Archive for the ‘search’ Category

Online Archive, Not Just a Search Rank Checker

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Ok, after my previous post and looking at things a bit more. I’ve decided to make the search rank checking tool even more of a knowledge base to help track proceedings over time.

The aim now is to include archiving of:

  • Rankings in search results
  • Number of pages indexed in the different search engines
  • Google Page Rank
  • Back link numbers from Google and Yahoo!

Might also look at lower quality metrics such as alexa ranking.

Is there anything you’d recommend archiving?

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Posted in analytics, search, seo, Web | 3 Comments »

Search Rank Checker

Friday, December 19th, 2008

After looking round for a web based search rank checker solution that will keep an archive of rankings. I decided it’ll probably be easier to develop rank checking software to reside on my server.

I’m after your input, what sort of features would you like to see in a web based search rank checking solution?

Proposed Features:

  • Account > Client > Keyword structure
  • Cron setup to run rank checking at selected intervals
  • Graph rankings over time
  • Download CSV export

Once sorted will look to open it up to the public, but in this blog post i’m hoping to get a few ideas around what if any additional functionality I should look to build in. Things like:

  • Search engine selection. Google, Yahoo, live, local variants (Google.co.nz), local variants restricted (Google.co.nz New Zealand only)
  • Competitors rankings along side the selected keywords
  • Number of search results returned
  • Rank checking frequency. Monthly, Fortnightly, Weekly or Daily

Your input is valuable for this project.  So please let me know what you’d like to see and try and work it in.

Also if you’re interested in taking it out for a trial run. Drop a comment and I will update you on when it’s stable enough for a trial.

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Posted in search, Web | 4 Comments »

Second Page Search Result Traffic Tracking in Google Analytics

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

Yesterday I came across this great post: Tracking Referrals from Second Page of Google in Google Analytics

Setup is basic:

  • Add a filter to identify if the referal contains page number information
    Setup details
    Filter Type: Custom Filter >Advanced
    Field A –> Extract A: Referral > (?|&)(start)=([^&]*)
    Output To-> Constructor: User Defined > $A3
    Field A Required: Yes
    Field B Required: No
    Override Output Field: Yes
    Case Sensitive: No
  • Create an advanced segment that selects the user defined information set by the filter above
    Dimension > Visitor > User Defined > Starts with > 10

From an SEO point of view, this information can be used to identify potential keywords that need a little boost to get to the first page of results and if acted on correctly could result in significant increases in traffic.

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Posted in analytics, search, seo, Web | 1 Comment »

Google Service Updates – Reviewed

Monday, December 1st, 2008

Google, Inc.Image via WikipediaA lot has happened with a number of Google services over last few weeks, i’ve summarised them below:

Google SearchWiki

To my frustration, Google launched SearchWiki. Allowing Google users to re-rank and comment on  search results. The frustration comes with automatically opting in everyone that is logged in when searching, with no ability to turn off the extra visual aspects now cluttering up the search results.

Google Analytics Update

Some great new Analytics features rolled out in this update. Personally I particularily like the advanced segmentation, allowing more detailed reports on specific areas of the site, specific referers and more. Love that! One thing that seems a bit buggy is the account screen when you just log in. I’ve got access to multiple accounts, navigating to additional account pages doesn’t seem work.

Google AdWords Update

A couple of interesting updates for AdWords.

  • Quality score improvements, where the quality score is calculated at time of the search. This for me have helped the accounts managed to get higher placement, higher click through rates and higher number of clicks. All this without increasing cost per clicks.
  • A new search based keyword tool was launched. This tool seems pretty sweet! and can help to identify additional keywords that is relevant to your sites content also allows running some competitor analysis.
  • Display ad builder allows you to create image ads online and run on the content network.

Ok, the floors all yours, go on…  leave a comment or two on your experience on these new changes.

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Posted in analytics, search, seo | No Comments »

Google Latest Site Links

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Looks like google is playing with the idea of using latest posts as sitelinks
new google site links

seo blog

nzherald

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Posted in search, seo | 6 Comments »

Yahoo Searchscan and Your Business

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Yahoo has teamed up with McAfee setup searchscan and displays information within the search results.

Now from a user point of view this is a good thing, it adds an extra safety net to their everyday internet usage. Making the end user aware of any issues regarding a particular search result.

When it comes business, its another precaution step that you take for your everyday workings. You need to make sure that you don’t get flagged within these results, especially when the reason is to do with your business and the services offered. (see image below)

Yahoo Seo Search

If you’re wanting to check your own website you can go to McAfee Siteadvisor and perform an analysis report like this one for webhelp.co.nz

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Posted in business, search, seo | 5 Comments »

Google AdWords Display URL Policy Hasn’t Taken Effect…yet

Friday, April 4th, 2008

According to Google the change in display URL policy was meant to come into effect on the 1st of April 2008. Now its the 4th of April and I am still seeing ads with an invalid display url.

In New Zealand and searching for plumbers

Plumbers AdWords

When clicking through this ad it takes you to “http://sites.yellow.co.nz/site/tricklebanks/

The display url is missing the .nz, allowing them to run multiple ads for the one keyword. This is what the policy change was to eliminate, wasn’t it?

I’d like to hear your views on this.

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Posted in advertising, search, Web | No Comments »

Refferal Spam

Friday, April 4th, 2008

Refferal Spam

I was doing some competitor research the other day and while I was searching the competitors domain in Google I found many serps that included pages from multiple website stats packages.

Clicking through it was obvious that these sites were victim of referrer spam. With links to porn and gambling sites. Sites like these exploit the stats package to generate backlinks to their site for free and without the site owner knowing about it.

If you are running some server stats package be sure to restrict access to the folder containing these stats. It doesn’t look good if your domain is associated with these bad neighbourhoods

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Posted in search, seo, Web | No Comments »

Google AdWords All Messed Up

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Sometimes people get the fundamentals of keyword insertion so wrong when creating ads for google adwords. I have seen this done a few times, usually it is because the dynamic keyword insertion hasn’t been implemented correctly.

Compete.com AdWords done wrongThis is such a bad look. Especially when you get some high profile site such as compete.com. The good thing about this is it makes the rest of us look good. 🙂

Another fundamental issue that I see all the time is when the display url isn’t consistant with the destination page. This here is going to catch so many people out when Google update their display URL policy on April the 1st.

Sometimes the little things count for so much.

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Posted in advertising, search, Web | No Comments »

5 Things I Would Like To See In Google Analytics

Monday, February 4th, 2008

I use Google Analytics quite a bit over a number of sites. But there’s some things I would like to see:

  1. Weekly, monthly and yearly trends rather than the current daily trends.
  2. Site performance stats such as page load times and server uptime
  3. Multi path funnels
  4. Search bot stats
  5. Real time stats

I’m sure theres more, feel free to add any others in the comments

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Posted in analytics, search, seo, Web | 4 Comments »

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