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

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

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.

Link masking is a great way to protect your affiliate commissions from being hijacked. In today’s post I want to share with you a really cool WordPress Plugin that will allow you to mask your links in no time at all, and right within your WordPress admin area.

Before we get to the good stuff I just want to quickly say that masking your links is what is often referred to as cloaking but they are two different things. Masking is preventing people from viewing your affiliate link to help decrease affiliate link hijacking and to also increase click-through rates, some people really don’t like to click on those affiliate links.

Cloaking your links is a way of gaming the search engines by presenting the search robots with one page while showing people a different page. You can read more about link cloacking and what Google have to say by reading this article.

You’ll want to head on over and grab the GoCodes Redirection WordPress plugin. Then use your FTP client to upload the plugin to your plugins directory and then return to your admin area to activate GoCodes.

To mask your first link you will need to click on the GoCodes link under tools (in your admin area).

Now you’ll want to decide on the name of the redirection.

1. Your custom redirect will be www.yourdomain.com/go/. By choosing your redirection key, in this case, Keyword Elite, my masked link is now

http://www.foxleymarketingsolutions.com/go/KeywordElite.

2. Now you will need input the URL you are masking. In this example I am using a ClickBank affiliate link for a product by Brad Callen called Keyword Elite. If keyword research is your thing then this a serious piece of software. You can also grab a free keyword research report by visiting here.

3. Lastly you will want to select whether or not you want GoCodes to track your clicks, I enable this for a quick reference point.

Now click the ‘Add Redirect‘ button to create your first masked link.

That’s it, you’ve created your first redirect and masked your link. If you would like to change the redirection folder from /go/ to something that you would prefer then you will need to click on the GoCodes button under the ‘settings‘ tab in your WordPress Admin area.

The most common file name people use is ‘recommends‘ but you can use whatever word you like.

GoCodes is a great plugin and I have had no issues since I started using it. The guys who created the plugin do mention one known issue:

There seems to be a conflict with the WP Super Cache plugin where a redirect will only work once before the cache is cleared. There is a workaround, though. All you have to do is add “index.php” on a new line in the “Rejected URLs” field of the WP Super Cache options page. This will disable cacheing of the page yourdomain.com/index.php. Generally, this shouldn’t be too big of an issue, as visitors will rarely add the /index.php when they visit your blog.

As you can see, this work around makes the problem a very minor issue. What are you waiting for, go and check out GoCodes now!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. Be sure to check out Keyword Elite version 2.0 and put your keyword research on steroids.

P.s.s. An alternative plugin to GoCodes Redirect is Affiliate Mask I haven’t used this one myself so you will have to test it for yourself.

Link Masking Software: PHP Link Cloaker, Powerlink Generator, Easy Link Manager

photo credit: Gret@Lorenz

Seems pretty clear to me!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

Below you will see my profile page. You can see my page live at www.google.com/profiles/karlfoxley

As you can see, I control what information I share and best of all, Google will list this in their search results.

Google say:

“Here are some tips to help you make your Google profile more findable:

• Add information about yourself on your profile so that people can find you when they search by keywords associated with your profile. For example, include details such as the name of your hometown, your job title, where you work or where you go to school.
• Link to your profile on another website (for instance, your blog).” (source)

I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a great way to not only control the information Google shares about you but it is also a way of generating some extra exposure to your business website.

Head on over to Google to create your own profile page.

Creating your profile only takes a few minutes but I recommend you take the time to add as much information as you feel comfortable sharing.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

Website usability analysis is an important element that must be factored into your business monitoring. You can use Google Analytics and other visitor tracking software to get statistical data that can draw up a clearer picture of how your users are finding your site, interacting with your site and leaving your site.

You should have some form of tracking in place but to really test usability it is better to watch someone navigate your website. One way of testing your website for ease of navigation is to conduct sessions with a variety of users; always use people who computer savvy and those that hardly ever use a computer. This will ensure you get a broader picture of how easy your site is to use.

You’ll want to watch people use your site with no object in mind but, more importantly, you’ll want to give people specific tasks to see how easy they are to complete. For example, you could give the following instructions:

Find an item, add it to the shopping basket and proceed to the checkout page.

Find the contact page and submit a question.

Find product x add to basket, continue shopping and add item z, now empty basket.

Along with your observations it is wise to ask each person to complete a questionnaire where you ask for their feedback regarding ease of use. You can always use friends and family to do this but be aware that they may lean on giving you feedback that is more positive due to your relationship (you’ll be best to judge this).

An additional tool that can really help with your website usability analysis is to record visitor sessions on your website. Clixpy is free to register with and they give you a number of credits to get you started. You will be able to play-back visitor sessions and see exactly what your prospects and customers are doing on your site.

You’ll be able to see exactly what people do. Let’s say the sessions you record show that people are consistantly adding items to your shopping cart software and then not completing the checkout process. You may be able to deduce that the checkout button is not visible on certain pages, or is not clear enough, or the page you thought was live is actually returning a 404 page not found message.

Clixpy is a great service and purchasing additional credits is very cost-effective. You can find a setup tutorial on my personal blog by clicking here. You can get 100 captures for as little as $5 and they accept PayPal payments. Register for you free account with Clixpy by clicking on the link below:

www.clixpy.com

To your success,

Karl Foxley