Off-Page SEO Techniques for 2013

The strategies you adopt outside the periphery of a blog or website to improve search engine rankings are known as off-page SEO techniques. Over the years, webmasters have experimented with various off-page SEO techniques and they keep evolving every year.
We all know that Google is constantly coming up with changes in their algorithm. Algorithms like Penguin and Panda had a massive impact in the land of search engine optimization.
It is a fact that SEO is always changing and thus we have to be on top of all the recent changes and trends going on.

In this article, we will discuss 10 off-page SEO techniques which will help you to escalate search engine rankings in 2013.

Scale up Guest Blogging efforts

2013 will definitely be a year for guest blogging. It is an amazing blog networking strategy and when you publish really awesome content on other blog domains, it scales up your blog’s search engine ranking, as well as blog reputation.
Page Rank, domain authority, reader engagement, blog audience, Moz Rank are some of the criteria used to choose blogs for guest contributions.

Massive Blog Commenting

These days you find a lot of blog owners publishing list of blogs with the active CommentLuv plugin. The reason for its popularity is its role in link building, which is the main focus for off-page SEO.
Even if you contribute ten real opinionated discussions on CommentLuv enabled blogs daily for 30 days, it is going to improve search engine visibility. More than search engines, you will get new traffic and reader engagement.

SlideShare Presentations

SlideShare is prominent these days. Top blogs feature it as a great way to do off-page SEO and gain recurring traffic. All you need is PowerPoint Presentation making skills and a really unique topic to work on.
If you can create such a presentation and promote it through your blog(s) and guest post about the benefits of SlideShare marketing on prominent blogs, you can double off-page SEO development efforts.

YouTube Marketing

YouTube is huge. It is almost like an independent search engine. With millions of queries and thousands of hours of video uploads daily, you need to maximize on this opportunity. Create or outsource video development on a topic similar to your niche.
The video should be linked back to your main domain. All you need to do is create a free YouTube account, upload it and share. You can also hire a search engine expert to rank the video in 2-3 months. It works.

Article Directories & Web 2.0 Properties

The article directories are tried and tested way to build backlinks. It may not help in getting traffic as these mediums are over-populated; but when you are starting out, it won’t hurt to get few backlinks from good directories like Ezine.
On the other hand, invest some time in building web 2.0 properties like Squidoo Lenses and HubPages. You can even add affiliate products to earn some money from these pages.

Do Podcasting

Podcasting is an exciting new medium which combines blogging and MP3 to create user-friendly content. More and more bloggers are using podcasting to repurpose their content and reach to new audiences.
You too can create and share podcasts on various social networking platforms, video channels and link it back to your site.

Build a Facebook Group

Why Facebook? It is the easiest way when it comes to creating an online community. A lot of blog owners have a Facebook Group to share new content, reach out to new traffic and network with other bloggers.
You can add friends and leave it open for anyone to join. Link it back to your blog and try to keep it active.

Ask others to Review your Business

This off-page SEO technique is useful if you run a business, not a mainstream blog. If you have a big social circle, you can ask them to review the business and post on websites like Shvoong and RateItAll.
You could also use various campaign building sites like Sponsored Reviews, Link Vehicle, Pay Per Post to get more reviewers. This is a paid method.

Local Business Listing

A great way to boost off-page SEO is to get your business listed on local listings such as Yahoo Local, Google Maps and Yellow Pages. This strategy increases the chances of your business services being found and sought after by service buyers. Competition is less and potential of returns high.

Social Bookmarking

Select a couple of social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. Whenever you publish a new blog, share them on these sites. Add tags carefully, categorize them in proper niche, add description and share.
Off-page SEO takes as much work as On-page search engine optimization. You need to perform both in equal measures. Draw a 3-month On-page and Off-page SEO program, and you are sure to get a lot of benefits.
What next? Share your valuable views in the Comment section.

Top 40 SEO Myths You Should Know About – Part 1

Myth #1: Only the First Rank Matters
Many ebooks and other resources that business owners use will place an important emphasis on the need to be at the top of search results, whether that be on Google Search, other engines, or even in places like social media. But surveys have shown that people quite often will look at other results and they will scroll down through the page. Being on top of a second page, for example, can be quite beneficial for traffic. Also, search ranking is only one part of the puzzle. Now Google places other results on the page like social recommendations and local results as well, which means there are many more avenues open to you, and being in first place is no longer as crucial as it once was.
Myth #2: You can do SEO Without Outside Help
Doing SEO simply means that you follow a set of techniques and procedures to improve the chance that web users will go to your site. It is true that anybody can learn these techniques, and, if you are a web site owner and you want to do your own SEO, then you can spend the time to learn and apply those techniques. But SEO can be complex and touches many areas such as marketing online, coding, technical aspects and PR skills. Most business owners simply do not have everything required to do a great job at SEO, and that is why so many agencies exist that offer help. An IT worker or online marketer is often not enough if you want truly good results.

Myth #3: META Tags are Very Important
It used to be that every page on your site needed Meta tags in order to rank well. Those are small pieces of code that would give Google a list of keywords and a description. The search engine would use those to find out what your web site was about. Now however, those do not affect your ranking at all. Both Google and Bing stopped caring about META tags awhile back. However, Meta tags are not useless. For example, the description tag is the text that often appears next to the link that shows up in the search results, so it still serves a useful function.
Myth #4: Keyword-Rich Domain Names are Ranked Higher
Back in the dotcom days, it used to be that the URL you used was very important. Google placed a lot of importance on the domain name, and if you could get a name that had your keyword in it, you would gain a big advantage over other sites. This is why a lot of companies in the late 90′s bought domain names for a lot of money. But now, the indexing process only looks at the actual content of your pages, and not the domain name. The domain name is still important, because people still get to see it, but it will not give you a higher rank.
Myth #5: You have to Submit Your Site to Google or Other Search Engines
All search engines used to have URL submission forms where you could send your site to Google and others. In fact, they still do, but that process is unnecessary. The crawlers that these engines use now are sophisticated enough that any new site will be found in a matter of days, if not hours. The only time you would have to worry about submitting your site is if for some reason it was not indexed automatically after a couple of days.
Myth #6: Submitting a Sitemap will Boost Your Rankings
Google offers a webmaster interface and from there, you can submit a sitemap, which is a XML file containing links to every page on your site. Some site owners take the time to submit such a file every time they make a change, but that is not necessary. Submitting a sitemap does not change your rankings. All it does is add pages which may not have been indexed already. If your site is typical and has links to all your pages, then it is not needed.
Myth #7: SEO has Nothing to do with Social Media
Before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, SEO was the one and only technique to get traffic in an organic way. But now, social media is everywhere, and the line is quickly blurring between the two. While some marketers still consider SEO and social media to be different beasts, the truth is that they are very closely linked. For example, Google now places their own social network, Google Plus, into its search results. If you can get enough influential people to talk about your product and link to your site, then their recommendations will show up in any Google search result that their friends do. This clearly affects SEO. On the flip side, Facebook has also entered search, by recently introducing their Open Graph engine, which searches based on friends and interests. So the two spheres are closely linked, and they are becoming closer all the time.
Myth #8: Google does not read CSS Files
The Google bot used to be fairly primitive and only saw text, which is why many people concentrated on the text part of their web site. But now that engine is very sophisticated and reads JavaScript, CSS, and more. The crawler can definitely see whether your site’s presentation is appealing to users or not. For example, if someone searches on a mobile device and you have no mobile layout on your site, you may be missing out.
Myth #9: You Need to Update Your Home Page All the Time
Some people think that by updating their home page content all the time they will rank higher, or by not updating it their ranking will drop. In most cases that is not the case, because if you have a sales page that offers a product, then there would be no reason to update that page unless something about the product changes, and Google expects that.
Myth #10: The H1 Header has Greater Value than the Rest of Your Text
The structure of your page is seen by Google and other engines, but you have to realize that many sites are structured very differently. As such, no one specific tag has more value than another. An H1 tag is simply a header that corresponds to a CSS entry in order for the user to see your page a certain way. It does not make Google rank your page any differently if you use H2 tags instead, or if your keywords are mostly in the text and not in a specific CSS tag.
Myth #11: Linking to Other Highly Ranked Sites Helps Your Ranking
Some sites try to link to many other high authority sites in order to help their rankings, but that does not help at all. Google uses PageRank to decide how your site will rank, and that algorithm is based on how useful your site is to others, and as such it will only look at how many other people link to you. Whether you link back to them is of no importance. Otherwise, any site could rise to the top simply by linking to millions of sites, which is simply not the case.
Myth #12: Using Automated SEO Methods is Always Spam
Many people use automated SEO methods that do not fall into the spam area. Many companies have very big sites and they use automated scripts to do a lot of the grunt work of SEO. Whether or not a method is spammy is based on what the result is, not on how automated it is.
Myth #13: PageRank is the Only Factor that Matters
The algorithm that Google uses to rank sites is PageRank, which determines how useful a site is to others. But according to Google, search result rankings are also affected by hundreds of other inputs. Some of these inputs are easy to see, like having your site being recommended by others on Google Plus. This proves that not only PageRank matters. The company is staying tight-lipped on how many inputs there are and how important each is, but it is clear that there is more going on than just PageRank. With that said however, it is still widely believed that PageRank is the most important factor, and a PR10 page is always better than a PR3 page.
Myth #14: The Title Tag is Hidden from Search Engines
Most of what Google sees on your site is the text that is visible to users, such as what appears on the screen and is rendered in a web browser. As such, it would be easy to think that the title is not picked up. However, your title is very important for SEO, because it is the text that appears on the link people will click on. Not only is Google using it to help your ranking, but people will also see it when they go to click on your site.

2013 Research Study: Google SEO Ranking Factors

Purpose

The point of the study was to analyze the characteristics of web pages at the top of the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

What We Did

We randomly selected 100 keyphrases, typed them into Google and collected the URL’s of the first 5 results that showed up. The Firefox browser was used for all the searches. We were not logged into any Google products during the search phase.
The 100 keyphrases ranged from 2 word phrases up to 6 word phrases.  The first 5 results in the Google search results listings were chosen, giving us a total of 500 different web pages to collect data from.
We ignored all the Google Adwords ads. We also skipped image listings, shopping site sets, and news site sets.  We only analyzed actual web pages ranking #1 through #5 in the SERPs.
Here’s what we collected from each web page:

• Full URL
• Title tag
• Headline
• Number of subheadings
• Body copy word count
• Number of images in the body
• Number of videos in the body
• Number of referring domains to the web page (data from ahrefs.com)
• Social signals; Tweets, Facebook like, and Facebook shares (data from ahrefs.com)

We also analyzed the keyphrase the web page ranked high for in comparison with many of the factors listed above.

What We Found

There’s a lot of data, so let’s get to the results.

On-Site Factors

I’ll break each of the on-site factors down in this section along with the findings…
Title Tag
Out of the 500 web pages ranking in one of the top 5 positions in Google, 50% of them had the keyphrase in the title tag.

Title Tags & Keyphrases

To arrive at this percentage, a web page counted as a positive when it had the exact keyphrase in the title tag and when the keyphrase was included with slight variations. Here’s what is meant by a slight variation:

• If the keyphrase was singular and the title had a plural, (or the other way around) it was counted.
• If there was a word in between the keyphrase in the title, it was counted.
• When a word meaning the same thing was substituted, (guy vs. man) it was counted.
• If all the words of the keyphrase were in the title, but not in the exact same order, it was counted.

Since many of our keyphrases were randomly generated, they weren’t the type of phrases that would sound perfectly natural as a title tag or a headline. So we didn’t only limit it to times when the exact keyphrase was in the title.
Just to be complete, we also recorded the number of exact matches with the title tag as well.  23% of the high ranking web pages had the exact phrase in their title so it was still substantial.
Headline
Of the high ranking web pages, 43% of them used the keyphrase in the headline.

Headlines & Keyphrases

Again, we counted exact matches for the keyphrase or slight variations (see above).
20% of the web pages had the exact keyphrase within the headline.
Note that for both the title tag and the headline data, partial matches were not counted or these numbers would have been much higher.
As you can see, nearly half of the high ranking pages had the keyphrase (or a very close match) in the title tag and or headline (and many had it in both).
Subheadings
The average number of subheadings in the body copy was right around 6.  Many high ranking pages did not have subheadings at all.  Very few of the high ranking web pages included the exact keyphrase in the subheading (in fact, this number was well under a half of a percent). We did not count partial matches in the subheadings, only exact matches.
Word Count
Of the top ranking web pages, 916 was the average number of words in the body copy.  The body copy included all the content excluding the header, sidebar, navigation menus, and footer area.
We measured the number of times the exact keyphrase was in the body copy. For this statistic, the we only counted the exact keyphrase (partial matches and slight variations were not included) On average, the exact keyphrase was found at a rate of slightly under half a percent.
Judging by the data we collected, you do not need to include odd or unnatural sounding keyphrases in your title tag, headline, subheadings or your body copy. If you’re going to include exact keyphrases, you really only need to include them one time. There’s no need to over-optimize your pages.
Images & Video
Of the 500 high ranking web pages, the average number of images per page was 7. Many high ranking pages had no images.
The average number of videos was well under 1 per page. In fact, most of the web pages had no videos on them.
Comparisons
We compared the #1 ranked webpage and the #5 ranked webpage for each keyphrase to see if there were any correlations for any of the major data. Here’s what we found:

Title Tags & Keyphrases Compared

On average, the #1 ranking web pages had the keyphrase (either the exact phrase or a slight variation of it) in the title tag 60% of the time. The #5 ranking web pages only had keyphrases in the title tag an average of 49% of the time. We did the same thing for headlines:

Headline & Keyphrases Compared

On average, the #1 ranking web pages had the keyphrase (either the exact phrase or a slight variation of it) in the headline 47% of the time. The #5 ranking web pages only had keyphrases in the headline an average of 41% of the time.

Based on our study, there’s a correlation between having the keyphrase in the title and/or the headline and the higher rankings (even just moving up page one of Google). Next we looked at the word counts between the #1 ranking web pages and those in the #5 spot:

Word Counts Compared

As you can see, the average ranking web page ranking in the #1 spot had a significantly higher word count than the average web page in the #5 spot by about 120 words.

We looked at number of images and videos and there wasn’t any real correlation there (at least in our study).  It didn’t matter whether the web page ranked #1 or #5, the average number of images and videos still held up.

Off-Site Factors

The main off-site factors analyzed in the study were backlinks and social signals.

Backlinks

We collected the total number of referring domains for each of the 500 web pages we analyzed. If a referring domain linked back to the web page 300 times, it was still only counted as 1 link.

The number of referring domains to the high ranking web pages varied widely; from 0 to tens of thousands of referring domains for a single webpage. The average number of referring domains linking back to a high ranking web page in our study was 335.

That’s a significant number of links.  Keep in mind these were just to specific web pages on a site, not the site as a whole.  On average, the number of referring pages to the home page of these sites was significantly higher.

We looked at just how many of these high ranking web pages were internal pages and how many were the home page.  Our data showed that 88% of the high ranking web pages were internal pages. Only 12% were home pages.

Home Pages vs. Internal Pages

In many cases, internal pages were ranking high even with zero backlinks to them. We checked further and in most of these instances, the home pages of these sites had a high number of backlinks. This wasn’t just limited to major sites like YouTube.com and Wikipedia.org. There were many examples of high ranking internal pages with very few backlinks on sites that were not major brand names.   This indicates the overall popularity measured by backlinks can help you rank high for keyphrases without always having to gain backlinks to individual pages on your site.

Social Signals

There’s a lot of talk about social signals in SEO so we collected a few social signals and averaged those as well.

Average Number of Social Signals

The high ranking web pages analyzed in the study were tweeted 371 times, received 1512 Facebook likes, and had 988 Facebook shares.  These are averages per web page.  That’s a lot of social sharing!

Comparisons

Here we collected the backlink data of the sites ranking in position #1 and position #5 to see if there were any noticeable differences.

Backlink Comparison

It’s clear there’s a real correlation (at least with our data) between the number of referring domains/backlinks and how high up Google search results listings a site will go. Again, these are averages, but the web pages holding a #1 position had 662 backlinks.  The web pages in the #5 position had an average of 142 backlinks.

So there’s a big difference when it comes to backlinks by nearly a factor of 5. It shows how much backlinks play a role in rankings.

And interestingly, the same goes for social signals.

Social Signal Comparison

The #1 ranking web page had many more social signals than the web page in the #5 position.  The web pages in the top spot had more than twice as many Tweets, over 10 times as many Facebook likes, and twice as many Facebook shares.

It’s unclear if Google looks at social signals for their ranking, but even if they don’t, high levels of social signals are a good indicator that a page is popular and may rank high.

Take Aways

The study isn’t perfect, but it does give us some characteristics of high ranking web pages on Google at the present time.
Here are a few of the characteristics of high ranking web pages according to our research:
On-Site Optimization

• There was a substantial amount of text on the web pages.  According to the study, a good number to target is around 900 words, but keep in mind this is only an average, there was a wide variety. So there were high ranking pages with far less content and those with quite a bit more.
• Many of the pages use the exact keyphrase or a slight variation of the keyphrase within the title tag and/or the headline. At the very least nearly all of the high ranking pages included individual keywords in the title and headline.
• The pages we analyzed used keyphrases sparingly in the body copy of the content (under a half a percent keyphrase density was the average).
• On average the high ranking web pages included 6 subheadings. These subheadings included individual keywords where they made sense.
• Using an exact keyphrase one time within the body copy (including the subheadings) is plenty.  Many of the pages also had individual keywords incorporated throughout the copy where they made sense.
• Although  the study shows it’s definitely possible to gain a high ranking without images or video, many of the sites we analyzed incorporated images into the content and to a lesser degree, video.

The biggest take away from the on-site optimization portion of the study is to write naturally (over-optimization should be avoided), but do not waste the opportunity to help label what your content is about for the search engines and your visitors.
Off-Site Optimization

• Internal web pages are more likely to rank high than home pages. Home pages are often optimized for a general keyphrase (which can be harder to rank high for) while internal pages can do the heavy lifting for specific keyphrases.
• There’s a big difference between the number of backlinks required to go from #5 on page one of Google to the #1 spot. The #1 ranking web pages had an average of nearly 5 times as many links as those in the #5 spot.
• Social signals may play a role in your rankings (or at least be a good indicator in the type of content that ranks high).

The biggest take away with off-site optimization is to gain as many links as possible to your web pages. Because of this, it’s going to be in your best interest to build one site and focus your energy on that instead of building a number of sites.
So those are the conclusions of the study, backed by actual data. If you found value in this study please share it as a lot of time went into putting it together for you.
Let us know if any of the findings were surprising to you by adding to the comments below.

Seo Beginners-Chapter 10- Measuring & Tracking Success

They say that if you can measure it, then you can improve it. In search engine optimization, measurement is critical to success. Professional SEOs track data about rankings, referrals, links and more to help analyze their SEO strategy and create road maps for success.

 

Although every business is unique and every website has different metrics that matter, the following list is nearly universal. Note that we're only covering those metrics critical to SEO - optimizing for the search engines. As a result, more general metrics may not be included. For a more comprehensive look at web analytics, check out Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators from Avinash Kaushik's excellent Web Analytics Blog.

 

Every month, it's critical to keep track of the contribution of each traffic source for your site. These include:

• Direct Navigation: Typed in traffic, bookmarks, email links without tracking codes, etc.
• Referral Traffic: From links across the web or in trackable email, promotion & branding campaign links
• Search Traffic: Queries that sent traffic from any major or minor web search engine

Knowing both the percentage and exact numbers will help you identify weaknesses and serve as a comparison over time for trend data. For example, if you see that traffic has spiked dramatically but it comes from referral links with low relevance, it's not time to get excited. On the other hand, if search engine traffic falls dramatically, you may be in trouble. You should use this data to track your marketing efforts and plan your traffic acquisition efforts.

 

Three major engines make up 95%+ of all search traffic in the US - Google and the Yahoo-Bing alliance. For most countries outside the US 80%+ of search traffic comes solely from Google (with a few notable exceptions including both Russia and China.) Measuring the contribution of your search traffic from each engine is critical for several reasons:

Compare Performance vs. Market Share

By tracking not only search engines broadly, but by country, you'll be able to see exactly the contribution level of each engine in accordance with its estimated market share. Keep in mind that in sectors like technology and Internet services, demand is likely to be higher on Google (given its younger, more tech-savvy demographic) than in areas like cooking, sports or real estate.

Get Visibility Into Potential Drops

If your search traffic should drop significantly at any point, knowing the relative and exact contributions from each engine will be essential to diagnosing the issue. If all the engines drop off equally, the problem is almost certainly one of accessibility. If Google drops while the others remain at previous levels, it's more likely to be a penalty or devaluation of your SEO efforts by that singular engine.

Uncover Strategic Value

It's very likely that some efforts you undertake in SEO will have greater positive results on some engines than others. For example, we frequently notice that on-page optimization tactics like better keyword inclusion and targeting has more benefit with Bing & Yahoo! than Google, while gaining specific anchor text links from a large number of domains has a more positive impact on Google than the others. If you can identify the tactics that are having success with one engine, you'll better know how to focus your efforts.

 

The keywords that send traffic are another important piece of your analytics pie.
You'll want to keep track of these on a regular basis to help identify new trends
 in keyword demand, gauge your performance on key terms and find terms that
 are bringing significant traffic that you're potentially under optimized for.
You may also find value in tracking search referral counts for terms outside the
 "top" terms/phrases - those that are important and valuable to your business.
If the trend lines are pointing in the wrong direction, you know efforts need
to be undertaken to course correct. Search traffic worldwide has consistently
 risen over the past 15 years, so a decline in quantity of referrals is troubling
 - check for seasonality issues (keywords that are only in demand certain times
of the week/month/year) and rankings (have you dropped, or has search volume
 ebbed?).

 

When it comes to the bottom line for your organization, few metrics matter
 as much as conversion. For example, in the graphic to the right, 5.80% of visitors
 who reached SEOmoz with the query "SEO Tools" signed up to become members
 during that visit. This is a much higher conversion rate than most of the 1000s
 of keywords used to find our site. With this information, we can now do 2 things.

1. Checking our rankings, we see that we only rank #4 for "SEO Tools". 
2. Working to improve this position will undoubtedly lead to more conversion.
3. Because our analytics will also tell us what page these visitors
4.  landed on (mostly http://www.seomoz.org/tools), we can focus on efforts
5. on that page to improve visitor experience.

The real value from this simplistic tracking comes from the "low-hanging fruit"
- seeing keywords that continually send visitors who convert and increasing
focus on both rankings and improving the landing pages that visitors reach.
While conversion rate tracking from keyword phrase referrals is certainly
 important, it's never the whole story. Dig deeper and you can often
uncover far more interesting and applicable data about how conversion starts
and ends on your site.

 

Knowing the number of pages that receive search engine traffic is an essential metric
for monitoring overall SEO performance. From this number, we can get a glimpse
 into indexation - the number of pages the engines are keeping in their indices from
 our site. For most large websites (50,000+ pages), mere inclusion is essential
to earning traffic, and this metric delivers a trackable number that's indicative
of success or failure. As you work on issues like site architecture, link
 acquisition, XML Sitemaps, uniqueness of content and meta data, etc., the
 trend line should rise, showing that more and more pages are earning their
 way into the engines' results. Pages receiving search traffic is, quite possibly,
 the best long tail metric around.
While other analytics data points are of great importance, those mentioned
above should be universally applied to get the maximum value from your SEO campaigns.

	Google's (not provided) Keywords In 2011, Google announced it will no longer pass keyword query data through  its referrer string for logged in users. This means that instead of showing organic  keyword data in Google Analytics, visits from users logged into Google will show  as “not provided.” At the time, Google said they expected this to effect less than  10% of all search queries. Soon after, many webmasters started reporting up to 20% of their search queries as keyword (not provided). Google responded by saying that the 10% figure was  an average across all worldwide sites and that some differences would exist based  on country location and type of website. With the launch of Google+, webmasters fear that more and more users will create, and log into, Google accounts. This would result in an even greater percentage of  “not provided” keywords. How this will eventually play out is anyone's guess. In the meantime, smart SEOs and web analytics experts have devised workarounds to try and recover some  of this missing keyword data, although nothing can substitute for the real thing. Read more about dealing with (not provided) keywords in this blog post.

Analytics Software

The Right Tools for the Job

• Omniture
• Fireclick
• Mint
• Sawmill Analytics
• Clicktale
• Coremetrics
• Unica Affinium NetInsight

Additional Reading:

• How to Choose a Web Analytics Tool: A Radical Alternative - 
• From Avinash Kaushik way back in 2006 (but still a relevant and quality piece)

• Yahoo! Web Analytics (formerly Indextools)
• Google Analytics
• Clicky Web Analytics
• Piwik Open Source Analysis
• Woopra Website Tracking
• AWStats

While choosing can be tough, our top recommendation is Google Analytics.
Because of it's broad adoption you can find many tutorials and guides available
online. Google Analytics also has the advantage of cross-integration with
 other Google products such as Webmaster Tools, Adwords and Adsense.

No matter which analytics software you decide is right for you, we also
 strongly recommend testing different versions of pages on your site and
 making conversion rate improvements based on the results. Testing pages
on your site can be as simple as using a free tool to test two versions
 of a page header or as complex as using an expensive multivariate software
 to simultaneously test hundreds of variants of a page. There are many testing
platforms out there, but if you're looking to put a first toe in the testing waters,
one free, easy to use solution we recommend is Google's Website Optimizer.
It's a great way to get started running tests that can inform powerful conversion
 rate improvements.

Metrics for Measuring

Search Engine Optimization

In organic SEO, it can be difficult to track the specific elements of the engines'
 algorithms effectively given that this data is not public, nor is it even
 well researched. However, a combination of tactics have become
best practices, and new data is constantly emerging to
 help track direct ranking elements and positive/negative ranking signals.
The data points covered below are ones that we will occasionally
 recommend to track campaigns and have proven to add value
when used in concert with analytics.

Metrics Provided by Search Engines

We've already discussed many of the data points provided by services such as
 Google's Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft's Webmaster
 Tools. In addition to these, the engines provide some insight through
publicly available queries and competitive intelligence. Below is a list
of queries/tools /metrics from the engines, along with their respective applications.
Employing these queries & tools effectively requires that you have an
 informational need with an actionable solution. The data itself isn't valuable unless
 you have a plan of what to change/build/do once you learn what you need to
know (this holds true for competitive analysis as well).

Google Site Query

e.g., site:seomoz.org - useful to see the number and list of pages indexed on a
particular domain. You can expand the value by adding additional query
 parameters. For example - site:seomoz.org/blog inurl:tools - will show
 only those pages in Google's index that are in the blog and contain the word "tools" in the URL. While this number fluctuates, it's still a good rough measurement. You can read more about this in this blog post.

Google Trends

Available at Google.com/Trends - this shows keyword search volume/popularity data over time. If you're logged into your Google account, you can also get specific numbers on the charts, rather than just trend lines.

Google Trends for Websites

Available at Trends.Google.com/websites - This shows traffic data for websites according to Google's data sources (toolbar, ISP data, analytics and others may be part of this). A logged in user account will show numbers in the chart to indicate estimated traffic levels.

Google Insights for Search

Available at google.com/insights/search - this tool provides data about regional usage, popularity and related queries for keywords.

Bing Site Query

e.g., site:seomoz.org - just like Yahoo! and Google, Bing allows for queries to show the number and list of pages in their index from a given site. Unfortunately, Bing's counts are given to wild fluctuation and massive inaccuracy, often rendering the counts themselves useless.

Bing IP Query

e.g., ip:216.176.191.233 - this query will show pages that Microsoft's engine has found on the given IP address. This can be useful in identifying shared hosting and seeing what other sites are hosted on a given IP address.

Microsoft Ad Intelligence

Available at Microsoft Advertising - a great variety of keyword research and audience intelligence tools are provided by Microsoft, primarily for search and display advertising. This guide won't dive deep into the value of each individual tool, but they are worth investigating and many can be applied to SEO.

Ask Site Query

e.g., site:seomoz.org inurl:www - Ask.com is a bit picky in its requirements around use of the site query operator. To function properly, an additional query must be used (although generic queries such as the example above are useful to see what a broad "site" query would normally return).

Blog Search Link Query

e.g., link:www.seomoz.org/blog - Although Google's normal web search link command is not always useful, their blog search link query shows generally high quality data and can be sorted by date range and relevance. You can read more about this in this blog post.

Page Specific Metrics

Page Authority - Page Authority predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well, regardless of its content. The higher the Page Authority, the greater the potential for that individual page to rank.
mozRank - mozRank refers to SEOmoz’s general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of global link authority (or popularity). mozRank is very similar in purpose to the measures of static importance (which means importance independent of a specific query) that are used by the search engines (e.g., Google's PageRank or FAST's StaticRank). Search engines often rank pages with higher global link authority ahead of pages with lower authority. Because measures like mozRank are global and static, this ranking power applies to a broad range of search queries, rather than pages optimized specifically for a particular keyword.
mozTrust - Like mozRank, mozTrust is distributed through links. First, trustworthy “seeds” are identified to feed the calculation of the metric. (These include the homepages of major international university, media and governmental websites.) Websites that earn links from the seed set are then able to cast (lesser) trust-votes through their links. This process continues across the web and the mozTrust of each applicable link decreases as it travels "farther" from the original trusted seed site.
# of Links - The total number of pages that contain at least one link to this page. For example, if the Library of Congress homepage (http://www.loc.gov/index.html) linked to the White House's homepage (http://www.whitehouse.gov) in both the page content and the footer, this would still be counted as only a single link.
# of Linking Root Domains - The total number of unique root domains that contain a link to this page. For example, if topics.nytimes.com and www.nytimes.com both linked to the homepage of SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org), this would count as only a single linking root domain.
External mozRank - Whereas mozRank measures the link juice (ranking power) of both internal and external links, external mozRank measures only the amount of mozRank flowing through external links (links located on a separate domain). Because external links can play an important role as independent endorsements, external mozRank is an important metric for predicting search engine rankings.

Domain Specific Metrics

Domain Authority - Domain Authority predicts how well a web page on a specific domain will rank. The higher the Domain Authority, the greater the potential for an individual page on that domain to rank well.
Domain mozRank - Domain-level mozRank (DmR) quantifies the popularity of a given domain compared to all other domains on the web. DmR is computed for both subdomains and root domains. This metric uses the same algorithm as mozRank but applies it to the “domain-level link graph”. (A view of the web that only looks at domains as a whole and ignores individual pages) Viewing the web from this perspective offers additional insight about the general authority of a domain. Just as pages can endorse other pages, a link which crosses domain boundaries (e.g., from a page on searchengineland.com to a page on www.seomoz.org) can be seen as endorsement by one domain for another.
Domain mozTrust - Just as mozRank can be applied at the domain level (Domain-level mozRank), so can mozTrust. Domain-level mozTrust is like mozTrust but instead of being calculated between web pages, it is calculated between entire domains. New or poorly linked-to pages on highly trusted domains may inherit some natural trust by virtue of being hosted on the trusted domain. Domain-Level mozTrust is expressed on a 10-point logarithmic scale.
# of Links - the quantity of pages that contain at least one link to the domain. For example, if http://www.loc.gov/index.html and http://www.loc.gov/about both contained links to http://www.nasa.gov, this would count as two links to the domain.
# of Linking Root Domains - the quantity of different domains that contain at least one page with a link to any page on this site. For example, if http://www.loc.gov/index.html and http://www.loc.gov/about both contained links to http://www.nasa.gov, this would count as only a single linking root domain to nasa.gov.

Applying that Data

To Your Campaign

Just knowing the numbers won't help unless you can effectively interpret and apply changes to course-correct. Below, we've taken a sample of some of the most common directional signals provided by tracking data points and how to respond with actions to improve or execute on opportunities.

Fluctuation

In Search Engine Page and Link Count Numbers

The numbers reported in "site:" and "link:" queries are rarely precise, and thus we strongly recommend not getting too worried about fluctuations showing massive increases or decreases unless they are accompanied by traffic drops. For example, on any given day, Yahoo! reports between 800,000 and 2 million links to the SEOmoz.org domain. Obviously, we don't gain or lose hundreds of thousands of links each day, but the variability of Yahoo!'s indices means that these numbers reports provide little guidance about our actual link growth or shrinkage.
If you do see significant drops in links or pages indexed accompanied by similar traffic referral drops from the search engines, you may be experiencing a real loss of link juice (check to see if important links that were previously sending traffic/rankings boosts still exist) or a loss of indexation due to penalties, hacking, malware, etc. A thorough analysis using your own web analytics and Google's Webmaster Tools can help to identify potential problems.

Falling

Search Traffic from a Single Engine

	You're under a penalty at that engine for violating search quality or terms of service guidelines. Check out this post on how to identify/handle a search engine penalty. You've accidentally blocked access to that search engine's crawler. Double-check your robots.txt file and meta robots tags and review the Webmaster Tools for that engine to see if any issues exist. That engine has changed their ranking algorithm in a fashion that no longer favors your site. Most frequently, this happens because links pointing to your site have been devalued in some way, and is especially prevalent for sites that engage in manual link building campaigns of low-moderate quality links.

Falling

Search Traffic from Multiple Engines

Chances are good that you've done something on your site to block crawlers or stop indexation. This could be something in the robots.txt or meta robots tags, a problem with hosting/uptime, a DNS resolution issue or a number of other technical breakdowns. Talk to your system administrator, developers and/or hosting provider and carefully review your Webmaster Tools accounts and analytics to help determine potential causes.

Individual

Ranking Fluctuations

Gaining or losing rankings for a particular term/phrase or even several happens millions of times a day to millions of pages and is generally nothing to be concerned about. Ranking algorithms fluctuate, competitors gain and lose links (and on-page optimization tactics) and search engines even flux between indices (and may sometimes even make mistakes in their crawling, inclusion or ranking processes). When a dramatic rankings decrease occurs, you might want to carefully review on-page elements for any signs of over-optimization or violation of guidelines (cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc.) and check to see if links have recently been gained or lost. Note that with sudden spikes in rankings for new content, a temporary period of high visibility followed by a dramatic drop is common (in the SEO field, we refer to this as the "freshness boost").

“Don't panic over small fluctuations. With large drops, be wary against making a judgment call until at least a few days have passed. If you run a new site or are in the process of link acquisition and active marketing, these sudden spikes and drops are even more common, so simply be prepared and keep working.”

Positive

Increases in Link Metrics Without Rankings Increases

Many site owners worry that when they've done some "classic" SEO - on-page optimization, link acquisition, etc. they can expect instant results. This, sadly, is not the case. Particularly for new sites, pages and content that's competing in very difficult results, rankings take time and even earning lots of great links is not a sure recipe to instantly reach the top. Remember that the engines need to not only crawl all those pages where you've acquired links, but index and process them - given the almost certain use of delta indices by the engines to help with freshness, the metrics and rankings you're seeking may be days or even weeks behind the progress you've made.

Seo Beginners-Chapter 2- Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines

 

Over the past several years, a number of misconceptions have emerged about how the search engines operate. For the beginner SEO, this causes confusion about what's required to perform effectively. In this section, we'll explain the real story behind the myths.

 

In classical SEO times (the late 1990's), search engines had "submission" forms that were part of the optimization process. Webmasters & site owners would tag their sites & pages with keyword information, and "submit" them to the engines. Soon after submission, a bot would crawl and include those resources in their index. Simple SEO!
Unfortunately, this process didn't scale very well, the submissions were often spam, and the practice eventually gave way to purely crawl-based engines. Since 2001, not only has search engine submission not been required, but it is actually virtually useless. The engines all publicly note that they rarely use "submission" URLs , and that the best practice is to earn links from other sites. This will expose your content to the engines naturally.
You can still sometimes find submission pages (here's one for Bing), but these are remnants of time long past, and are essentially useless to the practice of modern SEO. If you hear a pitch from an SEO offering "search engine submission" services, run, don't walk, to a real SEO. Even if the engines used the submission service to crawl your site, you'd be unlikely to earn enough "link juice" to be included in their indices or rank competitively for search queries.

 

Once upon a time, much like search engine submission, meta tags (in particular, the meta keywords tag) were an important part of the SEO process. You would include the keywords you wanted your site to rank for and when users typed in those terms, your page could come up in a query. This process was quickly spammed to death, and eventually dropped by all the major engines as an important ranking signal.
It is true that other tags, namely the title tag (not stictly a meta tag, but often grouped with them) and meta description tag (covered previously in this guide), are of critical importance to SEO best practices. Additionally, the meta robots tag is an important tool for controlling spider access. However, SEO is not "all about meta tags", at least, not anymore.

 

Ever see a page that just looks spammy? Perhaps something like:
"Bob's cheap Seattle plumber is the best cheap Seattle plumber for all your plumbing needs. Contact a cheap Seattle plumber before it's too late"
Not surprisingly, a persistent myth in SEO revolves around the concept that keyword density - a mathematical formula that divides the number of words on a page by the number of instances of a given keyword - is used by the search engines for relevancy & ranking calculations.
Despite being proven untrue time and again, this myth has legs. Many SEO tools still feed on the concept that keyword density is an important metric. It's not. Ignore it and use keywords intelligently and with usability in mind. The value from an extra 10 instances of your keyword on the page is far less than earning one good editorial link from a source that doesn't think you're a search spammer.

 

Put on your tin foil hats, it's time for the most common SEO conspiracy theory: spending on search engine advertising (PPC) improves your organic SEO rankings.
In all of the experiences we've ever witnessed or heard about, this has never been proven nor has it ever been a probable explanation for effects in the organic results. Google, Yahoo! & Bing all have very effective walls in their organizations to prevent precisely this type of crossover.
At Google in particular, advertisers spending tens of millions of dollars each month have noted that even they cannot get special access or consideration from the search quality or web spam teams. So long as the existing barriers are in place and the search engines cultures maintain their separation, we believe that this will remain a myth. That said, we have seen anecdotal evidence that bidding on keywords you already organically rank for can help increase your organic click through rate.

 

As long as there is search, there will always be spam. The practice of spamming the search engines - creating pages and schemes designed to artificially inflate rankings or abuse the ranking algorithms employed to sort content - has been rising since the mid-1990's.
With payouts so high (at one point, a fellow SEO noted to us that a single day ranking atop Google's search results for the query "buy viagra" could bring upwards of $20,000 in affiliate revenue), it's little wonder that manipulating the engines is such a popular activity on the web. However, it's become increasingly difficult and, in our opinion, less and less worthwhile for two reasons.

	1. Not Worth the Effort Users hate spam, and the search engines have a financial incentive to fight it. Many believe that Google's greatest product advantage over the last 10 years has been their ability to control and remove spam better than their competitors. It's undoubtedly something all the engines spend a great deal of time, effort and resources on. While spam still works on occasion, it generally takes more effort to succeed than producing "good" content, and the long term payoff is virtually non-existent. Instead of putting all that time and effort into something that the engines will throw away, why not invest in a value added, long term strategy instead? 2. Smarter Engines Search engines have done a remarkable job identifying scalable, intelligent methodologies for fighting spam manipulation, making it dramatically more difficult to adversely impact their intended algorithms. Complex concepts like TrustRank (which SEOmoz's Linkscape index leverages), HITS, statistical analysis, historical data and more have all driven down the value of search spam and made so-called "white hat" tactics (those that don't violate the search engines' guidelines) far more attractive. More recently, Google's Panda update introduced sophisticated machine learning algorithms to combat spam and low value pages at a scale never before witnessed online. If the search engines' job is to deliver quality results, they have raised the bar year after year. This guide is not intended to show off specific spam tactics, but, due to the large number of sites that get penalized, banned or flagged and seek help, we will cover the various factors the engines use to identify spam so as to help SEO practitioners avoid problems. For additional details about spam from the engines, see Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Bing's Webmaster FAQs (pdf). The important thing to remember is this: Not only do manipulative techniques not help you in most cases, but often times they cause search engines to impose penalties on your site.

 

Search engines perform spam analysis across individual pages and entire websites (domains). We'll look first at how they evaluate manipulative practices on the URL level.

One of the most obvious and unfortunate spamming techniques, keyword stuffing, involves littering repetitions of keyword terms or phrases into a page in order to make it appear more relevant to the search engines. The thought behind this - that increasing the number of times a term is mentioned can considerably boost a page's ranking - is generally false. Studies looking at thousands of the top search results across different queries have found that keyword repetitions play an extremely limited role in boosting rankings, and have a low overall correlation with top placement.
The engines have very obvious and effective ways of fighting this. Scanning a page for stuffed keywords is not massively challenging, and the engines' algorithms are all up to the task. You can read more about this practice, and Google's views on the subject, in a blog post from the head of their web spam team - SEO Tip: Avoid Keyword Stuffing.

 

One of the most popular forms of web spam, manipulative link acquisition relies on the search engines' use of link popularity in their ranking algorithms to attempt to artificially inflate these metrics and improve visibility. This is one of the most difficult forms of spamming for the search engines to overcome because it can come in so many forms. A few of the many ways manipulative links can appear include:

• Reciprocal link exchange programs, wherein sites create link pages that point back and forth to one another in an attempt to inflate link popularity. The engines are very good at spotting and devaluing these as they fit a very particular pattern.
• Link schemes, including "link farms" and "link networks" where fake or low value websites are built or maintained purely as link sources to artificially inflate popularity. The engines combat these through numerous methods of detecting connections between site registrations, link overlap or other common factors.
• Paid links, where those seeking to earn higher rankings buy links from sites and pages willing to place a link in exchange for funds. These sometimes evolve into larger networks of link buyers and sellers, and although the engines work hard to stop them (and Google in particular has taken dramatic actions), they persist in providing value to many buyers & sellers (see this post on paid links for more on that perspective).
• Low quality directory links are a frequent source of manipulation for many in the SEO field. A large number of pay-for-placement web directories exist to serve this market and pass themselves off as legitimate with varying degrees of success. Google often takes action against these sites by removing the PageRank score from the toolbar (or reducing it dramatically), but won't do this in all cases.

There are many more manipulative link building tactics that the search engines have identified and, in most cases, found algorithmic methods for reducing their impact. As new spam systems emerge, engineers will continue to fight them with targeted algorithms, human reviews and the collection of spam reports from webmasters & SEOs.

 

A basic tenet of all the search engine guidelines is to show the same content to the engine's crawlers that you'd show to an ordinary visitor. This means, among other things, not to hide text in the html code of your website that a normal visitor can't see.
When this guideline is broken, the engines call it "cloaking" and take action to prevent these pages from ranking in their results. Cloaking can be accomplished in any number of ways and for a variety of reasons, both positive and negative. In some cases, the engines may let practices that are technically "cloaking" pass, as they're done for positive user experience reasons. For more on the subject of cloaking and the levels of risk associated with various tactics and intents, see this post, White Hat Cloaking, from Rand Fishkin.

 

Although it may not technically be considered "web spam," the engines all have methods to determine if a page provides unique content and "value" to its searchers before including it in their web indices and search results. The most commonly filtered types of pages are "thin" affiliate content, duplicate content, and dynamically generated content pages that provide very little unique text or value. The engines are against including these pages and use a variety of content and link analysis algorithms to filter out "low value" pages from appearing in the results.
Google's 2011 Panda update took the most aggressive steps ever seen in reducing low quality content across the web, and Google continues to update this process.

 

In addition to watching individual pages for spam, engines can also identify traits and properties across entire root domains or subdomains that could flag them as spam. Obviously, excluding entire domains is tricky business, but it's also much more practical in cases where greater scalability is required.

 

Just as with individual pages, the engines can monitor the kinds of links and quality of referrals sent to a website. Sites that are clearly engaging in the manipulative activities described above on a consistent or seriously impacting way may see their search traffic suffer, or even have their sites banned from the index. You can read about some examples of this from past posts - Widgetbait Gone Wild or the more recent coverage of the JC Penney Google penalty.

 

Websites that earn trusted status are often treated differently from those who have not. In fact, many SEOs have commented on the "double standards" that exist for judging "big brand" and high importance sites vs. newer, independent sites. For the search engines, trust most likely has a lot to do with the links your domain has earned. Thus, if you publish low quality, duplicate content on your personal blog, then buy several links from spammy directories, you're likely to encounter considerable ranking problems. However, if you were to post that same content to a page on Wikipedia and get those same spammy links to point to that URL, it would likely still rank tremendously well - such is the power of domain trust & authority.
Trust built through links is also a great method for the engines to employ. A little duplicate content and a few suspicious links are far more likely to be overlooked if your site has earned hundreds of links from high quality, editorial sources like CNN.com or Cornell.edu. On the flip side, if you have yet to earn high quality links, judgments may be far stricter from an algorithmic view.

 

Similar to how a page's value is judged against criteria such as uniqueness and the experience it provides to search visitors, so too does this principle apply to entire domains. Sites that primarily serve non-unique, non-valuable content may find themselves unable to rank, even if classic on and off page factors are performed acceptably. The engines simply don't want thousands of copies of Wikipedia or Amazon affiliate websites filling up their index, and thus use algorithmic and manual review methods to prevent this.
Search engines constantly evaluate the effectiveness of their own results. They measure when users click on a result, quickly hit the "back" button on their browser, and try another result. This indicates that the result they served didn't meet the user's query.
It's not enough just to rank for a query. Once you've earned your ranking, you have to prove it over and over again.

 

It can be tough to know if your site/page actually has a penalty or if things have changed, either in the search engines' algorithms or on your site that negatively impacted rankings or inclusion. Before you assume a penalty, check for the following:

Once you’ve ruled out the list below, follow the flowchart beneath for more specific advice.

Errors

Errors on your site that may have inhibited or prevented crawling. Google's Webmaster Tools is a good, free place to start.

Changes

Changes to your site or pages that may have changed the way search engines view your content. (on-page changes, internal link structure changes, content moves, etc.)

Similarity

Sites that share similar backlink profiles, and whether they’ve also lost rankings - when the engines update ranking algorithms, link valuation and importance can shift, causing ranking movements.
Duplicate Content
Modern websites are rife with duplicate content problems, especially when they scale to large size. Check out this post on duplicate content to identify common problems.

While this chart’s process won’t work for every situation, the logic has been uncanny in helping us identify spam
 penalties or mistaken flagging for spam by the engines and separating those from basic ranking drops. This page
 from Google (and the embedded Youtube video) may also provide value on this topic.

 

The task of requesting re-consideration or re-inclusion in the engines is painful and often unsuccessful. It's also rarely accompanied by any feedback to let you know what happened or why. However, it is important to know what to do in the event of a penalty or banning.

Hence, the following recommendations:

1.  If you haven't already, register your site with the engine's Webmaster Tools service (Google's and Bing's). This registration creates an additional layer of trust and connection between your site and the webmaster teams.
2.  Make sure to thoroughly review the data in your Webmaster Tools accounts, from broken pages to server or crawl errors to warnings or spam alert messages. Very often, what's initially perceived as a mistaken spam penalty is, in fact, related to accessibility issues.
3.  Send your re-consideration/re-inclusion request through the engine's Webmaster Tools service rather than the public form - again, creating a greater trust layer and a better chance of hearing back.
4.  Full disclosure is critical to getting consideration. If you've been spamming, own up to everything you've done - links you've acquired, how you got them, who sold them to you, etc. The engines, particularly Google, want the details, as they'll apply this information to their algorithms for the future. Hold back, and they're likely to view you as dishonest, corrupt or simply incorrigible (and fail to ever respond).

1.  Remove/fix everything you can. If you've acquired bad links, try to get them taken down. If you've done any manipulation on your own site (over-optimized internal linking, keyword stuffing, etc.), get it off before you submit your request.
2.  Get ready to wait - responses can take weeks, even months, and re-inclusion itself, if it happens, is a lengthy process. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of sites are penalized every week, so you can imagine the backlog the webmaster teams encounter.
3.  If you run a large, powerful brand on the web, re-inclusion can be faster by going directly to an individual source at a conference or event. Engineers from all of the engines regularly participate in search industry conferences (SMX, SES, Pubcon, etc.), and the cost of a ticket can easily outweigh the value of being re-included more quickly than a standard request might take.

Be aware that with the search engines, lifting a penalty is not their obligation or responsibility. Legally, they have
 the right to include or reject any site/page for any reason. Inclusion is a privilege, not a right, so be cautious
and don't apply techniques you're unsure or skeptical of - or you could find yourself in a very rough spot.

Seo Beginners- Chapter2- Search Tools & Services

SEOs tend to use a lot of tools. Some of the most useful are provided by the search engines themselves. Search engines want webmasters to create sites and content in accessible ways, so they provide a variety of tools, analytics and guidance. These free resources provide data points and opportunities for exchanging information with the engines that are not provided anywhere else.

Below we explain the common elements that each of the major search engines support and identify why they are useful.

 

1. Sitemaps

Think of a sitemap as a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have found on their own. Sitemaps also come in a variety of formats and can highlight many different types of content, including video, images, news and mobile.
You can read the full details of the protocols at Sitemaps.org. In addition, you can build your own sitemaps at XML-Sitemaps.com. Sitemaps come in three varieties:

XML

Extensible Markup Language (Recommended Format)

• This is the most widely accepted format for sitemaps. It is extremely easy for search engines to parse and can be produced by a plethora of sitemap generators. Additionally, it allows for the most granular control of page parameters.
• Relatively large file sizes. Since XML requires an open tag and a close tag around each element, file sizes can get very large.

RSS

Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary

• Easy to maintain. RSS sitemaps can easily be coded to automatically update when new content is added.
• Harder to manage. Although RSS is a dialect of XML, it is actually much harder to manage due to its updating properties.

Txt

Text File

• Extremely easy. The text sitemap format is one URL per line up to 50,000 lines.
• Does not provide the ability to add meta data to pages.

2 Robots.txt

The robots.txt file, a product of the Robots Exclusion Protocol, is a file stored on a website's root directory (e.g., www.google.com/robots.txt). The robots.txt file gives instructions to automated web crawlers visiting your site, including search spiders.
By using robots.txt, webmasters can indicate to search engines which areas of a site they would like to disallow bots from crawling as well as indicate the locations of sitemap files and crawl-delay parameters. You can read more details about this at the robots.txt Knowledge Center page.
The following commands are available:

Disallow

Prevents compliant robots from accessing specific pages or folders.

Sitemap

Indicates the location of a website’s sitemap or sitemaps.

Crawl Delay

Indicates the speed (in milliseconds) at which a robot can crawl a server.

	An Example of Robots.txt #Robots.txt www.example.com/robots.txt User-agent: * Disallow: # Don’t allow spambot to crawl any pages User-agent: spambot disallow: / sitemap:www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Warning: Not all web robots follow robots.txt. People with bad intentions (i.e. e-mail address scrapers) build bots that don’t follow this protocol and in extreme cases can use it to identify the location of private information. For this reason, it is recommended that the location of administration sections and other private sections of publicly accessible websites not be included in the robots.txt. Instead, these pages can utilize the meta robots tag (discussed next) to keep the major search engines from indexing their high risk content.

3. Meta Robots

The meta robots tag creates page-level instructions for search engine bots.
The meta robots tag should be included in the head section of the HTML document.

	An Example of Meta Robots <html>   <head>     <title>The Best Webpage on the Internet</title>     <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">   </head>   <body>     <h1>Hello World</h1>   </body> </html>

In the example above, “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” tells robots not to include the given page in their indexes, and also not to follow any of the links on the page.

4. Rel="Nofollow"

Remember how links act as votes? The rel=nofollow attribute allows you to link to a resource, while removing your "vote" for search engine purposes. Literally, "nofollow" tells search engines not to follow the link, but some engines still follow them for discovering new pages. These links certainly pass less value (and in most cases no juice) than their followed counterparts, but are useful in various situations where you link to an untrusted source.

	An Example of nofollow <a href=”http://www.example.com” title=“Example” rel=”nofollow”>Example Link</a>

In the example above, the value of the link would not be passed to example.com as the rel=nofollow attribute has been added.

5. Rel="canonical"

Often, two or more copies of the exact same content appear on your website under different URLs. For example, the following URLs can all refer to a single homepage:

• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.example.com/default.asp
• http://example.com/
• http://example.com/default.asp
• http://Example.com/Default.asp

To search engines, these appear as 5 separate pages. Because the content is identical on each page, this can cause the search engines to devalue the content and its potential rankings.
The canonical tag solves this problem by telling search robots which page is the singular "authoritative" version which should count in web results.

	An Example of rel="canonical" for the URL http://example.com/default.asp <html>   <head>     <title>The Best Webpage on the Internet</title>     <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com">   </head>   <body>     <h1>Hello World</h1>   </body> </html>

In the example above, rel=canonical tells robots that this page is a copy of http://www.example.com, and should consider the latter URL as the canonical.

 

Google Webmaster Tools - Popular Features

Google Webmaster Tools

Settings

Geographic Target - If a given site targets users in a particular location, webmasters can provide Google with information that will help determine how that site appears in its country-specific search results, and also improve Google search results for geographic queries.
Preferred Domain - The preferred domain is the one that a webmaster would like used to index their site's pages. If a webmaster specifies a preferred domain as http://www.example.com and Google finds a link to that site that is formatted as http://example.com, Google will treat that link as if it were pointing at http://www.example.com.
URL Parameters - You can indicate to Google information about each parameter on your site, such as "sort=price" and "sessionid=2". This helps Google crawl your site more efficiently, ignoring those parameters that produce duplicate content and increasing the number of unique pages Google can crawl on your site.
Crawl Rate - The crawl rate affects the speed of Googlebot's requests during the crawl process. It has no effect on how often Googlebot crawls a given site. Google determines the recommended rate based on the number of pages on a website.

Diagnostics

Malware - Google will inform you if it has found any malware on your site. Malware is not only bad for users, but will have a severely negative effect on your rankings.
Crawl Errors - If Googlebot encounters significant errors while crawling your site, such as 404s, it will report these and identify where Googlebot found the link to the inaccessible URL.
HTML Suggestions - This analysis identifies search engine unfriendly HTML elements. Specifically, it lists meta description issues, title tag issues and non-indexable content issues.
Sign Up

Your Site on the Web

These statistics offer unique insight to SEOs in particular, as they report keyword impressions, click-through rates, top pages delivered in search results, and linking statistics. Beware, many SEOs complain that the data in Webmaster tools is often incomplete and offers rough estimates at best.

Site Configuration

This important section allows you to submit sitemaps, test robots.txt files, adjust sitelinks, and submit change of address requests when you move your website from one domain to another. This area also contains the "Settings" and "URL parameters" sections discussed in the previous column.

+1 Metrics

When users share your content on Google+ with the +1 button, this activity is often annotated in search results. Watch this illuminating video on Google+ to understand why this is important. In this section, Google Webmaster Tools reports the effect of +1 sharing on your site performance in search results.

Labs

The Labs section of Webmaster Tools contains reports that Google considers still in the experimental stage, but important to webmasters nonetheless. One of the most important of these reports is Site Performance, which indicates how fast or slow your site loads for visitors.

Bing Webmaster Center

Bing Webmaster Center

Key Features

Sites Overview- This interface provides a single overview of all your websites' performance in Bing powered search results. Metrics at a glance include clicks, impressions, pages indexed and number of pages crawled for each site.
Crawl Stats - Here you can view reports on how many pages of your site Bing has crawled and discover any errors encountered. Like Google Webmaster, you can also submit sitemaps to help Bing to discover and prioritize your content.
Index - This section allows webmasters to view and help control how Bing indexes their web pages. Again, similar to settings in Google Webmaster Tools, here you can explore how your content is organized within Bing, submit URLs, remove URLs from search results, explore inbound links and adjust parameter settings.
Traffic - The traffic summary in Bing Webmaster reports impressions and click-through data by combining data from both Bing and Yahoo search results. Reports here show average position as well as cost estimates if you were to buy ads targeting each keyword.
Sign Up

 

While not run by the search engines, SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer provides similar data.

Features

Identify Powerful Links - Open Site Explorer sorts all of your inbound links by their metrics that help you determine which links are most important.
Find the Strongest Linking Domains - This tool shows you the strongest domains linking to your domain.
Analyze Link Anchor Text Distribution - Open Site Explorer shows you the distribution of the text people used when linking to you.
Head to Head Comparison View - This feature allows you to compare two websites to see why one is outranking the other.
Social Share Metrics - Measure Facebook Shares, Likes, Tweets, and +1's for any URL.
For more information, click below:
Learn more

Search engines have only recently started providing better tools to help webmasters improve their search results. This is a big step forward in SEO and the webmaster/search engine relationship. That said, the engines can only go so far with helping webmasters. It is true today, and will likely be true in the future that the ultimate responsibility for SEO is on the marketers and webmasters.

It is for this reason that learning SEO for yourself is so important.