SEO tools like WebCEO or SEO Elite are normally used to track rankings of keywords. It is also possible to check them manually which is fine for a few selected keywords but impossible for webmasters who track hundreds or even thousands of keywords.

I recently came upon a post on a blog that explained how to track Google rankings in Google Analytics. It did not work at first and I had to fix an error before the ranking tracking was actually working. Below is now the explanation on how to track a website’s ranking in Google.

You start by adding a new profile to an existing website. Start by clicking on the Add New Profile link on the right side of the overview of all websites that have been added to Google Analytics.

Now select to add a profile for an existing domain, select the domain from the drop down list and give it a unique name, e.g. website rankings. A click on continue will create the new website profile which will initially track the same data that the original profile is tracking.

You will be taken back to the profile overview page. Click on the edit link next to the newly created profile. Click on the Add Filter link on the right lower side of the profile detail page.

We need to create three new filters:

Filter name: Ranking 1
Filter type: Custom filter – Include
Filter field: Campaign Medium
Filter pattern: organic

Filter name: Ranking 2
Filter type: Custom filter – Include
Filter field: Campaign Source
Filter pattern: google

Filter name: Ranking 3
Filter type: Custom filter – Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Campaign term, (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Referral, (\?|&)cd=([^&]*)
Output To -> User Defined: $A1 (position: $B2)

It then takes a few hours before the first rankings can be checked as the new profile will start tracking traffic beginning with the time it was created.

The rankings are then accessible by clicking on Visitors > User Defined when checking the stats of a website. They look like this

And there you have it. A dead easy way to track keyword rankings in Google.

Related posts

• Test Google’s Next-Generation Search Engine Infrastructure (3)
• Blogging Tips (10)
• An Advice on Buying and Selling Websites (0)
• A Niche Marketer’s SEO Toolbox (17)
• Wordpress SEO: Advanced Nofollow (3)

It is not often that a search engine invites users to test it’s search infrastructure. Google invited webmasters yesterday to test out their next-generation search engine infrastructure. Interested users can point their web browsers to http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ to perform a live test.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Webmasters usually have the advantage of being able to check how their websites rank for certain keywords which makes it easier for them to spot differences. Most users who commented in the original post at the Google webmasters website mentioned that search results in the new search engine would be more relevant. It was also noted that less spam websites would occupy a position on the first three search results pages.

A quick test for some of the keywords that Ghacks ranks for did not reveal any major changes. Please post your opinion about Google’s next-generation search infrastructure in the comments.

Related posts

• Spice Up Google Search With Google Fx (4)
• SortFix Adds Visual Aids To Search (6)
• Perform Plain Google Searches Without Video, Image And News Results (0)
• How To Track Google Keyword Rankings In Google Analytics (7)
• Google Squared Launches (4)

There are obviously two factors that play a role here. The amount of traffic that can come from Twitter depends largely on the Twitter users who post links pointing to a website on Twitter. The more users and the higher their follower count the better. It certainly depends on the content as well but the content is usually of interest if it is posted by a user.

Some webmasters like to monitor the dynamic process more thoroughly. The default Twitter search engine is no real help when it comes to discovering links pointing to a specific url or website on Twitter. BackTweets is a third party search engine that offers more reliable results. A search for ghacks.net would reveal nine results at the Twitter search engine and more than 4000 results at the BackTweets engine.

Results display the Twitter user who made the post, the post contents and the time it was posted. A click on the user icon or name will open the Twitter user page. A good way of finding new users to follow (and to thank them for posting links). An advanced search form is available as well which can be used to search in a specific date range or by Twitter user.

Backtweets is an interesting service for webmasters who want to analyse and increase the traffic that Twitter is sending to their websites.

Related posts

• Twitter Real Time Search (4)
• How Webmasters use social sites to create a keyword monopoly (1)
• Follow Social Media Conversations With Spy (1)
• Yahoo Meme Opens Registrations For Anyone (1)
• Yahoo Meme Invites (47)

FireFox – This isn’t really a SEO tool per se, but more of a requirement. Most SEO tools on the Internet require FireFox and the reason is simple: FireFox allows plugins. FireFox is an amazing browser which has gained astounding ground since its release leaving Internet Explorer to the not-so-tech-savvy and those who are currently using Internet Explorer to download FireFox!

NoDoFollow – This is very handy tool to find whether links on a site are no-follow or do-follow. When doing SEO for Google, Internet marketers prefer their site’s back links to be do-follow. Do-follow back links raise a website up in Google SERPs more so than no-follow links. It’s important to know whether a site gives do-follow links or no-follow links when doing link building. The NoDoFollow Firefox plugin (yes, you’re going to need FireFox for this one) allows link builders to differentiate between do-follow and no-follow links.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Anyone looking to earn money from creating and doing search engine optimization on niche sites will have to do keyword research. Those versed in SEO already know this, but there are a lot of SEO newbies out there who have neve rheard of keyword research. This is extremely important. Doing keyword research often means the difference of making cents or dollars online. It’s a good idea to know which keywords make money and which don’t before spending time and money doing SEO for a site. Doing keyword research prevents that time and money from being wasted — most of the time. Surprisingly, there are a lot of people who don’t even do keyword research!

SEO for Firefox Extension – This is a major time saver. Those who’ve ever had a full piggy bank as a child and counted out all the change before taking it to the bank where the teller just dumped the change into a machine that counts the change in a matter of seconds can appreciate the time saved with this addon. Those on dial-up will also appreciate this. When doing keyword research it’s important to know the Google Page Rank of a site and how many back links from Yahoo of probably hundreds of sites depending on how many keywords researched. Instead of inputting each site into some online Page Rank checking and manually going to Yahoo to find how back links a site has, this tool allows Googlers to see ALL this information and more right in Google search when they’re researching each individual keyword.

Website Marketing SEO Score Tool – This is actually pretty cool. This tool gives web site owners to see what’s wrong with their website. This tool gives each site a score and tells what could be done differently. Of course, anyone can manually check all this stuff themselves, but this is great for a nice pick me up and it can be used as a learning tool.

All in One SEO Pack – Have a niche site? If so, you probably use WordPress. I’m not making fun of Blogger users, but those using WordPress do have a significant SEO advantage over those who use Blogger. If you’re a niche site person like me, you’ve probably got WordPress. This tool configures WordPress blogs to be very SEO friendly and is highly popular among literally the whole niche marketing crowd. It’s important not to use something because it’s popular, but because it works. However, this is popular for a reason.

Related posts

• Test Google’s Next-Generation Search Engine Infrastructure (3)
• An Advice on Buying and Selling Websites (0)
• x Ways To Manipulate Websites In Firefox (6)
• Spice Up Google Search With Google Fx (4)
• Protect your privacy from Google AdSense’s new behavioral ads (17)

The program will then analyze the text and display various statistics about it in the lower half of the interface. Statistics are divided into the three tabs General, Word Statistics and Unique Words. General lists the word and unique word count, lines and full size of the text.

The Word Statistics tab displays all words of the text including the time they have been used and their percentage. Next to that are word phrases and their occurrence in the text. The Unique Words tab lists all unique words of the text document.

The information provided by the text analysis might be interesting for webmasters who optimize their text for search engines.

Text Analyzer is compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5.

Related posts

• Search Engine Position Check (8)
• ZoneScreen Finally Gets 64-bit Update (6)
• ZC DVD Creator Platinum [Free Full Version] (16)
• Youtube Videos Downloader TubeQueue (14)
• Youtube Video Search Is A Barebone Youtube Downloader (2)

Advanced tips are not that easy to come by and most websites running a Wordpress blog do not have them implemented. This article will list some options that center around the nofollow tag. Nofollow basically tells search engines like Google to not count the link vote that is usually being passed when linking on the Internet. Why is that beneficial? A website has a certain linking power. Each link that is pointing to internal and external resources gets a piece of that linking power. Not all pages should be treated equally however which is what this article is about. It makes for example no sense to pass linking power to internal pages that you do not want to link for, think of privacy policies, contact pages, login, log off or social bookmarking links.

Wordpress themes come with a surprising amount of links, the majority of which is not set to nofollow. Here are a few areas where you should consider placing the nofollow link tag in a Wordpress blog:

• The more (read more) tag. The page is already linked from the title of the post properly.
• Wordpress meta data
• Pages like Privacy Policies, Contact Us
• Social Bookmarking links

To add the nofollow link one would simply add the rel="nofollow"
tag to the link structure which is not a problem if the link is displayed in the source code of the theme, for example:

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example Link</a>

There are however links (like the previously mentioned more tag) that cannot be manipulated in the theme source as the link is created by a php function.

Here is how you make the more tag in Wordpress nofollow:

• Open the file post-template.php in the wp-includes folder.
• Locate the following line beginning with:

  $output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink()..

• Replace it with:

  $output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink() . "#more-$id\" class=\"more-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">$more_link_text</a>";

• You basically add the rel=\"nofollow\" tag to the line

This ensures that all more tags will be nofollow from then on.

Related posts

• Wordpress Hack: Change Number Of Comments Per Page In Admin Interface (4)
• Wordpress Blogs: Create Custom Tag Pages (5)
• Search Engine Position Check (8)
• Exclude Categories From Wordpress Feeds (4)
• An Advice on Buying and Selling Websites (0)

Apart from the reason that content is weighed most heavily by Google, all other so called “methods” are temporary. In the beginning there was the “fill your site with invisible keywords” method. The point of this was to create a huge chunk of text containing keywords, and setting its visibility to none. This means its still in the code, so Google sees it, but users don’t. Try that now and you’ll get a ban in seconds. Then came the meta tags period where people used to give huge-long descriptions and lengthy meta keyword lists. While not such a ’sin’, it won’t give you what you’re looking for.

My point is that everyone wants to cheat search engines and while it is of course a possibility, its only a matter of time before they get ahead of you. If you’re lucky you fall back a few hundred places, if not, you’re banned. As with every other business you have to work at it. I mean gHacks has 4,851 posts right now, over almost four years, that’s about 3.5 posts every day. Not all are written by Martin nowadays, but I bet he started the blog alone, and up until not too long ago he had a day job.

So if you want to go instantly to number one, you really need a great idea, like Twitter, Remember The Milk and so on. Otherwise you will have to keep at it. if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’ll find so many little successes on the way. When I started my own blog, Hack Your Day after about a 5 days if you typed “Hack Your Day” into Google I was at number 8-9, Hack a Day, Lifehack and so on were in front of me. After a month or so I was at number 1. This is of course of no use at all, but still a small victory, showing I’m doing something right.

If you’re doing a project on the web, especially a blog, keep in mind that you won’t be successful in a matter of days, it will most like take years if it ever happens at all. Hey, if it was easy, where would the challenge be?

Related posts

• Blogging Tips (10)
• Wordpress SEO: Advanced Nofollow (3)
• Wordpress 2.8 (5)
• Webmasters: Search For Links Posted On Twitter (3)
• Web CEO Free (1)

Someone who wants to earn money from blogging needs traffic more than anything else. It is not hard to put Google Adsense on a blog and earn money with it. The ad might not be optimized but it will still earn money if the blog receives traffic. Without traffic, there will be no money no matter how optimized or clever the ad units are.

Blogging for a period of three years teaches a lot if you are eager to learn. Bloggers learn about search engine optimization which is a profession in itself, about monetization, about the blogging plattform, how to interact with visitors / customers / fellow bloggers and more.

It’s a steep learning curve but if you master it you will be successful. Here are a few blogging tips that helped me a lot:

• Keep Going: That’s the most important part of it all. Many bloggers give up after blogging for a few weeks because they cannot see that traffic comes in. No visitors equals low motivation and that’s usually the point when they decide to quit.

  Some search engines apply an automatic filter to new websites (some call it sandbox) that prevents them from ranking for popular keywords to avoid spam. It is natural that new sites will not rank well for terms like business or credit cards while they will have lesser problem ranking for long tail keywords.

• Keywords: Speaking of which. Keywords are the essence of a blog. Search engines analyse blog posts and pick out keywords that they think the blog post is about. They then give the keyword a score and compare it to other sites that rank for that keyword and place the new website on a specific rank in the search engine for that keyword. Other factors may weight in like the new blog filter but that’s basically how it works.

  If bloggers are serious about traffic generation they need to understand the keyword concept and how they do keyword research. Keyword research meaning to find profitable low competition keywords that the blog can most likely rank well for.

• Long Tail Keywords: Long Tail refers to keywords that are very specific and usually consist of a few words. Blog is not a long term keyword while How To Create A Blog is. Long Tail keywords receive less traffic than their more generic counterparts but that traffic is usually targeted.
• Build a Network: If you blog on your own you will miss opportunities. It is impossible keeping up with all the news and trends related to blogging. A network of bloggers that target the same niche can help each other in several ways. If they come upon an interesting topic or option they will inform their fellow bloggers about it. They can also promote the blogs of other network members in their own blogs.
• Don’t read the Chows: Don’t read the blogs of those so called probloggers. The only thing they usually care about is their own bankroll. The products that they promote will earn them money because other bloggers will join or buy them because of their recommendations but there will be no or small gain for the little guy who bought the product. Their sites are about an image that they have to keep up and about upselling products to newbies. Stay away from them. Look at my link list for recommendations.

Here is a short link list:

• Make Money For Beginners
• Internet Marketing School
• Seo Zombie
• Google Adwords Keywords Tool (Keyword Research)
• Wordtracker Free Keywords (Keyword Research)
• SEO Quake (Firefox Extension)

If you read the three blogs posted above you will learn a lot in short time. Those are honest bloggers who do not try to sell you yet another “make money in no time” product that only works for them because they can sell it to you.

Seo Zombie is a site that I discovered a while ago and the guy does a good job as well, his Keyword Sniping Case Study sounds interesting and might be a great way to learn if he continues posting updates.

The keyword research tools are essential to discover keywords that can be target that pay well and have enough traffic to make them worthwhile.

Seo Quake finally is a Firefox extension that displays all kinds of “SEO” information like Pagerank, links and domain age on the screen.

If you have any questions about blogging let me know and I try to answer them.

Related posts

• Why content is king on the internet (5)
• Webmasters. Listen. Please! (14)
• Test Google’s Next-Generation Search Engine Infrastructure (3)
• How To Track Google Keyword Rankings In Google Analytics (7)
• Blogging with Blogger from your desktop with BloGTK (5)

Professional webmasters use search engine optimization software to check the search engine position of their keywords. Those software applications provide a history, comparison and access to hundreds of other information that can all be useful in determining why a website is ranking the way it is.

Low budget webmasters have to either rely on manual searches which is so time consuming that one could spend a whole day checking a few dozen keywords in the major search engines.

That’s where SERPs Finder comes into play. The basic SEO tool can check the search engine position of a given keyword in the major three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Windows Live).

It checks the first hundred results only for Google who like to temporarily ban an IP from their search engine if excessive use has been detected. The other two search engines are checked for the first 1000 results.

It is only possible to check the results in one search engine at a time. The user will be notified if the website is found in the results and the search engine position checker will load that search result’s page in the default browser.

SERP’s Finder is no tool for webmasters who want to check hundreds of keywords but it is great for small websites with only a few keywords.

Related posts

• Wordpress SEO: Advanced Nofollow (3)
• Analyzing Text With Text Analyzer (3)
• Why content is king on the internet (5)
• Webmasters: Search For Links Posted On Twitter (3)
• Web CEO Free (1)

Keeping track of rankings can however be a tedious task, even if you have one website and only a few keywords that you want to observe. With five keywords and three search engines it would mean that you would have to perform 15 searches and click through several pages until you find your website in the results. Now assume you do not have one website and five keywords but ten websites and 50 or even 100 keywords.

You would be sitting in front of your computer all day searching for keywords and writing down the rankings of your websites that you find. That’s where SEO software is extremely helpful. You add a url, the keywords, choose the search engines and let it do the rest. It takes only minutes to compile the results which gives you time for other tasks.

There are a handful of SEO programs available, most sell for $100+ Dollars which is an investment that most site owners do not want to make, especially when they are in the beginning stages.

Web Ceo is one of those softwares that sells for $339 normally. The company however is clever enough to offer a free version of their product which does not have all the functions that professional webmasters would need but enough to keep track of several web projects.

It offers four basic functions, these are: Find your niche, promote your site, analyze your site and maintain your site.

Find your Niche:

Find your Niche helps you find the relevant keywords that you should target in the search engines. This is done by a number of ways including analysis of the website, of competitors or of search engine results. It helps you optimize your pages for certain keywords and gives advice on changes that could affect search engine rankings positively.

Promote your Site:

Offpage SEO is probably the most important aspect of it all. You can build a highly optimized website that does not rank well because it has virtually no incoming links. This function lets you find possible link partners, manage pay per click campaigns and submit urls.

Analyze your site:

Check the websites ranking in the search engines, get traffic reports and analyze the link popularity. This is a great way to observer search engine rankings for your website and that of your competitors.

Everything can be scheduled so that rankings are updated regularly. As I said earlier Web Ceo is available in a free version which should be sufficient for most webmasters. There is however a promotion going on currently where you can buy the smallbiz version for $149 instead of $339 and the professional version for $249 instead of $479. (smallbiz for all webmasters, professional more aimed toward SEO professionals)

My suggestion would be to test the free version. This version should be sufficient for most webmasters. If you run into limitations and like the software you can still make a purchase. I for one am perfectly happy with the free version.

Related posts

• Test Google’s Next-Generation Search Engine Infrastructure (3)
• Stay Away From Dreamhost (16)
• How to link and how not to (7)
• Google Adsense Revenue and Traffic Comparision (4)
• Check, Log and React on Website Downtimes (3)

We have two different approaches though. The first is to get a so called double ranking. If two pages of a website are on the same results page the lower ranking one gets moved just below the higher ranking one. If you have the number 1 spot the lower ranking one will get the number 2 spot even if it would only qualify for number 9 or 10.

That’s two spots of ten already. What happens if you submit a site to a social news or bookmarking website ? Right, it gets a new entry in the search engines that points to the original url that the marketer wants to promote. Many social sites like Digg have such a high standing at Google that their results are often seen in the top 10 or 20 if you search for a keyword.

There is another way that is currently possible. Google treats subdomains as if they were different domains. Marketers create keyword rich subdomains that are pushed in the search engines as well. So, even if you expect to see 10 different results the reality could be different.

Related posts

• Use Onlywire to drive traffic to your website (7)
• Why Stumbleupon is better than Digg for Webmasters (11)
• Webmasters: Search For Links Posted On Twitter (3)
• Manage your Delicious Bookmarks locally (3)
• Fichey Digital Microfiche (0)

Let me give you an example to make this clear. If you search for Click Here in Google you will see that the first result is a page at Adobe, to be precise the download page of Adobe Reader. You won’t find the phrase on that website but it still ranks as number one for that term. Why is that ? Because other websites that link to this page are using the keyword Click Here as the anchor text.

And here begins the dilemma for the average webmaster, Adobe could care less because they are a huge company. Lets say you write an awesome article about Windows 7, the new operating system of Microsoft. If someone links to your blog with the anchor text Windows 7 or Windows 7 review you will get a vote from that website for that keyword and your ranking in the search engines might improve.

It actually will improve if you get enough votes. The article is about Windows 7, you get votes for that keyword, that’s awesome. Right ! That’s the correct way of linking to another website because it is helping the other website in the search engines which attracts more visitors that visit that website.

Many websites however use a sites name, or even worse phrases like here, website or click here to link to other websites. Those average terms do not help the linked websites at all. They do not hurt either but they cast votes in a field with a competition in the hundreds of million. Not that helpful.

So, if you want to help a website and write an article about a story that you found on another website you should use a related anchor tag to help that website – that is, unless you want to rank better for that term.

Related posts

• Check For Broken Links on Websites (2)
• Website Information (2)
• Webmasters. Listen. Please! (14)
• Web CEO Free (1)
• Use Multiple Internet Explorer Versions Simultaneously (10)

Here are a few sites and forums that have categories for website sales: Digitalpoint, Namepros and Sitepoint. I’m sure you can find dozens more easily.

The first thing that you can do is to check on various markets. Which sites and topics sell well, which do not. If you have a blog or website compare the traffic level and revenue with your own. Check all the advertisers and try to get into their advertising program as well to earn more money with your website.

But that is not the main advice and tip of this article. Buyers post all sorts of information when selling websites. Traffic level, earnings, visitors, search engine rankings, advertising schemes, number of pages, how many users have signed up for the newsletter and much more.

And here is what you can do with that information. Check Google and other search engines for the main keywords, see if those keywords spill out lots of websites writing about the same topic. If you only find blog posts for example you might have hit a gold mine.

Instead of buying that website for several thousand Dollars you build a website around the main keywords and theme. The main benefits should be clear.

1. You know the main keywords and can research additional ones that bring in additional users
2. You know that there are not many competing websites and that you can get a top 10 position easily with some SEO (onsite and offsite)
3. You know which traffic levels and earnings you can expect from that website, even if it would only rank 2nd or 3rd on the main keywords
4.Instead of paying hundreds or thousands of Dollars you only pay for a domain name, some hours of your time and some basic SEO (links)

This leads to the Advice to the buyer of a website. There will be others who will try to get some piece of the cake by building a website that looks similar to yours. This means that it very well can be that your traffic levels and or revenue will drop if you do not continue to work on the website.

A website with strong keyword links is much safer than one that only has a dozens of links and still takes the top spot in Google because of zero competing websites.

That’s it. A quick post, all thought up and written in about 10 minutes. Opinions ?

Related posts

• Test Google’s Next-Generation Search Engine Infrastructure (3)
• A Niche Marketer’s SEO Toolbox (17)
• Wordpress SEO: Advanced Nofollow (3)
• Why is Google.com redirecting me to another Google domain ? (27)
• Using Google to find Free Mp3 files (3)

If you do that regularly this becomes a tedious time consuming process. I like to automate stuff like that. Autofill Forms is a Firefox extension that lets you fill out web forms with the click of the mouse / pressing a keyboard shortcut. It is possible to create profiles in case that you are using more than one identity on the Internet or use the extension for work and spare time.

You can fill out a lot of variables like name, username, street, city, phone and several others with the option to add new ones to that list or edit existing fields. This is important because the extension uses possible form field names to identify forms on the website.

By default it assigns the birthday to forms that have the name byear, birthyear, birth-year or dob-year. It would be possible to add ‘date of birth’ to that list and every other phrase that comes to your mind.

It is possible to set rule priorities and add site specific rules. Profiles can be exported which is excellent if you work with different computers. The default keyboard shortcut for filling out a form is ALT + J.

Read More:

Autofill Forms

Related posts

• Web CEO Free (1)
• Test Google’s Next-Generation Search Engine Infrastructure (3)
• How to link and how not to (7)
• Yahoo Server Monitor Widget (0)
• XML Escape Tool (0)