served up “link:” data)."

So how do I accurately measure backlinks?

• Yahoo Site Explorer - Any SEO expert worth their salt points straight to Yahoo Site Explorer as the king of backlinks because unlike Google Webmaster Tools you can check competitor backlinks.
  Other services include export result to TSV, exclude on include internal links, search specific URLs.
  It doesn't prioritise link weighting and it also includes links designated 'nofollow'.

• Google Webmaster Tools - A really tidy backlink checker that lists backlinks per page that you can look at and download. Your site has to be validated on Google Webmaster Tools to access this so you can't check competitor sites.
  Like Yahoo it doesn't prioritise link weighting and it also includes links designated 'nofollow'.
  

For my blog URL the results of each tool can be seen below:

Backlink checker	Number of links
Yahoo Site Explorer	20
Google Webmaster Tools	25
Google Link: operator	1

As you can see there was still variation between Google and Yahoo. A quick look showed that Google had picked up a few more links from Technorati than Yahoo did. Despite this, either tool will provide an accurate measure of trends – whether you are getting more or less backlinks each month and how quickly they are accumulating.

There are other backlink checkers out there but I’m just mentioning these two as these seem to be the most accurate from all the sites I’ve visited. If you know of others, please let me know.

Also an honourable mention to this extensive analysis of external links I found on my travels.

Online popularity culture is killing good journalism

Sites with 'most popular' box BBC Times Online CNN Reuters New York Times The Sun

Sites without 'most popular' box Guardian CNET Telegraph Don't quote me on the above information but it was correct when i looked

Pretty much every news site has a 'most read articles' and a 'most emailed articles' box somewhere on every page - indeed i wrote a post about a plugin that did just that a few months ago.

Journalists writing online are increasingly paid or incentivised based on how many hits they get. I was at a conference held by one of the UK's top online publishers just two weeks ago where i was told that all the journalists are incentivised on clicks to their articles as well as general site traffic.

Now this isn't surprising. Most online publishers make money from advertising. The more hits you get the more of an attractive proposition you are for advertisers. And if you are charging on a cost per impression basis then hits are your mainstay - or Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in buzzword business-speak.

The problem with this, as stated in a Lee Siegel interview i was reading in New Scientist this morning (subscription only), is that:

"Popular culture is becoming popularity culture, where quality no longer matters. News, for example, is becoming a popularity contest as never before."

By trying to ensure all your contributors are aiming for popularity through high hits and high email referral there is a real danger that news may start concentrating on quick wins. The subjects that get the most people's attention, that can be read quickly, and that provoke an instant reaction start to take over from often longer articles, that are well researched and present a deeper opinion but may take longer to digest.

The problem with this from a purely SEO point of view is that it is no coincidence that these high hit 'popular' articles are known as quick wins. Yes they get the traffic on the day of publication and may result in higher unique users as more non-regular visitors come to your site attracted by the bait, but that doesn't necessarily mean they attract many links that last - and this is how you get long term sustainable traffic.

Good articles that last are often just as relevant two years after publication as they were when they were written. These can continue picking up links from external sites long after the popular story about a high profile celebrity is forgotten about.

I DO think that journalists need to be incentivised on different metrics as writing for the web is a different matter to writing for offline publications BUT part of this strategy needs to take into account your long term link building strategy and the importance of building up a number of resource articles in your web archive.

One way out of this fall into popularity contests is the 'top rated article' box that some sites (such as the register) have started to employ but i still don't think this is the perfect solution as some of the best articles and those that get the most links are the ones that polarise opinion. It's clear that publishing still hasn't quite grasped the potential of the internet.

Related posts
BBC increase most read stories to top 10
Manipulate the BBC's most emailed stories

Digital editions should be killed

Digital editions don't provide the functionality of a website and you are wasting your content by using them.

What are they?
Digital editions are online magazines that physically look like a print magazine.



These have been on the scene for many years but I've so far managed to ignore them and tried to convince others to do so too. I've never had a specific reason for this dislike beyond the feeling that doing something that looks like it's offline online seems wrong. To be honest I'd thought they'd go away but they haven't, in fact they seem just as popular as ever.

So I've recently been looking at them in more depth, well if advertisers are willing to spend money on them and people are willing to read them or even pay for them then i can't ignore them.

Examples include the lad's mag Monkey (NSFW) and a whole host of print titles which you can get in digital magazine format (men's health, business week, hello...). They come in two main types - reader-based and browser-based - the former requiring a download and the other online (with the use of flash).

No search engine indexation
My first problem with digital magazines is their inability to function with search engines. They are flash, Google doesn't like flash. However I'd heard that some suppliers of browser-based digital magazines are also providing a HTML page for each flash page so allowing the magazine to be indexed by Google. I wanted to find out more.

So i rang up a digital magazine supplier (CEROS) and battled through the sales spiel until i was passed to a technical member of their team to properly explain what they did to produce this page and what it looked like. I learnt that they are just outputting the PDF (which is what a digital magazine is made from to begin with, and flash graphics and animation is added in later) to HTML. Simple!

Well yes and no. Simple is what it does - it just takes the text in the PDF and puts it into a HTML page that looks like a simple text file. Not pretty but does the job - some of it will be indexed. All the flash content put in after this process (such as animations) won't have any HTML equivalent unless you type it in yourself.

Normal digital edition page	HTML digital edition page (click to enlarge) Yes, it is black text on a grey background but then i guess it is for search engines only...

This is essentially hacking apart a PDF file to turn it into a website. The time and energy doing this would seem better spent copying and pasting every page into notepad and saving every image and then creating a website with the functionality of, well a website.

Update: Google now indexes flash, this doesn't change my opinions though.

Recreating offline experiences
Why shouldn't you recreate offline experiences online? Well the following are my reasons why and I'm not alone:

• Zooming: If you want to read you have to zoom in to the page and move the page around - This seems ridiculous when you can fit an article with images on a well designed webpage and see it without any zooming, just a scrolling down of the page to read more.
• It's not interactive: The beauty of the internet is its interactivity. You can't comment on digital magazines (mostly), it's difficult to link to it, you can't print it without using up all your ink.
• It's a dead end: The internet is a city and you surf from website to website like you would walk from house to house. Digital magazines don't share this world, they're a web cul-de-sac.
• Where do you go from here? Your digital magazine is a static screenshot. They'll be no dynamic links on the side of your digital magazine articles linking to newer articles. Once it's done it's done.
• Usage: Why would i want to flick through a virtual magazine with turning pages? I know I'm online, I realise this is a computer and I'm looking at a screen.
• Browser function: Digital magazines are flash - you can't press the back button on explorer when you turn a page and want to go back.
• Accessibility: I'm not sure how accessible these are but looking at the HTML page i'm not hopeful

Longevity
Content is king online. Good content will gain links over time, the more good content in your website the better you will perform in searches. More good content = more good links = higher Google ranking. But if you are putting your fantastic content into a format that is not as compatible with Google as a normal HTML web page and it doesn't lend itself to being linked to you are wasting that content.

So if you're thinking about using digital editions only use it if you want something short term - it may well provide instant hits when emailed out, and immediate revenue from advertisers excited by its interactivity. But long term, putting good content in a search engine friendly format will gain exponentially more hits over time and building relationships with advertisers on your website may well provide more revenue over time.

Do rel=nofollow tags on internal links benefit your site's SEO?

Well yes, using rel=nofollows on your internal link structure is an advanced SEO technique but it can help to improve your SEO. [See update at end of page, it's likely this technique no longer works].

I asked this question on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago and what follows is a summary of some of the responses I received and other research I’ve done online.

What is it?

“A site may have many pages that have the opportunity to get crawled and indexed in the SERPs (search engine results pages). You're also looking at near infinite choices for how you interlink all those pages. Out of all those permutations, there is one configuration that is the most optimal from an SEO perspective.

That's because it maximizes the flow of link juice (e.g., PageRank if you're speaking purely in Google terms) to your most important pages and minimizes (or cuts off completely) the flow of link juice to your least important pages.” - Stephan Spencer at Search Engine Land

By adding rel=nofollow to a link you are telling a spider not to follow that link. This was invented to be used in comment fields to prevent comment spam. However as all it does is prevent link juice being passed on, SEO specialists have realised it can be used (completely legally, Google even approves it!) to sculpt internal linking structures.

Example: If you have 100 internal links on a page you are diluting that page’s link juice. By adding rel=nofollow to 90 of the less important links the 10 that remain have 10 times more link juice and subsequently benefit the pages they link to more.

Site structure
Before I get onto the use of rel=nofollow it’s worth considering that this technique is used to fine tune internal linking structure. There’s no point in fine tuning your internal linking structure if it’s sculpted incorrectly in the first place.

“The size and shape of your site's navigational hierarchy is your blunt instrument and rel=nofollow is your scalpel.” - Stephan Spencer at Search Engine Land

“One of the most powerful, and most underdeveloped, on-page SEO tactics is rejigging your internal hierarchical linking structure to optimise the flow of link juice.” This makes sense from an SEO point of view but also from a user point of view – if all your information is arranged in a logical structure it will make for a better user experience.

Using rel=nofollow
So if your site structure is as perfect as you want it, you’ve tried card sorting, user testing and the hippo (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) is happy then it might be time to look at using rel=nofollow.

First check you have a good xml and HTML sitemap on your site. As Tom Griffin stated in the LinkedIn answer, “The goal is not to block the page from being indexed - the goal is to funnel internal authority throughout your site in the smartest way possible”.

Then you need to select which pages on your site you identify as the most important (and least important) for the relevant keywords you target. This in itself is a worthwhile task for any webmaster. There could be many pages on your site which rank highly for certain keywords but are underused due to being buried in your site structure. The links from those pages could be a massive boost to other pages on your site.

Next is the big one - look at the pages themselves and identify all the links. Clearly this could be a mammoth task even for a site of a few 100 pages so start with the biggie – the home page.

I haven’t tried this yet but I’d recommend creating or using some sort of database or record of which links are on or off (rel=nofollow) to best understand the impact you are having on your site structure. As mentioned above you don’t want to risk creating a dead end and cutting off a page.

Real life examples
SEOmoz have implemented rel=nofollow on their site and witnessed a 20% rise in traffic. However others are more sceptical; Matt Cutts from Google says that nofollowing your internals is a 2nd order effect. It will best optimise the traffic you have rather than gain you more. Essentially he believes there are others things you can do first for a better return on investment.

Conclusion
And my final question on LinkedIn was why aren’t the big sites doing it?

Bbc.co.uk, theregister.co.uk, look in their source code and you won’t find one rel=nofollow tag. The only answer I can think of (and the only answer I got on LinkedIn from Brian Rogers) is that if you have a perfect link structure and your pages rank very highly due to large amounts of external links what difference will fine tuning your internal links make? Or maybe it’s just too complicated?

So to summarise, it’s worth it and it works. How worth it is something only you can decide and, to bore you with clichés, this is only one tool in the SEO armoury.

Update, June 09: Apparently Google now ignores pagerank sculpting such as this. More on Google's Matt Cutts' blog.

SEO Suite 8 review: What does it do?

According to the Apex website, SEO Suite 8 is a ‘comprehensive’ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) programme doing a variety of SEO functions.

Some of the functionality of SEO suite 8 is new to me and quite useful (such as the external link checker) however much of it can be found in numerous free tools on the web.

The cost of SEO Suite 8 ranges from £75 to £300 pounds for a number of different versions. I tested the trial version (which is free) for about 20 minutes and there is also more functionality over and above the core functionality I will look at below.

On the sites I carry out SEO on there are already initiatives in place that cover a lot of the functions of this software – such as directory submitting from an online list monitored via an excel spreadsheet, a linking policy done in much the same way, a manual check of internal website structure, tags and links plus reporting done through a separate analytics programme.

As a result I won’t be buying SEO suite 8 but it’s not as bad as my cynical mind expected it to be.

Following is a break down of all the functions and overview of what they do.

SEO suite 8 is split into 4 tools:

1. Site Optimizer
2. Site Submission
3. Links Building
4. Reporting

Site optimizer consists of:

• Keyword builder
• Input in a keyword and it will give you more related keywords. Same thing as Google Keyword Tool or Quintura does.
• Plus a ‘keyword library’ – which is where the list is stored, much like copy/pasting into Excel.
• Site optimizer
• Based on the keywords you input on the previous page this will scan your webpage(s) and tell you the keyword density
• Page creator
• I didn't use this but apparently it creates a page containing all the keywords. You could just do this yourself.
• Meta Tag Editor
• Hook SEO suite up to your website, enter in the meta tags you want and it will change them all. Again you could just do this without SEO suite.
• Competitor Analysis
• Do the same for you competitors and compare where you lie, what keywords they use etc.

Site submission revolves around submitting to search engines

• This has a list of search engines. Essentially it’s a browser that will take you to each of these search engines where you go through the normal submission process.
• Of course if you get people linking to your sites you may well get indexed without resorting to this. (click image below to enlarge)

Links building does what it says on the tin.

• Backward Link checker
• Find sites that link to yours. Do this in Google by entering "link:www.yoursitename.com" into the search box. Update: This is actually inaccurate, read how to get backlinks here.
• Competitor Link checker
• Find sites that link to your competitors. Do this in Google by entering "link:www.yourcompetitorssitename.com" into the search box. Update: This is actually inaccurate, read how to get backlinks here.
  
• Internal link analysis
• In their words "this will analyse your internal linking structure to make sure that it complies with search engine standards. This will help to increase your link reputation." - I couldn't figure out exactly what this did, think it shows amount / proportion of links.
• This seems a bizarre and slightly pointless way of checking site structure - card sorting and user testing (video on user testing) are probably more useful – however i could be wrong.
• External link analysis
• Checks your external links – this will check all the links to your site and look at the keywords contained within those links. One of the few functions of SEO suite I really liked. (click image below to enlarge)

• Link directory creator
• Submit to directories – as useful or not as directory submitter.
• Reciprocal link creator
• "It will send "personalized" reciprocal link invitations to all potential link partners" – much like sending a "personalized" email to a list of websites.
• Article submitter
• I wasn't actually aware of this technology – it will submit articles to popular ezine websites. I've never seen an ezine website but imagine this submitter tool to be along the same lines as the link directory creator.
• Link partner checker
• Become an SEO Clouseau with your link partners. Once you've entered in your link ‘partners’ (the sites you've asked to link to you) this will check their site to see the link actually exists.
• Link validator
• I couldn't get this to work but if it checks internal links then it may well be useful. This would mean alerting you to links on your site (both internal and external) that return dead pages, 404s etc.
• This is something that Google Webmaster tools also does, just not very well.

Reporting

• Web Ranking
• Set up regular reports to monitor your 'ranking' on search engines.
• I've always been a bit dubious of the word 'ranking'. Surely what’s more important are whether people are clicking through, not leaving your site, visiting other pages within it, buying products, reading articles etc. See my post on measuring SEO effectiveness.
• Page Rank
• Gives you Google page rank for all your URLs.
• Link popularity
• I got bored by this point but the promo is just as informative as this post on the matter telling me that "[checking your link popularity] can be done easily with the SEO Suite" no less than twice in a three sentence paragraph.
• Index checker
• What pages are indexed on which search engines, not just Google.
• Ranking on each engine, not just Google.
• Submission report
• Remember that submission you did earlier? Well here's where you find out if it worked.
• Site statistics
• Didn't get into this but quite a stats package with everything from hits to unique visitors. Much like Google Analytics, webtrends etc.

Directory Submitter Review: What does it do?

To summarise, Directory Submitter contains a list of directories, you input your information into the software and it then takes you through each directory one by one to submit your site.

I was asked to review this after my colleague received a promotional email. I'm quite sceptical of anyone or anything who uses sales talk for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) products such as:

"Increase your Google Ranking and Get Tons of Targeted Prospects To Your Website For FREE!"

I'm of the firm belief that SEO can be achieved through creating an excellent user friendly, useful website that people will naturally want to link to and ensuring it meets all the technical parameters that make it search engine friendly.

Nevertheless there's no harm (in fact it's essential) to kick start linking by ensuring links appear in relevant places. Plus this review of Directory Submitter said it was alright.

This is the step by step guide of how Directory Submitter works (from the demo):

Step 1

Input all your information - this is what will be used each time you submit to a directory.

Step 2 (click image to enlarge)

The list of directories is at the top of the page and by double clicking on one you are taken to their website.

Step 3

Once on their website within the Directory Submitter software, your information is autofilled into the form and you then click submit.

As i'm sure you can tell from the above steps, all Directory Submitter is doing is giving you a list of directories and providing you with a way to autofill forms.

You can find a list of directories on many websites and an auto form filler is also an easy bit of (free) software you can find - even Google Toolbar contains an auto form filler.

Yes, this will give you a long list of directories and 'help' you to submit to them. However considering that a link to your site from another relevant site that performs highly in Google rankings, is a site in it's own right (and not a directory) and wants to link to you because you have good content is worth well more than 20 links from tiny directories based in Eastern European countries I wouldn't recommend wasting your time with this.

Also if you do it yourself you will be able to tailor what you input in each directory submission per site rather than having to create a new profile of your website information every time you want a different description of your website.

Concentrate your link building efforts on ensuring you have the content that people will want to link to. Then if you have done everything else in the world of SEO and you have the time to submit to directories - find a list online and do it yourself.

Is interlinking sites on the same server bad?

Many companies own many different websites. For example a publishing company may own 20 different sites for its 20 magazines. Now what's to stop them putting a link to each site in the footer of each site?

What's the effect on SEO of doing this?

I’ve looked into this linking issue and there are hundreds of conflicting views about the effects of it. I can’t find anything that says it’s either bad or good.

This forum covers both interlinking sides of the argument and leads me to the following conclusions:

• Google will treat links between sites from the same server like internal links – some weight, not much.
• From a usability perspective it would NOT make sense to include links to your unrelated sites in the footer.
• From a usability perspective it WOULD make sense to include links to your related sites in the footer.
• Spamdexing (linking lots of sites purely for SEO) is punished.
• If you design for the user you won’t be punished.

Example
If a publishing company has a site for accountants it would make no sense whatsoever from the user's point of view to link in the footer to their site aimed at 10 year olds.

However if they were to link to a site for human resource professionals in the footer of the accountancy site it may make more sense.

Conclusion
If you think about this subject from Google's point of view why would they want to punish someone who's genuinely trying to give the user a good web experience and also encourage visits between related sites?

Link your relevant sites together, it will help your SEO as much as internal linking will (ignore internal linking at your peril), however don't do anything EVER that will not benefit your users, confuse them or send them to places they don't want to go.