Pittsburgh SEO Group » google

Pittsburgh SEO Group September Meeting Recap

pshank — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:25:04 +0000

The Pittsburgh SEO Group recently held their free September meeting at the Pittsburgh Tech Council offices in the South Side. Chris Hornak, Director of Operations at Eyeflow Internet Marketing, presented the session Five Legit Ways to Spy on Your Competitors.

Chris created the fictional company “Yogamatic,” and walked the SEO group members through ways to conduct research on one of Yogamatic’s top competitors. The following is an overview of the techniques he presented:

Google Tools

Most of us are familiar with the Maps, Videos, News and Images tools on Google. But Google has other vertical search options that allow you to conduct targeted research on your competition.

The Updates tool will allow you to see what social media your competitors are using, and what users of social media are saying about your competitors. The Discussions tool allows users to see threads and forums that mention your competition. This is a great place to look for – and capitalize on – complaints that people are making. And the Blogs tool allows you to see what blogs are saying about your competition.

Backlinks

OpenSiteExplorer.org is a free tool that allows you see which domains are linking to your competitors. You can view by page, domain, anchor text, or a full list of metrics. You can use this information to help determine what direction to take your own website.

Traffic Patterns

Compete.com is another free tool that allows you to spy on competitors by peeking at their traffic levels. You can graph your own traffic against that of your competition to get a direct comparison. You can see from these graphs who is growing and who is shrinking, and by how much.

Keyword Rankings

SEMRush.com and SERPAnalytics.com will allow you to enter the domain name of your competition and see what keywords are organically ranking for that site. You can also see which keywords they are bidding on and how much they spend per month on PPC. SEMRush includes a handy estimated traffic graph with the data.

Alerts

Setting up a Google Alert for your competitors means you will know when new pages appear in search rankings. Through SocialMention.com, you can set an email alert or an RSS feed that helps you keep tabs on your competition.

Star Wars vs Star Trek – Google Says the Winner is…

Chris Hornak — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:16:21 +0000

Google Insights is a great keyword and industry research tool. Just type in a few keywords or phrases and google insight will compare the terms using a line graph. You can also narrow your search down to a specific geographical location. This will come in handy for websites who are more interested in local search traffic.

I decided to use this tool for a fun little experiment and according to Google search trends Star Wars has more search volume than Star Trek.

Features of Google Insights:

Narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports.
Anticipate demand for your business so you can budget and plan accordingly.
Know where to find your customers. See how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.

More Examples

Google Page Rank Update

Chris Hornak — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:25:03 +0000

“new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days.” – Matt Cutts

This is great news… I’m looking forward to seeing if the page rank of my websites increases.

PageRank is Google’s link analysis algorithm that gives a 1-10 score to quality web content.

Google Can Now Index Flash Content?

Chris Hornak — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:38:10 +0000

According to a post made last night on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog they have improved Google’s ability to index Flash websites. This is big news because from an SEO standpoint we’ve always had to steer away from using flash to display textual content this can change everything.

I ran some quick tests by going to an all flash site (http://www.cubamoon.com/) Then I grabbed a paragraph out of the site and did a Google search for that text; “cubanmoon is a new media design studio” and no results where found. So at this time it doesn’t seem to be working at 100%. It may be because this new algorithm still needs time to crawl and index the websites. So hopefully we’ll see this working really soon and start seeing more successful online marketing with flash websites.

Get Notified Immediately If You’re Blacklisted By Google

Chris Hornak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:40:41 +0000

Are you worried that your site might of been blacklisted by Google or would you like to have a way to be notified if yours or a clients site was blacklisted. If so then I have a great new and free tool you can use called SERPGuard. Its free service that checks the Google Safe Browsing Blacklists and sends you an instant notification through email and/or an RSS feed.

Google Answered my Question

Chris Hornak — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:21:18 +0000

Last week google had a live chat with anyone who could attend, so of course I did. A friend of mine said that he thought google must of took something away from links tagged nofollow, at least the anchor text. I was intrigued by this and at the first chance I got I asked this question…

Chris Hornak – 5:08 pm
Q: Does google take anything from links taged nofollow, for example does it read the anchor text and credit that to the destination?

Susan Moskwa – 5:24 pm (of Google)
A: No, it basically drops that link from our link graph (it ignores it).

See more questioned answered by Google.

Now I also have a theory this could just be Google telling us what they want us to think.