richardbaxterseo
Google Testing Flight Search Results in UK
Unless anyone cares to correct me, I’m seeing a new type of flight search result in Google (UK) – the query was “flights to Barcelona” (as I’ll be flying over there on June 8th for DomainFest).
Here’s the result:
And here’s how the result looks when the “Show all non-stop routes” link is clicked:
The expanded query pushes the organic search results all the way to the bottom of the page, effectively reducing the value of organic visibility to nil.
Google Testing Flight Search Results in UK 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!
Originally posted on SEOmoz, this post still has legs, having been recently referred to in a number of Excel related posts including Mike’s Excel Guide to SEO. I thought it would be great to revisit the post, give it a bit of a rewrite and share it with our readers.
Image credit: Alamodestuff
Despite what some say, tracking rankings for your target terms is an important part of an organic search marketing campaign. On occasion, SEO people who follow specific niches tend to describe ranking fluctuations with smart looking charts describing ranking position, by keyword over time. If you’d like to be able to build those charts quickly and easily, you’ll need this step by step guide. By the end of the guide you’ll have a rankings chart that looks just like this:
Step 1: Collect your data
To be able to produce a chart like the example above, you’ll need Microsoft Excel, and a rankings checker that will export rankings data, by search engine and by date. For tracking rankings over time, I’m using Advanced Web Ranking.
Start by putting your data in an Excel table named “rankings” just like this:
Create a pivot chart
Pivot tables were designed for exactly this type of application, and making them is heaps of fun. Let’s start by selecting “Insert > PivotTable >PivotChart” in the options along the top of your Excel ribbon.
You should see a window appear like the one below. Make sure you’ve named the correct range (our table name: “rankings”) and select “New Worksheet“, followed by OK.
Drag and drop your legend, axis and value fields
The cool thing about making a pivot table is the drag and drop functionality when you’re creating the row labels and values for the table. Here’s the visual explanation of where to put your keyword, date and position data:
Now, filter for the keywords you’d like to create a chart for. It’s quite inpractical to create a chart with hundreds of keywords, but you can add a good number for comparision purposes. Head to the “Column labels” drop down and filter for the keywords you’d like to build the chart for:
Filter by search engine
If you’ve collected data on multiple search engines, you’ll need to add a filter. Drag the “Search Engine” field down into the “Report Filter” section, and select the search engine you’re interested in using the drop down at the top of your pivot table.
Format your chart nicely
If you’ve followed the instrutions so far, you’ll see a slightly noisy and weird looking bar chart, so next we’ll create a line chart to show the positional changes over time.
For pure charting awesomeness, a simple right mouse click on the chart, followed by “Change chart type > Line“, will do the trick. Finally, you’ll need to reverse your Y axis, leaving position 1 at the top and your lower rankings at the bottom. Using your right mouse button, click on the axis and select “Format axis” – you should see a window like this:
The end result
After spending some time having fun with formatting, you can create really nice charts. Here’s mine:
Hope you find this approach useful – it’s certianly handy for visualising rankings over time. Enjoy!
Visualising Search Engine Rankings by Keyword in Excel 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!
Since launch, we’ve had some user feedback requesting better “how to” content and support material for our keyword tools. While we’ve been working on product quality and platform stability, some of the more important elements (user guides, instructional aids) have been put on the back burner.
Photo Credit: JD
I hope you like our helpful “how to” video (warning: may contain Jazz music)
Embed this video
A few charts I made earlier
Just recently I used our tools to throw together some data for an SEO pitch. The data looked at job sectors, such as architecture, interior design by salary research terms. These charts are very easy to make – just follow these instructions.
Here’s another example – which UK towns do we love the most?
“I love Reading” – ahh, perhaps that’s less about location and more about reading.
Filters highlight massive opportunities
Obviously this tool was built to solve a problem for SEOgadget – speeding up detailed keyword research projects. One of the features available to our users is the filtering capability. Here’s an example:
Combine this filter with any category, or further filters for traffic and search volumes, and you can quickly pinpoint keywords worth targeting in your SEO campaign:
Uncategorised keywords with the default “low hanging fruit” filter active reveals a tasty ranking for SEOmoz’s “Open Site Explorer”. Perhaps I should be sending that traffic via their affiliate program 
Handy How To Video for Our Keyword Tools is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.
Own a video or media rich website? It’s a fact of life that search engines truggle to understand the content of video on websites. This post will help you overcome some of those problems and may even come in useful for less media rich websites, too.
Image credit: BobaliciousLondon
Transcribe your video content
There’s a ton of potentially valuable, unique content locked away inside those video files. Use transcription service, using a “human” reviewer to iron out any typos / kinks in the wording. Alternatively, outsource your transcription via services like Elance, ODesk or send the audio to companies like Speechpad.com. If your video content is in a specialist, niche topic area, it might pay to locate a freelancer who has some expertise in your subject.
Mark Up User Ratings and Reviews with Microformats
Seemingly few, if any video sites are fully embracing the magic of structured data on their sites. If you’re taking the time to invite users to rate your content, you should definitely play it back on your pages with a sensible markup. If RDFa is your thing, Yahoo Search Monkey (Video) has a [review:rating] attribute or you could experiment by nesting the rating attributes from RDFa. I prefer the simplicity of Microformats, and where appropriate some experimentation with hReview could yield improvement. Video rating [<video:rating>] is an optional attribute in video sitemaps too, so don’t forget to push your review data into your XML sitemap if you can.
Use simple embed funtionality
I’m particularly keen on making any embed process as slick and easy for users as possible. If this involves reworking your embed code and ensuring solid cross platform compatibility, then so be it. I love Vimeo’s example – it’s simple and clean. If you need to customise the display options a little further no problem.
It’s also worth pointing out that webmasters who produce video are looking for easy ways to earn links back to their site. If one of your visitors choose to embed your content, you’d like to earn a link back to your site, too. Most video hosting sites embed code will always ensure a link back to their own sites, not nessecarily that of the contributor. SEOmoz demonstrate a work around solution to this problem in their Whiteboard Friday posts, by adding their own link back in the embed code with the anchor SEO Software, and Paddy Moogan of Distilled talks about leveraging Youtube’s embed code for links in this post.
Use technology, differently
What happens when hardcore web developers and creatives get together to create something ground breaking?. There’s no doubt that doing something new or different with technology in the right space will attract serious buzz from social, the technology press and the developer community. Often confused with HTML5, the awesome flash hack NinjaUnboxing2 (hosted on Youtube) attracted 934 links (Root Domains, OSE).
934 links to a single campaign URL? That’s proper linkbuilding.
Social Activity On the Video Host Page
What are people saying about your video content? Sure, you’ve got the ability to capture comments, but what are people saying about that video on Twitter? Did the URL get submitted to other video aggregation / news sites? What are people saying in the comments on those sites? Scrape, fetch, display for a long tail traffic boost and solid social proofing of your content.
Make mash-ups easy: make your content available through an API
Great API documentation leads to great use cases of your API. Mash ups are awesome. Scraping is, cool. Let people use your content, openly through Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licensing. The outcome can be pretty amazing, with all-important attribution, of course. For an example of “awesome” check out my new “is this the future of search?!” favourite-site-of-the-week, the amazing Qwiki:
I will point out that Qwiki’s embed code doesn’t have a link back to the source, for now…
Amp up your social connection / login capability
Not solely an “improve your SEO” point, but also an “improve your sign up and registration rate” point. Why have your own registration process when you can use sign in using Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, LinkedIn or Google? Tom uses this approach via Janrain on his excellent 7books – and remember that once you’re OAuth’d, the activity of your users can be shared, liked and tweeted in their social spheres with their permission. More social activity centred around a web page is arguably a great thing for your SEO efforts.
7 Ways Video & Rich Media Sites Can Improve Their SEO is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.
Page Level Search Engine Indexation [Data & Collection Methodology]
Our first post of the New Year looks at the topic of measuring SEO indexation. Inspired by Rob’s post on Distilled, and a wish to revisit some of my previous work on the topic, I thought it might be interesting to share a method of collecting data to build a clearer understanding of page level indexation.
Image credit: Justin De La Ornellas
Hopefully by the end of this post you’ll have a few new methods to collect site index data for your own SEO studies.
Why do SEO’s need an understanding of the principles of indexation?
How hard is your website working for you? Which pages and content groups yield the most benefit, traffic wise? Are there any weak spots, groups of pages that don’t seem to be working well? How can you make changes to navigation, architecture and sometimes page layout to improve a website’s overall search engine visibility or long tail traffic performance? These are questions that should occur to an SEO on a regular basis – but coming to a reliable answer is not always straightforward.
Seeking answers to indexation and site architecture related questions is a worthy cause, but achieving a meaningful answer is a significant hurdle to overcome. All of the (excellent) resources on this topic tend to approach indexation from the perspective of analytics data, or content grouped together inside sitemaps. What about individual pages, though? I use the term page level indexation, because I’m seeking a granular, page level answer to my indexation questions.
What data sources can tell us how a website has been indexed by Google?
For me, there are a number of approximate indicators that a page (or page group) is indexed – for example, reporting on pages that receive at least one entry from Google via Analytics. You might wish to take a look at the “URLs in Web Index” report in the sitemaps section of Webmaster Tools. Savvy webmasters and SEO’s may even use multiple sitemaps to get clearer page group level insight.
Logfiles will tell you a lot about GoogleBot visits, but not indexation, so where else can we look for inspiration?
Expressing the number of pages included in a web index as a percentage, but exactly which URLs are included?
Collecting indexed pages data using the “cache” query
As a method to compliment your existing approach, you might find this methodology quite interesting. The outcome will be a page by page URL list for your site, where Google cache data, SEOmoz custom crawl and XENU data will give you a cracking starting point for you to diagnose your indexation problems. These steps involve having a Mozenda account, although you could do the same (or similar) by building your own crawler or using 80Legs.
Collect Google cache data via a proxy
Fundamentally we’re going to be executing a series of Google cache queries via a proxy. With Mozenda you have to have a method of distributing queries to Google via a proxy. even then it gets unreliable quickly if you overcook the requests. If you use a simple PHP proxy and go very, very slowly, you’ll probably be alright.
Get a URL list
For this, you’ll need a list of all of the URLs your site can generate. The easiest way to get to this list is to extract all of the URLs from your XML sitemap(s) or ask your developer. Remember that, if you crawl your site with XENU you might miss orphaned pages.
Build a Mozenda agent scraper
Your crawler needs to execute the Google cache query and should be configured to capture the URL and cache date.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:[URL]
Would result with:
If no results are found, your agent needs to be able to record the alternative result. When you’re happy with the agent you’ve built, upload and run the agent. Execute this very slowly (proxy in image is a publicly available service – proceed with caution).
Mozenda running my cache agent:
Combine your new data with a few other sources
While your cache scraper is running, think about where else you could gain insight through combining your data sources. Let’s not forget we’re trying to locate pages that are not indexing. Some of the data points you could include may be;
- Click depth of URL from home page
- Internal links out from page
- Internal links in to page
- Meta robots
- X-Robots in server header
- Status code response
All of these data points can be gathered from two sources – Xenu’s link sleuth and the SEOmoz Custom Crawl tool. Xenu needs little introduction, but few know that click depth, internal links in and out of a page are part of the available data. SEOmoz’s Custom Crawl is awesome, and includes data on the server header response, contents of the X-Robots tag, meta title and rel canonical target.
Having a list of all URLs on your site, with a definitive answer on click depth, number of internal links and the Google Cache status is a very interesting piece of data to have, but (of course), it can be extended even further.
If you’re looking for a larger crawl of your site, but the same data, Adam from SEOmoz has pointed out you can get 10,000 pages + (depending on your membership level) crawled and exported from the SEOmoz Pro Account:
You can find this data via the “Crawl Diagnostics” tab in your campaign dashboard. Thanks Adam!
Content grouping
Most websites have a relatively simple approach to content types via their URL formation. This blog, for example, uses “/category/” in the URL to indicate the category content type. Paginated URLs might appear as “/page/*/”. If you’re a retail site, perhaps your product pages contain “/product/”.
By using an Excel query to group your contnet types, you’ll have the ability to get a sense of overall indexation in an area of your site, without having to group the sitemaps together. Try something like:
=NOT(ISERROR(SEARCH(“[URL CHUNK]“,Table3[[#This Row],[URL]],1)))
Where “[URL CHUNK]” could be “/page/”, “/products” or whatever. The outcome is “TRUE” if your URL belongs to a recognised group, and “FALSE” if it doesn’t.
Entries via Google to URL
With a simple VLOOKUP, you can combine traffic numbers by URL in your indexation data. This might help highlight pages that *should* have a little traffic from Google, but don’t – or at least you’ll have another point of reference for your investigations.
The end result
Here’s a screenshot of the example data I built while writing this post. You’ll see all of the data I’ve mentioned in this post, along with a number of “content groups” I found most relevant to my blog. There are some properly configured duplicated pages with SEOgadget which, I can confidently report, are not cached, nor are they generating traffic. My data tells me that the paginated URLs on the homepage, category and tag pages are properly set to noindex but that those pesky comment pages (where a blog post has more than a certain level of comments, we paginate them) are misbehaving (they should be set to noindex). Time to roll my sleeves up.
Click to enlarge…
I hope you can see from this screenshot how you might benefit from combining data into a single point to identify, diagnose and fix indexation issues on your site. Of course there are other data sources out there, and we’ve not touched on the visual aspect of representing this data, which I’m saving for another post.
In the meantime, I’d really like to hear your thoughts, particularly on the data you might choose to help diagnose your architecture and indexation issues.
Page Level Search Engine Indexation [Data & Collection Methodology] is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.
How to Use Our Keyword Tools
An industry friend recently said to me; “by the time you get round to writing the how to, it’ll be out of date”. It’s funny how you get so immersed in building something that you lose sight of the obvious things. Perhaps one mind only has the capacity to work with a fixed amount of variables, and for me, those variables have been so focused on engineering and testing that marketing took a back seat (the irony).
Image credit: Adam Selwood
Building and launching a keyword tool has been an incredible experience. Not that I use past tense lightly, there’s much left to do but all-in all I think what we’ve achieved here is pretty cool.
Anyway – it’s time to get started on writing about, and improving documentation for our product. This post is all about how to make best use of our tools, by segmenting your keyword lists, making categories and creating filters.
A quick how to on keyword categories
Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re an SEO company. What types of keyword might be of interest to you? Location based search? SEO consulting product terms? CRO? Social Media? How about searches for your own brand terms (and variations of those). I’ve spent ages, days (and sometimes weeks) working with large lists of keywords, rankings and search volumes. It’s laborious enough to collect the data, but categorising (with say, Excel array formulas) and lookups to combine ranking and search volumes is just a nightmare after even a few thousand keywords in Excel. It’s slow, crashy and painful.
There is so much value in grouping, categorising and ranking your keywords if you can find an easier way to get the job done.
Imagine you’re interested in learning about how people search for SEO agencies in some of the top UK cities. Creating a “location” based category is easy. Click the create category button to arrive at the category editor:
As you type in new markers (in this case, UK city names) the results list dynamically updates. You can sort the list by rank, volume or visits. Sorting and adding markers helps you to see new oppotunities, at least, keywords that could lead to new opportunities.
Click suggest on any of the more interesting keywords to expand your category:
Select any of the keywords you’d like to add to your project and the tool sets about automagically capturing the data.
I’d like to add keywords in bulk
No problem. One suggestion would be to grab a list of your most important keywords from your favourite rank checker, Think Pragmatic’s UberSuggest, Mergewords.com, Wordstream’s Keyword Suggest Tool, or pretty much any technique that can generate you a list of keywords.
I like Mergewords a lot, because you have precise control of the keyword list you’re generating. Simple, and smart.
Paste in those keywords
Note that right hand column in the screenshot? That’s a list of travel destinations, perfect for a category named “travel destinations”.
Generate your keyword list and paste them in to the “manually add new keywords” tool.
Duplicates are removed and as soon as you add the keywords, we start to populate the category with all of the juicy keyword data:
Take an hour to really work with the tool
Working inside the tool is an iterative process. It’s been designed to compliment the SEO process, and to work with you answering questions as you come up with them. At first glance though, the default, uncategorised view (after first creating a campaign) can appear daunting at first. Work with the tool though and it’s not long before your first categories are right in front of you and the penny has dropped.
Export your data and create awesome pivot charts
Ok, I owe Claire a write up on this topic. At the core of every keyword category in this tool is the data you need to confidently create a new content category and sub category based architecture. That’s definitely a different post (it’s coming soon!). In the meantime, this step by step guide on how to create a pivot table (and chart!) should help you turn the exported data from this tool into great presentation fodder:
Create an awesome filter
Want to see a list of keywords that rank on page 2, with search volume and analytics entries? No problem, create a filter like this:
Thank you
Thank you to everyone using this tool, giving feedback, asking questions or generally saying really nice things. It’s exciting, challenging and invigorating and truly rewarding to be doing this. There’s a growing list of brilliant ideas and important changes to the messaging we use to help users understand the tool and get the most from it. Thank you!
How to Use Our Keyword Tools is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.
Announcing Keyword Research – Inside Our New Tool
For the past few months, I’ve been working on a project to help make the keyword research process easier. Getting clear visibility on keyword search volume and opportunity data is painstaking and time intensive, but it’s such an important part of the initial and ongoing process of SEO. I’ve wanted to build something to automate the more laborious elements of keyword research for some time, and it’s (finally) ready to show the outside world.
Introducing the SEOgadget Keyword Tool BETA
Previewing our keyword research tool
One of the greatest challenges with keyword research is making your data actionable. It’s difficult to build large keyword lists without losing focus on which terms you’re targeting, and in what order. Grouping keyword data into categories is also really problematic with the tools most search marketers have at their disposal. Unless you belong to a very well resourced in-house team or a very large search marketing agency, large keyword research projects can be a huge bottleneck.
What does this tool do?
This tool allows you to create and export categorised keyword lists, with ranking, local search volumes and analytics visits from Google for each phrase. The categorisation data allows you to quickly and easily create pivot charts (for each keyword category).
The beta version of our tool integrates with the Google Analytics API allowing you to download keywords that drove traffic to your (or your clients) site in the past 30 days. As soon as you sign up and connect to your Analytics account, we start downloading your keywords, collecting search volumes in your local market and their ranking.
Make keyword categories and create powerful filters
While we’re collecting your data, you can do a few really cool things. Create keyword categories, add new keywords and create filters to deep dive into your data. Here’s a break down of what you get:
What’s a keyword category?
Let’s imagine you’re an online retailer who sells shoes. The types of keyword you’re interested in might be grouped by gender (“shoes for men”, “shoes for women”), colour (“red”, “black”, “green”), or type (“boots”, “shoes”, “heels”) and so on. This simple example can be applied to almost any form of industry online. Automotive, for example has categories such as make, model, colour, age and location. Travel has destination, route, accomodation, date, location and travel type.
Understanding how people search in any given market is a critial prerequisite to designing a site architecture capable of catching all of traffic.
Our tool allows you to create a keyword category and define what keyword “markers” might identify a phrase belonging to a category:
Use suggest to find new keyword ideas or add your own
You’ll see the suggest link on the right hand side of the category editor. When clicked, the tool will suggest 10 keywords you might want to add to your campaign. This is a great way to discover new opportunty, allowing for easier keyword expansion methodology.
Of course, I’m a big fan of the excellent Mergewords and Think Pragmatic’s Uber Suggest for generating big keyword idea lists. Adding a list of keywords to your campaign using external tools is easy. All you have to do is generate, copy and paste:
Powerful filtering
What keywords present the best “low hanging fruit” opportunity? What phrases rank on page 2? With filtering you can create filters by search volume, analytics and rank.
Some of my favourite filters are:
- Page 3 rankings (Rank higher than or equal to 30 but lower than 20)
- Page 2 rankings ((Rank higher than or equal to 20 but lower than 10)
- Low hanging fruit (Keywords with more than one visit, a page two ranking and measurable search volume)
Filters are configurable and can be combined and chained. This is one of the areas I’m most fascinated to learn from our users on how these filters are applied and what can be learned from them.
Over to you
Our beta testers have been helping us test and optimise the site in the past week and thanks to their feedback, we’re prioritising and working on some new features for late January 2011. If there’s something that springs to mind, be sure to let us know.
Some of the items we have planned are:
- Improving the suggestion tool to make it easier to add even more keywords more quickly
- Filter paid / non-paid traffic, ecommerce integration
- An enhanced Google Analytics management interface to allow users to restrict data by a specific date
- A agency account profile allowing for larger volumes of keywords
- Improve the charting / embeddable reports
- Save charts as PDF
- Make ranking / search volumes data available via an API
Ask a question and tell us what you need – Support Forum
There are a few ways to get in touch – commenting here is great but we have a support forum for you to talk to other users of the tool too.
The beta period and what we’re trying to achieve
While this site is in beta, particularly in the next few weeks, we’re monitoring, and tweaking site performance. Initially, getting a full data set for a campaign could take between a few hours and a day, depending on the size of your website. In this time our development team are monitoring and optimising the back-end functionality to improve the tool, make it slicker and more powerful. If anything crops up, remember we’re at the beginning of our beta journey, and the more input we recieve early on, the better!
I’m really excited to be ready and I’m really grateful for your input and support at a really exciting time for us all!
Have fun, tell us what you think and sign up!
Announcing Keyword Research – Inside Our New Tool is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.
SMX London – Top 10 Tips – By Jaamit Durrani
In May 2010, I attended SMX London, a search marketing conference that all SEO industry folk are familiar with. Many, if not most of our UK industry peers attend these conferences, amongst them Jaamit Durrani, UK SEO SEO Director at OMD and close friend to so many in the UK SEO industry. I was lucky to have had the chance to sit next to Jaamit for a few sessions and discuss the conference on the day and by follow up email afterwards.
The outcome of one of our email conversations was that Jaamit would send me some tips to cover on the State of Search radio show a few days later. Jaamit’s tips arrived ever-so-slightly too late for the show, meaning those tips were never covered and were never published, and then forgotten.
I’m so delighted to have found them in my email account after his tragic loss almost 7 months later.
SMX London – Top 10 Tips
1. Links higher up the page pass more weight than those lower down, according to tests Rand Fishkin has carried out
2. Since January Google has devalued the link juice passed via cross site 301 redirects and seems to be favouring cross domain canonical
tags instead – Rob Kerry
3. The long tail ranking drops from the ‘MayDay update’ seem to be due to the fact that Google has devalued deeper pages which get all their
power from internal links and domain authority alone – “”Deep pages need to justify their existence by having external links to them” – Rob Kerry
4. Get SEO value and link juice from affiliate links by using a session ID-style URL parameter for them, and then using rel=canonical from these to your ‘money pages’ – Rob Kerry
5. The most important dynamic in search is asking and answering questions. So always identify common questions and use your site content to answer them – Rob Sheppard, Ask Jeeves
6. There are loads of ways of getting links from highly authoritative university and government sites. You just need to put some work into it – look at Kelvin Newman’s 17 tips – some are easier than others!
7. New link analysis tool Influence Finder looks like an awesome way of sourcing influential bloggers out of a backlink profile.
8. You can actually get an XML feed of Google Suggest related keywords. Use this combined with Mozenda to trawl through your keyword list and pull out long tail keyword opportunities – Sam Crocker
9. If you have a particularly Social Media Unfriendly domain (eg heavily commercial, won’t wash with the digg/reddit etc crowds), consider a Guest Viral – one step beyond guest blogging, eg making an
infographic, offering it to an authority blog and put your link in the embed code – Chris Bennett
10. “If you can’t figure out an action after looking at an analytics report, don’t use it, it’s crap.” – Pere Rovira
Thanks mate
Jaamit kept his word and sent in those tips even though he knew he’d missed the show deadline. I like people who do what they say they’ll do, a lot. The SEO industry will miss Jaamit a lot – it’s so very sad when good people are lost. Our industry (and our Twitter streams) will never be the same again.
SMX London – Top 10 Tips – By Jaamit Durrani is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.
I asked “Can anyone recommend the best WordPress hosting in the UK?” on Twitter today - after all, choosing a fast, secure WP host is an important move for any business. I got some great replies and after checking them out, here’s a list of recommended hosts (according to my friends on Twitter!). I’ve pulled through the description on each site too.
After a complete security and performance review, I chose TSOhost to host this site.
Winner: TSO Host (UK)
By far, the fastest and most secure hosting in the UK. Their team are knowledgeable, friendly and quick to respond. I highly recommend these guys, afterall, it’s where SEOgadget is hosted.
We reviewed their platform and security tested it before we signed up. Their 2011 service is 100% excellent -
Tip: The grid cluster hosting is solid as a rock, even in extreme traffic conditions. Get the dedicated IP and SSL certificate for an extra £49.99 a year.
2) Clook (UK)
Coming in a close second, the guys at Clook are very friendly and happy to help
Reliable & uncrowded servers in a UK hosting facility with REAL 24/7 support and a proactive methodology towards quality. Came heavily recommended in the UK, with easy auto installing scripts for WordPress and numerous other content management systems and e-commerce platforms.
3) Lunar Pages (US, UK, ES)
A solid and cheap WordPress hosting package for beginners. Comes with free domain, control panel and setup. Hosting in the UK, US or Spain.
Other hosts we recommend
Some of our UK and Europe Clients host with US hosting companies – check out these recommended providers
4) Webfaction (US)
From a small blog to a complex web application, Webfaction’s shared hosting plans let you run any type of website you like. Single click installation of WordPress from a control panel, hosting packages start at $5.50 per month.
Webfaction are well known to put fewer sites on each webserver than most word press hosting providers and as a result their servers tend to be faster and more stable. For static files, Webfaction use the blazing fast Nginx to serve content.
5) A Small Orange (US)
“A Small Orange” is a provider of internet solutions and services specializing in web hosting and site management.
6) Liquidweb (US)
Established in 1997, Liquid Web Inc, is a premier Web Hosting provider specializing in Windows and Linux Dedicated Servers, VPS, and Shared Web Hosting. Their own data centres allows them to provide unmatched service and support.
“Using state-of-the-art publishing tools like WordPress, users can quickly and easily deploy W3C standards compliant web pages with RSS feeds, commenting, spam protection, multiple author support, password protected posts and much more.”
Features include:
- Customizable Themes
- Easy content migration from Typepad and other blogging systems
- Plug-in Enhancements
- Multi-Language Support
7) Media Temple (US)
Provides business-class Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) hosting solutions. Media temple host some of the better known publishers in the US and are definitely worth a look.
The Best WordPress Hosting Packages (UK Hosts) is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.
Extract Your Competitor Keyword Strategy [Excel Skills]
At the recent SEOmoz / Distilled Pro Seminar in London, I gave a presentation on advanced keyword research. Today I’d like to share one of the tips I gave on how to extract your competitors target keyword list, with relative ease using tools we all have at our disposal.
Image credit: House of Sims
Here’s the pro training slide, just if you’re keen for a sneaky preview of this post:
Predictable, SEO people can be
That meticulous attention to detail SEM practitioners apply to the optimised pages of their big dynamic sites can be quite predictable sometimes. Even really big sites consist of only a few page templates, which makes extracting data from them simple. Let’s use this blog post to learn the basic skills needed to generate an instant keyword list, with no keyword research tools whatsoever. Yet.
It’s been a while since we mentioned Xenu’s Link Sleuth
How did you guess I was going to mention Xenu? Xenu’s a cracking piece of software, enjoyed by SEOs pretty much since the dark ages, and I totally recommend it. While I write this post, Xenu is dutifully crawling a jobs website ready for me to export the data to Excel. Note the “Title” column, an oft-overlooked column in Xenu’s captured data list:
Carry out a crawl of your target website, with the appropriate settings to avoid crawling external links. We’re really only interested in the onsite data, list of URLs and Titles.
Dust off your Excel Skills
Start by exporting the data you’ve gathered into Excel via a TAB separated text file. That’s quite easy if you’re unfamilar with the process, just go to file > export to tab separated file. Import the file into Excel, just like this:
PS – by a handy coincidence, Excel imports text files with the TAB delimiter selected by default. You can just click finish straight up when you’re importing one of these files.
Make a table and work out some formulas
There are some seriously cool functions in Excel for handling text. My favourites, in no particulalr order, are; “LEFT”, “MID”, “RIGHT”, “FIND” and “SEARCH”. An honourable mention goes out to “LEN”, too.
Here’s what they do:
LEFT – Returns the specified number of characters from the start of a text string
MID – Returns the characters from the middle of a text string, given the starting position and length
RIGHT – Returns the specified number of characters from the end of a text string
When you combine the queries above with the numerical output from the queries “FIND” (Returns the starting position of one text string from inside another), and “LEN” (returns the number of characters in a string), you can quickly construct mechanisms to extract and repurpose the keyword data extracted from your site crawl.
Here’s a simple example:
=IFERROR(LEFT(Table1[[#This Row],[Title]],FIND(” in”,Table1[[#This Row],[Title]],1)),”No Jobs”)
If you translated this Excel query into English, it might read:
Return the characters in column “Title” in this row, until the string “in” is found. If there’s an error with this formula, display the text “no jobs”.
Download the example
You can see this example in action in the template file I’ve created for you to download here. Check out the “Optimised KW 1″ column, which extracts generic job category terms from our test crawl data.
Here’s a more complex example, also included in the data
=IFERROR(MID(Table1[[#This Row],[Title]],(FIND(“in “,Table1[[#This Row],[Title]],1)+3),FIND(” | “,Table1[[#This Row],[Title]],1)-(FIND(“in “,Table1[[#This Row],[Title]],1)+3)),”No Location”)
This one extracts the location contained in the title data, which you can see in action in our “Location” column. The query looks a little more daunting, but if you de-construct it, bit by bit – you’ll see that the query is basically the same as the first, using the text “in ” as a starting point and returns characters until the ” | “. As FIND is used to return the position of the pipe, we subtract the starting position of the “in ” to get the number of characters between our two markers – thus extracting our precious location from the title. WIN.
This trick isn’t just for keyword research
If you can improve your skillset to include extracting data, like job titles, locations, stock / gift items, books, car data etc, you can repurpose it or make it “more unique” quite easily, too. Think about concatenating your new data points together in new sentences and title constructions, ready to upload to your own database (laughs evil laugh).
If you’re keen to get the data from other sources, such as search results pages, product listing pages and the like, you could also give importXML a try using Google Docs. Of course you’d probably be keen to get the data into Excel as quickly as possible either by importing it, or editing it within Excel using Google Cloud Connect. Have fun!
Extract Your Competitor Keyword Strategy [Excel Skills] is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.