SEO Tools

Keyword Eye Makes Keyword Research Fun

I just found this new keyword research tool by a fellow Leeds based company, Keyword Eye.

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First impressions are great - no more long lists of keywords and numbers, now you get a “word cloud” style list - with all the same functionalities of Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Tracking Monthly Differences in Keyword Rankings with Excel

If you track search engine rankings and send reports to clients every month, a good way to present this information in a monthly report is to create an Excel sheet with historical data of your rankings charting your progress from when their campaign began to the present date.

Keyword Checking Tools like RankTracker is good for giving you an indication of whether your search terms have gone up or down. But if you check your rankings often, have many keywords and track both local and global versions of Bing, Yahoo as well as Google, the final published report will be quite long. Often you (or a client) will have to trawl through pages and pages of data before finding the data they require that month.

Using Conditional Formatting in Excel, creating a simple chart to track whether you have made a positive or negative impression in the SERPs is made really simple. All you need to do is set up your keywords when the

Free DIY SEO Guide - Download Now!

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!)

A lesson in Canonical URLs & Trailing Slashes

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

SEO Spyglass Review

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.