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The use of meta tags in web pages are often required by search engines as a source of information to help them to decide how to list and rank your website. Meta Tags are not always required, but as a rule of thumb, it makes more sense to take advantage of them than to leave them out.
It is a simple process to add Meta Tags to web pages. We have created this free Meta Tag generator, to help you make the most of your submissions.
Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Heck, we’ve been blogging about SMO since 2006! Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search.
The changing nature of social media marketing and optimization create the need for tools whether for research, marketing and promotion or analytics. Here are 11 social media and SEO tools you might find useful:
Below are screen shots of each tool with a more detailed description of how you might use them.
HowSociable is a useful tool to quickly gauge the social presence of a particular keyword or brand name. Agencies like TopRank Marketing will use this kind of tool (customized) to take snapshots of customer social presence metrics for social media optimization programs. For each social site polled, you can clickthrough to see specific mentions. This is a characteristic of more advanced social media monitoring tools, but for those that want a quick glimpse, HowSocialble is easy to use and the price is right, just like these free social media monitoring tools. However, if you want more comprehensive brand search and monitoring, then a paid social media measurement tool is worth the investment.
KnowEm is both a free and a paid service that will help you easily and quickly check whether your brand terms or other keywords have been registered as social profiles on a wide variety of social media web sites. Everything from blogging platforms to social news and bookmarking services are included. If you don’t want to complete all those profiles yourself, you can pay knowem to do it for you. Companies invest a lot in building their brand, so this tool is helpful both for creating off site promotion channels as well as guarding against brand name squatters.
Social Media for Firefox is the only browser addon in our list and can be a handy tool to identify upcoming news items that are gaining popularity on certain social news and bookmarking services. A big part of building a more influential user profile is to be a consistent source of submissions for articles that become popular. This addon helps identify articles that are becoming popular on services like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon giving you a heads up to submit to other services. The logic is that if a news item becomes popular on one service it has a good chance of becoming popular on others. Relevance, timing and focus are key as is patience for this kind of tactic.
SEMRush is an interesting tool for identifying the keyword visibility, both organic and PPC, on Google for pretty much any domain name you might be curious about. Your own or competitors for example. A common question for marketers is, “What are my competitors optimizing for?”. This tool helps uncover that insight and in combination with other standard and social keyword research, can be very helpful insight in a social media optimization program.
Google Insights for Search is a handy tool to research trends in popularity of various keywords on their own or in combination. Filters for search type, geographic location, industry or topical category and timeframe allow you to refine some pretty useful information about what’s in demand.
Eric Miraglia ’s Inlink Analyzer is a back link analysis tool based on Yahoo’s Site Explorer that not only counts and displays source links to a particular URL, but it also shows if the source links were bookmarked on Delicious and what keyword tags were used. This kind of insight can be quite useful for understanding the relationship between social keywords and link popularity. It would be nice if there was a CSV export option.
Majestic SEO is easily one of the most powerful and useful link analysis tools available. There is a free version that gives you link acquisition counts over time and if you are a site owner, you can get full reporting for your site once you validate it. If you use the paid service, you can get the juicy link details on your competition. This tools is useful for finding high impact links for standard SEO but it’s also useful for finding out which social media sites your site or competitors’ site are getting the most links from. Also, which of your own social destinations (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are getting inbound links and from where.
Andy Beal’s Trackur service is a very easy to use social media monitoring tool that offers a free version that will satisfy many beginners in the social media optimization space. Social media monitoring services are keyword based, (queries and negative or exclusionary) and that means some very useful information about how popular certain keyword concepts are on the social web. Of course you can use it to monitor what people are saying about your brand, identify a certain measure of influence and where they’re saying it. But seeing social keyword popularity trends can be quite useful for taking advantage of real-time marketing opportunities.
SocialMention is a free real time and social search tool that offers an array of search options (just blogs, just forums, just bookmarks or all) and output in the search results. You can get an indication of basic sentiment and the top social keywords associated with your query. As a free service, you don’t setup an account and save your search results, but you can easily download them into a spreadsheet. This is probably one of the most useful, free social search tools online.
Bit.ly URL shortening is very handy since they’re included as a default service on Twitter and many other Twitter applications. Bit.ly is rock solid reliable with uptime, which is pretty critical when you’re relying on their URL redirect to send traffic to whatever it is you’re promoting. You can also get basic statistics for each URL that your shorten to show how productive the site is where it was shared. In today’s succinct social web with Twitter, status updates and micro-content, being able to conserve space with a reliable URL shortener is very helpful. Stats on top of that make this a “go to” URL shortening service.
PostRank offers a nice measure of engagement at the individual document level and if you pay attention, you can get that data on any web site in their database, not just your own. You can easily see what content on your competitors blogs are getting popular and where. If you sign up for the PostRank Analytics service, you can incorporate Google Analytics data with social engagement metrics. These are essential comparisons in a social media optimization program and can help you understand where to plan your time on the social web.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO and Social Media Marketing tools. What low cost or free tools have you found to be effective for social media optimization tasks?
Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by Pete Hollier in Search Optimization
The age old adage you get what you pay for is in most cases true with the exception of Google Analytic which is free. The Google Analytic application to monitor web site performance is a powerful tool that is often under utilized by many web site owners who just barely scratch the surface of its capabilities.
There are a number of quick check reports that are invaluable to web site owners, some of the more important reports include:
The visitors report provides an indication of how well your web site is engaging your visitors by providing data in the Visitor Summary such as:
Included within the Visitor’s drop down menu are a number of additional reports which are highly recommended depending on your requirements.
Benchmarking report: The Benchmarking Report provides an excellent indication of how well your site performs compares to the average of the competitiors in your niche, and provides a clear indication of whether or not you have to improve your web site promotion strategies. There is one catch to this report, to gain access to this comparative analysis you must agree to share you Analytic data with Google for comparative analysis.
Map Overlay: If your business targets a specific geographic area the Map Overlay is a report you should not ignore. It not only provides a report outlining the country of the visitors origin, but can also drill down to cities to provide you an indication of how well your web site marketing programs are working for such tactics as Local Search or advertising.
Mobile: Viewing the Mobile Report may just offer a few surprises to many web site owners as to how often the web site is being accessed by mobile devices. The Mobile Report may encourage you to consider developing pages specifically for Mobile devices which can potentially offer benefits in Mobile Search.
Visitor Loyalty: The Visitor Loyalty reports include a wealth of information in addition to the Visitor’s Summary Report. Some of the more notable reports providing additional information on how well you are engaging your visitors include:
To monitor and improve your web site promotion initiatives it is important to understand where your web site traffic is originating. Google Analytic provides this information within the Traffic Sources section. Reports of interest include:
Direct Traffic: The Direct Traffic Report provides an indication of the percentage of visitors which have accessed your web site directly, these could be from a Book Mark or typing the URL into a web browser. This report can assist you to determine the level of public awareness of your web site from either off line marketing initiatives, or to some extent Email marketing or Social Media Marketing programs.
Referring Sites: The web sites referring traffic to your web site are an important part of your traffic generating mix. Understanding which sites deliver traffic to your site can indicate the value of the Blogs you comment on regularly, the effectiveness of your Twitter or Facebook presence, and also provides an indication of how well targeted your link building program has been.
Search Engines: Search Engines are the primary reason you implement an Organic Search Engine Optimization Program. The Search Engine Report when read in conjunction with the Keyword Report also under the Traffic Sources tab provides detailed information about which Search Engines are delivering traffic for specific keywords.
The reports under the Content category provide a wealth of information which can assist you to determine web page popularity, and also identify pages which are not performing to their maximum potential. Of particular interest in this section are:
Top Content: The Top Content Report lists your pages from the most to least visited. Within this report is also important page by page data such as Bounce Rate, Time on Page, Exit Rate and if Ecommerce is used on the site, information about the financial value of the page is also provided.
Site Overlay: Ever wondered what links are being clicked on your web site? The Site Overlay Report identifies which links are clicked on each page. This information must be analyzed with some consideration of how important or popular you expect a specific link to be. Also it may indicate that an important link within your site is not properly labeled, or in a poor position if it is not achieving the click throughs you would expect.
Although there is some overlap in many of the reports available through Google Analytic, it is a powerful tool to assist you to determine how well your web site and promotional efforts are performing. The reports reviewed here are the basics which must be reviewed as part of your web site monitoring program. In the weeks to come I will provide additional information on how to really leverage the power of Google advanced analytical processes.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization
This guide provides a complete overview of many of the processes, techniques and strategies used by professional search engine optimization specialists.
http://www.rogertheriault.com/agents/plugins/great-real-estate-plugin/
A real estate content management plugin for WordPress. Initial version allows management of listings.
Need an idea of what it can do? Here’s a live demo:
There are a number of SEO tools I use on a daily basis to help me analyze a client or competitors website. I will use specific tools depending on what type of data I am looking to analyze. These tools can save you a lot of time when researching links, on-page/off-page SEO, social media, ORM, and site analytics.
Best of all.. each of these tools all free!
1. SEO Toolbar
This is by far the best SEO tool out there. No matter what client or industry I am researching, I always start with the data provided by the SEO Toolbar. It will give you a snapshot of a site, by providing high level information search engines analyze when ranking websites. Even though the toolbar will give you lots of different data points, there are only certain things I look at. I look at the follow data to get a basic overview of the site.
2. Xenu
There was a great post written by Ann Smarty that talks about the different things you can do with the Xenu tool.
Basically this tool will allow you to scan and analyze a site to help find potential problems.
This web-based tool, allows you to enter a url and it will analyze the site, then it creates a user-friendly SEO report. This can be an easy report to generate for a potential client. However, sometimes it can be overwhelming for people because of all of the information it returns.
SEO for Firefox is a plugin that will pull in data about the site within the Google search results. I will use this to see how fierce the competition is and to help determine how much effort and time it will take to optimize a potential clients site. The nice thing about SEO for Firefox is the flexibility to only add data into the results that you want to see. These are the data points I pull in:
5. Rank Checker
Rank Checker is a stand alone firefox plugin (also on the SEO Toolbar) that allows you to check the rankings of a site for specific keywords/phrases. One nice feature about Rank Checker is you can check not only US search engines, but foreign versions of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Data I pull from this tool include:
6. AuditMyPC: Sitemap Generator
There are a lot of sitemap generator tools out there, however I feel that this is the best…plus its free.
This tool allows you to see what other domains are on the same server. It is not often, but sometimes if a site that has been penalized by Google is hosted on the same server as your site, it can penalize ALL that are on the shared hosting server. This is another reason why being on your own dedicated server can help your SEO.
There are a number of link analysis tools like Link Diagnosis, BackLink Watch, and Link Assistant, however Yahoo! Site Explorer I feel still does the best job of not only finding backlinks, but ordering them in place of importance. Here are the main things I will look at when analyzing SiteExplorer links.
To see what is being said about a potential or current client, I will use a variety of real-time search engines. I usually will start at SocialMention because it will scour the web including Blogs, Q&A, Forums, Mircoblogs, Social Bookmarks, Events, Video, and News sites for mentionings of your brand or keyword you enter. I can get a better understanding of:
10. Google Analytics
Of course if you have access to a clients Google Analytics you can find out a wealth of knowledge that you wouldn’t be able to gather with free tools anyone can use. When I first look at a sites analyics I will look at certain data including:
With all of these free tools you can learn a lot about a potential/current client and your competitors. You are able to cover a wide spectrum of information including on-page/off-page factors, social media, reputation management, and user engagement. Feel free to try one or all of these tools the next time you perform some research on a site.
By: Drew Meyers, Zillow Business Development Specialist | August 12, 2009
We’re happy to announce we have just finished the Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin that creates “city pages” inside the WordPress interface.
While the most important feature of any agent or brokerage Web site is a robust search interface to find homes for sale, one of the questions home buyers — particularly those relocating — are trying to answer prior to looking at listings is “where should I live?” Home buyers spend an immense amount of time researching areas they are interested in living to get a better feel for the area. So, as an agent or broker, having that local information on your own Web site is a huge benefit to being a complete real estate resource for your clients throughout the buying process.
There are a number of great local real estate Web sites built entirely on top of WordPress. For example, Ines Ines Hegedus-Garcia’s Miamism, Heather Elias’ LoCO Musings, and Jim Duncan’s Real Central VA are three that do this. WordPress is a powerful platform that more and more agents and brokers seem to be utilizing by the day. As many of you know, Zillow is big on syndicating our data to other Web sites, so we’re naturally intrigued with anything that can help us with this effort. While widgets are easy to add to sidebars within WordPress, plugins provide added flexibility above and beyond the possibilities of widgets.
There are a couple of WordPress plugins built using the Zillow API, such as the CMA plugin built by Realivent, but this is our first official entry into the Wordpress plugin game. We think there is huge value in adding real estate market information, but there’s even more value to bloggers if all the most relevant information consumers are looking at when researching places to live is included in their city pages — so we teamed with a few other companies who have complimentary datasets. The plugin pulls school data from Education.com, local amenity data from Yelp, photos from Flickr, and of course, real estate market statistics and recently sold information from the Zillow API.
Here are the modules currently included in the plugin, along with a sample screen shot for each one.
Market Statistics:
About (text editable by you) and Flickr Photos:
Market Activity:
School Data:
Walk Score:
Yelp:
Some details:
If you’d like to see an example of the plugin, I’ve installed it on the Geek Estate Blog as a demo. Here are a few sample pages:
Once you install the plugin, how do you actually use the plugin? A couple possibilities:
<p align=”center”><img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/local-market-explorer/images/badges/120lmegraphorange.gif”></p> <ul> <li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/local/Sammamish/WA/”>Sammamish</a></li> <li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/local/Redmond/WA/”>Redmond</a></li> <li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/local/Issaquah/WA/”>Issaquah</a></li> </ul>
You can download the Local Market Explorer plugin here in the WordPress Plugin Directory. If you have questions, please check the FAQs.
The plugin was built by Jonathan Mabe and Andrew Mattie, both of whom have day jobs with Diverse Solutions (a member of the Zillow API program). I have to extend a huge thanks to them for their great work on this plugin.
For the WordPress bloggers out there — what do you think? Do you have any specific requests for the next version of this plugin? Perhaps more market data, a Twitter module, ability to automatically link to your local pages within blog posts, more flexibility to modify the sidebar widget, or a module that brings in data from Wikipedia? Please leave your feedback on this Zillow Advice thread or in the comments field below.
