Almost everyone is aware that mobile usage has been on the upswing for the past few years, and more and more search activities are being conducted via smartphones. Since consumers are going to handheld devices to find products and services, it behooves companies to target the mobile market and focus on the unique opportunities to be found there.

Enter Pure Oxygen, a real pioneer in the field of mobile ad optimization. The firm provides consumer brands and marketers independent analysis, tools, and strategy to improve results across mobile web, search, social, sms, apps, and more.

They have created a tool for checking out webpages on mobile devices, the Mobile Site Analyzer, currently in beta, which checks content for optimal delivery on multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Pure Oxygen also provides consultation services for more sophisticated analysis of mobile friendliness, and they help increase conversion rates and ROI derived from mobile channels.

There’s a surprising number of companies which are ignoring mobile optimization and ad targeting — apparently expecting their regular internet marketing via SEO and PPC advertising to automatically distribute their marketing message via mobile as well. This is a very poor assumption, since traditional internet media does not automatically translate onto mobile platforms, and there’s a plethora of mobile-specific channels which would fail to be exploited under this lack of strategy. For instance, mobile apps can be a terrific source of referrals and promotion, but they must be properly engineered and could be offered through iPhone app store, Android/Verizon app store, and Amazon’s appstore.

I recently pointed out how Google is treating mobile-friendly sites differently than sites without mobile optimization, and this has significant implications for websites’ performance as mobile usage continues to grow. For many local companies desiring to appear and rank in local search results, the need for mobile optimization borders upon necessity — it could well be, ahem, “oxygen” to them!

Anyway, congrats to Brian on the launch of Pure Oxygen Mobile! I think this new venture is targeting a great niche, and will provide just what many companies need.

The new features might also reveal some secrets of Google Maps ranking factors. It’s definitely a space that’s well worth watching for local search marketing experts.

Google has modified the tool over time, and one of the great additions was the ability to see the monthly demand via a small little bar chart. This can be very useful for factoring in seasonality or growing demand for certain phrases. Wrapping your head around the actual numerical data is a bit more challenging. The Local number is just for the most recent month while the Global number is a monthly average. This is further complicated in that the Global number includes the world essentially while the Local number may factor in your campaign settings and locality (based on your AdWords campaign configuration).

To help tighten up data and provide a little more insight into the Local numbers, I just released an Excel spreadsheet that can take your Google Keyword Tool’s export and annualize the Local demand numbers. In some cases, this may dramatically change the order of importance of keywords to target.

Best of all, this tool is free to use so give it a play. The link below will take you to the download page for the tool as well as more detail about how it works and an example.

Google Keyword Tool Annualizer

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:

• General constructs and patterns used
• Title tag duplication
• General sense of optimization quality (potentially)

Branding (or lack of) always jumps out quickly, of which we have a number of different examples:

• three quarter sleeve sweater | Coldwater Creek
• Apparel at Coldwater Creek
• Coldwater Creek misses clothing.
• Coldwater Creek

What about duplication? I expect to find some levels, especially on an ecommerce site or any site that features a pagination system. Most CMS or ecommerce systems don’t provide a way, or at least an easy way, to modify the title tags (or headings and body copy) of individual paginated pages like GravityStream can. However, I also want to see beyond the pagination to identify duplication across URLs/pages that really should be unique. In this case, these pages are cannibalizing and missing an opportunity to target additional phrases.

Best way to do that in this case is to sort by the title, rather than the URL, and then filter out those with a “page=” in them to clear out all the pagination and make reviewing easier (the specific sorting will vary depending on a site’s constructs).

I quickly find some examples of title duplication.

Title: Clearance apparel at Coldwater Creek

Used on these URLs:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-apparel.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-tops-and-tees.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-dresses.aspx

Title: Coldwater Creek

Used on these URLs:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/blue-jeans-in-pink.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Catalog/catalogRequest.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/cqo/cqo.aspx

Title: Coldwater Creek offers a great selection of women’s denim jeans.

Used on these URLs:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/classic-waist-jeans.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/lower-waist-jeans.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/natural-waist-jeans.aspx
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/shop-by-fit.aspx

Not to mention the store locations, which appear to not have titles at all. Of course I would still want to verify this against the actual site, but Xenu has quickly jump started the audit process by pointing to areas of concern. It may not find the needle in the haystack, but it does move the hay from the field to the stack to begin, and sometimes cuts the stack down into manageable bales.

Some of the title tags above are okay and maybe are the most optimal … only keyword research combined with site analytics will reveal that. What we do know though is that duplicating the same title across different 4 pages means at least 3 of them are not optimal and we’ve created keyword cannibalization. Just based on the URLs, I can also tell that there are probably better, more targeted titles that could be used.

Whether a site’s title tags are manually or programmatically optimized doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the title tag is the strongest and easiest signal that a site owner has control over. This is the juiciest, ripest, most important low hanging fruit opportunity that many sites continue to miss.

A couple more interesting bits of information we can get from Xenu that also probably go mostly unnoticed, are the Level, Links Out and Links In columns. Level may not be exact, but we can get a quick idea of how deep, based on click and crawl path, content is. While purely site related, the links information can give us a quick view as to internal linking strength, identifying which pages or sections may undervalued or serving as internal hubs.

Hopefully this proved an interesting exercise. While I wouldn’t recommend doing a real SEO site audit blindfolded, I definitely recommend reviewing your site in new and different ways and removing some of the visual cues (and clutter) to see how the bots view some of the site’s most important signals. Remember that Xenu doesn’t provide the answers, but at least helps to identify areas that may be problematic and helps to better make sense of the foundation of a site … especially if that site consists of hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs.

This is also a great training tool and a way to further hone your skill set. I’ll liken it to Luke Skywalker’s blindfolded lightsaber training … one must move beyond seeing to feeling. May the SEO be with you.

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.

Okay, so maybe not really blindfolded, but how about auditing a site without actually seeing the site? Hmm, that might be interesting. This is more than gimmick. In fact, though I might normally take a quick look around a site, ala 60-Second Audit, I generally start the deep dive of an audit exactly as I’m going to show you.

So how do I start auditing a site without looking at the actual site? Just like a search engine, I start at the crawl, which is what we are going to do today. SEO is about so much more than just keywords, and while the title tag is one of the most important signals a site can send to a search engine, a title tag that can’t be found is of little value.

Let’s Audit, Blindfolded

I needed a website I haven’t seen before for this experiment. To pick a site randomly that I haven’t seen, I started by picking a word and searching in Google for it. Being mid-October and feeling the quick approach of winter, the word “sweater” seemed aptly appropriate. I then jumped to the 5th page of results and selected the 2nd result, which was ColdWaterCreek.com. While I know of Cold Water Creek, I don’t recall ever seeing their site, so this is perfect.

Let me introduce you to Xenu. Xenu Link Sleuth™ is a free crawler program that you can download and use to crawl your own site (highly recommend) or other sites. Xenu is one of the most powerful (and perhaps underrated) tools an SEO can have. The amount of information from this tool is priceless, and in this case, will be how we’ll start to audit ColdWaterCreek.com “blindfolded.” That said, if you want to try this at home, I’d recommend doing so on your own site, rather than everyone running out and crawling Cold Water Creek’s site!

Since I prefer to work with the data within Excel, the first thing I do after running it is to export it out to a tab separated format that can be imported into Excel. The details of using Xenu are beyond the scope of this post, so if you are new to Xenu, I highly recommend spending a little time reading first.

After moving the external URLs/links, which in this case also includes the images to another tab, I’m left with 5,161 rows of data, or in other words, 5,161 URLs. When I do a site:www.coldwatercreek.com search in Google (appending &filter=0&start=990 to the URL), I see Google returns 820 results. Quite a difference … what’s the true number?

No idea, but most clients feel that the Google number is often far less than the number of URLs (pages) they have and Xenu seems like a lot more than they expect. I certainly don’t expect Google (or any other search engine) to index 100% of a site’s URLs, but seeing less than 16% indexed based on the Xenu number tells me there may be some issues. Remember though, I haven’t even looked at the site so I don’t really have any idea what those issues are yet.

More importantly, and I see this time after time, we don’t know whether the “true” number should be closer to the Google number or the Xenu number. Too often, people view indexation numbers as something that needs to be increased, that more is better. But more could just as well be indicative of problems.

Next, I note that the server is running Windows IIS as the server platform. I see this in part by the .aspx file extension, but confirmed by the “Server” column of the Xenu report, which lists the URLs as Microsoft-IIS/6.0. In a normal audit, this would clue me in on two things, the first being that I want to be aware of possible case issues. Since IIS doesn’t distinguish case differences, this means that we might see somewhat “sloppy” or inconsistent linking references, such as default.aspx vs. Default.aspx, or blue-jeans.aspx, Blue-Jeans.aspx, Blue-jeans.aspx or even blue-Jeans.aspx. While the server may gladly serve up the appropriate content for these variations, search engine spiders recognize that these could be different pages on other serves, such as Linux, which means that each of these URLs are unique.

Second, this also alerts us to proper redirection challenges. Setting up 301 permanent redirects vs. 302 redirects in IIS seems to trip up many IT departments. So now, we know that this may be a roadblock to any recommendations we make, or that we really need to double check that they have been done in the past and that they are done correctly going forward.

A quick scan is all that is needed to find examples of the case issue:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/StoreLocator/Store_Details.aspx?StoreID=9126
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Storelocator/Store_Details.aspx?StoreID=9126

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/StoreLocator/Store_Events.aspx?StoreID=146
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Storelocator/Store_Events.aspx?StoreID=146

See the differences above? One version uses an upper case “L” while the other version uses a lower case “l” within StoreLocator. This means that there are likely duplicates of all of the stores for the details and events pages. Fortunately, the rest of the URLs are pretty clean and consistent, which isn’t always the case (no pun intended).

After sorting by URL, we quickly see some other common issues. Ironically, this issue is less about the content that is there and more about what isn’t there. Toward the top of the list, we find these URLs:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/%2f404.htm
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/404.htm
• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/404.htm?aspxerrorpath=/MyAccount/MyAccount/MyAcctLogin.aspx

First, the %2f is the encoding for the “/” which tells me that there is probably a malformed URL here. The real issue though is that all of these represent a 404 file not found page, yet all return a 200 ok header status. This means that these, and likely any malformed URLs or URLs that no longer exist, will continue to live on and bloat the index rather than drop out. It also means that the site isn’t sending the highest quality signal to search engines by appearing to return ok statuses for URLs that don’t exist. However, we can also see by the following example that some URLs are returning a proper 404 header status:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/%2fGiftCard%2fEGiftCardATB.aspx%3fproductid%3d01GC006%26ensembleid%3d10756

Along with additional examples of possible encoding issues, this is a good reminder that we need to check for issues in different areas of the site and in different ways. This is especially true with complex sites that might appear seamless visually, but may be powered by a number of different scripts, such as a content management system, ecommerce cart, blog, forum and FAQ … all of which might be powered separately.

While we are on that note, my guess is that the following URL probably isn’t of much value either:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Blank.htm

Other examples of possible duplication or diluted content may be seen in the following:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/default.aspx (because I still haven’t viewed the site, I don’t know for certain, but experience and my gut tells me that this may be a duplication of the homepage URL, http://www.coldwatercreek.com/).

Another challenging area for duplication is in presentation, and my guess is that:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx

is probably being duplicated by:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?ShowAllProducts=false

Which is prevalent for all products that have pagination, and to some extent, duplicated further by the counter URL variation:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?ShowAllProducts=true

At this point, we don’t know if these are being dealt with in other ways, such as robots handling, nofollow link attributes or the canonical link element. Nor can we determine how these should be handled, but at least we have a better understanding of what is going on and what we need to dig into.

Related to that, we also have a quick view into the pagination URL construct:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?page=1

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?page=2

In addition, some other URLs that are probably low value for search (as well as possible encoding issues again) that we’ll want to check to see whether they are being excluded from the bots:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/%2fGiftCard%2fGiftCardATB.aspx%3fproductid%3d44130%26ensembleid%3d50183

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/EGiftCard.aspx?productid=01GC001&ensembleid=10756

While we are looking at URLs, we can quickly scan our Excel file and identify key URL constructs being used.

Such as parameter-based product detail pages, including perhaps low-value duplication:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/Detail.aspx?productid=30144&ensembleid=34281

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/Detail.aspx?productid=30144&ensembleid=34281&Skn=outlet

Some lengthy, a little parameter heavy and generally ugly URLs that may be challenging to bots:

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/prodList.aspx?provider=productsearch&cmd=czcategory&cat=All+Products////Apparel////Dresses////UserSearch=Dept.Channel+ID=1&ShowAllProducts=false

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Sale/default.aspx?provider=productsearch&cmd=czNewPage&path=All+Products////UserSearch=RedTag////UserSearch=Misses&page=18

Especially in comparison to the cleaner, keyword friendly category pages (though I’d still want to review these around the pagination construct mentioned earlier):

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/knit-dresses.aspx

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/misses.aspx

• http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-jackets.aspx

Seem like a lot of focus on URLs? You bet. URLs are at the foundation of a site’s SEO. Get these wrong and little else matters. Xenu is excellent at seeing the URLs that exist that may not ever make it into a search engine index … which may be quite telling. So remember that a “site:domain.com” advanced query only reveals what is “above water.”

The Cold Water Creek site is actually quite small with only a few variations of URLs. The real power and beauty of Xenu is when you find yourself reviewing 300,000+ URLs from highly complex sites with several URL constructs and variants.

In part 2 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we’ll start out by seeing what Xenu can show us about the most important search signal a site has.

You can use a Firefox or Internet Explorer browser both of which are compatible with the Google toolbar. You also need a Gmail account with which your comments can be associated.

The sidewiki panel that appears on a website will be displayed to users with the toolbar installed. It is a separate window that appears to the left of your browser. All the comments displayed are stored on Google servers.

This annotation of the web through the sidwiki pane on any website is not owned by a site owner. It is activated by a program that users install on their computers of their own volition.

The disconcerting fact is that when visitors arrive at your site by either typing in your website address or clicking a link that points to your site, they can see comments on the side of your site.

There is no separate URL on the sidewiki panel that shows the source of the comments. They look like part of your site. It cannot be taken for granted that all users know the concept behind sidewiki even if they have willingly installed it on their computers. The comments beside your site can lead to users assuming that it is part of your site.

Unlike your blog on your site where you can moderate the comments, in the case of sidewiki, as the site owner, you have no control over the comments that appear beside your site.

The Google moderation team will ensure that damaging comments will be prevented from getting published. But there is no guarantee on this. As Matt Cutts always states, it is the intent which Google has a close look at (behind any strategy or move by webmasters). In this case, it may not be truly relevant as malicious competitors can hold the key to the comments and the site owner cannot do anything about it.

If visitors to your site were to see offensive comments on the sidewiki panel that fly under the moderation team’s radar, it can reflect badly on your site and can stop repeat visits after that experience.

Consider the example where you search on Google for the term “sidewiki controversy” (without the quotes). Have a look at the second result on the Google SERPs in the screenshot below.

The link below the second SERP result clearly shows the Google domain as the URL. On clicking the link, you are taken to a wikipedia page titled Vaccine Controversy. You can see that the comment on the Sidewiki panel has been indexed by Google and displayed on the Google SERPS. The highlighted portion on the screenshot below (click to enlarge the image) matches the second result on the Google SERPs in the screenshot above this.

If sidewiki comments can influence search engine rankings, then that is a matter of worry too as your competitors can leverage it to their advantage by posting comments that are contextual to the content on your site and get your site ranked for search terms with negative intent.

Google might possibly consider the aspect of monetizing the comments made on sidewiki panel through contextual advertisements in future. These can confound the web landscape further as ads placed can be contextual to the comments made that in turn corroborate with the content of the site on which the sidewiki panel is displayed.

With commercial sites selling products or services, an ad with an affiliate link in direct competition to the site on whose left side it is displayed can become a classic case of riding piggyback on some site owner’s hard work.

I am certain Google will take precautions to counter these possible ill effects. Maybe an idea would be to exclude websites with commercial intent from this sidewiki feature to start with. Once the system is ascertained to be foolproof in the non commercial space, then it can be slowly introduced to include commercial sites.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland ppc services provider that offers both seo and ppc services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

The actual conversion process involves testing a landing page leading to a signup or filling in of a form or a thankyou page in the event of a successful sale of a product. With Website Optimizer, you can set up experiments that involve Multivariate testing or A/B testing to track which version of the landing page is pulling in the desired results.

The top ranking of a client’s website on the Google SERPs is often used to justify the success of a SEO firm’s efforts. Clients are also obsessed with their site rankings especially in the face of their competitors flying high on the SERPs which is a pretty natural human reaction. But rankings are not the ultimate way of judging the success of a website. Conversion of visitors into customers or visitors taking the necessary action is an ideal way to measure the success of a site’s SEO or PPC efforts.

The testing I did for a client involved switching between an original landing page and a completely new landing page in a PPC campaign. This is an example of A/B testing which is simpler version of testing with Website Optimiser. It is ideal to start with this test if you have lower traffic volume and gain faster results. The conversion in my experiment involved filling in a form.

Multivariate testing involves using the same landing page with changes to headings, call to action, placement of menu items, logos etc forming the variation of the original page. In effect, you are testing between variations of the same page to see which one results in the user taking the desired action and hence achieving the optimum measure of conversion.

When setting up the A/B experiment, fix the original landing page and a new landing page without any room for doubts as you will switch the traffic between these two pages. Then the conversion page is the page with the form that needs to be filled. It is handy to have a printout of the Website Optimizer help section for reference.

Steps to follow when setting up the experiment:
1) Choose your original landing page (let us denote it as OLP)

2) Create a totally different landing page (this is an A/B test) (denoted by DLP)

3) Choose your conversion page (denoted by CP)

4) Now comes the crucial part of installing the tags. These are pieces of javascript code that need to be installed on the different pages.
a) The control script is installed only on the original landing page, placed just after the head tag.
b) The tracking script is installed immediately before the closing body tag on all the three pages namely, OLP, DLP and CP.

5) Website Optimizer’s validation tool will check for errors in the installed tags. It does this in two ways. You can provide the URLs to your original and variation landing pages and the conversion page. If these pages are externally visible, Website Optimiser will access them and point out errors if any.

Alternatively, if Website Optimizer cannot access the pages on your live site, you can save and upload the HTML source files for your landing pages and conversion pages and allow Website Optimizer to validate them.

Once Website Optimizer validates the installed tags, it is time to start your experiment. Make one final check of your experiment settings. Once the experiment is started, you will not be able to change the experiment parameters. You would do well to ensure that the settings are as you intended them to be.

6) The last but not the least step is the % of traffic you wish to switch between your original landing page and the new landing page. I started off diverting 75% of the traffic to the new landing page and retaining the original landing page 25% of the time. Google advises to have a 100% switch in order to run the experiment faster and hence obtain results faster. It is entirely up to you to make the final decision.

After the activation of the experiment, when you click on Website Optimizer, you can see the name of the experiment (the naming is part of the guided process that Website Optimizer leads you through when setting up the experiment) and the Status column says – Running Collecting Data. There are links below it to edit settings and view the report. (screenshot attached below)

The View Report setting allows you to compare the performance of the original landing page and the new landing page. It shows how well or how badly the newer version is performing against the original. In the early days of my experiment, I saw a yellow colured bar which showed that testing was inconclusive.

There are three other columns namely Chance to beat original, Observed Improvement and Conversion/Visitors. As my experiment progressed, the new combination worked better and finally in 15 days, the green colored bar indicated that the new combination is a clear winner.

The Website Optimizer documentation says that if the Chance to bear Original column exceeds 95%, then you can safely assume that your new combination is a winner.

In my experiment, I had to install the script tags on a site run by WordPress. A great Website Optimizer WordPress plugin created by Filippo Toso makes it a breeze to install the tags.

NOTE:
The switching of the original landing page and the new landing page is applicable to all forms of traffic, be it organic or pay per click.

For example, if the original landing page forms part of your website and your new landing page is created specifically to target a PPC campaign and therefore not visible to users landing on your site through an organic search listing, remember that the original landing page will be switched to show the new landing page according to the traffic percentage value that you set in your experiment.

Again, depending on the complexity of your experiment, it can take more or less time for Website Optimizer to judge the winning combination.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo consultancy offering top quality organic search and paid search services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

These tips are easy to implement and will suit a majority of the businesses on the web. With paid traffic getting more expensive with each passing day (and yet providing only 12% of traffic on the web), it is high time all website owners started ramping up their organic seo efforts. These tips will certainly help in improving a site’s natural search visibility which still accounts for 88% of the traffic on the web.

There are a few proprietary tools (created by SEOMoz) that are mentioned in the post. These tools do a great job of automating the mundane tasks thus saving valuable time and giving great results to help you plan your strategy. You have to be a paid PRO member to access these tools.

1) Request for a link in customer communications:
There are many opportunities arising in the course of a site owner communicating with a customer in the entire buying cycle. In your emails, you will be well advised to ask for a link in a courteous manner.

It could read – “If you have a website or blog, we would appreciate if you could link to us by copying this code Anchor text that suits your business.”
NOTE:
a) Vary the anchor text subtly in your emails
b) If possible, get links to your inner money pages

2) Use of Top Pages Tool To Identify Competitor’s Backlinks:
The Top Pages tool is a great way to see your competitor’s backlinks by just plugging in their site URL. The screenshot below helps you get an idea.

You can then create suitable linkbait that can attract links from those sites that are already linking to your competitor. Else, you can email the powerful domain owners and request for a link after you have referenced their site post or article on your own blog or your site. This will help answer the other domain owner’s question – “What is in it for me?” and thus incentivize her to link to your site.

3) Use Adwords Tool To Find Keywords That Have High Search Volume And Low Competition:
Many of us are prone to miss the obvious Adams in many things we do in life. This point is a classic example. In most cases, these money keywords are long tail keywords that can be optimised through on page factors and made to rank well in the major search engines.

A search for pet collar using the Adwords keyword tool results in the following screenshot:

The term

pet collar supplies

has a search volume of 49500 with limited advertiser competition. If your site is in the pet industry business, this will be a good keyword to target.

4) Use of Top Pages Tool To Find Linking Pages To Your Domain That Need A Redirect:
The Top Pages tool mentioned in (2) above is very useful to identify links from external sites to pages on your domain that are currently maybe showing a 404 Error or temporary redirects etc, whatever the case maybe.

You can then use 301 redirects to preserve and forward the inherent link juice on such pages to the latest updated versions on your site. I am reproducing a screenshot of the original post which clearly explains what I have written.

If you are the site owner, then the access to Google Webmaster Central will help you identify the 404 pages. It can be a problem if you are doing research for a potential client.

There is another instance where an entire domain has been 301 redirected to a new domain. If the old domain had pages with 404 errors, then a 301 redirect to them is still going to show up as 404 errors as far as Google is concerned. These are lost pages and will not show up in the Webmaster Tools when the new domain is analyzed.

But Top Pages tool does show up these lost pages. It is invaluable data to rectify the lost pages and gain their link juice by 301 ing them to the appropriate pages on the new domain.

5) Competitive Link Finder Tool To Build Your Site External Profile:
The new Competitive Link Finder tool released by SEOmoz is a powerful aid that helps you identify the linking sites that link to multiple competitors in your industry.

You have to plug in your site URL and atleast three of your competitor sites to get the best results. You can always email such domains that link to your industry competitors and get a link to your site as well.

6) Optimize Your Google Local Listings:
Google local listings are a huge asset for any business to be listed on the first page for the most representative search phrase of their industry. It is helpful if the business is physically located close to the city.

I have found that a good local backlink profile boosts a site on Google local search. This can be achieved by submitting to local directories and other businesses in the same local geographical location in which the business operates.

David Mihm is an authority on local search issues and his points at the SEOMoz Pro Conference are outlined below:
a) Claim your local listing on Google (even if you make a multiple submit). This is given more value by Google than a bulk upload that is susceptible to spam.

b) Use keywords in the business title when submitting a local listing. Avoid keyword stuffing the title.

c) Add custom categories that your business offers. This can be a helpful ranking factor. Use the maximum number of permitted custom categories.

d) Citations are the links of Google Local rankings. Get listed on Localeze, InfoUSA, Openlist.com, etc. Americans should check out this list of places to get citations

Others should check out David’s guides to citations in Canada, UK Citations, Citations in Australia and Continental Europe Citations

You can use the search engines to find even more citation sources:

• yourcity, st blog
• yourcity, st directory
• yourindustry, st blog
• yourindustry, st directory
• yourindustry yourcity, st blog
• yourindustry yourstate directory

7)Buyind paid advertisements on Google Content Network:
There is a tip on buying advertisements on sites listed on the Google Content Network. Sites listed there are maximising their revenue through Adsense and would be more open to paid link advertisements. It is each individual site owner’s call whether to adopt this strategy or not.

8. Increase Link Love By Becoming A Green Business:
If a business goes green online, it is a good way of attracting links from authoritative domains. There are many sites like Ethical Directory, EcoFirms.org, Guide Me Green etc willing to give your site a link provided it is a green one. This also reflects on a business owner’s willingness to be eco friendly. With global warming taking centerstage, this issue is all the more vital.

9) Work on Your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):
A good majority amongst us (especially in the SEO industry) are obsessed with rankings and traffic. Conversion of visitors into paid customers often takes a backseat. Ben Jesson’s CRO presentation provided a wealth of information and lot of food for thought.

You could make a good start by learning your customers’ needs once they land on your site. This can be done by implementing tools on your website from which you can learn what your customers are looking for.

Get some unbiased feedback from other folks who are not your friends or relatives. The more the site is torn to shreds, the better it is as an eye opener for you to take instant remedial action. A good list of tools for learning from your customers are:

• GoogleTalk Chatback (I just added this to my site and it is super easy to implement)
• Tell-a-Friend-King
• Kampyle
• iPerceptions 4Q
• Distilled Reputation Monitor
• CrazyEgg (I have used this, and it rocks)
• SurveyMonkey
• Ethnio
• ClickTale
• Google Website Optimizer

You would be well off checking these great Conversion rate optimization articles and sign up for the newsletter on their site.

10) Seth’s Marketing Opportunity Calculator:
To help you in your sales pitch efforts, it is worth your effort in taking a look at Seth’s Marketing Opportunity calulator. You can download his slides and spreadsheets at How to Win SEO Budget and Influence your CMO

Whitespark’s entire post titled 10 Valuable, Actionable, Take-Aways From the SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar is a great read on which this post is based.

My post titled Next Frontier In Search Marketing gives the traffic figures for seo and ppc.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company offering both natural search and Auckland pay per click marketing services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

The demo product is an HTML 5 applicaion built using the Google Web Toolkit. Wave is being released as an open source product. Its open platform encourages developers to build other Wave clients, extensions and embed waves in other web pages and platforms. The product is characterised by the 3P’s namely product, platform and protocol.

The brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen from Google Australia are the creators of this incredible product. Their previous creation was Google Maps which is now the defacto standard for online mapping of geographical locations. This has taken a good couple of years to develop and bring it to its current form. Jens stressed this fact to the audience – You must remember that all this is happening in your browser.

A “wave” contains equal parts document and conversation where people can simultaneously work and communicate together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more.

How Google Wave Works

You create a wave and add contacts to it. All the contacts on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, videos, gadgets and feeds from other sites on the web. All members can edit the wave directly and also insert replies. You can see all the edits in real time as the changes are made to the wave by others.You can be running a Firefox browser and your friend can be on Safari browser. You can add as many contacts as you want.

The playback feature is a very powerful feature. If a new contact joins the wave, she can see the collaboration and communication that has taken place in a certain form at that point of time. By clicking playback, she can see how the whole wave has evolved from the beginning to the point of time she joined the wave. This is a very powerful feature especially when teams are working on different parts of the same project document.

Some of the really cool features are:

• Google Wave offers plain vanilla type email conversation where you can send emails to contacts you choose to.
• Instant messaging where unlike the typical IM chat, you see the message – Sarah is typing
  before you get to see the message once Sarah is done typing, in a wave, you see the chat transferred character by character in real time
• Use playback to see how the wave has evolved to its current shape
• Drag and drop attachments, say photos, into the wave from your desktop and everyone else on the wave can see it almost instantly
• API for embedding your wave to web pages such as a blog
• Wave can be embedded in social media sites like Orkut
• You can participate in a wave from your mobile phone
• Editing of the wave in real time and edits appear instantly with markups denoting the different edits
• Ability to send a private message to a particular contact which others cannot see
• Teams working on a project document can collaborate in real time and communicate simultaneously when working on it

Google Wave can be viewed as a platform with a rich collection of open APIs. This allows developers to build new extensions that can work with waves and also embed waves in other web services.

The Google Wave Federation Protocol is the basis for storing and sharing waves with the all important live concurrency mechanism which allows edits to be viewed in real time across contacts and services. This protocol is designed such that any user’s wave services can communicate with each other and with the Google Wave service. This is going to be achieved by making the Google Wave protocol code open source.

An excellent video on the Google Wave demo by the development team will give you a great idea of the amazing features that have been built into it.

Google is encouraging the developer community to create some cool apps that can be incorporated into the Google Wave before it is made public. You can sign up at http://wave.google.com to be notified of the release date when Google Wave is launched as a public product.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts, our Auckland search engine optimisation company in New Zealand. He also posts regularly to the Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz

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(Try out their local search engine to view businesses and ratings.)

Praized was built by some local search veterans from the Yellow Pages Group, and it’s already managed to nab small dribbles of acclaim — most recently, it was named a finalist in Red Herring’s Canada’s Top 50 Canada award which recognized the year’s most promising private technology ventures in Canada.

While it may be a Canadian company, the technology itself is nationality-neutral and compelling enough to be attracting interest and usage from U.S. developers and companies as well. Indeed, Praized has loaded United States directory listings into their database as well as Canadian businesses.

With the company founded by Yellow Pages Group expatriots, it’s no surprise that they have a formal partnership with that company. Praized has also set up formal partnerships with U.S. companies Yellowbook and Localeze as well.

Funded by a mere $1,000,000 seed round by Garage Technology Ventures Canada (and that was in Canadian dollars, right?), the company appears to have achieved a trifecta necessary to set it up for success: (1) compelling/useful product; (2) “vision” – management who *get* how to target a non-saturated market niche; and (3) partnerships with the sorts of companies that can help drive success faster.

Okay, so Praized isn’t really a paradigm-shifting new technology, I know. However, it marries up a few different pieces of functionality smoothly and simply, and targets a local search / social media niche that could drive rapid adoption and distribution. It looks to me like Digg for local search.

(Greg Sterling previously reported about Praized – check out his post on it.)