SEO Update

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.

#1 – Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes

Whenever we (or many other SEOs we’ve talked to) conduct tests of page or link features in (hopefully) controlled environments on the web, we/they find that links higher up in the HTML code of a page seem to pass more ranking ability/value than those lower down. This certainly fits with the recently granted Google patent application – Ranking Documents Based on User Behavior and/or Feature Data, which suggested a number of items that may considered in the way that link metrics are passed.

Those who’ve leveraged testing environments also often struggle against the power of the “higher link wins” phenomenon, and it can take a surprising amount of on-page optimization to overcome the power the higher link carries.

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Why Don’t We Always Obey These Rules?

That answer is relatively easy. The truth is that in the process of producing great web content, we sometimes forget, sometimes ignore and sometimes intentionally disobey the best practices laid out above. On-page optimization, while certainly important, is only one piece of a larger rankings puzzle:

(FYI – The new ranking factors survey data is set to release very, very soon)

It most certainly pays to get the on-page, keyword-targeting pieces right, but on-page SEO, in my opinion, follows the 80/20 rule very closely. If you get the top 20% of the most important pieces (titles, URLs, internal links) from the list above right, you’ll get 80% (maybe more) of the value possible in the on-page equation.

Best Practices for Ranking #1

Curiously, though perhaps not entirely surprisingly to experienced SEOs, the truth is that on-page optimization doesn’t necessarily rank first in the quest for top rankings. In fact, a list that walks through the process of actually getting that first position would look something more like:

1. Accessibility – content engines can’t see or access cannot even be indexed; thus crawl-ability is foremost on this list.
2. Content – you need to have compelling, high quality material that not only attracts interest, but compels visitors to share the information. Virality of content is possibly the most important/valuable factor in the ranking equation because it will produce the highest link conversion rate (the ratio of those who visit to those who link after viewing).
3. Basic On-Page Elements – getting the keyword targeting right in the most important elements (titles, URLs, internal links) provides a big boost in the potential ability of a page to perform well.
4. User Experience – the usability, user interface and overall experience provided by a website strongly influences the links and citations it earns as well as the conversion rate and browse rate of the traffic that visits.
5. Marketing – I like to say that “great content is no substitute for great marketing.” A terrific marketing machine or powerful campaign has the power to attract far more links than content may “deserve,” and though this might seem unfair, it’s a principle on which all of capitalism has functioned for the last few hundred years. Spreading the word is often just as important (or more so) than being right, being honest or being valuable (just look at the political spectrum).
6. Advanced/Thorough On-Page Optimization – applying all of the above with careful attention to detail certainly isn’t useless, but it is, for better or worse, at the bottom of this list for a reason; in our experience, it doesn’t add as much value as the other techniques described.

Let’s turn our attention to those pesky H(x) tags again, and see if the ranking model has more to say about their impact/value.

via SEOmoz | Explaining (Some of) Google’s Algorithm with Pretty Charts & Math Stuff.

Google’s AJAX Proposal

With Google’s proposal, an AJAX-generated URL that contains a hash mark (#) would also be replaced with a URL that uses #! in place of #. So, the second URL above would become http://www.buffy.com.seasons.php#!best=2. When Googlebot encounters the exclamation point after the hash mark, it would then request the URL from the server using a syntax that would replace the #! with ?_escaped_fragment_=.

Still with me? All this means is that when Googlebot encounters:

http://www.buffy.com/seasons.php#!best=2

it will request the following URL from the server:

http://www.buffy.com/seasons.php?_escaped_fragment_=best=2

Why, you ask? Well because ?_escaped_fragment_= in the URL tells the server to route the URL request to the headless browser to execute the AJAX code and render a static page.

But, you might protest, I don’t want my URLs in the search results to look like that! Not to worry, Google requests the URL using that syntax, but then translates the ?_escaped_fragment_= back into #! when displaying it to searchers.

via Google May Be Crawling AJAX Now – How To Best Take Advantage Of It.

Check your back-links as Google knows them

There are at least three ways how you can explore your back-links in Google:

Google Webmaster Tool (specifically the Links to your Site-section) gives the best and most complete overview on how Google sees your back-links. However it is important to note that only the webmaster/owner of a website who has been verified can see these back-links. For your convenience you can even download all the links in a spreadsheet format and process them on your own computer.

The Link-operator in Google Web Search (link:yourdomain.com) shows anyone a number of the back-links of any website. It is very important to note that this overview is just a sample from a much larger set of back-links. The Link-operator in Google Web Search will never give you the total overview, just a number of back-links and even the total of this number can change every time you submit your query to Google.

Since the Link-operator only gives you a limited view of back-links, several people have found that you get a better (and more complete) sample of back-links with the following query: “yourdomain.com” -site:yourdomain.com. So let me translate this query for you: the first part means you are looking for any reference to yourdomain.com (note that the quotes are important), and the second part means that you want to ignore any reference to yourdomain.com from the domain yourdomain.com (more information on the Site-operator and other advanced operators can be found here). If a SEO or competitor performs an analysis of the back-links to your website, and does not have access to your Google Webmaster Tool account, then this will be one of the queries they will perform.

via Explore Your Back-Links. Here’s How! — Fili Wiese.

Duplicate content detection tools;

Here are some of the best duplicate content tools on the web that will not only check for other copies of your content on the web, but will identify internal issues you may have with your site.

1. Copyscape

Copyscape is probably the most popular duplicate content tool out there. This free service detects copies of your web pages across the web. The free version only returns no more than 10 results for any search, and you are limited to the number of searches you can perform. However they do offer two other premium services for users who need to be able to gather more in-depth duplicate content research. Copyscape premium offers a more comprehensive search for plagiarism detection along with features like batch search (up to 10,000 pages), copy and paste, manage cases of plagiarism, exclude certain sites, compare two urls, and automatic checks using the API.

copyscape-screenshot

2. Plagiarism Checker

This tool will allow you to enter a keyword, phrase, or sentence into the search field and it will return Google results of any other sites that have the same words entered. One cool feature the tool will allow you to do is set up a google alert, so it notifies you if someone copies your content.
plagiarism-checker

3. Plagiarism Detect

Plagiarism detect offers a free and premium version, similar to Copyscape. The free version of this tool will allow you to upload text and word doc files for analysis and will return detections found. The premium version has many other features including comparing two documents side-by-side, a more advanced algorithm and a Microsoft Word plugin, so you can check for plagiarism directly from word.

plagiarism-detect

4. Plagium

This plagiarism tool will display a visually pleasing diagram of detections of other websites that have copied your content. Plagium will show a calendar of when it was discovered. This tool will allow you to search over the entire web or strictly news sources. You may also refine by language and only check for duplicates in a specific language.
copy-usage

5. Virante

Virante offers a different type of duplicate content tool, that checks more for internal duplicate content issues. The issues it will check include www vs non-www redirect issues, similar pages on your site, issues with index.html vs /, properly returning 404 error pages for any pages that are missing, any PR issues between the www and non-www.virante

6. WebConfs

The WebConfs tool will take two urls and determine the percentage of similarity between the two urls. The lower the percentage the less similar the two pages are. webconfs

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Benefits of a title tag formula:

• Keeps SERP listings consistent across a site
• Simplifies things for vast content networks and multiple contributors
• Reinforces branding

Home page?

• attract the lion’s share of authority links; and
• have the strongest PageRank.

‘Action Words’

• Informational Action Words – learn, discover, find, read, see

• Transactional Action Words – try, get, buy, download

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