Jobs in Digital Marketing

> Please give me the tool now!

Way back in September we released the first version of our content strategy tool, and due to popular demand and awesome feedback I’m excited to be releasing an even hotter version of the tool! This blog post takes a quick look at some of the cool new features in this latest update.

Since the launch of the first version of the tool, there have been numerous updates across a number of websites forcing the xpath to return a null value, or to change the value returned. The first part of this update restores values for any empty fields, and reformats a number of elements of the tool for a cleaner, more digestible appearance.

More Insight from Google Insights

We all know how useful and powerful Google Insights can be for identifying trends and finding out what is ‘hot’ right now to provide you with the ability to spot opportunities to create new content.

Both sets of data for ‘Top Searches’ and ‘Rising Searches’ can now be found within the content tool:

Find out what’s growing in popularity relating to your niche, pop the keyword/phrase into the content tool and be inspired for a unique angle on a hot topic!

Taking the next step…

“I’ve been playing with the tool, and came up with an awesome content idea but now what?”

In the previous version of the tool there was a sheet called ‘Source and Place’, which featured a breakdown from Topsy of experts relating to your specified keyword to help find potential content placement opportunities. With this in mind, the newest feature of the tool takes this process to another level with the help of followerwonk.

We want to track down bloggers and editors who we can potentially get in touch with, that may be interested in our awesome new content idea. The tool now automatically scans twitter bios for mentions of ‘blog’ (blogger) and ‘editor’ + your specified keyword(s), to return highly relevant outreach contacts for the idea you’ve just come up with!

The data returned for each user can be broken down as follows:

• Twitter name
• Real name
• Location
• Influence
• Number of tweets
• The number of people they are following
• Number of followers
• Age of account
• Website URL

Find editorial and blogger contacts

Oh, I also forgot to mention that the tool pulls in 50 results for both editorial and blogger contacts, so that’s 100 potential new outreach contacts right there, on top of the outreach data found via Topsy!

Getting started

1. Access the tool here
2. Log in to your Google account
3. File > Make a Copy
4. Enter keyword into cell ‘B3’ and hit return (for multiple keywords please use the ‘+’ operator e.g. london+hotels)

I really hope you enjoy the new features of the tool. I look forward to hearing your feedback. PS. If you have any problems accessing the tool please drop me a comment below or hit me up at @dbseo.

Featured image credit:
kennymatic

Content Strategy Generator Tool – V2 Update is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

At the Gadgetplex we recently ordered some awesome new monitors, and following our purchase received the below email:

What product are you actually sending me? Where are you sending it to? When will I have my order? How can I track my order?

Ok, let’s pretend that the order confirmation email has already been sent, and now we’re looking to do some after sale follow up, so let’s analyse the above email from that perspective.

You will notice that the email requests for the customer to leave a review on a 3rd party site, trustpilot.co.uk. This is just one of numerous sites which Google looks at in Google Shopping for trusted review data, and they are capitalising on that for enhanced visibility.

Why the hell should I leave a review? I mean, what’s in it for me?

This email doesn’t answer those questions, but it did spark my interest to pull together a blog post looking at ways we can improve emails like this, to not only encourage repeat sales but improve effectiveness of our marketing strategy as well.

As we touched on 3rd party review sites, we’ll start with this…

How can I generate more reviews on trusted review sites?

Here is a quick list of some of the main review sites which are being attributed to Google Shopping:

• Ciao UK
• Kelkoo UK
• PriceGrabber.co.uk
• TrustE-Marketing
• Trust Pilot
• Dooyoo.co.uk
• ReviewCentre.com
• ResellerRatings.com
• Reevoo
• Google Checkout Reviews

When contacting customers, rotate the requested review destination to heighten visibility across these key platforms.

Ok, so what can we do to encourage these reviews? Think of the rewards:

• Discount code
• Entry to a competition to win X
• Complimentary gift/freebie
• Free delivery on next order
• Redeemable points
• Exclusive deals

Encouraging customer engagement

So where can we hook up with our customers online?

Inviting them to connect on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in the email is such a simple addition yet there are still so many situations (like the above example) that ignore this opportunity altogether.

Why should they join? More exclusive deals, competitions, freebies as well as news on the latest products and offerings – shout about it in the email!

Related products

This is more likely to be seen as part of the check-out process but there is certainly no harm in offering other products that may be of interest in a follow up email.

Or if your site has integrated with Facebook, why not show products that have either been purchased/liked by their friends.

Introduce a friend

Referrals from friends can be very powerful, so why not give a greater reason for customers to introduce their friends.

Perhaps this could be in the form of a Tweet, Facebook Share, G+ post etc and the customer could receive X% off their next order. Why not take it even further and friends who sign up via a ‘discount url’ promoted by their friend can receive X% off of their first purchase:

“I just bought an X at @[site] – now you can get 10% off your first order [discount url]”

Personalisation

What data are you collecting from your customers that you can potentially use to personalise these very template-y emails? How can you use this data to pull at the heart strings of customers, enticing them to come back to the site or spread the word?

Some typical data collected:

• Gender
• Date of birth
• Name
• Purchase history – therefore an insight into the interests of the customer
• Type of customer – did they purchase cheaper or more expensive products
• Location
• Wish lists/Saved lists

Based on this data we can transform emails to be much more personal, but ok this has been mentioned before right, so what else can we do?

Has your site integrated with Facebook Connect? Here is some data that we can get by using Facebook:

• Birthdays for friends and family, anniversary, engagement etc.
• See which products friends have commented on/reviewed/liked/added to wish list
• Which products on the site have been purchased by friends/family
• Your interests – music, movies, television, sports, books, games etc.
• Facebook pages, brands etc liked by the customer

There are naturally going to be some privacy concerns, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend displaying products which X friend has purchased, unless they have given consent to do so. But that doesn’t mean you cannot use the data here to power personalisation of emails!

Reminders and related offers

“Hey, your brother’s birthday is coming up in 2 weeks! But don’t panic, we’ve pulled together a selection of gifts just for the occasion…”

Personalised wish list

You know which products they have purchased on the website, and you now know what their interests are based on Facebook; put the products in front of them in the form of a ‘dream wish list’.

Friend’s purchases

You know what their friends have purchased on the website, and based on the theory of sharing similar tastes with friends, put those products in front of the customer (without disclosing who purchased what unless consent is given).

Social sharing

If you have written a blog post or produced something that coincides with their interests – share it here!

What your friends think…

We all rely on reviews, so when they are enhanced to show exactly what your friends/family think of a specific product, the persuasive influence becomes even stronger.

Now the power of Facebook is naturally limited to the size of the active community on your site, and some parts are more applicable than others, but hopefully this gives an insight into ways of using data to add more personalisation.

My take on what this email could look like

Taking all of the above points in to consideration, here’s a mock up of how we can incorporate the above features. Please note that this is not an email template, this mock up is purely for illustration of the above features only.

[Please click on image to zoom in and read annotations]

Image credits:

Mail box by Ed Siasoco

Tips for Making Your After Sale Emails Work Harder is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

> Skip the chit chat, give me that tool now!

It has been a little while now since my last blog post, but hopefully the wait has been worth it! I’m very excited to be writing this post and to be sharing this tool with you.

Research for new content strategies takes time

Every day in our industry we face the challenge of developing new strategies for attracting traffic to a website and staying ahead of the competition, whether this is through on or off site engagement. As marketers it’s our job to overcome these challenges to ultimately build ROI.

But before you can jump to a strategy you need to do the research:

• What type of content is (and has been) working well – is it contextually relevant?
• What topics are people talking about now in and around your industry?
• What’s trending?
• What questions are people asking?
• What types of content is attracting social shares, mentions etc?
• What types of websites are mentioning these topics? And more specifically, who?
• Which platforms are being utilised to promote this content?

– In a nut shell, what is hot right now? And how are people interacting with this content?

Our research doesn’t end there, once you have the above data you should be checking out similar topics too. Answering these questions will give us the foundations to creating our own on or off-site strategy.

Check out our content generation tool

The problem we have with this process is that it naturally absorbs a lot of time, and if you are just checking out ideas for outreach purposes it is almost completely unfeasible.

For the purposes of this blog post here is a top level view of the on & off site strategy process:

Maximise return, minimise time

After checking out Tom’s epic guide to Import XML for Google docs, I was inspired to develop a tool that would effectively generate this research which could be adapted for both processes based on a single user action.

As soon as a user enters a keyword(s) into the tool, content will be returned from a number of sources all based on this keyword.

These sources can be categorised as follows:

The latest news & discussions

Google Discussions – What’s the latest [keyword] talk in the forums?

Google News & Bing News – Hot off the press [keyword] news.

What content is being shared?

Digg – the most dugg content relating to [keyword], there is also an additional column for the most recent dugg content.

Reddit – The top rated reddits relating to [keyword].

Youtube – The most viewed videos relating to [keyword].

Topsy Latest Tweets – the most popular [keyword] related tweets in the last day, including twitter name and number of RTs received.

Topsy Latest Top Trending Tweets – this is then aggregated in the same way as the previous point.

Twittorati Search – the most ‘authoritative’ tweets relating to [keyword] based on the Twitterati authority score.

All Things Now – the most popular content Facebook shares relating to [keyword].

What questions are being asked?

Yahoo Answers – questions relating to [keyword] filtered by questions with the most answers.

Wiki Answers – this is split in to two columns, the latest questions that have been asked relating to [keyword] and the top answered questions.

How Stuff Works – articles answering a problem relating to [keyword].

Content aggregators

Blog Catalog – the latest blog posts relating to [keyword].

Fark – the latest and most popular items shared on Fark relating to [keyword].

Redux – discover further video content relating to [keyword].

Helium – The latest [keyword] articles shared on Helium.

Cracked – One of my favourite sites I couldn’t leave out. A fun/comedic site returning articles relating to [keyword].

Niche

Due to the generic nature of this blog post, I haven’t included any niche specific sources in the tool, but to really get the most out of it incorporate aggregation sites relating to your target niche or even specific blogs, there are plenty of them out there which will provide an even greater insight into what works well/what’s hot in your niche right now.

The party doesn’t stop there

After going through your first sweep of the Google doc, your brain should (hopefully) be flooding with ideas for link bait, viral and useful content that could be used for outreach or on your own website, but that was for only one keyword!

Towards the end of the spreadsheet you will find three additional columns looking into keyword variants. Using the power of Uber Suggest and Google’s similar and related queries, why not incorporate these into your search for even greater content analysis and idea creation…

But wait a sec!

Before you get stuck into other queries, there’s another dimension to this tool which has been running in the background. If you head on over to sheet 2 (Source and Place), the tool will whip up possible placement opportunities for the ideas which you will have just been putting together.

With the help of Topsy I have pulled out ‘experts’ relating to the keyword you will have typed earlier. To help filter out the junk, I have incorporated another filter which searches the users twitter profile to determine how many times they have mentioned your keyword (naturally works best with single generic keywords), and the number of followers they have. Finally, the website that is featured on their bio has been extracted. Together they will help you to identify potential outreach placements.

Ok so this helps for outreach, how can this actually help create content for my own website?

Analysing the data collected within this tool will tell you what types of content are working for your niche. If there are questions being asked over and over again, why not consider introducing useful guides for people on your website, or if there are a lot of different questions being asked why not develop a Q&A system.

You should constantly be looking at how you could potentially capitalise on the latest news to gain traffic, just tread carefully as some can be more controversial than others.

Analyse the types of content that is attracting a lot of social buzz and how the websites have went about promoting this content – is it a video?, an infographic?, a topical post?, a creative piece or an article that triggers an emotional response? Etc.

Strategies based on this research can begin to evolve, but before you become fixated on delivering i.e. a Q&A system – break out the box, find out what (in this instance) awesome Q&A systems are currently out there, and take look at what makes them stand out from the crowd. List their positive characteristics, but also take note of the negatives – this identifies potential gaps that you could exploit in your strategy.

Whether it’s a QA system, an infographic or whatever, research every fragment of existing strategies, look for the holes and how you can make this even better and more unique – finding gold takes time, but if you mine for long enough you are going to eventually strike it rich!

Right, let’s get started…

As this is a Google doc’s tool and due to the number of queries it contains, if it is run a few times within close proximity then you will likely see some incomplete results, so just be careful with it. Would love to see this developed into a more secure tool using python, but that’s another challenge.

Ok, here is a link to the tool: Google Docs Tool

Please can you log in to Google in order to make a copy of the Google doc and activate the tool, if you have any problems accessing it just let me know.

Type your keyword(s) in to cell B3 using the + symbol to separate multiple keywords e.g. seo+agency and then hit return. You should now have a complete set of data ready to spark some creativity!

I am very excited to be sharing this tool with you and would love to hear your thoughts.

Image credit: Tom T

Using Google Docs To Generate Hot Content Strategies [Tool] is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

When search engines announced a universal vocabulary for the next generation of structured data markup we all thought our lives just got a lot easier. The Schema.org vocabulary offers a greater flexibility in the choice of attributes to mark up data on a web page. Richard explained the background in greater detail over on seomoz.

I decided to ask, ‘does it work?’ by testing it on a site that has hReview rich snippets in Google’s search results.

Testing Schema.org

For our test, we replaced the existing hReview aggregate with the Schema.org aggregate-review equivalent:

Testing structured data implementation

During testing, it was extremely difficult to ascertain whether a Schema.org code snippet will parse correctly into Google’s search results as the rich snippets testing tool doesn’t validate that the code will parse into a snippet:

This could simply mean that the tool needs an update to validate this mark up.

Once we had embedded the schema.org mark up on our case study site, this too was tested in the rich snippets testing tool with the exact same result.

No rich snippets produced after re-indexing / caching the page

We eagerly waited for the site to be cached in Google. After the page was reindexed, nothing. We waited several weeks only to find rich snippets were not being generated. Throughout the test we were extremely confident that the code was correctly implemented and matched the appropriate vocabulary at Schema.org

Test limitations

It’s important to note the following considerations for our test:

• The domain benefits greatly from its rich snippets. We were unwilling to roll out the change site wide unless we saw evidence that the markup would work in the testing tool or in the search results pages.
• The test page itself used only Schema.org (all Microformats were removed).
• We assume that approval for Microformats also wins approval for Schema.org.

So is it worth it?

The short answer is we don’t know. With Google bringing updates for their own Microformats support [can you link to whatever this is] I’m left wondering how schema.org will fit in and what, if anything Google and the other search engines plan to do to encourage webmasters to implement the approach. It’s extremely difficult to find anyone who has had success with the markup, so it seems there’s a long way to go.

A slightly confusing example in the wild:

This website has integrated schema.org vocabulary but if you check in the Google testing tool for the above rich snippet, you will notice mark up for hreview-aggregate. If this code is removed from the page, no rich snippet is generated in the testing tool and I suspect this for Google as well.

I would love to see some examples of sites using Schema.org returning a rich snippet in Google’s SERPs. If you’ve come across any, do leave a comment!

Image credits:
Elsie

Should Webmasters Switch To Schema.org? is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

This is the first post in a two part series on how to engage and attract new audiences purely with the content that you create, whether this is outreach for link acquisition, or content to host on your own website.

Is Innovative Link Building Dead??

Barry Schwartz recently reported on a Webmaster World thread around the topic of innovative link building, and questioned whether new techniques have dried up. Whilst I do believe that the industry is forced to evolve as new technologies become available – and so the approach to link building will undoubtedly evolve as well – there are still trending strategies which remain overlooked and relatively untapped by competitors.

This post will take a look into how we can open up more outreach opportunities by tailoring your content to a new audience, but remaining on-topic and relevant to your websites key targets.

Typically when we look for potential link acquisitions, we naturally look for sites related to a specific niche, and do not go beyond the realms of familiar verticals. Fair play, after-all these are all highly relevant and on-topic websites. For example let’s take a look at the automotive sector:

These are just some of the related verticals that can lead to link generation. But why limit yourself to niches and verticals that your competitors will surely be dominating as well? It’s time to break out the box and the confines’ of your ‘niche’ and target untapped, new verticals to acquire links where your competitors would have not thought to go.

Unrelated verticals, unnatural links…

Generally speaking links from websites in unconnected topic verticals look unnatural, but the links themselves will only be viewed as unnatural in terms of the context in which they are defined. However we can use this to our advantage: why not adapt the content to suit the needs of a new vertical? This can be done by ensuring the content contains the contextual targeting that will generate a natural relevance for a link to be placed back to your website.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at the automotive sector again and start to include some other verticals:

Ok now that we have some awesome new verticals to reach out to, how can we tailor content to suit the needs of websites defined by these verticals?

The first step in this process will be the same as if you were identifying blogs within a similar niche, find out the types and styles of posts that engage their audience. Once you have this in mind you can then start to adapt your content ideas to meet their audience base, and so present the web master with tailored new content ideas that will suit both parties.

For example let’s take a location specific website based on topics related to the UK, one content idea could be ’The 10 Most Expensive British Cars Ever Made’. Lets use another more niche example say ‘Toys’, something like ’Model Cars That Cost More Than The Real Thing’ would also work well.

Here are a few other examples:

• Games That Make Virtual Cars, Real Cars! [Games]
• Videos To Prove That It’s All About The Car and Not The Girl [Media]
• The Most Terrifying Roads To Drive In The World [Travel]

And when we really push down the walls…. BOOM!

As a result we end up with a lot more verticals that our competitors have never thought twice about, and these niches don’t end there! As a famous inventor once said “Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future” – Charles F Kettering.

Image credits:
ncongrunt

Link Acquisition & Contextual Relevancy [Part 1] is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

If you haven’t installed IIS toolkit yet, then what are you waiting for? Go! Now! Install IIS toolkit!

Image Credit: tsuacctnt

This is truly a genius tool, and the amount of data that can be extracted is immense. In another blog post, Richard spoke about some cool techniques using IIS toolkit to find orphaned pages when combined with VLOOKUP in Excel, but it can do so much more.

There are a few hidden doors to this tool, which provide you with more powerful options to manipulate the site analysis data beyond the standard reports and queries.

Unlocking custom queries

IIS toolkit has a custom query section which you can use for a deep dive into more specific data. This post will act as a set of keys to start you on your way to unlocking even more custom queries.

For this blog post I will be running over three different custom queries including identifying:

• Internal anchor text popularity
• Internal link count
• 304 not modified

Let’s kick off with finding the different anchor texts used internally throughout a website and sorting these to display the most popular first.

Open up the ‘Query’ drop down menu shown in the screen shot above, and you will notice there are 4 different queries, including a ‘New Query’ option allowing you to utilise custom queries.

How to create a query

Select the ‘New Link Query’ from the drop down menu and the standard query screen appears:

This is the site analysis query report screen in IIS toolkit. Along the top of the screen you are given the options to execute, export, group by, add/remove columns and save a query (which will be covered later in this post).

The query builder (the first section) includes the field name, operator and value columns as default but can be removed and extended to suit you. For the purpose of this query the standard column set up is ok. Within the field name column you can select from a range of filter options related (in this query type) to links.

The operator and value columns allow you to set up the parameters for each filter to further hone in on specific sets of data. The white table below the field entries (you guessed it) is where our data will appear based on these parameters.

Creating the internal anchor text query

What are the most popular anchor texts used on internal links in your website? Here’s how we set up our first query, the internal anchor query.

This first row sets the parameter to exclude counting information by external links from the website. We then need to group this information by link text.

You are then ready to see the magic happen by executing this query to view the data.

You can extend the specifics of this query as much as you like, combining further parameters and then utilising the ‘aggregates’ field to display tailored data listings. But as we are happy for now, we can save this query as an XML file, which can later be uploaded and run on any site analysis report.

Alternatively, if you have had a long day here is the code for this example (just save as XML and upload):

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<query dataSource=”links”>
<filter>
<expression field=”LinkedIsExternal” operator=”Equals” value=”False” />
</filter>
<group>
<field name=”LinkText” />
</group>
<displayFields>
<field name=”LinkText” />
<field name=”(Count)” />
</displayFields>
<orderBy>
<item field=”(Count)” order=”Descending” />
</orderBy>
</query>

Once your query has been saved, you can then export the data from IIS toolkit and into Excel in the same way as a standard report.

The next two queries have been put together in exactly the same way as the query for the internal anchor text. Let’s take a look at the internal link count and 304 header responses.

How to import an XML query

I’ve created the XML you will need for the next two queries. To import these files, head to the dashboard and select ‘Query > Open Query’ and navigate to the XML file.

Two awesome copy and paste IIS toolkit queries

Below is the XML code for the ‘Internal Link Count’ query, which excludes all image files and external links, and then combines the use of aggregates (‘link text, linked-title and linking URL’) to filter the data even further.

This query can help you find a best friend of yours who is actually a bit of a loner, ok that’s never going to happen but it can help to identify important pages on a website which contain very few internal links.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<query dataSource=”links”>
<filter>
<expression field=”LinkedIsExternal” operator=”Equals” value=”False” />
<expression field=”LinkedUrl” operator=”NotContains” value=”jpg” />
<expression field=”LinkedUrl” operator=”NotContains” value=”jpeg” />
<expression field=”LinkedUrl” operator=”NotContains” value=”png” />
<expression field=”LinkedUrl” operator=”NotContains” value=”gif” />
</filter>
<group>
<field name=”LinkedUrl” />
</group>
<displayFields>
<field name=”LinkedUrl” />
<field name=”(Count)” />
<field name=”First(LinkText)” />
<field name=”Last(LinkedTitle)” />
<field name=”First(LinkingUrl)” />
</displayFields>
<orderBy>
<item field=”(Count)” order=”Descending” />
</orderBy>
</query>

304 not modified query

Last but by no means least, is the 304 Not Modified query. This is a custom ‘new query’ in IIS toolkit which is designed to locate pages on a website that incorporate this header response. IIS toolkit already pulls data from the header response of each page, but there isn’t currently a report set up to identify this type of header.

Here is the XML code for this query:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<query dataSource=”urls”>
<filter>
<expression field=”IsExternal” operator=”Equals” value=”False” />
<expression field=”Headers” operator=”Contains” value=”Last-Modified” />
</filter>
<group>
<field name=”URL” />
</group>
<displayFields>
<field name=”URL” />
<field name=”(Count)” />
<field name=”Average(TimeTaken)” />
</displayFields>
<orderBy>
<item field=”Average(TimeTaken)” order=”Descending” />
</orderBy>
</query>

The first field in the query again blocks external URLs, and the second specifically targets the ‘headers’ section of the page with a custom value of ‘Last-Modified’.

The data has then been grouped by URL and aggregated with the time taken to load each URL, and sorted further to display the most time consuming pages first.

This could be filtered even further to display only HTML pages on a website by filtering images, styles, scripts, feeds etc.

Finished with IIS toolkit? Not yet you haven’t…

There is literally no end to the different kinds of queries that can be created, and when you think you have rinsed all the data you can get from IIS toolkit…..well, you haven’t!

If you are or know of a developer, then the functionality (violations, links, errors and types of data) can be extended a lot further and this is where you can really see the power and flexibility of IIS toolkit.

One example is the W3C validation. Carlos Aguilar Mares writes a fantastic post about how to incorporate W3C validation in to IIS toolkit as a new ‘validations’ constraint for all URLs on a website.

He also writes another in-depth post about how to extend the functionality of IIS toolkit in general to allow for custom validations to be put together.

Have you noticed that we love using IIS toolkit? I hope this post gets you as excited about it as we are.

IIS SEO Toolkit Secrets You Might Not Know is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk. Going to this year's SMX Advanced London? Use this discount code - SEOGADGET011 to get 15% off your entrance fee!

We think the IIS Toolkit is absolutely awesome!

Image credit: Lumaxart

This post will provide a step by step guide on how to install the powerful IIS 7.0 toolkit from Microsoft, and show you some of the many cool features which can open up a whole new world for extracting information from a website (we are talking about a Xenu link sleuth beater here!).

Please note: IIS 7.0 is only compatible with Windows Vista or Windows 7

The program is quite simple to install but it certainly isn’t one of the most obvious, and when you need a helpful guide there isn’t much about, so here’s something to help get you started…

1. Install Web Platform Installer 2.0

By downloading and installing the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, the set up process of IIS Toolkit becomes a lot easier, so this is a good starting point.

2. Install ‘Search Engine Optimization Toolkit’

Once the web platform installer has downloaded and installed, navigate over to the Microsoft SEO Toolkit page and click on ‘install using web platform installer’ in the download extension box in the right hand column:

Or alternatively here is a direct download and install link for IIS toolkit.

Once the download has begun, the Microsoft web platform installer will take care of the rest and install the required components to set up IIS Toolkit on your computer.

3. Activating IIS Toolkit

Now this is the section which isn’t that clear, once the download and installation process has been completed, on the majority of occasions (unless you are one of the lucky few – if so, then IIS toolkit will appear within ‘All programs > IIS 7.0 Extensions > Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit’ ready to use) you will need to active the software.

To do this, perform a search on your computer for ‘Turn windows features on or off’, or go to ‘Start > Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows features on or off)’

Once located a dialog box will be displayed, and under ‘Internet Information Services > World Wide Web Services’ double check that the check boxes have all been selected (see below screenshot for further guidance).

Once selected hit ‘ok’, and you are ready to launch IIS Toolkit.

Go to: Start > All Programs > IIS 7.0 Extensions > Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit 1.0

Using Microsoft’s IIS Toolkit

Now it’s time to let the fun begin. Once you have opened the program click on the ‘create a new analysis’ link underneath ‘Site Analysis’, and add in the details of the website you are looking to examine:

Clicking ‘ok’ will start the site crawl.

If you have used Xenu link sleuth you will immediately notice how much quicker and cleaner it is to crawl a website. Once the crawl has been completed you will be presented with a report overview with an indicator on the number of links crawled and errors encountered:

You can take a look in a lot more detail at the errors encountered within the violations tab (*cringes at the thought of posting this* If anyone asks it is not for seogadget!):

The summary provides a fairly detailed analysis of the types of errors (or potential errors) encountered and the number of occurrences of each type of error.

The Violations section also provides details on:

• Pages with the most errors
• Error levels picked up (number of errors, warnings and information)
• Categorises the errors (SEO, content, web mark up etc)

But the IIS Toolkit analysis doesn’t finish there, content, performance and links sections all contain their own extensive report data. Here are some bullet points summarizing these 3 sections of IIS toolkit:

• Content
  • Host summary
  • Directory summary
  • Content types summary
  • Status code summary
  • External links
  • Duplicate files
  • Duplicate titles, descriptions and keywords
  • Duplicate keywords
  • 404 errors
  • Large content areas
  • Broken links by page

• Performance
  • Slow pages
  • Slow pages by directory
  • Slow pages by content type
  • Pages with many resources

• Links
  • Pages with most links
  • Most linked pages
  • Redirects
  • Links blocked by robots.txt
  • Internet protocols
  • Link depth

You can then export all of this data into a single Excel file where you can hone in even further on the data, and Richard’s post last week on finding orphaned pages from your sitemap.xml using IIS toolkit is just one example on how to use this powerful piece of kit.

Now I have always been a Xenu link sleuth fan, but after using IIS SEO toolkit, let’s just say ‘times they are a-changing’.

How To Install and Use IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit (IIS 7.0) is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk. Going to this year's SMX Advanced London? Use this discount code - SEOGADGET011 to get 15% off your entrance fee!

When we look to the future of the internet and how SEO is evolving, what can we expect to find on the agenda in the not so distant future with regards to website mark up?

Image credit: Dominicspics

Well, no one can truly predict the future but by looking at recent past developments we can certainly find a general trend that we are all starting to follow. In my first post as an seo consultant at SEOGadget I will be looking into the use of HTML 5 and (Richards favourite) Micro Formats.

HTML5 – What’s New?

Ok let’s start off with HTML 5 and the introduction of new elements and attributes which not only make a webmasters job a lot easier and more flexible, but more importantly provide a greater context about the content contained on a web page.

For example here are some of these new HTML 5 elements:

• <nav>
• <footer>
• <audio>
• <video>

Although W3C standards are a set of generic website guidelines which do not necessarily influence SEO directly, the mark up can to some extent be understood by search engines e.g. they expect to see a website header, navigation, content area and some kind of footer. Back at the start of 2009 Dave Harry wrote a great post on page segmentation concepts and how search engines are able to identify common elements on page to determine a framework for a website.

As a result of HTML 5, areas of a web page can now be more easily defined which in turn will provide a solid framework of a page to search engines. In doing so will at the same time provide more specific detail of the content contained on a given web page, which search engines can then use to their advantage in their algorithms.

The Launch of Rich Snippets (Micro Formats, Micro Data and RDFa)

The developments in Micro Formats (as well as Micro Data and RDFa) are also part of an evolutionary chain to provide even greater detail about specific pieces of content on a web page. When Google launched rich snippets back in 2009, support for some micro formats was introduced and as a result these have gradually been incorporated within some types of search queries.

Here are some Micro Formats which are currently supported to some extent by Google:

• hReview-aggregate – This property provides a generic average rating based on the data within individual hreview listings. Attributes include rating, count, and summary.
• hReview – Describes individual review listings with attributes including rating, reviewer, dtreviewed (ISO date format) and description.
• hProduct – Describes an individual product with attributes including fn (name), brand, category, price, description and photo.
• hCalendar – Describes an event including attributes location, dtend (ISO date format) and duration (ISO date duration).
• hRecipe – Describes a specific recipe with attributes including ingredient, instructions, duration and photo.
• hCard – Describes contact/profile information with attributes including fn (name), email, logo, photo, and url.

These micro formats can all influence the information presented on search results. For example a combination of hreview-aggregate, hreview and hrproduct (which could typically be used to describe a product on an ecommerce website), can produce a listing with rating information pulled in:

An example listing of hcalendar incorporated within a web page:

An example of a search result including hrecipe and hreview-aggregate:

An example of a search result incorporating hcard:

Although these are the only Micro formats that we have seen influence search results to date, there is still a number of attributes which although supported do not provide a direct impact on the display of search results and are currently under-going testing.

For example if we take the hproduct property, we have the ability to add attributes such as category, price and photo which currently do not bear any impact on the display of product page search results (although hproduct can be incorporated alongside hreview to display the price), but the attributes themselves are supported by Google.

Could this be an early indicator from Google that micro formats will be playing a more influential role in the development of search listings?

As the idea of micro formats is to provide even greater detail about specific content contained on a web page (as a set of standards), you can clearly see why search engines such as Google have jumped in and developed their search results to display this data. By encouraging webmasters to include micro formats, Google will be able to understand more about the content contained within a website, and could use this information to further judge the relevance of a website to different search queries and provide an insight into developing new potential products.

A recent article on readwriteweb.com – ‘Google’s Semantic Web Push: Rich Snippets Usage Growing‘ also indicates the growing popularity of rich snippets and how Google is trying to encourage web masters to introduce this on their websites.

If we then combine this with news that micro formats 2.0 discussions are already under way to simplify the integration, could this amplify Google’s quest for a greater understanding of website content.

The Evolution of Content is King

In a “Content is King” SEO world how can Google look to evolve this one key strategy to create even more relevant results for its users?

Google have reached out directly to the guys behind the internet, website developers/designers/owners and encouraged the use of even simpler coding with HTML5. A great article at Techcrunch on Google’s HTML5Rocks explains how Google is one of the major players pushing the development of HTML5.

The integration of rich snippets and support for Micro Formats, Micro Data and RDFa is another step to encourage webmasters for the change in mark up by displaying more informative search listings in their rankings.

When you combine the two and look behind the scenes Google have been very clever in gradually integrating a format which will ultimately provide them with a lot more knowledge on the structure and content of websites. This will undoubtedly become an influential factor within the rankings, and future services provided by Google.

The developments in website mark up and rich snippets go a long way in providing a greater insight into the future evolution, not only in SEO but the internet as a whole.

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Hope you enjoyed my first post on SEOGadget, it would be great to hear your feedback!
Daniel

Google’s Underlying Plan for HTML5 and Rich Snippets is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.