seo tools Archives • Page 2 of 3 • Identity Developments

August 17, 2012May 18, 2022

14 Excel Tips for SEO and Beyond

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “SEO: Using Excel for Keyword Analysis.”

Excel is without a doubt the SEO tool I use most frequently. Excel helps me organize my thoughts, decide which keywords or pages to focus on, illustrate key concepts, and even draft rudimentary content. Of course you can use these tips for far more than SEO analysis. Unfortunately, some of these features are only available in Excel 2010. For full descriptions of each item and how I use them in my daily SEO work, please click through to Practical eCommerce: “SEO: Using Excel for Keyword Analysis.”

Favorite Excel 2010 Formulas

VLOOKUP
SUMIFS
IF ISERROR
CONCATENATE

Favorite Excel 2010 Menu Items

Freeze Panes
Remove Duplicates
Manual Calculation

Favorite Excel 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts

Highlight Range: Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Key.
Move to End: Ctrl+Arrow Key.
Filter: Ctrl+Shift+L.
Delete: Alt+E, D.
Insert > Cells: Alt+I, E.
Paste Special > Values: Alt+E, S, V.
Transpose Rows and Columns: Alt+E, S, E.
Escape.

These are some of the commands, formulas and shortcuts I use day in and day out in Excel 2010. Sometimes it’s ugly, sometimes it’s kludgy, but it always gets the job done. What are your favorite time-saving Excel shortcuts?

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

February 24, 2012August 29, 2021

BloomReach: SEO Automated at Last?

Read more in my latest article at Practical Ecommerce, BloomReach to Change SEO Technology?.

Can relevance platform BloomReach change the SEO technology landscape? Bet on it.

Making search engine optimization more scalable, effective & efficient is the holy grail of all SEO platforms. Many measure different SEO datapoints and offer recommendations for marketers to implement. Some platforms actually implement SEO automatically. But well funded newcomer BloomReach debuted this week the most interesting solution in years with its Web Relevance Engine and BloomSearch service.

BloomReach’s head of marketing, Joelle Kaufman, was quick to say that it is not an SEO platform. It’s about “creating the most relevant user experience possible on any page,” she told me. The new platform is focused on improving user experience and conversion by exposing content —such as descriptions on a product page and user reviews —and algorithmically improving its relevance to search terms. Essentially, what BloomReach does is suck hoards of data from a merchant’s site, web analytics, product feeds, social media streams, competitors’ sites and more into its Web Relevance engine by means of an API. BloomReach semantically analyzes the data, determines relevance, decides which pages need additional content and links, and deploys the appropriate content algorithmically to the appropriate pages through its three services: “BloomSearch” for SEO, “BloomLift” for PPC, and “BloomSocial” for social media marketing. The infographic below makes the process a bit simpler to understand.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

November 29, 2011August 29, 2021

5 SEO Conversion Tools

My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

The quickest path to earning more from an ecommerce site’s organic search traffic is to convert more consumers who already go there. So many SEO strategies focus on driving more visitors, but what use is driving more searchers to a site that can’t convert them? ZenithOptimedia, a large advertising and marketing firm, predicted in 2010 that “$56.8 billion will be spent this year on generating website traffic, but only 2%-3% of visitors will actually convert.” Given, that’s across all marketing channels, but the typical ecommerce site’s organic search conversion rates tend to hover around that same 2 percent to 3 percent.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

November 17, 2011August 29, 2021

Link Stalking the Web Piecat Way [LOLcat SEO]

OK, so this isn’t link stalking, it’s a battle over a box. Cats love boxes. Cricket controls the box, but Mittens is definitely interested in acquiring the box for his own uses. And because he’s aggressive, Mittens does indeed become king of the box.

Link stalking is much the same. It’s about determining which links your competitors have that you might fancy having yourself. Unlike Mittens, your reign will not usually be supreme — the typical successful result is that both you and your competitor now have similar links. If this is the only tactic in your link building arsenal, you’ll likely get closer to your competitors’ results but this alone will not beat your competitor. That’s not surprising since there is no single SEO tactic that will beat your competitor, but it’s worth repeating anyway.

Learn more about the link stalking by reading “Link Stalking with Link Diagnosis.”

Like this LOL? Vote it up at http://cheezburger.com/jillkocher/lolz/View/5447259648.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

November 12, 2011August 29, 2021

Competitive Research, the Web Piecat Way [LOLcat SEO]

Cricket, the most neurotic of the Web Piecats, is not hiding. No, she’s spying, and was none too pleased that I was jeopardizing her cover. I tried to tell her that there are much more effective ways to conduct competitive research for organic search, but she wanted to do it her way.

Here are a couple of effective and free ways to spy on your competitors’ SEO tactics, all of which work much better than hiding under paper packing paper:

How about looking at their site for starters, silly kitty. What keywords are they targeting in the title tags and navigation?
Crawl their site to collect all the title tags and linking patterns quickly. See 8 SEO Reasons to Crawl Your Sites for more on using crawlers for SEO.
Check out SpyFu.com to see what terms they’re bidding on and winning in paid and organic search.
Scope their link portfolio with tools like Link Diagnosis or Open Site Explorer.

Like this LOL? Vote it up at http://cheezburger.com/jillkocher/lolz/View/5423868928.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.