Last month I spoke at Think Visibility about Getting the Links that Matter.  Part of my presentation focused on getting the attention of the person you want to get a link from.  The traditional method that most people go with is email – I pointed out that a phone call is better but we are all geeks and don’t like using the phone

I have found a neat way to still use someones email address but perhaps find out more info about them so that you can contact them through some other means.  If you install an Outlook extension called Xobni, you can find social media accounts held by the person you are emailing.  You can see an example of this in the screenshot below.   (The blurred parts are my email and phone number)

In this example, I can see that the person I’m contacting also has Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts, so there is the possibility of contacting them via one of these accounts as well as their regular email.  You can even use a combination of both, perhaps a tweet followed up by an email.  It can also help if you haven’t already got the persons name, chances are that you can see their full name from their Facebook account as well as seeing part of their profile.

Using xobni you can also see links between yourself and the person you are emailing, for example if one of your other email contacts has already contacted this person, it will show up in the sidebar.  This can be very useful because you have “an in”, you can mention this other person in the email and it may help get the persons attention.

This is just another small tip which can make a big difference to your link building conversion rate and give you a little bit more chance of getting a reply and getting the link you want.

Very quick post today on link building, this one is for ecommerce websites who have offline shops as well.

I’ve noticed that some shopping centres throughout the UK have their own websites, they often list the shops inside the shopping centre with details of opening times, location etc.  Some of them also provide a link to the official shop website too.

I’ve found an example using the website for the Bullring Shopping Centre in Birmingham, Ann Summers.  Honestly it was the first one I came to that had got a link to their website!  Well, maybe not the first but the first that caught my eye

So if you have a client with offline stores, draw up a list of all of their stores across the UK and see if any of them are within a shopping centre.  If they are, you know what to do!

Well its done – my first ever conference presentation is over.  I was very nervous but looking back on it – I’d love to go back and do it again!  I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who was presenting for the first time – Paul Carpenter has written a great post about his experience and I can relate to a lot of it.

I’ve already written a post over on the Pin Digital blog which reviews the presentations I attended and the conference as a whole.  Rather than bore you with the same stuff here, I wanted to take a more personal angle of the whole experience.  So I thought I’d write about the things I’ve learnt from being a speaker for the first time, as well as once again being an attendee.

Being a First Time Speaker – Oh Shit!

I can still remember submitting my application to be a speaker, it was the night before I was due to fly to New Zealand for 3 weeks.  The closing date for applications was whilst I was away so it was a case of now or never.  I had to quickly think of a topic I felt comfortable talking about and would be of interest to the Think Visibility crowd.  After a quick chat with my mate Paul Forcey, I decided to submit a presentation on link building.  I knew I wasn’t very well known in the industry so I wanted to make my subject stand out, so I decided to talk about actually getting important links rather than just where to find them.

A few weeks later, after my fantastic New Zealand trip, I got an email from Dom accepting my application.  Now, this is pretty much what I said out loud after I read the email -

“Oh shit I didn’t think he would actually say yes!”

Closely followed by -

“Oh shit what did I say I was going to talk about?”

After a chat with Paul again, I worked out what my presentation was going to be about!

I started to note down little things that I thought I wanted to include, printed out articles, made notes on them and wrote down the process we were using at Pin Digital for our link building.  It was actually a massive learning curve and the process of preparing for the presentation actually led to me re-thinking some of our own practices and re-writing some of them.

1. If you are the next speaker and are watching another presentation before you – stay at the back close to the door!

I went to see Sarah Carling‘s presentation before mine, it ran on time but I could have done with giving myself a few extra minutes to get my presentation loaded on my laptop and have a quick flick through the slides.  I also had a technical problem with my laptop which made me panic for a few minutes, not the best preparation!  So I could have done with making a discreet exit a little early so I could get ready without rushing.

2. Networking and making friends is key to a great conference experience

For many SEOs, they will only pick up one or two golden bits of info from a conference which they were totally unaware of before.  This is no bad reflection on the content, its just the nature of SEO that brand new stuff is often blogged about before a conference anyway.  Therefore the best bits of info are often found out whilst having a drink in the bar afterwards, so take advantage and go to them!

SEOs are a friendly bunch too!  Don’t be afraid to go over and strike up a conversation with a group of people and just introduce yourself.  I’m not the most confident of people when it comes to doing this but once you’ve met one or two people, you’ll be surprised how quickly you make more friends as they introduce you to others.

3. If you have extra questions, go ask the speaker!

I don’t think I’ve come across a conference speaker yet who wasn’t happy to give a few more minutes of their time to answer questions.  From a speakers point of view, I found it very encouraging that I was being asked questions and enjoyed speaking to more people.  I’m sure others feel the same!

Thought I’d do another post on SEO Rank Monitor which I reviewed last week, I wanted to show a quick way to get your keywords into the software with tags attached.  SEO Rank Monitor allows you to group sets of keywords together using tags.  This is a great feature as you can quickly filter your keywords by group and see which ones are performing better than others.  This is very helpful as sometimes you can work on a few keywords, which will then have an effect on other keywords within the group.  So using SEO Rank Monitor you can see these changes easily.

How to Import Keyword Groups in SEO Rank Monitor

1. Put your keywords into Excel in your first column, then in the next column add the name of the keyword group, eg:

2. In the next column, enter the following formula:

=CONCATENATE(A1,”|”,B2)

3. Drag the formula down the rest of your cells so that you get something like this:

4. Highlight the cells in the column you just created

5. Login to SEO Rank Monitor and go to Settings > Keywords and paste in your keywords, click Submit

So now you will be able to filter your keyword rankings by tag and narrow down your results better!  If you are a regular user of SEO Rank Monitor,  you may also want to checkout my post on Exporting Keyword Rankings.

As regular readers will know, I love Google Analytics.  Its a great piece of free software and can tell you a lot about how users interact with your website.  However it can’t do everything, sometimes you need something a bit more advanced to tell you more details about users.  I’ve spent a lot of time looking at various Analytics products which help spot problems with converting a visitor into a buyer, one of the products I came across was Clicktale.

I noticed that they have a free trial so I decided to install Clicktale on this blog to get an idea of what it can do.  I was pretty amazed with what I learnt and what Clicktale can do, even with just the free version.  With the free version you get access to click heatmaps which show you were people have clicked on a certain page,  you also get access to scrolling heatmaps which shows you which section of a page people keep their attention on the most.  A great application for this would be if you have an ecommerce website and wonder whether people actually scroll all the way down a long product page.

The best part of Clicktale for me though is the opportunity to watch actual videos of browsing sessions by real users.  So you can see exactly what they did as they browse your website.  This really is valuable information which is also very actionable.  You can make an assessment on what people do on their site and change your design or calls to action to suit.  Although there is a drawback – if you are a large website recording hundreds of sessions, you can’t aggregate them into one movie like you can with heatmaps etc.  So this is a potential issue.

One thing that I learnt from the analysis run on my blog, is that the blog post titled “New SEO Strategies and Marketing Ideas” which is linked from the right hand side, attracted more clicks that any other blog post in that section of the page.  So I know that this kind of content is of high interest to my visitors.  But it also tells me I may need to work on my other blog post titles as they attracted very little attention!  You can see how this data was shown to me in the image below -

Clicktale have a free trial version which gives you a good idea of what it can do, I’d recommend just giving it a try and seeing what feedback you can get from this.  I’m sure you can get some good, actionable tips just from the free version.  If you are running an Ecommerce website, I think software like Clicktale is essential.

I recently wrote a review of SEO Rank Monitor and if you read it, you will know how much I like the software!  Well I came across a small problem with exporting keyword ranking data into Excel.  It was only a small problem which was easily fixed after I dropped a quick email to support.  But I thought that it would help to show the process here as well in case others have the same problem.

Basically when I export a report I ended up all the data being combined into one cell – not very much use to anyone!

To overcome this problem you just need to import the data in a certain way and reformat it by following these steps.

1. Open a new Excel spreadsheet

2. Go to Data > Import External Data > Import Data

3. Navigate to your CSV file that you’ve just downloaded from SEO Rank Monitor and import it

4. Select Delimited and click next on this screen:

5. Select semicolon from this screen and click next:

6. Click Finish followed by Ok

Thats it, you should now have all the data seperated nicely into columns which is much easier to manage, sort and manipulate.

If you haven’t tried it yet, read my SEO Rank Monitor Review or go over and get a free trial and see what you think.

I wrote some time ago about the top Google Base Ranking Factors and had some good feedback and opinions.  One of the questions which kept coming up was how to monitor traffic you received as a result of listing your products on Google Product Search.  I’ve found a pretty good way of doing this via Google Analytics so I thought I’d share this technique with you.  You do get some stats by logging into your Google Merchant Centre but I wanted to see how much revenue was being generated in comparison to other traffic sources.

If you’ve used Google Base at all, you will know that it involves uploading a feed of all of your products to the system.  Part of this feed is the URL of your product, all we are doing is adding a small piece of tracking code to each of your product URLs which will feed click data into Google Analytics.

I used the principle behind the Google URL Builder to get the correct tracking URL.

I’ve basically tagged all my product URLs with the following:

?utm_source=google&utm_medium=base&utm_campaign=products

The important parts are the source=google and medium=base which feed back into Google Analytics.  If you use this format, it will show as this when you view traffic sources:

Now that you have your tracking code, you need to attach it to all of your product URLs.  If you are a developer or have someone to call upon, they can do this automatically for you when you generate your product feed.  However if you are limited to just the standard feed, you can do some tweaking with Excel to take care of this issue quickly.

1. Download your product feed and open with Excel

2. Insert two columns to the right of the column that contains your product URL (column header should be “link”)

3. Write your tracking code into the cell to the right of the URL:

4. In the next cell to the right that you’ve previously inserted, write the following formula, substituting cell numbers if appropriate:

=CONCATENATE(B2,C2)

You should see a result similar to the screenshot below showing the two cells merged together:

5. Copy the cell formula all the way down to cover all of your products so that all of them having the tracking added.

6. Highlight all of your product URLs which now have the tracking code added, copy and paste them into Notepad

7. Delete the columns you’ve just created so that you only have the ones you started with.

8. Paste in all of your new URLs over the top of the old ones – you have to do this in order to get the spreadsheet back in a format to be uploaded – the extra columns will be rejected.

9. Upload to Google

10. After a day or do, log into Analytics and go to traffic sources.  You should be seeing traffic from Google / Base showing.  Assuming you are getting traffic!  It can take some time to start showing and build up a good ranking.  Best to test by clicking on a few of your own first to see if the tracking is working properly.

Finding a reliable keyword ranking tool has been quite a struggle for a while now, I’ve used quite a few and they’ve had various problems.  One of which was running too many queries on Google in a short space of time and getting our IP address banned – which the other guys in the office weren’t happy about!  Another problem was exporting results into a nice format and monitoring over time, it often took some trickery with Excel and some extra formatting for the results to make sense over time.

I stumbled across SEO Rank Monitor by chance really, in fact I can’t actually remember where I first saw it but I remember making a note to test it.  I setup an account last week and put a few sites into the interface.  I went for the $39 a month plan and got the following -

• 10 Domains to track
• 2500 Keywords
• 3 Competitors
• Analytics integration

After a day or so there was enough data for me to assess how the software worked.  I was very impressed, the user interface is very smart, tidy and easy to use.  But the best part was the fact that the software updates my rankings automatically, plots it on a graph and shows you progress over time.  It took me ages to accomplish this with Excel!  Here is an example of how you can see your overall rankings at a glance:

There is also an option to integrate with Google Analytics so that the software can record how many visitors you get and aligns this number with that keywords ranking.  This involves giving user access to your Analytics account which I was a bit unsure about but after an email to the rank monitor guys I thought I’d give it a shot.  Again this data is great and presented in a friendly interface.

My only slight disappointment was that you can only track three competitors as well but this isn’t a major problem.  I can get over it!

As you can probably tell, I’m very impressed with the software hence I’m recommending it to you guys.  If you want to take a look here is the website link – SEO Rank Monitor.

As an SEO, you are going to have some kind of understanding and regular use of Excel.  Whether its exporting keyword data or compiling stats for a client report.  However most SEOs (including myself until recently) don’t understand the potential Excel has to make our lives so much easier.  It can be integrated with a number of SEO/PPC tools and make sense of normally complicated data.  So it can be utilized to plan future campaigns, review existing ones and visualise data for your boss or client.

I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Richard Baxter and Will Critchlow who first sparked my interest in Excel as an SEO tool back at the SEO Pro Training Seminar.  So I’ve decided to do a series of blog posts showing how I use Excel in my SEO work.  How often these series will be I can’t say as I don’t blog enough due to lack of time already.  But I’ll do my best!

Using Google Analytics and Excel to Plan Keyword Targeting

Objective – See which pages to target with your keywords

First in this series of blog posts, I want to talk about exporting keyword data from Google Analytics and using it to plan future SEO campaigns.  You can export keyword data and sort it so that you can see which keywords sent the most traffic to which pages.  This data tells you exactly which pages are already ranking for your keywords, therefore you know which pages Google see as most relevant.

I actually came across this method whilst doing some research for a client, I wanted to know which keywords sent them the most traffic last summer.  Some of their product lines are very seasonal and we saw a large increase over the summer, so I wanted to be prepared for this year.  I figured the best place to start was to improve rankings for keywords they were already getting some traffic for.

After I’d exported their top referring keywords, I started to map these keywords to the pages I thought were most relevant.  Then I realised – Analytics could tell me which pages had actually received traffic for these keywords.  This data would make it much easier for me to plan my SEO campaign.

Note – Data is from my own blog

1 – Go to Traffic Sources > Search Engines

2. Click on Google followed by non-paid traffic to see the following screen (with keywords included!)

3. From the drop down menu select “landing page”

4. You should see something like the following

5. Go to the bottom of the page and select how many keywords you want to look at, I usually choose 500

6. Export your data into Excel

Now you have several approaches you can take at this point, you can sort by keyword, landing page or visitors.  It took a bit of playing around but I decided to sort by landing page followed by visitors.  This gave me a sorted list of which pages had received the most traffic and which keywords sent that traffic.

My next step was to use some internal processes and documents to map the keywords to landing pages and integrate this into the SEO strategy for the client.  Its worth noting that its possible for keywords to send traffic to more than one page, commonly this will be your homepage and an internal page.  Here you need to make a judgement call but I’d nearly always opt to optimise the internal page.

I’d start by going through my on-site SEO checklist followed by coming up with some link building strategies that can incorporate these keywords and landing pages.

Thats it!  Nice simple way to get data into Excel, re-arrange it and use that data to plan your SEO campaign.

Very quick post on increasing your chances of being listed in the Open Directory Project.  I’m not convinced that its essential for a site to be listed in order to rank well, however it certainly can’t hurt to be listed.  Plus for the time it takes to submit its worth it.

If you find a category that has an editor listed at the bottom of it, then you can be reasonably sure that it is being maintained.  If a category has “Volunteer to Edit this Category” at the bottom, then chances are that there is a big queue of submissions which aren’t being looked at.

Try using the follow advanced query on Google to find these pages -

site:www.dmoz.org “Category editor:” +your keywords

This should bring back a set of results that are more useful and will get you a better return for your time spent link building.

Another option to get listed in Dmoz is to become an editor, if you are interested in this then there is a great post over at SEOmoz.