SEO Update

Regex and Google Analytics

First off we have the standards:

* ^s*[^s]+s*$ – one keyword

* ^s*[^s]+(s+[^s]+){1}s*$ – two keywords

* ^s*[^s]+(s+[^s]+){2}s*$ – three keywords

* ^s*[^s]+(s+[^s]+){3}s*$ – four keywords

* etc.

You can also use ranges (remember my post on Regex?) to sort your keywords into groups. Unfortunately, while the range command {x,y} works just fine in filters, it won’t work in advanced segments.

* ^s*[^s]+(s+[^s]+){1,4}s*$ – two to five keywords

* ^s*[^s]+(s+[^s]+){5,}s* – six or more keywords

via SEO Analytics – Regular Expressions, Filters and long tail SEO – VKI Studios Blog.

SEO Audit Tool Comparison

by Rhea Drysdale on 11/05/2010 · 31 comments | SEO

At Outspoken Media, we love SEO audits. Link development and online reputation management may be our bread and butter, but three of us not-so-secretly pine for the SEO audit. If I have the time, I will fight with Dawn over who takes the lead on a complicated SEO audit even though I know it means having to sit with Rae

via SEO Audit Tool Comparison.

The How

Getting this properly set up was remarkably easy for me, and I have so very little programming knowledge, so I would imagine most wouldn’t have much issue. I used PHP, as I was working with a WordPress site, but I’m sure you crazy hackers can do the same in most any language.

Update: See Joost and André Scholten’s comments below for a JavaScript method of passing the cd= value

Step One – Extract cd= Value from Referrer String

I used this snippet to do this.

<?php preg_match("/cd\=(\d+)/",$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $matches);
$str = $matches[0];
preg_match("/(\d+)/",$str,$matches);
$rank = $matches[0] ?>

Read more

The Value of Google Result Positioning

May 25th, 2010

How much is the top spot on Google actually worth? According to data from the Chitika network, it’s worth a ton – double the traffic of the #2 spot, to be precise.

In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement. The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.

via The Value of Google Result Positioning – Chitika Research.

The table below shows the various factors that we examined along with the 3 methods:

Framing the process

In my questions, I asked link builders to respond within this framework:

1. Linkable Asset. Definition: what’s “linkable” varies from vertical to vertical. Cash is almost always a linkable asset, as are available jobs, events, expertise for interviews and many other forms of great content.

2. Link Target. Definition: what types of sites, pages, and people seek this linkable asset?

3. Link Prospecting Query. Definition: what queries uncover great targets for your linkable assets?

via 21 Link Builders Share Advanced Link Building Queries.

A Few Basic Rules:

1. You should perform all of these searches at each of the major engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN & Ask – yes, even Ask, as they often link to some very valuable and achievable link sources). I’m illustrating using Google for simplicity and brevity.

2. At Google and others, it often helps to show 100 results per page and have the maximum “grouping” of results from the same site. That way, you can find all of the most relevant pages on a particular domain with ease.

3. This process is only half the battle – the other half is identifying the sites inside the SERPs that would make good targets; I’ll try to cover that next week.

via SEOmoz | Long List of Link Searches.

SEO Excel Functions

LEN

Character Length in Excel

The LEN function returns the number of characters in a cell. It’s particularly handy in creating the right title and meta descriptions. Remember to keep your titles to ~60 characters and meta descriptions to ~150 characters.

TRIM

Phantom spaces at the beginning or end of a cell can be maddening. So before you go Office Space on your keyboard use the TRIM function which gets rid of any spaces before or after text. It’ll also get rid of any extra spaces between words. Think of TRIM as a vacuum cleaner for spaces.

SUBSTITUTE

This is just what it sounds like. Using the SUBSTITUTE function you can find specific text and substitute it for different text. It doesn’t sound all that interesting but it turns out to be vital in creating useful formulas.

Word Count Formula

There’s no out of the box word count function. But with a little creativity you can create a useful word count formula using the three functions above.

=LEN(TRIM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,” “,”"))+1

via 18+ SEO Excel Functions | Blind Five Year Old.