Very rarely do I get upset at Google, the Webspam Team or any other aspects of the search engine business. One of the few things that annoy me is all the smoke and mirror-PR they do. I’m aware that they make it easier for themselves by trying to get us (webmasters and SEO’s) to chase after better search results rather than better positions for ourselves and I’m fine with that but wouldn’t it be nice if they once in a while told you the truth?

Barry Schwartz recently published a video with Matt Cutts where Cutts gets to explain the top 5 SEO mistakes. Third on Matts list is the following statement:  Don’t think about link building, think about compelling content and marketing. Top commenter on the post, Katherine Tattersfield gives the only reasonable answer: I’ll stop thinking about link building when you start counting “great content” instead of backlinks.

Google (obviously) have an agenda of their own

People manipulating the link graph makes life harder for Matt Cutts and Google, we are all moving away from their previous situation, a world where a link was given from a webmaster wanting to recommend a site. In the eyes of a web spam-hunter SEO should be to make a site easily crawable, making life easy for Google. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that they care for a second if you rank number 1 or number 11. Your agenda should not be Googles agenda, their agenda is to make money from providing (well mostly ads now to be honest) search results, your agenda should be making money for your company.

Links from 15.000 good domains, not bulk links from the link vendor, not comment spam but good, decently earned (including paid for) links will take you to the top of any search result except 4 maybe 5. If you can wield that kind of power you can impact the index like an Atom Bomb can impact a bowl of porridge. Matt Cutts might not like it but Google is a machine that counts links.

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That’s why I decided to take a fresh look at 5 popular SEO tools out there and try them out myself doing quick site audits. Here’s what I found!

First, let me show the criteria for tools selection:

1. I asked my friends, experienced Internet Marketers, to suggest SEO tools for review
2. I only picked the so-called all-in-one solutions (that help manage most of the SEO tasks)
3. Yes, I did Google “online SEO tools”

Well, probably not a 100% serious approach, but this review is not a thesis, just a single user feedback!

Second, here’s what I tried to do the using each tool – a quick SEO audit including:

1.  Checking rankings for some keywords;

2. Retrieving site architecture and validating it for compliance with the SEO standards + analyzing page content;

3. Checking which sites were linking back;

SEOmoz

1. The ranking module is simple to use, but ranks can only be checked weekly, so you cannot initiate a ranking update even if you really need it. This can seem not that critical, unless you deal with nervous customers!

2. The data on crawl stats and on-page optimization is well-presented in charts and quickly gives data to act on. The division into Errors, Warnings and Notices works pretty well, as you know straight away what needs to be fixed immediately.

3. I bet you’ve already tried the Open Site Explorer and have a good idea of how the tool works – the backlinks with anchors and stats are collected into a clear table.

It’s a little bit confusing though that the tool shows simultaneously internal and external backlinks and you have to filter the results to get the external ones only.

4. It took me a while to get to the “Find new keywords” tab – by contrast, this module is not significantly highlighted, so you can easily miss it (After you open the Campaign, click the small blue link “Manage keywords,” then switch to “Find new keywords”).

Another remark is that you’ll only get suggestions from your Analytics account, so if you are doing a site audit for the first time and you don’t have the GA credentials yet, the feature’s not going to work for you.

5. When you try to create a new report under the Reports tab, it actually gets scheduled not generated, so you can’t view and edit the data inside. It’s possible however to export data separately from each module.

What makes me feel disappointed about SEOmoz PRO tools is that it can take days to have your reports and data collected – sometimes we need the information pretty fast!

Raven tools

1. Unfortunately Raven doesn’t provide the rank tracking feature anymore.

2. Keyword research looks pretty decent, the tool pulls the data from Google AdWords, Wordtracker and Wordstream – and you can add any keyword from research to your keyword list.

3. Site auditor is nicely done and helps you quickly see crawlability and meta issues if any. I was really excited about the Page speed module, but my excitement vanished with very scarce data:

followed by a huge (really huge!) guide on how you can make your pages download faster. I’ve nothing against being educated, but I expected a little bit more detailed stats.

The tool also helps to find the pages with too little word count and duplicate content.

4. The backlink module works fine: the data’s collected quickly and there’s a handy backlink management module that’s really good for outreach (you can add all the necessary details, including the link type and the actions you need to take)

5. The reports are largely customizable – you can choose which data to include and in which order simply by dragging-n-dropping the tabs.

I’ve always liked Raven tools and do miss their rank tracking module. On the whole, these tools are very well developed and seem to be a decent all-in-one solution.

WebMeUp

WebMeUp appeared about a year ago, but it’s already gaining popularity with marketers. On the whole I liked the tools, especially the unified interface – all modules are connected with one another and data integration looks perfect.

1. The rankings get checked automatically when you add the keywords to the project. The good thing is that the tool supports local search engines and checks positions every day.

2. WebMeUp has collected the site structure and analyzed pages according to availability and performance factors.

What I really enjoyed is that you can star landing pages for more specific analysis. It’s possible to assign specific keywords to specific pages to get better on-page recommendations. Though I don’t personally rely on the tips provided by automated tools, that’s still can be of use for beginner users.

3. Just as Raven, WebMeUp has found backlinks pretty fast, but I couldn’t find some of the latest links I got. I was curious enough to contact the support team, who said that the Backlink module’s in Beta and more data sources are to come in the nearest time.

Meanwhile I looked at the backlink management module, which lets you track some of your critical backlinks. The tool regularly checks the presence of these links and alerts if a link’s gone.

4. Keyword ideas are grabbed by WebMeUp using multiple services, the tool can also mix words to create more variations as well as localize your current list of phrases.

5. In addition to data export, WebMeUp lets users generate reports using 4 main templates: Monthly rankings report, On-page SEO report, Off-page SEO report, Website SEO report. Reports can be white-labelled and scheduled to be sent to certain recipients.

What I miss most in WebMeUp is integration with Google Analytics, which is one of the features to be released soon. The overall user impression after doing a quick site audit is pretty good!

SEMrush

Definitely, SEMrush is more known as a pay-per-click analytics tools in the SEO industry, however recently some new features were developed by the team, so now you can also manage lots of your organic SEO using the tools.

1. The position tracking module in SEMrush is in Beta, but already looks promising: using the PRO plan, one can add up to 10 campaigns to track 500 keywords. The tool also lets you add competitors to compare your positions with theirs and set up e-mailing reports.

2. SEMrush doesn’t currently provide modules for on-page and content analysis. Just seeing how many new features have been added recently, it’s possible the SEMrush team will release new modules for SEO.

3. Surprisingly, the tool didn’t provide any backlink data for websites that are about 1 year old (I tested a domain with lots of backlinks and vice versa – with few), then I went on in with a very established and popular domain – the tool revealed about 1,400 backlinks, which seems to be too little (especially considering that there were lots of duplicate backlinks).

The columns cannot be filtered in any way, so you can only export the stats and manage them in Excel.

4. Keyword suggestion can be divided into 2 parts: keywords for organic search and keywords for advertising. The approximate cost per click, as well as the historic data for keyword search volume would be useful before you launch a pay-per-click campaign.

5. There’s no separate Reports module, but you can quickly export any data from any module. There’s quite an interesting option – to order a customized data report (if you need to track something really specific, as the Japanese keywords for some local search engine not supported by default).

SemRush does a good job as a website audit tool in terms of both organic and PPC analysis. Though I’d love to see more backlinks for “younger” domains, as well as generate on-page reports.

WebCEO

1. The keyword rankings are checked automatically, as you add them to the project. Further on, the checks are done on a weekly basis.

2. After I added a website to the project and opened Site Auditor, I wasn’t really happy to see a review of a single page (index page):

Also I was confused to see that lack of the project keywords in ALT attributes was seen as an “SEO issue”. There’s no correlation page-keyword and it’s pretty hard to optimize the whole website this way. One page limit analysis is part of the Free plan, but even with paid options (Silver, Gold, and Platinum), you’ll have up to 1,000 pages analyzed per site.

3. The Backlink module of WebCEO showed 20 backlinks to my website. To see more or to see ANY backlinks of competing websites, I’d have to upgrade. Well, this is really sad, considering the amount of free tools offering at least some backlink data…

4. You can get keyword suggestion in WebCEO using Google Adwords, Google Analytics (the keywords already bringing traffic) and from competing sites (“Spy on competitors” tab). However, at the time I was testing the tool, there was a notification stating “The Keyword tool is experiencing temporarily technical problems with the Google AdWords API. Some reports can be partially or fully unavailable.”

So, probably the tool will need to integrate with other keyword services to provide more detailed data.

5.  There’s no separate Reports module, but you can export data in every module.

On the whole, I wasn’t really comfortable doing SEO audit in WebCEO – though the tools are not overstuffed with features, you cannot feel the flow of an SEO process.

In most cases however, even the most feature-rich all-in-one SEO solution wouldn’t be fully sufficient for ALL of your SEO tasks. Just take your time to test-drive more options to get the most suitable collection of tools!

And which tools do you prefer for such site audits?

Inessa Bokhan is the co-founder and chief internet marketing manager at SEOlots (http://seolots.com), an SEO agency for small businesses. Iness has been working as a copywriter (software development and marketing topics), pay-per-click manager, and has provided strategic consulting to search marketing clients. She’s keen on cycling & skiing and loves cats!

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This is my own traffic data from Linkedin

Out of all social networks, Linkedin is by far my favourite. The others have advantages of course but all of them scream for attention and my view of Linkedin is that it doesn’t.

I’m not always logged in on Linkedin as I might be on Facebook, I don’t really read whats happening in that steady stream of semi-automatic updates as I do on Twitter. What I do though, is I use it professionally and I can actually measure positive results, something I haven’ t been able to see from Facebook or Twitter.

If you have read my article about getting offered jobs from Linkedin recruiters you know what I’m talking about, I optimized my profile and all of a sudden I was starting to get lots of requests. There is no difference in my CV from before I started optimizing the profile and I’ve been active on Twitter and Facebook for quite some time.

What is the biggest difference between Linkedin and the others in my opinion? It’s rather simple, by doing “seo” I managed to get visible in the search results on Linkedin, that means I’m visible where people look for me. People actually search Linkedin for candidates for jobs, no one ever searches Twitter or Facebook for anything.

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I’m certain that the number of blogs about SEO is higher than the amount of people actually working with SEO. All of them produce a constant stream of new revelations, new ranking factors and new ways of getting the neighbour to link to you. If it’s not about hacking the local search it’s about increasing the acceleration of your G+ speed and I’m still hammering on a log with two rocks. Why is it that I feel like a caveman when I read up on SEO these days?

The way I do SEO has changed over the years, that is a given, but a lot of what I do (or at least have someone do) is still exactly the same as it was both 2 and 5 years ago. The vast majority of my work is getting the text, headlines and titles right and when that is done building links. While everyone seems to be  optimizing author rank in the content promotion drive, instagramming their backlink-profile or what ever they do even for the smallest of keywords I have to stop and think. What is it all these brilliant minds know that I have missed?

95% of the times I just add an article with the right headline and make sure it’s getting the right links. I hardly ever do studies over Facebook-likes over time or diagrams over personas that might be searching for my content, I just add text and links.

David Wickström, CTO at Animail, described it like this when we were working together:  Sometimes it feels like if we were dressed in pelts, sitting in a cave slamming rocks together while everyone else is making pivot charts.

SEO is not that hard

After feeling like a cave man for a while I comfort myself with the results we reach becasue while they were drawing charts and liking on Facebook we were doing SEO.

If you’ve ever done SEO outside the English speaking part of the world you’ve ran into Internationalized Domain Names for sure. It might not be 100% clear how the get handled by Google though so I thought I’d sort things out for you.

IDN:s didn’t work out very good in the beginning when they were launched. Most browsers couldn’t handle them well for a long time and Google didn’t really treat them with respect. Having the exact domain – as in the case with my name magnusbråth.se didn’t actually give you any benefits over the more international magnusbrath (As you can see I’m gifted with the Swedish letter Å in my name). Google treated the domain as: xn--magnusbrth-85a.se

This is all rather reasonable, we had gotten used to exchanging the Swedish letters Å, Ä and Ö for A, A and O back when we first found out about the internet.

IDN today

This has changed today. Google nowadays give you the full benefit of having the exact match domain, even though they have nerfed (notice my blatant use of gaming lingo) EMD:s. This actually means that Google opened up for a whole new range of EMD:s, a large chunk of all Scandinavian words use these special characters. I’m not sure how large the part is in other languages but in Sweden this meant a whole lot of brand new EMD:s.

When doing keyword research

I know about the pains doing keyword research in a language you don’t fully master and doing it with characters you can’t even type on your keyboard is even worse. If you do it though, do check for exact match internationalized domains. More than you think are still available to register.

A very common misconception that drives me nuts is the notion of Guruness and Ninja-qualities in SEO. Dealing with an algorithm is not meditation, it’s not throwing shurikens and it’s not even slightly wizard-related. No wands or staves are ever used.

I honestly didn’t learn much at the science engineering program I attended back in the university days but I did learn one thing. How to cheat in computer games. Or at least exploit them. Every opponent in all the computer games were AI (I still have a hard time accepting that term for something so stupid). Google is the same kind of opponent and will react in the same way every time if given the same stimuli. That’s just the way it is!

How many times have you been visiting a conference and heard some Guru-ninja-anarchist go on and on about the next shiny thing, using midwife stories and stuff they heard from the guy reading the electricity meter? I’ve had to listen to this more times than not and it goes a little something like this:

Make great content and it will get the positon it deserves in the search engines or social media is the most important factor in SEO or Google bombs are impossible now.

Where do all the myths come from? I’m aware Google start a lot of rumors themselves but come on people, don’t you ever test anything? True, it’s hard to test anything properly in an ever changing enviroment but you can’t just pull crap out of the backside and pretend it’s how it’s done.

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I’ve been using Twitter for quite a while and from several accounts, I have @BRATH_AB (yup, it’s in caps) for the company, @alfamagnus for almost everything else and @sokmotorkonsult, connected to the Swedish SEO-blog I started a long time ago. On top of this I have a number of niche-specific accounts for lots of different reasons. What’s the value of this? To be honest, I’m still not sure.

On my different accounts I’ve been rather succeful in getting followers, considering I usually tweet in Swedish (only about 10 million people in the world speak Swedish) and that the topic is rather small, SEO. I’m certain that Twitter has helped make my name known and if it was possible to measure anything reasonable in any reasonable way there is a chance I could tell you I’ve gotten some clients. Right now though, I can’t.

I can’t track a single client to my years of twittering. I can’t even say if I have gotten any leads, there are no direct ones, maybe there are a few that have seen me on Twitter to later show up and buy services from me but I have no clue. It can’t possibly be worth the time I’ve spent, that is one thing that is certain. Top rankings for all Swedish SEO-related search terms on the other hand, that’s something useful.

So I like Whatever

As I can’t tell anyway if it gives me anything I decided to use my account for something useful, letting other people have their say. Instead of me going on about SEO I thought it a good idea to let those who want to say something else get a chance and for that reason my @alfamagnus account has been in the hands of others for the last two weeks, and will continue to be in the forseable future.

It didn’t take too long before Social Media Experts started telling me that I’m a moron, that my personal brand is forever destroyed. To be honest, I don’t care much for personal brands, I’m a person, I’m not a soda or a bloody sneaker.

So for that reason Liam Lynch is repeated over and over again at the office. Personal Branding…

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I want to tell you about Search Marketing Day in Poland in June 2013. This is the best conference in the industry and you really want to go there. 

Last year I went to Poznan to speak at Search Marketing Day and as a first time goer I was amazed by how intresting it was to listen to the other speakers. In general conferences are mostly for mixing with others in my world, rather than listening, you’ll never hear anything new at SMX or PubCon (maybe with the exception of new releases from Google or Bing). Search Marketing Day is different though and well worth a visit.

No speakers, or anything else for that matter, is announced but the date (june 27 and 28, 2013) but sign up for their news letter and get the info you need. You can find them here.

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This is what I wanted to do. I wanted to rank for the keyword Open Site Explorer, with a position good enough so it couldn’t be ignored and there was an opening. The Open Site Explorer-site itself is a tough nut, exact match domain, ranked number one etc but the SEOMoz.org was having problems at the time. From what I could tell they had ended up with some sort of filter for the phrase.

By publishing at the right time and having a generally strong blog I managed to achieve the following situation (this blog is ranking number 4 today, better at the SMX advanced conference):

Except from adding a lot of content to the post, I really didn’t do anything. Majestic was friendly enough to give me a pingback-link but that’s it. Of course there was some QDF (Query deserves freshness) involved and it probably wouldn’t have been possible (without a lot more effort, anything can be done with budget and effort) without the problems on SEOMoz.org.

I’m certain Rand is not to happy about this, the only thing he said to me when a friend explained was “I find that very hard to believe”

So you have a great idea for a web site and you know that it’s going to need SEO to take off. When is it time to involve the SEO?

I usually say that you want your SEO involved as soon as possible in a project, as soon as the decision to make a web site is made actually. This almost always true but you should consider money as well of course, it might not always be good value for your money to pay a consultant.

Remember that SEO is a front end type of problem. As long as your back end is separate from the front end there is actually no need to involve your SEO in any of the back end business. Sure, you must have support for a whole lot of things but a quick review should be enough if you have decent developers. My point here is that is usually a lot easier to do SEO when there is actually something to look at. SEO based on wire frames or sketches is more often than not costly with small results.

As I said, a quick review is usually good enough and saves you a lot of money rather than including SEO-skills in every project group.