Just because you don’t want Google tracking your searches, doesn’t mean you are up to something bad like looking for illegal software or spamming purposes.

This article covers why it is a good idea to not let Google have access to your search history and how best to perform private Google searches.

Unbiased Google Searches

I’m sure most of you will have had an experience where you have searched for a particular keyword you are trying to rank for and thought you were ranking very well.   That is, until you got someone else to search for the same keyword and discovered that it was actually ranked way lower than you initially thought.

The reason this happens, is that Google will bias your search results based on previous searches.   That means if you are searching for a particular keyword multiple times and clicking onto your site, Google assumes that the site you are clicking on is more relevant to your query and will place it higher up in the search results next time you do the same search.

This is particularly this case if you perform your Google searches while you are logged into your Google account.   However, even if you aren’t logged in, Google still tracks some of your searches via cookies and IP address.

There are various approaches you can use with varying degrees of success, such as:

• Clearing your browser cache and cookie history
• Using “private mode” setting in your browser
• Using a different browser from the main one you use for most of your searches
• Using Chrome incognito browsing mode (do you really trust Google to make a browser that hides 100% of the data from itself?)

While the above methods are OK, they can be a bit of a hassle to do every time you want to do a search.

In the past, I used a site called Scroogle.  This site allowed you to do anonymous and unbiased Google searches with no privacy concerns.

Unfortunately, Scroogle was closed down in early 2012, which left a lot of people looking for an alternative service.

Startpage

I only recently came across a site that is quite similar to Scroogle, but has been around for quite a while.

Startpage has a very similar look to Google and allows you to perform Google searches with no cookies or IP address being tracked by Google.   You can read the full Startpage privacy policy here.

I should point out in case there’s any confusion, that startpage.com and ixquick.com are the same sites except with a different logo.

The following extract is from the Startpage company background:

Startpage was released in 2009 in the United States as a new name for the Ixquick search engine. Because the name Ixquick can be somewhat difficult to remember and spell, people asked us for an easier name, and we were happy to oblige. Startpage uses Ixquick’s search methodologies and privacy features, and is governed by the same privacy policies. Startpage is only available in the English language at present, but we expect to launch Startpage in additional major languages later in 2010.

Startpage uses SSL by default (ie: https://), so that means that all your searches are encrypted, which gives you another level of privacy.As

The results page is quite similar to Google results page, with some minor differences:

• Startpage returns just websites, whereas Google results can include videos, Google Places etc in the results.
• Startpage doesn’t display Google Ads, but display their own version of Ads (which is how they fund the service).
• Startpage has a minimal number of options in the left sidebar (which is a good thing), compared to the ever growing list that Google displays.

The following two screenshots show the results page for “dog training” from Startpage and Google.

Please note that as I’m based in New Zealand, both results are querying google.co.nz (more on geo-location in the next section).

Also note that I use an Adblocker, so the screenshots don’t show any Ads.

Startpage Search Results

Google Search Results

Startpage Video Overview

If you prefer the visual medium, the video below I made gives you an overview on using Startpage.

Anonymous Web Browsing

When you look at the Startpage search results, you will see a link titled: View by Ixquick Proxy

This allows you to view the particular web page via the Ixquick Proxy.   This allows you to view web pages completely anonymously as the website can’t set any cookies or use any other tracking methods to identify you.

There are some limitations with using the proxy, such as:

• Slower performance
• Javascript is disabled (which can be a good thing if there is malicious Javascript on the web page you are viewing)

The following short video gives a good overview of the Ixquick Proxy and how it helps your privacy.

Geo-Location Searches

As I previously mentioned, I’m based in New Zealand, but a lot of my marketing sites are targeting the US audience.   One aspect of Scroogle I liked, was to be able to see US results for my searches.

If I want to do a Google US search, I can simply go to google.com and type in my search query.   Note that in the past, if you typed in google.com, Google would automatically redirect you to your local Google site, but this is no longer the behavour.

As you’ve probably seen from the Startpage screenshot, the results are coming from my local Google location, ie: New Zealand.

On the Startpage Privacy Q&A page, it states:

Q: Where are Startpage’s servers located? Startpage has server clusters in the Netherlands and the United States. Startpage typically routes European searches to the European servers, American searches to the U.S. servers, and searches from other countries to the closest location. On the rare occasion that there is a problem in one facility, searches are briefly handled by the other facilty.

If you want to perform a search based on a different region, you can use the Startpage Advanced search options and set the region, eg:

However, I found two issues doing this:

1. You can’t do a default broad match search.  You need to redo the search query once you are on the search results page.
2. More importantly, I couldn’t get similar results between Startpage and Google when doing US based searches.   I don’t expect the results to be completely the same due to a whole range of variants, but the results I was seeing were quite different and I couldn’t account for the differences.

In Summary

Startpage is great resource to use if you value your privacy when you perform Google searches and need to do anonymous web browsing.  

It is also a good resource if you want to check unbiased local searches, but don’t rely on it for search result positions outside your region.

Cheers

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The question asked is:

How do I increase my PageRank?

At first glance, this might seem like a reasonable question, until you start to delve a little deeper into the reasons why the question is asked so many times.

In this article, I’ll be looking at those reasons and some of the misconceptions and myths surrounding PageRank.

What is PageRank?

Firstly, let’s briefly go over what PageRank is.

Put simply, PageRank is a number from 0-10 that indicates the importance or popularity of a particular page.   PageRank is increased based on number of links to a page, but more importantly, high quality backlinks, ie:  backlinks from authority sites with pages that already have PageRank.

The PageRank score is publicly updated a few times a year (typically four).

If you want to bore yourself with all the gory details as to how PageRank is calculated, then the Wikipedia description of PageRank is a good place to start.

Wikipedia PageRank Example

Why Would You Want To Increase Your PageRank?

The first thing I ask when someone post on a forum that they want to know how to increase their PageRank, is why?

Quite often, the answer is along the lines of:

• I need to increase my PageRank to get my site higher in the SERPs.
• I don’t really know, but I’ve been told that PageRank is very important.
• I want to increase traffic to my site.

These are all invalid reasons, because increasing PageRank has little to do with how well your site ranks or how much traffic it receives.

This a major misconception regarding PageRank.   PageRank is really only a factor for the pages that link to your site.

For example, if you have one backlink from a page with no PageRank and one backlink from a page with a PageRank of 5, then the backlink from the page with PageRank is going to be more useful for helping your rankings.

I should point out that the above example is very simplistic as there are a whole range of factors that come into play, such as:

• Site authority
• No-follow links
• Number of outbound links
• Contextual backlinks
• Backlink relevance
• Anchor text

In general, it is better to receive backlinks from pages with PageRank.

So what would be some valid reasons to want to increase your PageRank?

The two main reasons for wanting a higher PageRank are:

1. Flipping (selling) your site.   Sites that have pages with some PageRank generally sell better than sites without PageRank.
2. Building a private blog network.   The idea is that by increasing PageRank, you can pass the link juice onto the various sites you are wanting to improve the ranking on.

Faked PageRank

You need to be aware that due to the obsession that a lot of people have with PageRank, many pages have faked PageRank.  The reasons for faking PageRank is people who want to flip their site (typically on flippa.com)  for an inflated figure or are selling backlink services where you pay a fee to have a link to your site on a page with PageRank.

PageRank is very easy to fake.   There are two main methods:

1. Set up a 301 redirect to an existing page with PageRank and after the PageRank score is updated, the redirect is removed.
2. Install a script detects if the request has come from a Googlebot then do a 301 redirect to a page with PageRank, otherwise display the webpage of the site to human visitors.

Both these methods are quite easy to detect using any number of the fake PR checkers that are available, or by doing a simple Google query:

info:domainname

If the result shows a different domain, then the PageRank has been faked.    There is a fuller explanation of this method  in my Google Tips & Tricks article.

Recently, there has been new method of faking PR that passes all the fake PR checks.   I’m not entirely sure how this new method works, but applying common sense, it is very easy to detect the obvious ones.

For example, recently someone posted a link to a WordPress blog where the homepage had a PR10.

As you probably know, PR10 is the highest score and google.com only has a PR9.  In fact, there are only a very small number of pages with a valid PR10.

Search Engine Genie has a list of PR10 pages, which currently totals only 10 sites.

This particular WordPress blog was only 2 months old and had a very small handful of backlinks.   A brief look at the site, without even checking the backlink details should have instantly set off warning bells that it had faked PR.

Now it’s quite possible if the owner of the site hadn’t been so “greedy” and had faked a more realistic score like PR4-PR6, then most people wouldn’t have given it much scrutiny.

PageRank Misconceptions

By far the biggest misconception with PageRank is many people think a site/domain has PageRank.

You see it all the time when people talk about how their site has PR or selling a domain with PR.

PageRank is referring to a specific page.   Pages have PageRank, not sites.

Now, it’s no coincidence that the page with the highest PageRank on most sites is the homepage.   So when most people talk about their site having PR, they are actually referring to the PR of their homepage.

The other major misconception as previously mentioned is that PR on your site will increase your rankings.    It is true that if you have a page with PR, then it has gained that PR from backlinks, which is an important factor for improving your rankings, but it doesn’t automatically give your site a boost.

You can see plenty of search queries where a low PR page will outrank a high PR page.   That’s because there are many factors involved in rankings, such as on-page SEO (which PR has nothing to do with).

Should I Worry About PageRank?

Bottom line is that way too much time is spent on worry about PageRank and on methods to increase it.

You are much better off spending your time writing articles and promoting your sites.

If your pages gain PR, you can briefly bask in the warm inner glow of satisfaction and then move onto more important matters.

Cheers

While we all use Google everyday in some capacity, whether it be simple searches or doing keyword research with Google Adwords Keyword Tool, there are quite a few hidden corners to Google (that’s definitely an under-statement) that a lot of people don’t know about or don’t know how to use efficiently.  

Video Summary

For those of you who prefer the visual medium, the video below covers most of the Google tips listed in this article.

Advanced Search Queries

The following collection of advanced search queries have a range of uses from keyword research to analysis of your website.

The first search query we’ll examine is the site: operator.  This is very useful for determining:

• Whether your site has been indexed (particularly useful to know if you have a new site)
• Conversely, whether your site has been deindexed, aka Google slap, Google Sandbox etc.
• How many pages are indexed.   This is useful to check if a new page has been indexed or not.
• Whether a the PageRank (PR) for page is faked or not.   Faking PR is quite common when selling a domain/site.

Checking If Your Site Is Indexed

An example of checking whether your site is indexed or not, is to just type in your domain with the site operator, eg:

If your site is indexed, Google will report the number of pages it has in it’s index.   If the site is not indexed, it will say something like:

A word of caution!

If your domain has subdomains, eg:

• blog.example.com

• store.example.com

then the site: operator will also include those subdomains in the query.

There doesn’t appear to be any easy way of excluding subdomains, unless you manually exclude them, eg:

You can also check if a specific page has been indexed, eg:

or

Another point to keep in mind is whether you use www in front of your domain name or not.   When you are checking your site, make sure you use the format that you normally use.   As most sites have a 301 redirect set up from the non-www to www version of the URL (or vice-versa), you should use the form the redirect points to.

 Checking For Fake PageRank

Related to the site: operator is the  info: operator.  This can be used for a number of function, but one very quick and easy method is to check if the PR for a particular page is faked or not.  The most common way of faking PR is by doing a 301 redirect from another page with PR to the target page.

This technique is sometimes used when people are selling a website or a domain and they artificially inflate the PR during the selling process and when the site/domain has been sold, the redirect is removed and when Google releases the next PR update, the new owner suddenly finds their PR has vanished.

There are a number of ways of checking for fake PR, but the quickest is to simply query the page (in most cases, it will be the homepage), eg:

If Google then shows you a result that has a different domain, you can very confident the site has a faked PR.

Checking The Actual Number Of Results Returned

Whenever you do a Google search, Google will give you a number (generally quite large) with the number of results.   It’s important to understand that this is just an estimate by Google in order to speed up how quickly they can display the results for your search query.

The following quote is from the Google Webmaster Tools Help.

As you probably know, Google will return a maximum of 1000 results.   However, in most cases it is much fewer than 1000, because Google will filter out most of the duplicate content and pages that have low relevance.  That means, if there are more pages of relevance for your search term, the higher the number of actual results.

This metric can be used as a factor for gauging competition for ranking for a particular keyword, although I would caution that you shouldn’t use it as your sole metric.   You are much better off doing a full analysis (on-page and off-page SEO) of the top 10 results to get a much better idea of the real competition, but looking at the number of actual results returned can still be useful.

OK, let’s take an example.

If I search for:

front loading washing machines

Google tells me:

About 2,8700,000 results (0.16 seconds)

Note that you’ll most likely get slightly different figures depend on when and where you do the same search from, but it should be roughly around the 2-3 million results.

Now, if we were to click on the Next button at the bottom of the results until we got to the very last page (that’s a lot of clicks), you will see a message like:

What that means is that of the 2.8 million results that Google estimated were related to your search term, only 592 were worth displaying.

Obviously you are quickly going to get very sick of clicking, Next, Next, Next…….

The quick way to get to the last page of the results is to modify the search URL. 

When you do your initial query, the URL in your browser will look something like:

To get to the last page of the search results add:

start=990&

anywhere in the URL after the first &, eg:

then press Enter and hey presto, you’ll be taken to the last page.

Querying US Search Results Outside the US

I live in New Zealand, but most of my sites target US audiences.   If I type in google.com into my browser, Google detects that I’m from New Zealand and will automatically redirect to google.co.nz

Doing a search on google.co.nz is biased towards New Zealand sites, which is generally not what I want.   To query the Google US results, simple add /ncr (which stands for “no country redirect”) at the end of the URL, eg:

http://google.com/ncr

Performing a Non-Personalized Search

As you probably know,  Google  personalizes your search results based on your search history.   This mostly applies if you are logged into your Google account.

If you don’t want to log out of your Google account when you do a search, just add

&pws=0

to the search URL in your browser bar.  For example:

You can also use Chrome in “Incognito” mode, which is supposed to remove traces of your search history and cookies.

Note, that none of these techniques will give you 100% guaranteed non-personalized results, but for most cases, they should be sufficient.

Scroogle.org used to be a great resource for getting unbiased Google searches, but unfortunately the site closed down in Jan 2012.

Using Google Cached Results

It can be very useful to know when Google last indexed a specific page.   Google keeps a cached copy of your pages in order to speed up processing search results.

To view the Google cache details for a particular page, use the query:

Google will display the cached version of the page along with an information area at the top of the screen that will say something like:

Another very useful tip that not many people use is the link to the “Text-only version” of the cache.  

If your site uses a lot of graphics and/or has a complex design, viewing the text only version of the cache gives you an inside view as to how the Googlebots see your page.   This can often be very revealing and may give you some big clues as to how to rearrange your site in order for it to be better optimized for Google when it next crawls your site.

Handy Google Links

Google has so many products these days, but as an online marketer, there are generally a small handful of links that you will use most of the time.

The following is a list of what I consider to be the most useful Google functions:

https://adwords.google.com

Without a doubt, this is the number one tool used by online marketers for keyword research and Adwords campaigns.  

You actually have access to a number of related tools from this URL.  The two most useful are:

1.  Keyword Tool – Invaluable for keyword research

2. Contextual Targeting Tool – If you are monetizing via Adsense, then using the contextual targeting tool will give you a much more accurate idea of the CPC.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Google Insights For Search is essentially a more advanced version of Google Trends.  It’s a great tool to use with your keyword research as it can tell you things like whether the keywords you are interested in are suitable for your targeted region or whether the keywords are seasonal or on a downward or upward search trend.

I wrote a post about Google Insights and the importance of trends in keyword research that has more details on the uses for Google Insights.

https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

The load time of your site is one of the factors that Google takes into consideration, therefore it is important to ensure your site loads as fast as possible.

The Google Page Speed Test will not only test your page load times, it will give you a list of suggestions on how to improve the performance of your site.

If you know of any other handy Google tips, tricks or techniques, please leave a comment below.

Cheers

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The changes that were mostly rolled out at the start of February are also known as Google Panda 3.3 update.

There are 40 changes listed on the Inside Search Blog post.   Not all of them are very important from an SEO point of view, but there are some changes that are quite significant.

In this article, I’ll be giving you my opinions on the impact of the key points of the Panda 3.3 update

Panda 3.3 Key Points

Note that Google will never reveal the exact details of their changes, so there is a certain amount of guess work and reading between the lines with the information they have provided.

More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

This description is a little vague as it depends on what Google’s definition of “official” is, but presumably it means that sites that target brand names or trademarks will no longer be given a boost in the rankings from a misidentified “official” status.

 

Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.

Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.

It’s well known since the first Panda update that freshness is an important factor for a lot of sites to rank well.   It’s impossible to say what the old classifiers are, but my guess is they are related to auto-content.

Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.

It doesn’t appear to be a coincidence that the new Flight Search feature (first introduced in Dec 2011) appears to favour the major airlines, rather than the smaller carriers or travel agents.

Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

What this means is that Google will show more local results for various queries, eg: doctors, restaurants, movies etc as they are able to better detect what location the searcher is in.

 

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

This is probably one of the biggest and most important updates.  Again, it’s very hard to know exactly what methods of link analysis that they’ve turned off.  

Reading between the lines, it is possible that Google is going to place less importance on the anchor text and more importance on where the link comes from.  Presumably this will benefit sites with contextual links from sites that have related topics to the site where the backlink is pointing.

So What Does It All Mean?

The most important thing to remember is that every Google update is not “The End Of The World For SEO” or “Google Hates Us”.

Google are always going to be tweaking the way they calculate the search results.

The bottom line is if you have a diverse set of non-spammy backlinking sources and a good mix of social media (eg: Google Plus, FaceBook, Twitter etc), then it’s more than likely you won’t notice much different in your website rankings.

Cheers

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• key points for google panda
• panda updated points

However, after checking the search trends (in particular the regional differences), I quickly realized that the keyword was nowhere as good as I initially thought it was.

Given that keyword research is the foundation for any site, I think trend and regional data are often overlooked in the whole keyword research process.

In this article, I’ll go through why analysing trend and regional data is a very important part of keyword research and why you shouldn’t ignore it.

Video Summary

For those of you that prefer a visual medium, the video below covers most of what is written in this article.

Keyword Research Case Studies

I’ve had good success with Amazon stores and I was looking to get into the baby product market as that can a potentially very lucrative market to be in.  

As a father, I recall just how much stuff you end up buying when you have a baby, so it seemed like a great market to tap into.

I use SECockpit for my keyword research as I can process huge amounts of keywords in a very short space of time.   Generally, I always leave the location set to “All countries and territories”.

After using a few general seed keywords such as baby and baby products, I saw what looked like a very promising keyword as you can see in the screenshot below:

The keyword baby bunting really stood out with 49500 exact monthly searches and lowish competition and with appropriate products available on Amazon.

When I looked at the keyword in more detail, I decided to check it out in Google Insights.  One quick glance at the data, told me instantly that this wasn’t a suitable keyword to target after all.

If you look at the Google Insights screenshot below:

you’ll see that while the trend data is very steady, under the Regional interest section, it shows that baby bunting is by far and away mostly used in Australia.

Amazon doesn’t have an Australian presence and all my Amazon stores are targeting the US market, so targeting  baby bunting really wasn’t going to be worth my while.

Now, what I really should have done from the beginning was to set my search location to be United States and I wouldn’t have wasted a few minutes checking out a keyword that wasn’t very worthwhile.    That’s certainly something I don’t forget to do now when doing keyword research for Amazon products.

Obviously, not everyone uses SECockpit, so let’s have a look at the data if we were using Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

In the following screen shot, you can see I’ve set my location to be United States and Match types to exact.

You can see that search figures are:

Global Monthly Searches (GMS): 49,500

Local Monthly Searches (LMS): 1,900

That’s a huge difference between the global and the local monthly figures as was clearly indicated in the Google Insights regional data.

Now the main reason for the difference is that baby bunting just isn’t a very common term in the US, whereas in Australia it’s a term commonly used.

As I don’t live in the US, I try to keep in mind the differences between terms in the US and other English speaking countries, but I don’t know them all.

I’ll give you another classic example of a huge difference in search volume between the global and US local monthly figures.

In the screenshot below, you can see that the keyword car hifi gets:

Global Monthly Searches (GMS): 18,100

Local Monthly Searches (LMS): 91

Now let’s look at the Google Insights data for car hifi

Here you can see that the United States doesn’t even make it into the list of countries under regional interest.   Clearly car hifi is a term most common in Europe, UK and Australia.

Trend Data

While it might be obvious to some people that you should choose a keyword where the search volume isn’t on a downward trend, it’s still a step missed by a lot of people.

In general, you always want to ensure that your keyword has a steady or rising search trend.

The following graph from Google Insights shows the search trend for baby bunting from 2004 onwards.

 As you can see from mid 2010 onwards, there is a very nice upward trend.   However, you recall previously, this keyword would currently only be suitable to target an Australia audience.

The same principle applies to seasonal trends, eg: Christmas, Valentines Day, Halloween etc.

The following graph shows the trend data for the term christmas gifts:

As you can see, there is an obvious peak over the Christmas period, but apart from 2004 and 2005, the peaks from 2006 onwards are all pretty much consistent, so you could classify this as a steady trend.

Taking a look at the other side, there are two main reasons for a declining search trend.

1.  A term that slowly declines due to waning interest or being superseded by something else.

2.  A short term fad where there is a big spike in popularity followed by a sharp decline.

An example of a search trend that are slowly declining are technology products that are becoming redundant, eg: VCR player, pager and fax machine

An example of a fad is myspace.   The following search trend graph illustrates very clearly the impact that Facebook had on myspace.

The Exceptions

There are a few exceptions to the cases I’ve already written about.

Sometimes, you don’t need to be so concerned with regional differences if the product or service you are promoting has a wide appeal across many countries.  Examples of this are: informational products, software, books and music.

With trend data, it obviously applies to search terms that have been around for a little while, but sometimes you may want to jump onto the bandwagon of some new technology that’s just about to be released but has no historic data to go on.  This is a bit of a gamble, but you can be rewarded for getting in early if it proves to be a very popular piece of technology.

Summing It Up

No matter what type of keyword research you are doing, it always pays to spend a short moment checking the trend and regional data.   It takes you very little time and could potentially save you a lot of wasted effort targeting a keyword in the wrong market.

Cheers

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Fiverr

Firstly, my experiences on Fiverr are only as a buyer.  I have never listed a gig, but have occasionally thought about it but the actually commission you receive has put me off (although there are quite a few tricks you can you to increase your profits from Fiverr, which I might cover in another article).

The other things I should point out is all the Fiverr gigs I’ve tried are related to SEO and graphics, so I can’t comment on the quality of gigs in the other categories.

It’s a Jungle In There

With so many people offerings gigs on Fiverr, it really is like a jungle in there.  You never know if you are going to come across a beautiful butterfly or get bitten by a snake.

The Fiverr rating system can give you a general idea as to the  quality of the gig, but it’s not a completely reliable or foolproof system.   I’ve ordered some gigs that had rave reviews, but found the results were were mediocre.

As with a lot products or services, the best recommendations come from your friends as they are the people you trust the most.

Bad Fiverr Experiences

Luckily I’ve never had a completely negative experience with Fiverr.  Perhaps if I had ordered a greater variety of gigs, the odds of getting a really bad one would increase.

Of all the gigs I order, I’ve only had to get one refund due to the gig not being completed.   I have to say that I don’t find the refund process on Fiverr to be entirely obvious, but once you’ve worked out where to flag the information, it generally doesn’t take very long for a Fiverr staff member to review the details and issue a refund (if appropriate).

For me, the type of gigs I was most disappointed with the results (with the exception of one person) were the ones related to creating graphics, ie: banners, headers, logos etc.   I’m no graphic designer, but honestly, some of the work I received was very basic or just looked plain amateurish.   I know you can’t generally expect a highly professionally designed graphic for only $5, but I was expecting a little more.

In most cases, I ended up doing the graphics myself and personally thought I did a much better job.

The other types of gigs I usually avoid are anything to do with SEO.   You can do some real damage to your rankings with some of the backlinking gigs on offer.   Most of these use automated software to blast out spam comments or pretty much useless profile links.  I can understand why some of these gigs do well, as there are a lot of people who don’t know much about SEO that read the gig descriptions and get sucked in.

Good Fiverr Experiences

Like I already mentioned, Fiverr really is a jungle, but there are some great services on offer that are high quality and an absolute bargain.

In regards to graphics and logos, I’ve ordered three gigs from a user called creative1desing

The particular gig I ordered was:

Create 3 Different Logos For Your Website or Blog

You’ll probably see some negative comments as graphic design is a very subjective and personal opinion.   Obviously for $5 you can’t expect the world, but I was happy with each of the results. 

The seller states that if you aren’t happy with any of the designs, they will redo them.   I got them to make some minor modifications to one set of graphics I ordered, which was done very promptly.

Now, I know I said there are a lot of SEO gigs on Fiverr that you should not touch.  I did try some recently and while I was initially impressed, I later worked out they were using greyhat methods.

In particular, there are a lot of Fiverr gigs that offer services that provide you with unique articles that are guaranteed to pass Copyscape, but in actual fact just steal unauthorized content from many sources and run it through some software to make it appear “unique”.

My next post will be covering this in more detail.

If you know of any other great Fiverr gigs you’ve come across or ones to definitely avoid, please leave a comment below.

Cheers

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There are obviously huge sites like Amazon that spend a lot of money into market research and website design and most people would agree that Amazon is highly effective from both the view of an Amazon affiliate and as a buyer.

As I live in New Zealand, I can’t always buy the items I’m after locally.  Additionally, if they are available locally, they are generally much more expensive than buying them from overseas.

Therefore, I tend to purchase quite a few products from various sites.

One thing you quickly realise when you live outside the US or UK is that many sites don’t ship internationally.   This is where my biggest gripe on website/shopping cart design lies.

Essential Information That Should Be Available

Shipping Details

I can’t remember the number of times I’ve found a product that I’m after on a particular website and then I have to hunt around all over the place to eventually find that they don’t ship overseas.

Then on the sites that do offer international shipping, they often make the shipping costs very inaccessible.   Sometimes, I have to add the items to the shopping cart, then register a user account, add all my address details and then, and only then, is the shipping costs displayed.  Quite often, the shipping costs are so expensive that it would more than double the cost of the item, so it really annoys me when I can’t find that information up front.

Now don’t get me started on sites that offer international shipping and assumes the rest of the world uses the same address formats as the US.   New Zealand does not use zip codes (we have postcodes) and we don’t have states.

Payment Options

My next gripe is sites that don’t clearly state what forms of payment they use.   I like using Paypal for most of my online purchases and generally favour a site that has a Paypal payment option.  However, it isn’t always easy or obvious to find whether a site has a Paypal option or not.

The same applies to credit cards.  Not everyone has a Visa or Mastercard, so it’s good to know what other forms of payment are accepted.

I have come across a few sites where this type of information is cleared displayed on their homepage and it certainly saves time knowing if you have a valid method for purchasing items on the site.

Applying This To Your Own Sites

Browsing various shopping sites is a good way of doing market research into the aspects of the site or shopping process that you like or dislike.

If you have your own site selling physical products, please ensure you have clear information as to your shipping and payment methods on the home page (or at the very least, prominent links to appropriate pages that contain all the details).

Even if you don’t directly sell physical products, but are an affiliate for physical products, you should still have the shipping and payment details available.

On one of my Amazon affiliate stores, I used to get a lot of queries from people outside the US asking if shipping to their country was available.  After replying to quite a few emails, I made sure I updated the shipping information on my site to state that shipping was only within the US.

This hasn’t entirely stopped all the queries about shipping, but it has certainly reduced the number of them.

Cheers

YSE was without a doubt, the most popular tool and source of information for seeing what backlinks a site has.   Many tools and plugins used YSE to get their backlink data, so they all have been affected as well and have had to move to a new backlinking data source.

So now Yahoo Site Explorer is dead, what are the alternatives?

In this article, I will be taking a look at four alternatives for YSE.

Note that the services some of the serviced I’ve reviewed have paid subscriptions, I am only looking at the features/reports that you get with their free offerings.

Backlink Reporting Sites Reviewed

The four sites I’m be taking a look at are:

1. Open Site Explorer – Operated by SEOMoz.
2. Majestic SEO Site Explorer – Operated by Majestic SEO
3. Ahrefs Site Explorer – Operated by Ahrefs
4. Blekko – Search engine with SEO reporting facilities

One thing to note is that all of the four sites will give you different data and different results.  Unfortunately when it comes to backlink data, there just isn’t any resource that can give you 100% accurate results.

Videos of Yahoo Site Explorer Alternatives

For those who prefer the visual medium, I’ve created the following two videos to give you an overview of what each of the sites offers in terms of backlinking data and other SEO data.

This video covers Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and Blekko.

This video covers Ahrefs.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer (OSE) is operated by SEOMoz, who are a highly respected SEO organization.

OSE has free and Pro membership levels, with the paid membership getting you access to additional reports and services.

The reports you get in the free version of OSE include:

• Inbound Links
• Top Pages
• Linking Domains
• Anchor Text
• Ability to compare backlink metrics between up to 5 sites

The following OSE screenshot shows the default Inbound Links report.

 Open Site Explorer Summary

While there is some very useful data returned by OSE, probably the biggest issue is the freshness of the index.  Even though the index is large, it is only contains about 25% of all sites on the web.  That’s one of the reasons why the total number of backlinks reported is substantially fewer than what the other sites report.

Additionally, the data is only refreshed every 30 days or so, which means there is always a lag between new backlinks and when they are reported.

 Click here to try out Open Site Explorer

Majestic SEO Site Explorer

Majestic SEO currently would rank as the most popular Yahoo Site Explorer alternative.

Just about every piece of software like Traffic Travis, Market Samurai etc, all changed their backlinking data source from Yahoo to Majestic SEO.

Like OSE, Majestic SEO Site Explorer comes in free and paid subscription versions, where the paid subscription gets you access to more data.

Majestic Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Backlinks
• Referring Domains
• Top Pages
• Backlink History

Majestic SEO also have a few additional SEO tools that you can access.

The following Majestic Site Explorer screenshot shows the default summary returned for a site.

Majestic Site Explorer Summary

There’s a good reason why Majestic Site Explorer is popular, and that’s due to the size of the data and more importantly the freshness of the data.

Since March 2011, SEO Majestic update their index daily.  In the backlink history reports, you can use the “Fresh Index”, which shows you backlink data from the last 30 days, or you can use the “Historic Index” which shows you all available backlink data that Majestic SEO have for a particular site.

Click here to try out Majestic Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer isn’t as well known as Open Site Explorer and Majestic Site Explorer, but it does have some very useful data that the other sites don’t.

Ahrefs is another free/paid subscription service.   If you don’t register, you are limited to 10 queries per day, if you register for a free account, you are limited to 20 queries per day.

Ahrefs Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Pages
• Backlinks
• Anchor Text
• Referring Domains
• Referring Subnets

There is also a SERPs Analysis function that is really handy as it will show you what keywords a site is ranking for and their position and movement in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The following Ahrefs Site Explorer Screenshot shows you the default information returned.

Ahrefs Site Explorer Summary

Even though the free version of Ahrefs is more limited than the other sites, the information it returns is very useful.   In particular, the ability to see what keywords and what rankings a particular site has is great when you are doing competition analysis.

Click here to try out Ahrefs Site Explorer

Blekko

Blekko is different to the previous sites as it is primarily a search engine.   However, it is a very flexible search engine that gives you very useful SEO data.

Blekko uses special filters/modifers that they call slashtags.  One of these slash tags is /seo, so when you do a query like:

somedomain.com /seo

You will get all the SEO data for that particular domain.

Blekko SEO Reports include:

• Inbound links and their location
• Outbound links
• Internal Links
• Crawled pages and their rank
• Domains that contain duplicate content

The following Blekko screenshot shows the default SEO information returned.

Blekko Summary

Of all the newer search engines that have been created, I’ve found Blekko to be the most interesting and most useful. 

While it’s backlink data isn’t as detailed as the other sites, it is free, fast and easy to use.

Click here to try out Blekko

Recommendations

 A lot of the time, the type of information and style you like to see it in comes down to personal preference, so my main recommendation is to try out all four sites and see which you like best.

That said, my two favourite sites are:

1.  Majestic Site Explorer – This is mostly due to it having the most comprehensive and accurate backlink data of the four and the freshness of the index.

2. Ahrefs Site Explorer – I like to use this site to get SEO data that the other sites don’t provide, eg: keyword/ranking data.

If you know of any other similar sites (that are free to use), please leave a comment below.

Cheers

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Typically a person will come across  a WordPress site that they really like and are interested in using the same theme, but find there is no information or links in the footer as to what WordPress theme has been used.

If you know what to do, you can look in the HTML source for the site you are interested in, but I decided that I would create a free tool to make this process super simple.

What WordPress Theme Is That?

So I created the site  called What WordPress Theme Is That?

It’s very easy to use.  All you do is enter a domain or URL and click on the “Check Site” button.

Here is a screenshot showing you the type of results you’ll get.

There will be a minority of WordPress sites that have their theme obscured, so the tool won’t get all the details for those sites, but for the vast majority of sites, it should correctly detect all the details.

Below is a short video showing you how it works.

Hope you find it to be a useful tool when building your WordPress Sites.

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QR Codes are an equivalent of a barcode for mobile phones.  The QR Code can contain up to 4296 characters of information.  

The type of information they can contain are:

• Website URL
• Email address
• Telephone number
• Contact Details (VCARD)
• Google Places information
• Social Media, eg: Facebook, Twitter etc.

QR Codes have been very popular in countries like Japan and Korea and are gaining a lot more popularity in Europe and the US.

The Real Estate industry has adopted QR Codes very quickly as it’s easy to see the benefit of being able to quickly view the details of a house by simply scanning a QR Code.

To really get a good idea of the power of QR Codes, then I think the video below illustrates this very well, with Tesco using them to great affect in Korea.

Now is the great time to jump on the QR Code marketing bandwagon while there are still plenty of opportunities available.

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Time and time again when I’m reading posts on Internet Marketing forums like the Warrior Forum, I see the same keyword research mistakes come up.

Keyword research is your foundation of SEO and without proper keyword research, the rest of your efforts are most likely to be a waste of time.

So what are the biggest keyword research mistakes?

1) Search Volume

By far the biggest mistake people make with their keyword research is using the wrong monthly search volume figures.

We all know that a good keyword should have good monthly search volume and low competition.   Typically “good search volume” is defined as 3000+ searches a month (this is not a figure set in stone though as it depends on the type of keyword).

Typically what happens is that someone who is doing their keyword research will go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool (GAKT), specify their keyword and see what the monthly search volume is.

Correct?

NO!

The problem is that by default, GAKT returns broad match search results when you really want to look at the exact match search results.

OK, so let’s use an example to explain what the difference is between broad and exact match search results and why it is so important.

For the rest of this article, I’m going to be using the example keyword phrase:

antique coffee table

So if we login to our Google account and go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool,  put in our keyword phrase, we can see the following results:

That’s 12,100 searches a month!  Happy days!

Not so fast.  

Click on the checkbox next to [Exact] under the Match Types in the left column and let’s see what results we get:

The exact match search volume is shown for the keyword phrase in square brackets, ie: [antique coffee table]

The global monthly searches for the exact match result is a only 1000, which isn’t too bad, but certainly way less than the 12,100 results for the broad match.   I’ve seen some keyword phrases where the difference is huge; for example the broad match results over 100,000 and the exact match results less than 100.

Just imagine if you built a website and optimized around a keyword that you thought got a lot of searches, only to find that even though your site is ranked at the top of Google, you are getting a  very tiny trickle of traffic.

It can be very disheartening.

Match Types

Alright, I’ve told you that you should always be using the exact match figures, but I have explained why…..yet.

Let’s look at the three different match types and what they mean.

Broad Match

A broad match is where your keywords can appear in any order and don’t have to be next to each other.

The following are all broad match results:

• antique table with coffee grinder
• a coffee table looks great with antique features
• sit at a table sipping coffee and reading books about antique furniture
• give your table and antique look by staining it with coffee

A broad match search is the default search type when you do a Google search (that is, without quotes). 

So a broad match search for our example keyword phrase, gives us:

That’s over 9 million results.

The first page of the results will have pages directly related to antique coffee tables, but let’s have a look at some of the results returned further down the search results:

This particular page isn’t specifically about antique coffee tables, but mentions a coffee table and an antique drafting table as it is still a broad match result.

This particular result was buried quite a long way down the search results, so someone searching for antique coffee table would almost certainly never even see it.

The point being, is that if you relied on the broad match search volume in GAKT, that will include all sorts of vaguely related searches that you won’t be optimizing your site for.

Phrase Match

A phrase match result is where your keywords appear in the exact order, but can be surrounded by other words or punctuation.

The following are all phrase matches:

• Why antique?  Coffee table for sale.
• antique coffee-table
• antique coffee, table free.

When you do a Google search in quotes, you performing a phrase match search.

So using our keyword phrase, the phrase match search gives us 123,000 results compared to just over 9 million results for the broad match search.

All of the search results will contain the phrase antique coffee table.

Here is one of the results on the very last page:

Notice that there is punctuation in the keywords, but the word order is the same.

Exact Match

The first and most important thing to point out is that exact match only relates to GAKT.  

There is no direct way to use exact match in a Google search.

Exact match is pretty self explanatory.  It includes searches for that exact phrase.

As we’ve seen, the broad match search figures can be much, much larger as they include so many other vaguely related searches.  By using exact match search figures, you get a much more accurate idea of the actual search traffic you are going to be targeting and optimizing for.

2)  Competition

Once you’ve found a good keyword, you need to know what sort of competition you are up against to get ranked on page 1 (and there’s no point in aiming for page 2 or lower).

The two main mistakes I’ve seen with gauging competition are:

i) Number of Search Results

This advice goes along the lines of put your keywords in quotes and check the number of results returned, if they are less than [insert some random number here], then it is a low competition keyword.

Now there is some element of truth in this method.  If a keyword search in quotes (phrase match) returns 10 million results and another returns a few hundred results, it’s reasonable to assume the keyword with 10 million results will be harder to rank for.

However, that is a very poor way of judging the competition.

As you are obviously trying to rank on page 1, the sites on page 1 are really your only competition.  You need to look at various factors such as on-page and off-page SEO for the top 10 results to gauge how difficult it would be to beat them.

It doesn’t really matter if there are a million results. If most of them are poorly optimized, then you have a very good chance of outranking them.

ii) GAKT Competition Bar

Quite a number of people don’t understand what the competition bar in the GAKT results actually means.

Let’s look at the results for our example keyword again.

You can see the competition bar for the exact search is almost 100%.  

Some people incorrectly interpret this as the competition strength for trying to rank for the particular keyword.

What it really means is the Adwords competition for that particular keyword, ie: the number of people trying to bid on that particular keyword for their adwords campaign.

While it can be a useful metric to look at if you are building Adsense sites, it has very little to do with the competition strength of sites for that keyword.

3) Commercial Intent

Assuming you find a good keyword with low competition and a good number of exact match search results, there is one more piece of the keyword research puzzle that you can get wrong.

This is where commercial intent (“buying keywords”) comes in.

If you have a site ranked on page 1 and are getting lots of traffic but little to no sales, it could be down to the keywords you original chose didn’t have a very high commercial intent.

By commercial intent, I mean how likely is the person searching for that term looking to purchase something.  

People may be just searching for advice, information or free products, in which case, there’s not much point in creating a website targeting their searches.

So what are some of the ways of determining commercial intent?

1. Put yourself in the mind of the person doing the search.  If you were doing a search for a particular keyword, are you looking for something to buy (or potentially purchase if you came across something that looked really good)?
2. Keywords targeting specific models.  For example, if someone searches for “LED TV’s”, they are most likely in a research phase to find out more about LED TVs.  However, if someone searches for a specific model of LED TV, they are generally looking for a place to confirm their decision and hopefully purchase from.
3. Look at the CPC and Competition columns in the GAKT.  Generally if a keyword has a good CPC (say, more than $2) and high Adwords competition, it’s generally a good indication that the keyword phrase has a high commercial intent, otherwise people wouldn’t be bidding on it.

Video Summary

For those of you who prefer viewing videos rather than reading articles, the following video gives a summary of what I’ve written in this article.

Getting Keyword Research Right

While keyword research is always going to be an inexact science, by avoiding the common mistakes I’ve listed above, hopefully it will increase your chances of creating a successful site that gets good conversions.

Cheers

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Given the huge popularity of the SEOPressor plugin, I thought I’d do a comparison with some recent competitors.

The basic premise of an on-page SEO plugin is that it gives you suggestions for improving on-page SEO and an overall score.

In theory, if the score that is reported by the on-page SEO plugin is high, then you should have a highly optimized page.

The six on-page SEO plugins I’m comparing are:

1.  SEOPressor - This is the most well known on-page SEO plugin.  It was developed by Daniel Tan and has been on the market for some time.

2.  BloggerHigh SEO – This is a free clone of the SEOPressor plugin.

3.  ClickBump SEO – This is a recent entrant into the on-page SEO plugin space.  It is developed by Scott Blanchard.

4. WP SEO Beast – This on-page SEO plugin arrived on the screen just after ClickBump SEO.   It is developed by Prashant Sharma.

5.  Easy WP SEO – This is the highly popular on-page SEO Plugin that is developed by Chris Landrum.

6. Measure My SEO – This is the newest on-page SEO Plugin on the market and is developed by Jason Fladlien and Wilson Mattos.

Demonstration of the On-Page SEO Plugins

The following video gives a brief overview of what each of the plugins do and how they compare to each other.

Please note that when I recorded the original video, WP SEO Beast wasn’t available, so the WP SEO Beast review is in the video below:

The video below shows a quick overview of the Easy WP SEO plugin

 Note that in the Easy WP SEO video above, this was using Easy WP SEO version 1.5.  Since then Easy WP SEO v1.6 was released and has a number of major improvements, including:

• Copyscape checking
• Export/Import of Easy WP SEO settings
• Ability to check membership/protected pages
• Ability to check any URL on your site, eg: archives, categories etc
• Ability to fine tune what SEO checks are used in the ratings
• Better SEO report option.

Looking at the Plugins In More Detail

SEOPressor

I was a reluctant purchaser of SEOPressor as I really didn’t think $97 was particularly good value for what it does (particularly if you already know the elements of on-page SEO).  However, given I review products, I ended up buying a copy as at the very least, it’s a useful reminder for particular on-page SEO elements I might have forgotten.

Good Points

• Has a central administration menu for defining keywords and viewing page/post scores and descriptions.
• Works with auto-blogs by giving it a list of keywords and SEOPressor will automatically “decorate” the keywords, ie: bold, underline, italics.

Bad Points

• Price!  In my opinion, $97 for a plugin like this is way over priced.  I think somewhere between $30-$50 is much more reasonable and realistic.
• Nags you about not having an H1 tag, when the vast majority of WordPress themes automatically use H1 for the post/page titles.  Of course you can ignore the suggestion, but it’s something that really irks me.

Click here to access the SEOPressor website

BloggerHigh SEO

BloggerHigh SEO is essentially a rewritten version of SEOPressor.

The actual author and origins of BloggerHigh SEO is a little mysterious.   It appears to be a product of the “Masked Guru”.  Whatever the origins, the big plus of BloggerHigh SEO is that it is free and rebrandable.

Good Points

• Can’t argue with the price as it’s free!
• The plugin is rebrandable, so you can rebrand it yourself (with some limitations) and give it away or sell it.
• Pretty much does the same things as SEOPressor.

Bad Points

• No central administration page.  You need to go to each individual page/post to check the score and suggestions.
• If you don’t have the “hide attribution” option checked, then you’ll have an ugly footer added to each of your pages that have links to the various BloggerHigh sites.  Although, to be fair, as it is a free product, you can’t really blame them for wanting backlinks to their sites.

Click here to access the BloggerHigh SEO website

Clickbump SEO

I recently bumped (bad pun) into Clickbump SEO on the Warrior Forum.  The plugin itself is not currently promoted so much as a standalone plugin, but usually offered as part of the Clickbump Engine Bundle.

Scott did mention that he had registered a domain for Clickbump SEO, so it will be offered as a standalone product very soon.

As I wasn’t that interested in the Clickbump Engine, I purchased just the Clickbump SEO plugin.

Good Points

• It’s less than half the price of SEOPressor.
• Is aware of WordPress themes that use H1, H2 and H3 tags for headings.
• Doesn’t have any overheads of processing a page to add auto-decoration.
• Has a LSI function to grab related keywords.  Very handy reminder of what keywords/phrases to sprinkle into your article.
• Customisable keyword density settings.
• Keyword/Score summary from the Posts/Page manager.

Bad Points

• Can’t really think of any.

Click here to access the ClickBump SEO website

WP SEO Beast

I bought the WP SEO Beast plugin when it was first released so that I could add it to the list of other plugins to compare it to.

I found a few issues with version 1.0 of the WP SEO Beast plugin, so I contacted the author (who was very prompt with his responses) and waited until version 2.0 was released.  This is the version I’m basing my review/comparison on.

Prashant Sharma has obviously studied the other on-page SEO plugins that are available as WP SEO Beast seems to borrow a few ideas from all of them.

WP SEO Beast is probably best described as a cross between ClickBump SEO and SEOPressor.  It does however, have a SEO settings option (similar to all-in-one SEO) which none of the other plugins don’t have.   This has good and bad points as I’ll detail below.

Good Points

• Costs $37, for a plugin that offers more than SEOPressor at more than twice the price.
• Has an option to generate LSI keywords.
• Is aware of WordPress themes that use H1 tags for the post/page title.
• Has summary pages for post and page scores.
• Has support for mobile devices.
• Has inbuilt SEO options to set the meta Title, Description and Keywords so no additional SEO plugins are needed, eg: all-in-one SEO.   Note that I’ve also listed this feature in the bad points

Bad Points

• Probably my biggest gripe with WP SEO Beast is that it forces you to use it’s SEO settings for title, description and keywords.  This means you have no choice to use another SEO plugin like all-in-one SEO or Platinum SEO.  If you do have one of these plugins active, you will end up with two sets of clashing SEO meta data.
• Your score is marked down if you don’t use SEO Beast title, description and keywords, but more importantly, your score is marked down if you don’t use the auto-decoration options (bold, italics, underline).  That means if you manually decorate your keyword, WP SEO Beast doesn’t recognise it.

I think it is only fair to point out that Prashant Sharma is extremely keen to take on board any suggestions to improve the plugin (unfortunately he didn’t address my gripe with the plugin recognising manually decorated keywords though), so you may well find the issues I’ve brought up have been dealt with.

Click here to access the WP SEO Beast website

Easy WP SEO

Easy WP SEO was the latest of the on-page seo plugins that I had a look at.

My first impressions were very favourable as Easy WP SEO has a very professional and polished look and feel.   This certainly extends through to the very extensive documentation that is available with the plugin.  There are instructional videos for every single function of Easy WP SEO.

One big feature that only Easy WP SEO has, is the ability to specify multiple keywords.   This is really useful as most of the time, you want to optimize for your main keyword plus a selection of secondary keywords.   With Easy WP SEO, you can easily select which keyword you want to see the analysis for.

Good Points

• Very clean and professional design.
• Ability to handle multiple keywords.
• Has an LSI function, where you can list LSI keywords and drag/drop them into your article.
• Able to fine tune a large number of settings, eg: keyword density, minimum number of words, title length etc.
• Only on-page seo plugin to include a readability index.
• Has a Copyscape check function.
• Extensive documentation including a manual and video guides.

Bad Points

• Can’t think of any.

Easy WP SEO is not currently available to the public via the main website, however you can grab a discounted copy below.

Click here to access the discounted copy of Easy WP SEO

Measure My SEO 

I recently came across the Measure My SEO plugin, but haven’t had time to personally review it.  I’m including it here for completeness.

Note that I’m basing my information about the Measure My SEO plugin from the Measure My SEO website.

At first glance, Measure My SEO looks like a much more pretty version of SEOPressor or BloggerHigh.  The core functionality doesn’t appear to be much different, but there are a few key differences that make it stand out.

Good Points

• The settings page allows you to control exactly what SEO features you want to measure.
• Has a live checker that automatically updates the SEO page score without you having to update the page.

Bad Points

• Not as fully featured as WP SEO Beast, Clickbump SEO and Easy WP SEO.

Click here to access the Measure My SEO website.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an important part of on-page SEO, but you should be aware that there are a few different ways to calculate it and you will get different results depending on what tool you are using.

There are two main ways to calculate keyword phrase density.

A=Total occurrences of the keyword phrase in the article

B=Total number of words in the article

C=Number of words in the keyword phrase

Keyword density calculation 1 uses:

(A / B) * 100

Keyword density calculation 2, uses:

(A * C / B) * 100

Let’s have a look at an example and the difference in the keyword density score those two formulas can make.

Let’s say we have a article with 1000 words and using keyword phrase of “search engine results page” (4 words) where there are 10 occurrences of that phrase.

So using the first formula, that gives us:

(10 / 1000) * 100 = 1% keyword density

and using the second formula, gives us:

(10 * 4 / 1000) * 100 = 4% keyword density

That’s quite a difference depending on which formula you use.  (Note: the differences only apply to keyword phrases and not when you use a single keyword).

All the on-page SEO plugins I tested use the first formula apart from BloggerHigh SEO.

With Easy WP SEO you have the option which keyword density calculation to use, where the default is the first formula.

There is a good explanation of keyword density calculations on Wikipedia.

So Which is the Best Plugin To Use?

My recommendation is if you already have SEOpressor and are relatively happy with using it, then there’s probably not a compelling reason to throw it out in favour of BloggerHigh SEO, ClickBump SEO,  WP SEO Beast, Measure My SEO or Easy WP SEO.

If you are on a tight budget, then BloggerHigh SEO is a good option.

Of the other four plugins, my pick would be for Easy WP SEO.  With the version 1.6 update, Easy WP SEO is now well ahead of the pack.

Of the other on-page SEO plugins, my next pick would be ClickBump SEO,  followed by WP SEO Beast or Measure My SEO.  

Hopefully all these on-page SEO plugins will be further developed and I’ll update this review page if there are any major changes.

If you come across any other similar on-page SEO plugins, let me know and I’ll add them to this review.

Cheers

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I’ve been using DigiResults as both a product seller, an affiliate,  and a buyer since DigiResults came onto the scene in October 2010.

In this DigiResults review, I thought I’d give you my impressions on the service given that I’ve seen it from all sides of the market.

What is DigiResults?

Probably the easiest way to think of DigiResults is that it is an alternate service to places like Clickbank, PayDotCom, Commission Junction, E-Junkie etc.

DigiResults enables you to sell your products (physical and digital) and as an affiliate, you can promote any of the listed products on the DigiResults Marketplace.

Payments and commissions are done via PayPal.

DigiResults Video Overview

The following video gives you a brief overview of some of the features of DigiResults and what the interface looks like.

Features of DigiResults

OK, so what are some of the features of DigiResults that I like?

Navigation

Probably the biggest aspect I like about DigiResults is the ease of use.   I have accounts on many other similar sites and I have to say that DigiResults is by far and away the easiest in terms of set up and navigation.   I curse every time I’m on a site like e-junkie where the navigation is not intuitive at all as I think it is critical that things should be easy to find and easy to set up.

On DigiResults, you can literally set up a new account and list a product in under 15 minutes.

Commissions and Refunds

The other feature I really like about DigiResults are the instant commissions.   This works really well from both the seller and affiliate perspectives.

There is no waiting to get paid when a sale has been made.  Your PayPal account is instantly credited whether you are the vendor or an affiliate.

On the flipside, refunds are easily handled with no action required from your affiliates.   As a vendor, if you need to issue a refund, DigiResults automatically reverses the payment from both your account and the affiliates account.

Flexible Payment Options

Most other similar systems have restrictions on what percentage you can set your affiliate commissions to.  DigiResults allows you to set the affiliate commission between 0% and 100%.

You might wonder why you would want to offer a 100% affiliate commission, but it is a great method for building your list.

If you want to offer your product at different prices, you have two options:

You can set up discount codes/coupons, which give the buyer the set discount at the point of purchase.   You can choose whether the discount codes are public or not and also set an expiry date.

An alternate method is to add a “variant”.  For example, if you have a special offer you want to give your customers or an affiliate, you can set up a variant with a different buy price.

There’s no limit to the number of variants and discount codes you can set up.

Hosted Downloads

If you don’t have the technical knowledge or software on your own site to offer secure downloads of your product, then DigiResults has an option where you simply upload your product and it will generate a unique download link for every buyer.

Autoresponder Integration

DigiResults can automatically integrate your preferred autoresponder (pretty much supports any autoresponder, eg: iContact, Aweber, MailChimp etc), so that your buyers can be automatically added to your list.

Note that this only works if you use the DigiResults hosted downloads.   Also important to point out is that buyers will still need to confirm their opt-in if you are using an autoresponder that only supports double opt-in.

DigiResults Screenshots

Here are a collection of screenshots that show the main parts of DigiResults.

The screenshot below shows the main dashboard when you log into DigiResults.  It gives you a handy summary of all the important information like number of sales, refunds, and affiliate sales in the last 60 days.

The next screenshot shows the page where you set up your product that you are selling.  As you can see, the options are pretty straight forward.

There are some optional advanced options not shown in this screenshot to configure your affiliate programme page, cancellation/receipt pages and options to allow you to additionally sell your product via ClickBank and PayDotCom.

The last screenshot shows the DigiResults marketplace.  This is where affiliates can select the product they want to promote and get all the details such as affiliate links, sales pages, affiliate promotional details etc.

The marketplace is really the only section where I think DigiResults needs some major improvement.

You can sort the list by any of the columns, but there are no advanced search features and categories to browse the products by.

Having said that, I know the DigiResults is constantly improving and I’m sure that the marketplace will be one of the things on their list to improve.

Final Thoughts on DigiResults

DigiResults is gaining a lot of popularity, particularly with internet marketers, as it provides a very simple and easy ways to enable your products to be promoted and sold.

At this stage, most of the products listed on DigiResults are in the internet marketing area, so most of the potential affiliates would be looking for products also in that category.  However, that certainly shouldn’t prevent you from listing a non-IM product.

For me, the biggest aspect I like about DigiResults is the simplicity.    It means I don’t have to muck around wading through huge manuals or watching lots of tutorials to get everything set up.

I highly recommend DigiResults and you can instantly join at no cost, so check it out for yourself.

>>Click here to access DigiResults<<

Cheers

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I’ve written this SECockpit review in the hope it will give you enough information to make an informed decision as to whether SECockpit is the right keyword research tool for you.

It’s certainly not my aim to give you an unrealistic and hyped up review of SECockpit that you’ll see on some other sites.

I’ve been lucky enough to use SECockpit since the very first limited release.  I’ve seen the product develop and evolve into the fully featured keyword research tool it is today.

Firstly, in case there’s any confusion, there is no relationship between SEO cockpit and SECockpit.  It’s a bit unfortunate that the names are so similar, but I guess there’s only so many combinations of product names you can come up with that have SEO and Cockpit in them.

SECockpit is a product from the SwissMadeMarketing team of Shane Melaugh and Sam Haenni.

Some of you will know Shane from his previously released products such as Backlink Battleplan and Sam has recently partnered with Shane as the brilliant technical person.

SECockpit was made available via invitation, so it has had a lot of real world testing before the public launch on July 5th.

Click here to visit the SECockpit Official Site

SECockpit Components

SECockpit has two main components:

1. Keyword Research – this is the heart of SECockpit where you do all your keyword searches, analysis, filtering and arranging your results.
2. Project & Task Management – this is where you can track your various projects and automatically assign tasks and track project revenues.

Obviously it is the keyword research component of SECockpit that will be of great interest to most people and the area where I’ll be concentrating on in this article.

SECockpit Overview

The  screenshot below shows the main SECockpit keyword search results.  The green niche bar gives you an idea of the niche strength, which is based on search volume, competition strength and a few other factors.

Keywords where the green indicator is high, are definitely worth checking out.

The competition strength is show by the orange bars.  This is broken down into positions 1-3, 4-7 and 8-10.   Having this breakdown can let you know how easy or not it is to get on page one and more importantly, how much competition there is for the first three spots (which after all, is where you really want to rank).

SECockpit Videos

The best way to get an idea of how SECockpit works and the features it offers is by watching the following videos I made.

In the video below, I give you an overview on how SECockpit looks and operates.

There have been a number of changes and improvements to SECockpit since I recorded this video, but the core functionality hasn’t changed.

There have been improvements in the filtering and keyword options, eg: grabbing keywords from Google Wonderwheel, Google suggest etc.  There have also been additional columns added so that you can see if there are things like Youtube, Amazon, or Google Sniper pages in the top 10 results.

In this second SECockpit video, I go over some of the additional features and options that weren’t available when I made the original video.

What are the advantages of SECockpit?

There’s certainly no end of keyword research tools on the market and I’ve used quite a few, eg: Market Samauri and Keyword Elite.

Now while, those keyword tools are certainly not bad, there’s one attribute they all share – they rely on the data from Google and Yahoo.  This is primarily the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for the search numbers and results and Yahoo explorer for backlink information.

Now SECockpit certainly uses Google Adwords Keyword Tool for getting a lot of its information, but there are some major differences:

1.  The range and diversity of keywords

You can greatly increase the number and diversity of keywords you are searching on by using the SECockpit Google Suggestions and Wonderwheel options.  In particular Google Wonderwheel can be a great source of long tail and related keywords.  SECockpit can dig down to 2 levels in the Wonderwheel, which can potentially find a few great keywords that you wouldn’t normally find with other keyword research tools.

2.  Competition Analysis

Most importantly, the competition analysis uses data supplied by SEOmoz.

If you’re not familiar with SEOmoz, they crawl the web and collect their own search data and metrics which is more complete and more accurate than what Google provides.

Most other keyword tools rely on a combination of data that is mostly supplied by Google for their analysis.

3.  SECockpit is a web Application

This means it is OS independent as it runs in your browser.

It also has the advantage that your local computer won’t get a temporary ban from Google for performing too many requests.

Additionally, as the processing is done in the cloud, the results are fast.  If you were to do the same type of processing on your local computer, it would chew up a lot of resources and take substantially longer to give you results.

4. Integrated Project and Task Management

Now while I don’t yet use the project and task capabilities of SECockpit, I can see that they would be useful for some people, although I suspect most people wouldn’t bother with it as they have their own methods for tracking projects.

SECockpit allows you to create projects around sets of keywords.  It then has built in  task lists based on the type of project that you can use, or create your own.

The screenshot below shows the the project creation:

Interview with Sam Haenni – SwissMadeMarketing Co-founder

In this interview with Sam Haenni, Sam discusses:

• the background behind SECockpit
• technical challenges along the way
• number of keyword searches that SECockpit performs
• future development plans for SECockpit.

Sam Haenni Interview discussing SECockpit

SECockpit Pricing

The pricing for SECockpit may be considered expensive for some people, but you need to keep in mind that SECockpit is a premium product and uses a lot of infrastructure to perform the massive amount of processing it does for every keyword analysis.

I have seen a number of new keyword research services on offer that utilize SECockpit as the tool they use for keyword research.  In these cases, the SECockpit monthly fee would be quite easy to cover and make a sustainable business model.

SECockpit Final Thoughts

It takes quite a bit for a keyword research tool to impress me, but I could see the value and worth of SECockpit from day one and having used it extensively, I can vouch for the results I’ve gotten.

One tip I would give is to not get too hung up on trying to find “diamonds”.  When I initially started using SECockpit, I discarded any keywords that didn’t have a “diamond” ranking.  This was a mistake as I was missing lots of good keywords.

I personally think keywords with “diamond” rating are generally quite difficult to rank for as the SECockpit algorithm is biased towards the number of daily searches.  That means if a keyword has a large number of daily searches and relatively low (that’s lowish for a high competition keyword) then it may get a “diamond” rating.

In general, it’s probably fair to say that “diamond” keywords are high reward, medium/high effort keywords.

While some people might be put off by the SECockpit pricing schedule,  you need to consider the power of SECockpit and the tools you are getting for your money.   At the very least, you could sign up for one month, to try it out and see if you agree that it’s the best keyword research tool available.

Bottom line is that I have no hesitation in stating that SECockpit is by far and away, the best keyword research tool I’ve ever come across.

>> Click here to find out more about SECockpit<<

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What is Google +1?

In a nutshell,  Google +1 is a way for people to indicate whether they like a particular piece of content.

It’s Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook’s “Like” button which has virtually become the de-facto standard for sharing and giving a thumbs up for content we like or find interesting.

What Effect Will Google +1 Have On Search Results?

That’s certainly what a lot of people are asking.  At this stage, the effect is quite minimal, but it’s safe to say that if Google +1 takes off in a big way, it will become a much more important factor in search engine rankings.

Here’s what Google has to say about it:

+1 helps people discover relevant content—a website, a Google search result, or an ad—from the people they already know and trust. Adding the +1 button to your pages lets users recommend your content, knowing that their friends and contacts will see their recommendation when it’s most relevant—in the context of Google search results.

When a signed-in Google user is searching, your Google search result snippet may be annotated with the names of the user’s connections who’ve +1′d your page. If none of a user’s connections has +1′d your page, your snippet may display the aggregate number of +1′s your page has received.

and particularly this quote is revealing:

Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.

Notice that Google says that they’ll be seeing how Google _+1 is used and adjusting their search algorithms accordingly.

Should I Start Using Google +1?

Regardless of whether Google +1 actually takes off or not, it certainly doesn’t hurt to start implementing it on your sites.   The worst that can happen is that it will unused or ignored and you can remove it at a later date.

However, if Google +1 does take off, it is a great advantage to get in early to establish some ratings on your sites.

Implementing Google +1 is pretty simple.  You can either generate a code snippet to add to you site at:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button

or if you have a WordPress site, then you can use the Google +1 WordPress Plugin from WPMU.org

Given Google +1 is quite new, there aren’t too many Google +1 plugins at this stage, but I’m sure that plenty more will be developed and that Google +1 will be incorporated into the popular social bookmarking plugins.

Hopefully you’ll notice this article has Google +1 buttons at the top and bottom of the article.

Cheers