Search Engine Placement

We’ve just added another entry to our collection of SEO tools. The Google PageRank Checker is designed to check the Google PageRank and Alexa Rating of not just one, but multiple websites. Enter a list of website domains (separated by commas) and compare their respective rankings.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google PageRank and Alexa…

• Google PageRank is a measure of link popularity for a given website. Google rates the quantity and quality of a website’s backlinks on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best. Only massive websites like Google and Adobe receive a 10.
• Alexa Traffic Rankings is essentially a measure of how popular a website is. The lower the number, the more popular the site is. That’s the abbreviated version anyway. If you really want the long version, check out Alexa’s explanation.

Although the internet started out as a way to reach people all across the world, reaching people in your local area and community is also important.

Many businesses these days are concerned just with getting their products bought all over the world, but can advertising to your local customers also help businesses? The question is should businesses use local search engine optimization along with regular SEO?

The obvious answer for some businesses would be yes. If the business serves only one specific geographical area or region, then local SEO is one of the first things to do get put in place.

But even if you’re not based in operations that are strictly localized, having your business optimized in the local search engines can be a positive experience. Local SEO can be used to expand the number of relevant keywords for your company. These keywords will relate to the location of your operations. These will get you rankings for more terms than those that are related directly to your business.

This is an industry defined by acronyms and in it people often have trouble determining the difference between SEO and SEM, and PPC and CPC. Here is a list of SEO acronyms which can be quite useful and worth letting other people know.

BL: Backlink (the incoming link from another website)
CPC: Cost Per Click (the cost that is paid to a publisher every time anyone clicks on a pay per click ad)
CSE: Comparison Shopping Engine or Custom Search Engine (Google)
CSS: Cascading Style Sheet
DC: Data Center
DMOZ: Directory - Mozilla
HTML: HyperText Markup Language
IBL: Inbound Link
IPB9: Internet Business Promoter
LSA: Latent semantic analysis
LSI: Latent Semantic Indexing
OBL: Outbound Link
ODP: Open Directory Project, See DMOZ
OWBL: One way back link
PPA: Pay Per Action
PPC: Pay Per Click (an advertising campaign where the advertiser pays a specific ad publisher only when anyone clicks on their ad)
PR: PageRank (Google’s measurement of a website link popularity, which is shown on a scale of 1-10)
RI: Regular index
RSS: RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication
SE: Search Engine
SEM: Search Engine Marketing (a set of techniques used to increase a website’s visibility in the search engines)
SEO: Search Engine Optimization (optimizing a website or web page as to create better search engine placement for particular search phrases)
SERP: Search Engine Results Page (the web page results of a search that a search engine finds when someone has made a search query)
SI: Supplemental Index
SSE: Yahoo! Search Submit Express
SSP: Yahoo! Search Submit Pro
SWL: SiteWide Link
TBPR: Toolbar PageRank
TR: Trust Rank
VIPS: Visual-block Page Segmentation
WP/WP4: Web Position/Web Position 4
XML: Extensible Markup Language

As promised in a previous blogpost, we’ve started working on a library of SEO tools. The first in the set was just added to the website yesterday and has been in highest demand from our clients. The Keyword Rank Checker allows visitors to check a single website’s position in the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) for a specific keyword phrase. No more waiting for those monthly reports…check your rankings on demand and in real-time!

At Search Placement, many of our clients are becoming more and more involved in their own search engine marketing campaigns and we couldn’t be happier! When our clients participate and are proactive in marketing their websites, we often see much better results and it makes our job much more fun.

We always send out reports on a monthly basis (if not more frequently), but some of our clients have asked where they can check their keyword rankings and link popularity in the meantime. Well, we’re currently in the process of writing an entire collection of SEO tools to help clients and webmasters stay on top of their search engine placement and website marketing efforts. So far, the SEO tools collection will include a keyword ranking checker, backlink checker, and keyword density calculator. Stay tuned for more updates and additions…

For once, Yahoo is leading the pack with it’s new release of Yahoo Pipes. The new service essentially allows users to ‘remix’ their own custom RSS feeds based on existing data on the web. Yahoo provides this explanation of their latest toy:

“Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.”

For more detailed explanations on the tool, check out posts by fellow bloggers Tim O’Reilly, Anil Dash, and Nik Cubrilovic.

Google has added the ability to check your sites back links in Google Webmaster Tools . And SEO’s everywhere rejoiced. It has been ages since Google has allowed access to site back links, mostly because of pesky SEO’s using it to our advantage. With this tool, you can only see links to your own site. You actually have to authenticate that the site is yours. Fore more info, check out the Google Blog.

We often get emails from clients asking where they can do their own preliminary keyword research for free. There are a number of options out there, but they are often bogged down with limited bandwidth or return limited results because of the databases they pull from. WordTracker.com, one of the more popular keyword research websites has just released a free keyword research tool giving users an estimate of daily search volume for each keyword.

The free keyword research tool only returns the first 100 search phrases and doesn’t include additional information, such as competition and KEI analysis, but is still a great resource for quick, preliminary keyword research. Thanks, WordTracker!