SEO Tools

Free DIY SEO Guide – Download Now!

Published: August 13th, 2010

The Blueclaw blog has been unusually quiet these last few weeks, but this was because we have been working on your very own do it yourself SEO Guide, available for free download right here on the Blueclaw website!

If you’re just starting out with your first website and want to effectively target search engines for a certain keyword or search query for users to find your business, this is for you.

In a handy and digestable document, this easy to follow and practical SEO guide will walk you through the very basics in keyword research, on-site optimisation, basic link building activities and some social media activities that you can work on.  (in less than 30 pages!)

Continue Reading »

A lesson in Canonical URLs & Trailing Slashes

Published: July 20th, 2010

Most websites will use the http://www.website.com structure as their main website URL and this will be the address used in link building campaigns. However in some circumstances, you may find that Google has indexed two versions of your homepage. E.g.

  • http://www.website.com
  • http://www.website.com/
  • http://website.com
  • http://website.com/
  • http://www.website.com/index.html
  • http://www.website.com/index.html/

These are called “canonical” URLs and for the best search engine results, you should get rid of all but one, and stick to it!

Use the Google site command to see if there are any extraneous URLs. Type in site:www.website.com to see what pages are indexed. If you have a large site, also try site:www.website.com/index.html or whatever your “index” page is. If both exist, you should go through your website links and point all your “home” links to just one of them. Also consider putting a 301 redirect on extra pages to

Continue Reading »

SEO Spyglass Review

Published: July 15th, 2010

If you are serious about ranking high within the search engine result pages and are serious about SEO then you will know that obtaining high authority, quality links from related website is one of the main factors in increasing ranking position.

Links can be achieved through a number of methods. Sourcing high authority blogs with link bait ideas, paid directories (yahoo directory) which offer instant boosts for a fee or article marketing and free directory submissions.

Working within a success SEO company, we are constantly challenge by our clients to ‘beat’ the competition. I am sure the competition are saying the same thing! Regardless, one of the main principles of SEO is ranking high within the serp’s for the keywords chosen by the clients. Achieving this requires back links and where better to start than analysing the back links of your nearest and dearest competitors? Gaining the knowledge of how your competitors rank high for a competitive keyword is a crucial aspect of successful SEO. Once you understand these links you are able to emulate their most valuable links aligned with your own strategy to move ahead in the search result pages.

There are many tools which you can use to analyse competitor back links. The SEO moz open site explorer is a fantastic tool for link popularity and backlink analysis. Alternatively you can explore competitor back links through Yahoo site explorer. Principally these tools are great in sourcing competitor back links but a personal favourite of mine is SEO Spyglass produced by Link Assistant.

Continue Reading »

Eric Ward Guest Post – Identifying Trust Link Targets

Published: May 10th, 2010

A couple of the more widely used terms in SEO circles are “high trust links”, aka “trusted links”, and “authority links”. As often as these terms are used and written about, you’d think there would be agreement as to what the terms actually mean. That said, I dare you to find a consensus or “universal definition” for any of them.

Continue Reading »

Cutting Edge Link Building with Adgooroo’s Link Insight

Published: May 5th, 2010

This week we have been playing with Adgooroo’s Link Insight tool which helps you go into great detail about the links to and from your website as well as up to 9 other competitors.

What I like about Link Insight is the really simple graphs for link quantity but more importantly, the quality. You also get to see your site and how it fares against your competitors, shown here in different colours. Link quality is judged on links from ‘Trust‘ websites compared to ‘Spam‘ websites. The ideal situation is a bell curve that leans towards ‘High quality’ links. More on this later on.

In the walk-through demo of Link Insight, we were given the analogy of a bow tie for the two types of  links available for your site, where your site is the knot in the bow tie.

On one loop of the bow tie are “Origin Sites“. These are defined as sites that are a bit niche and obscure but have been made through a ‘Labour of Love‘. These are sites that hold a lot of link juice and are usually low trafficked. Links from these sites are defined as a ‘Trust‘ link.On other loop of the bow tie, you have “Termination Sites“. These are those that are commercial or retail with many links in, but very few links out to any sites. Links from these sites are sometimes defined as ‘Spam‘  links.

Continue Reading »
« Older Entries