This spreadsheet will allow you to quickly profile your competitor backlinks and identify what keywords they are likely to be targeting.

Simply copy and paste Open Site Explorer data into this spreadsheet, refresh the pivot table and you’ll see the top ten anchor texts used to link to a given website. In addition, a graph visually represents the distribution of anchor text. This graph will give some initial indicators on how natural the link profile of the website is. Download the link profile spreadsheet for free. Further instructions on how to use spreadsheet can be found below.

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A sad day in the SEO community as Google removes the previous interface for the Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool. It’s moments like this when we realise that wars and poverty aren’t important.

I use a range of tools on a daily basis including SEOmoz and Raven but neither are great for tracking rankings. SEOmoz has limits and can be expensive if you want track hundreds of keywords. The data output of Raven is pretty poor, and the interface isn’t so slick. Step in Advanced Web Ranking.

I work agency side in Central London. I have a lot of accounts and one aspect of agency side SEO is that there is a lot of reporting involved. Transparency is key and we report rankings progress across all keywords we optimise for. Raven is ok but I needed a tool that would run in the background, and with a few clicks I could export the data into an Excel pivot table and send over to the client. That’s exactly what Advanced Web Ranking allows me to do.

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Would have thought that live.com would have served a HTTP status code that informed Google Bot to not cache.

I’ve been working on affiliate site, online betting offers. It compiles free bets for users. It’s based on WordPress and I started off with a pretty simple theme and over the weeks have been modifying here and there until it looks rather unique. I’ve put together some nice CTAs that will hopefully boost conversion. Haven’t really started to link build for it yet, as I’m so busy with work at the moment. It’s a long term project but hoping to get some traffic for the 2010 World Cup that kicks off this week.

If it has, it doesn’t lie in the ability to spell. Photo taken from the pub last night.

This week I’ve given thought as to how Google determines domain age. I recently picked up a dropped domain that has previously been registered since 2007. I was feeling quite chuffed with picking up an aged domain, but then I give it some thought as to how Google would determine the age of a domain and perhaps my acquisition wasn’t as good as it first seems.

Market Samurai, a SEO tool has a feature entitled ‘SEO competition’. It essentially collects data for a variety of on page and off page factors allowing one to quickly assess how easy it is to target a niche. One of the factors it collects data for is domain age. Market Samurai uses the earliest record in archive.org to suggest how old a domain is.

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I’ve been working on one client’s account and encountered some consequence of the operations of the previous SEO agency. The SEO agency in question has actually won awards, which comes as a great surprise since the quality of the SEO and the value generated for the client is questionable. Occasionally I get contacted by other SEO companies proposing the outsourcing of work, but all too often it’s the same old story; poor SEO practices. Therefore I thought I’d take some time to compile some of the most common characteristics of poor SEO agencies.

1) They do blackhat SEO
Some of the other reasons will comprise of the dysfunctions of practicing blackhat SEO, however it warrants a separate factor. There is a time and a place for blackhat SEO but on client accounts isn’t one of them. With the size of the accounts I work on, there are various stakeholder group interests to be taken into consideration, the risks of a strategy featuring blackhat far, far outweigh the advantages. The consequences for being penalised with a major client is that people could lose their jobs, and investors could lose capital. These are not risks that can be taken, and so it’s essential that strategies should be white hat.

2) … and they do it badly

Not only do they do blackhat, they do it badly. Your inbound link portfolio consists of a large proportion of inbound links placed with no context, with the perfect anchor text on PR loaded, low domain authority pages. They make no regard to maintaining an organic looking anchor text distribution, nor a natural PR distribution of links. Probably all of your key phrase targeted links appear only on pages PR3 and above, sending alarm bells to Google.

You’ll likely to have a range of links on penalised pages too, lowering your domain authority and link reputation.

3) They will turn off all your links when you switch agency
Unless you plan to be with your SEO agency for the rest of time, one day you won’t renew your contract and when that day comes, your SEO agency will stop paying for all the links that have been giving your rankings. When that day comes, you’ll lose your rankings, your links and you will be back to square one. Not at any point are you generating any sustainable competitive advantage. Indeed, with consideration to this you’ll only building up your barriers to switching supplier which in turn makes you more dependable and places you in a worse position to negotiate new terms.

4) They target vanity terms with no consideration to ROI
It’s common for management to place great pleasure on vanity terms, and sometimes as an agency you have to fullfill this. However it’s the responsibility of the SEO agency to convey the importance of leading a ROI focused campaign that delivers returns, not boasting material for management. SEO isn’t just about attaining high position in Google, but high positions that deliver returns on investment. 80% of traffic can come from the long tail, and ignoring this can be a huge mistake too. I’d always recommend tracking search traffic through to sales, so you can see which keywords are delivering you sales, and accordingly target these.

5) They underestimate good on page optimisation
It’s true that the Google algorithm heavily values inbound links in determining rankings, but on page optimisation should not be neglected. As previously stated, 80% of traffic is generally derived from the long tail, and accordingly on page retains great importance. Getting a good, indexable website is crucial, and an approach to content creation that gives consideration to semantics allows your to far better target the long tail.

No doubt I’ll continue to keep coming up with ideas why your SEO agency sucks, but this list will do for now. If you’re looking for a SEO agency, make sure you are satisfied with these points when you pick one.

For a few months now I have been subscribed to Web Designer magazine, and generally it’s a good read. This current months issue was of great interest to me, covering jQuery, and an article titled ‘Is social media the future of SEO?’.

As a SEO executive, it’s probable my view of the article is a little bias, however I felt the author got either a couple of points incorrect or didn’t clarify himself well. I’d like therefore to take the opportunity to give my thoughts on a couple of the points.

The author describes the rise in social media as having two key impacts where SEO is concerned. Firstly that users spend more time on these channels and attempting to follow the ambiguous logic of the author, is less likely to search for things using search engines? The second facet is that on Twitter and Facebook, users tend to distribute more material. This is true, however the author fails to speak of probably the biggest challenge social media presents to SEO.

With more discussion and sharing being conducted on social networks, and less blogs and general websites, Google will be more inclined to adopt social networks as reference points in the algorithm. Currently professionals use link building as a strong arm of SEO strategy but if the reference point weighting is to shift dramatically to social networks, where linking is more sporadic, organic and harder to replicate, then that does indeed represent a challenge to SEO.

After, when writing in regards to personalized search, the author states:

How can the SEO of today deal with this? It simply can’t.

Rejection of this argument is two fold. Firstly the notion of SEO as a marketing channel that comprises of a static, never changing strategy is nonsense. SEO has continuously changed in reaction to modifications to the Google algorithm, and the introduction of personalized search is no different. Indeed, SEO strategies have already been devised for people to lever personalized search to their advantage, for instance the encouragement of users to search brands.

Secondly the author’s perception of personalized search is overstated. Our tests of the change personalized search, and wider commentary provides evidence that the impact of preference of previous search behaviour affects rankings minimally. Even then it will be limited to previous markets that have been searched within. If someone decides to purchase a desktop computer, and hasn’t made any computer related in the past, how does Google personalize such results? Unless Google starts generating search results largely on preference, the current ‘traditional algorithm’ will still be hugely influential.

It’s probably the complete rejection that SEO can’t react to personalized search that leaves the author open to criticism. I agree that personalized search does provide new challenges, but also provides new opportunities to gain competitive advantage. The conclusion of the article is good. SEO has to give consideration to social media, but the general theme that social media is increasing in importance at the expense of SEO, I believe in unfounded.

Oh, and the irony that I had to resort to social media in order bring this to the attention of the author is not lost on me.

Spotted this gem while browsing my local Sainsbury’s. Aggressive pricing from Sainsbury’s.