Google has added a series of 6 videos on using the Search Based Keyword Tool (SbKT or SKTool) to their YouTube account. Here’s the first:
Great stuff, though they have to jump through some hoops at the end that my Missing Link tool (part of AdWords Evolved) makes much faster and more powerful.
This is an email I wrote to someone thinking of coaching a new Jr FIRST LEGO League team, and I thought others might find it useful:
Last year was my first, and it wasn’t that hard to run. I’m sure other homeschool folks would be interested, and I think there was a homeschool team at last year’s Kansas City JrFLL competition. Not sure who the coach was, though.
Google Analytics is a great tool for measuring site performance, but all too many sites install it and then never look at the info. We’ve found that automating the reporting and delivering stats via email helps clients stay on top of their site performance. Here’s a section from the book AdWords Evolved about how to do it:
Here’s a quick start to using Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool to find new, high-value, low-competition keywords on your existing site with zero work. To do this, we’ll use Google’s new “search based keyword tool”, SKTool.
Click over to:
Click ‘Sign in’ and sign in to your AdWords account. (Screen shots below show a random site I’m not associated with.)
Looking today at a client’s blog SEO, I noticed that they’ve got PageRank heading to their wp-login.php:
Working today on a client site that had a couple of PageRank issues, I once again ran A1 Website Analyzer, and found a couple of interesting problems. Just let it scan the site, then click ‘Analyze website’ and ‘External’ to see how much on-site link love is headed off-site:
On this particular site, each page links to a customer support portal hosted by SalesForce.com. So by not using rel=”nofollow”, we’re sending all that tasty link juice to SalesForce. No good!
The way this link was set up, we were leaking as much PageRank to SalesForce as we send to our own 2nd-level pages. Fixing this should help significantly.
The other problem is that the home page has lower on-site PageRank than other pages, but the solution for that will have to wait for another day.
I’m a big fan of Google Analytics, and check it often for clients’ sites, to see how things are going and get ideas about how to make improvements. One of the most frustrating stats for me is the “Bounce”. Today, I’ll show you a new tool for getting inside what happens during a bounce.
I’ve seen this a bunch recently, so when I saw this on Twitter tonight, I was curious what was up:
I have a great new tool that spiders sites and helps understand what’s up with on-site PageRank flow. It’s A1 Website Analyzer (free full-featured 30-day trial download), from Microsys Tools. I’ve used Xenu and other spider tools in the past, but what sets this tool apart is their on-site PageRank simulator. This is a GREAT asset for understanding where PageRank is going and how to make it flow better.
One of the great mysteries of Google Analytics is just why they won’t let us see referring URLs of our users. Probably some privacy concern of Google’s, but it’s easy as pie to get from web server logs, so I don’t understand the issue.
I’m so dependent on Analytics for day-to-day work that I really would prefer to have all the info in one place (Analytics) instead of having to integrate log-based reporting (and deal with clients asking why the two give different numbers!). Here’s how to do it:
I normally set up sites to just log 404s and check the log files for problems, which is fine for me, but hard for clients. Here’s how I recently set up a site so the client’s marketing folks could spot 404s on their own:
