Natural Search Blog


SEO Tools: Using Xenu and Excel – Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 2

During Part 1 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we started learning how to use Xenu and Excel to begin our SEO audit and focused on the foundational element, URLs.

Now let’s move on to the most important signal a site’s pages can send to the search engines, the all powerful title tag. Like URL constructs, sites often have nearly as many constructs for title tags. Three things that a quick scan of our data will tell us:

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Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1

SEO consultants spend a lot of time looking at websites. Moreover, like web designers, SEOs definitely “see” websites very differently than the average web user. Some days, it feels a little like the Matrix, where instead of seeing the streaming code, you see the people, cars and buildings that the code signifies. After doing web design, this is heightened even more, although perhaps inverted … instead of seeing shoes, cookware, and dog collars, I see title tags, heading tags, URL constructs and CSS.

Like any skill though, it takes continual honing and refining, along with the education. This is part of the concept behind the 60-Second Website Audit and training the eye to quickly identify key SEO issues and potential issues.

I’ve joked that, after so many audits, SEO consultants could probably do them blindfolded. So, whip out the blindfold and let’s put that to a test.

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SEO Followed By Website Optimization – Beat Your Competition

As search marketers, most SEO professionals are focused on the optimization aspects (both on page and off page) that will help a site achieve top rankings in the SERPs of the major search engines. The complexity of achieving top rankings increases by the day with the algorithms focusing more and more on factors that cannot be manipulated by a site owner/webmaster.

In this scenario, it is imperative that a site owner with a fairly new site maximizes her chances of retaining as many visitors to her site as possible by giving them an opportunity to communicate with her site through a comment on her blog, leaving feedback or collecting the visitor’s email address.

This will allow her to sell products/services on the backend through email marketing. This is where website optimization techniques coupled with solid SEO strategy can pay huge dividends in the long run.

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Social Media Costs … More Than Just ROI Calculations

Social media costs. Yes it does. One way or another, there is a cost that is (or should be) associated with social media efforts. Determining and measuring that cost isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but if you took the time to determine your Social Media Marketing Goals and established metrics for Social Media Measurement, then you are well on your way to understanding the financial (and resource) impact of social media.

Why are social media costs so challenging to measure? Social media is about more than just ROI. Unlike areas of a business that have very specific and direct cost and revenue associations, social media costs are a combination of your goals, metrics, direct costs and time; of which, many of these may actually be soft measurements. (more…)

Key Factors To Include In Competitive Analysis

As a site owner, you would be analyzing the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) frequently to see the sites ranking on Page 1 for terms that are of particular interest to your business or niche. Today it is vital to rank in the top 5 results on the first page to get the lion’s share of user clicks (approximately 70%).

Ranking below the fold on page 1 or on succeeding pages is not going to help your site’s cause in gaining better visibility and hence more traffic. The key factors you have to consider when doing a competitive analysis to dethrone a site ranking in the top 5 results and get your site listed in its place is what constitutes the meat of this post.

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Social Media Measurement

Measuring social media will help you better understand what works, which social media venues perform for you, and provides an important metric to factor into cost analysis. Once you have pulled together your social media marketing goals, you need to lay down how you are going to measure the impact of your social media marketing efforts.

Social media measurement presents some interesting challenges compared to the more typical site or page metrics. The most direct measures, such as traffic and conversion on your website, are only part of the picture. By the very nature though, much of your social media efforts will take place off your website. But let’s make it easy and start internally before we move to the more challenging external measurements.

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Google Annotates The Web Through Sidewiki

Google has introduced a new feature in the toolbar called the Sidewiki. Users can post and read comments about any website that appear on a pane on the left hand side of their browser. An example showing this is presented below.

google sidewiki

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