Let’s say you have a website that is focused on selling guided walks around Derbyshire. You would create content focused pages about specific walks following all the SEO tips you’d find in our Understanding SEO article.

As your website is indexed by the search engines you would want to start checking on each of your web pages performance in the search engine result pages (SERPs), as we all know, being on the first page for a search term is where you want to be (and at the top being the optimal spot).

So, a website about walks in Derbyshire may have pages optimised for:

• walks with children in Derbyshire
• Ghost walks in Derbyshire
• Country walks in Derbyshire
• Hill walks in Derbyshire

Checking how each page is performing in the search engines for each of those particular keywords can be performed in a few ways but I want to share with you one of the coolest little desktop applications that I have come across in a while.

I’ve be fortunate enough to have access to CuteRank Pro, a Website Ranking Checker that sits nicely on my desktop.

You can download a free version and discover how to get CuteRank Pro by visiting the CuteRank website. The following will walk you through how to quickly set up your profile and monitor your rankings.

Visit the website and follow the instructions to download a copy of the CuteRank software.

After you have successfully downloaded and installed CuteRank you will need to load the software for the first time.

When you fire CuteRank up you’ll want to start by adding the domain you wish to monitor. Click on the ‘New’ button and select ‘new profile’ from the drop down menu.

This is where you input your the domain you wish to monitor.

1. Enter your URL that you wish to monitor.

2. Select the keyword you wish to monitor.

3. Select the search engines you wish to track your ranking in.

Now click OK.

1. This shows the rank for ‘polite seo‘ in the following search engines.

2. This indicates the same info but in graph format (techies love their graphs) allowing you to track your progress over a set timescale.

You would simply now add more keywords to monitor.

As you build up a collection of keywords that you are tracking you can start to export your data in pdf format or CSV.

CuteRank will only allow you to monitor a limited number of keywords unless you are using the PRO version.

Follow the link to discover how you can get your hands on the PRO version for free.

I would say that CuteRank is good at what it does, it doesn’t eat into your computers resources while it is running and it pulls back the results that you want quickly (I tested this up to 50 keywords approx).

Who is CuteRank for? Having tested CuteRank for over a week now I would say it is good for website owners who wish to monitor the performance of their website in the SERPs and it is also good for SEO Consultants who are managing multiple domains.

What’s more, with the current price tag being free and with the ability to get your hands on the CuteRank Pro version by following some simple steps then you really have nothing to lose; CuteRank gets a two thumbs up from me!

Here’s the link again: CuteRank Website Ranking Checker

To your success,

Karl Foxley

If you are not sure what I am talking about then just take a look at the screenshot below of Google Images holding my site in a frame.

Not all sites that hold your site in a frame are bad, my objection is when the offending site has ads plastered everywhere.

Another objection of mine is the traffic I get from Google Images. You see, Google Images brings me a lot of visitors that wish to copy my images to use on their websites or projects, yes, I have tracked the clicks on my site and some of my images show a high click rate indicating the visitor’s intentions.

The simple solution to this is to install a small plugin known as the Frame Buster Wordpress Plugin by Semiologic.

You can download the plugin directly from the site by visiting the Semiologic Frame Buster Wordpress Plugin page or, alternatively, you can download the plugin from the Wordpress Plugins Directory.

Below is a quick video showing the plugin in use. The video opens in a new window (sorry no sound)!

The video shows me clicking through to my site from Google Images, as the page loads, frame buster kicks and forces the site out of the frame.

I am yet to discover any negative effect to using this plugin or any penalties netted out by the search engines. I’ve been using the plugin for a few months now and I haven’t had any issues.

On a side note, Semiologic have a special Wordpress package that will help you dominate any niche with their out of the box solution. Click on the graphic below and you’ll see the whole host of pro-member only special plugins that you will not find any where else!

I hope you found this post useful.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

For a live example of this site breaking free of a frame click here.

I was looking for something that I could use on my desktop without having to fire-up a browser, I also wanting something that would check multiple domains. Guess what? I found a neat desktop app that gives me the data in a matter of seconds.

As you can see, I’ve added a few URLs for this example.

After clicking the big green ‘go’ button the little app pulls in the Google Page Rank and displays them along with their respective smiley faces.

So what are the uses for this?

We regularly monitor the Page Rank of our client websites and that of our competitors to see how they are performing in the eyes of Google. What is great about this little tool is the fact that you can save the data in a spreadsheet file and then import the info when needed; this will save you lots of time when it comes to checking the Page Rank of a large number of websites.

The name of this neat little app is PaRaMeter and it is free to download from CleverStat. Visit the website and click on the link under the download tab. The site also offers other useful tools that you may want to have a look at.

Regards,

Kelly-Anne Foxley

The services I am referring to are:

Search engine submission services for small businesses.

If you have come across these services, don’t stop, keep moving. If you are paying for such a service then cancel your payment immediately, you are wasting your money.

Let’s take a second to look at the claims that come with these services and dispel the myths that they are selling:

“We submit your website to 1000s of search engines increasing the chances of people finding your website.”

1000s of search egines? Get real!

If you are tracking your visitor statistics using Google Analytics or similar you will have very useful information at your finger tips. What I want you to do right now is to go to your Analytics account and look at your ‘Traffic Sources‘ and find the ‘search engines‘ data.

The screen-shot below was taken from my Analytics account:

How many search engines can you see?

Other than the different country variants (we are happily read across the globe) the search engines in the list are Google, Yahoo and Aol. Google has the largest share of the search engine market so having them as the main referring search engine in our site statistics is typical.

Now, can you see these 1000s of search engines in your referral stats?

I didn’t think you would!

Last question, the last time you used a search engine… which one did you use?

Returning to the claims of the search engine submissions services:

We submit your website to the search engines on a monthly basis.

Oh come on!

The big players of search, Google, Yahoo and Bing, do not need to be reminded that your website exists. If you are paying an on-going fee for such a service please terminate your payment!

Continually submitted your website to ‘anywhere’ may get you and your business website listed as a spammer.

I don’t want to confuse anyone and I understand that you may be left wondering what you should do to alert the search engines when you launch a new website .

The simple answer is that you can do NOTHING!

Google, Yahoo and Bing are powered by super computers that WILL find your website.

You can speed things up by getting some quality inbound links from authority websites pointing directly to your website. You can learn more about securing quality inbound links by following the tips in our newsletter and mini-course.

Another thing you should be doing is adding your XML Sitemap to Google so that they know what pages on your website are important to you.In doing this you may also make Google aware of pages that they have not yet indexed.

You can add your Sitemap by registering your account with Google Webmaster Tools. If you do not have an XML Sitemap you can use this free tool to have one created in a very short space of time.

You can also do the same with Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center.

With this information in hand please do not pay for a search engine submission service for your business website (or any other website for that matter), the search engines will find you.

Final words, read what Google have to say about submitting your website to them (this does not include registering your site with Webmaster tools but is talking about the sumbit URL method.)

To your success,

Karl Foxley

The title of this post may suggest that I am going to be talking about myself but in actual fact I want to discuss visitor tracking and monitoring.

I use a few tools to track visitor statistics, such as Google Analytics and StatPress (a Wordpress Plugin).

What I have noticed is that I get visitors coming to this website by typing the following search term ‘Karl Foxley Marketing‘ into Google.

It makes sense to create a page specifically for this search query and give the visitors exactly what they are looking for, so before we continue:

If you are looking for an SEO service for your business website then you have come to the right place. Foxley Marketing Solutions, founded by Karl Foxley, is happy to discuss your SEO and other Internet marketing requirements with you. You can request further information by using our contact us page.

Returning to the focus of this post, are you tracking the search queries that are bring visitors to your website? If you are not, maybe it is time that you started.

Google Analytics is free, setting-up an account and registering your website can be done in a short space of time, allowing you to have a whole host of statistics at your finger tips.

Inside Google Analytics you can click on the ‘Traffic Sources‘ tab and then ‘Keywords‘ to see how people are finding your website.

Recommendations: You may see keywords and phrases that are very similar that can be grouped, why not create a content page that targets them so that your visitors now have a page that closely matches their search query.

You may see a lot of single search queries that bring visitors to your website, I wouldn’t waste too much time creating content pages for each instance of a search query as it may never be typed in again.

The reason you will want to create content pages to match search queries is simple: if you have too many search queries being met with loosely related content, searchers visiting your site will scan your content and probably leave again as your content will not meet their expectations.

By monitoring what brings searchers to your website you will be able to give them exactly what they want instead of relying on loosely related content pages, this makes the searcher happy and in return makes the search engines happy.

I hope you found this post useful.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. If you are using Wordpress you can grab the StatPress plugin here.

photo credit: Ivan Walsh

If you are unfamiliar with Sidewiki here is what Google say it is:

Google Sidewiki is a browser sidebar that lets you contribute and read information alongside any web page.

So the Sidewiki is a type of commenting system. Well, it’s a bit more than that, it is a way for experts to share their knowledge and skills across the web. People can leave comments to be displayed in the Sidewiki for a particular website / web-page for others to see and add further information to; making this a community tool.

I’ve got ahead of myself, let me quickly walk you through the installation process.

To be able to use Sidewiki you will need a compatible browser and and have the Google Toolbar installed.

Here is the link to Firefox, free to download and has many features you won’t find in other browsers, and here is the link to the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki.

Download Google's Toobar with Sidewiki

After you have successfully installed the toolbar you’ll need to restart your browser. If you’ve been successful you should see the following screen.

You've installed the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki

So why are people excited about the new Sidewiki feature? Well, below you will see a screen-shot taken from our homepage with the Sidewiki open.

The images below shows you what you are greeted with if you have Sidewiki open when you visit Foxley Marketing Solutions.

The next image is a close up of the Sidewiki message I wrote as a greeting to our homepage visitors.

As you can see I have created a custom message that quickly welcomes our visitors, tells them about the site and our search engine optimisation service, and finally, how to grab our RSS feed.

This is an exciting development because, as the site owner (you’ll need to verify your ownership of a website inside Google’s Webmaster Tools), my message stays at the top of the Sidewiki, as mentioned in Google’s documentation.

Returning to the fact that the Sidewiki is a community tool you may be wondering how Google will stop spammers and your competition from adding negative statements in the Sidewiki for your website.

Although I don’t have the answer to this what I do know is that Google say that they will be using multiple signals to score the relevancy and quality of the post plus using user-feedback as a quality score.

“Sidewiki uses a quality algorithm and user ratings to determine the order of the entries that appear in the sidebar for a given page. The entries that are scored as being the most helpful and pertinent are more likely to display.”

Will this stop abuse? I hope so but we will have to wait and see how this works out.

Another great feature of the Sidewiki is, if you leave a quality comment that provides value to the site owner and the community of readers then you increase the chances of your message being shared; that’s right, you will be able to send your favorite entries by email, post to Twitter and / or Facebook.

You will also be able to embed YouTube videos into your comments.

To read more about the features of the Sidewiki and watch a short video click here.

While you are at it, it’s time to grab your Google Profile like I have here.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

For those of you that don’t know the meta keyword tag looks like here is an example:

<META name”keywords” content=”german shepherd dog, gsd dog, german shepherd dog breed,”>

The keywords that are being targeted start at ‘german shepherd dog’.

Click play to watch the video, it is very short but covers everything you need to know about the meta keyword tag.

Matt makes it very clear that Google give absolutely no weight to the meta keyword tag due to how it was abused in the past. What Matt has shared has been common knowledge in the SEO world for a long time. If you are with a company that is still using the keyword tag for the ‘benefit’ of Google then maybe you need to start looking elsewhere.

Should you use meta keywords?

Yes, because other search engines may still give them some weight. My recommendation is that you only use a few relevant keywords per page that you create on your website.

If you have a page on your website about, let’s say, the German Shepherd dog, you could use the following:

German Shepherd dog, GSD, Alsation, German Shepherd dog breed.

That is pretty much the level of the keywords I would use in the meta keyword tag. The keywords are all relevant to the page and I haven’t gone overboard and added loads of keywords.

I wouldn’t lose any sleep over the meta keyword tag and simply choose the best fit for the page content and you’ll be fine.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. Be sure to read Matt’s post about the meta keyword tag.

Seems pretty clear to me!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

Are you being found in the major search engines by the people that matter most to you?

If you aren’t being ranked highly in the SERPs (search engine result pages) the chances are that your customers will not be finding your website and making you sales.

For your business website to make money it has to do well in the search engines, whether that is Google, Yahoo, Bing, or the lesser known search engines.

But how do you get your website to rank highly in the search engines?

This is where on-site SEO (search engine optimisation) is essential for your website to do well in the SERPs, to rank highly, to out-perform your competitors and to get you found by your customers.

Let’s be honest, you will never make any money online if people cannot find your website.

Being ranked highly in Google for a competitive keyword or keyword phrase can bring your website more visitors in a day than having a shop placed in the centre of Oxford Street in London or  Time Square in New York. Just think what that sort of traffic can do for your business.

When you purchase a car do you just expect it to keep working and performing to it’s best without ever having to take it in for a service?

I don’t suspect you do! For your car to stay tuned and optimised for the job it is meant to do, getting you from A to B, then you have to make sure it is in working order by completing regular checks.

This is the same for your website! You cannot upload a website and just hope for the best, you have to make sure it is optimised for the search engines and reviewed regularly to make sure it is still performing to the best of it’s ability.

You are not alone and you do not need to make SEO your business, running your company already takes up enough of your time. Let us, at Foxley Marketing Solutions, optimise your website for you, afterall, this is our speciality.

You can call us on 0798 802 6719 for a personalised quote or you can reach us using the form on our contact page to leave your details and we will get back to you.

We look forward to hearing from you!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

Let Matt Cutts explain this further by watching the video below.

So as you can see, some links are going to be much more effective than others.

Here are some directories that you should be on.

DMOZ.org (free)

BOTW (paid)

Yahoo Directory (paid)

To your success,

Karl Foxley