Aaron Wall first mentioned an offer of help…

…but it was Danny Sullivan who provided the details in his excellent post: Some SEO Advice for Bill Gates.

His post is required reading for anyone still a little unsure what the benefit of SEO is and how they can easily action some simple improvements. He takes us through title tags, meta description, de-duplication, RSS auto-discovery, webmaster tools, consistent URL and link building basics.

Bill was quick to take the advice on board

Let’s see how the site looks in a few days.

UPDATE: As at 27 Jan it looks like Title tag changes are appearing in Bing:

It’s based on their Linkscape data, and similar to Yahoo Site Explorer in many ways (but a lot easier to use).

Simply plug in the URL you wish to analyse (or compare with – you can enter multiple URLs) and push the button.

The site will return link data about your domain, along with ratings on page authority and domain authority. Here’s a quick summary based on my personal site.

If you’re a Pro Member on SEOmoz and use their toolbar you’ll notice these domain totals match the details there:

Open Site Explorer is a handy tool for checking backlinks on both your own sites, and those of competitors.

It’s an add-on for IIS7 and will work on Windows Server 2008 and R2, Windows Vista and Windows 7. I’ve run it on a couple of my sites and the reporting it provides is comprehensive – perhaps even too much at times.

It has been available in beta for a little while, and was officially released in early January.

There’s a stack of tutorials on how to use it (example) and in my experience it runs pretty quickly.

Full details are here on the IIS.net site.

Here’s a quick overview of how to use it:

Once installed, run up IIS and then click on the Search Engine Optimisation icon in the Management section.

You can run a site analysis (or view reports of a previous analysis), setup sitemaps and robots.txt files. Our main interest is in the Site analysis.

You can also view previous analyses.

Digging into a report you can view a summary, violations, content, performance and links.

Drilling into the Violations you’ll see them segmented by levels and context (eg SEO versus content)

Double click on a Violation title to view the list of violations. You can then work your way through the violations and start making fixes.

I won’t dive into all the different violations, except to say that it can be overwhelming. One of the problems with the SEO Toolkit is that is needs some refinement (it is only a version 1 product). For example, it will list simple little markup issues (like paragraph tags not being closed) in the same severity as missing title tags or duplicate content. This is misleading and needs to be separated out.

Also, if you notice in the screen shot above, it is highlighting an Error (ie think it is very bad!) for a button that is referenced in a WordPress theme CSS file. This is actually not a problem at all (it is switched depending on the activated theme), and yet is highlighted as a canonical issue. I’d imagine errors like this will get refined in time.

Here’s another example of an issue that isn’t really an issue:

In this case it is referring to text in table (ie not in a paragraph). It’s not really an issue, and yet has been flagged as such.

These kinds of things cause a lot of extra noise, that will work against the add-in (since people will get sick of seeing non-errors being flagged).

Luckily one of the big benefits of the plugin is its reporting and Query tools.

You can generate custom reports for the different violations. Plus you can export the reports and share them between the different analyses (or with your friends).

I’ve set up custom reports for giving cleaner violation summaries (and stripping out unnecessary errors). This is great, but frustratingly the queries aren’t OR based (ie you need a separate query for each violation, you can’t group multiple queries in one report).

And, as mentioned earlier these queries can be saved. For example, here’s what the XML for the report above looks like:

Note, an easy way to create custom reports is to right click on an existing one and choose ‘View Group Details in New Query’:

And adding additional columns is easy

You can also group by error titles, such as the following:

Finally though, the results can be exported to CSV for further analysis. You may find this is the best way of working through all the clutter of low priority analysis results.

Feature requests

If I were to request two features (besides reducing the noise) it would be the ability to schedule regular analyses, and perform delta reports (ie only the things that have changed since last run).

That way I could have the Toolkit analyse my sitea each week and send me just the list of new items I may need to action. (If you have numerous sites, you don’t want to be wading through big reports for each one.)

Summary

Overall, the SEO Toolkit is a useful tool for analysis your site and highlighting issues. It’s fast, easy to query against and stores a history of analysis results. Highly recommended.

• Nobody is searching for those terms
• People who do search for those terms never buy
• People only search for those terms, after having found your site by another keyword term

The first two scenarios are simple enough to understand, it’s the third that is most common. An example might be the company’s brand name, for example ‘ACME SharePoint Services’. Taking a basic look at analytics it at first might appear that people are searching for that term, since you get a number of visits each month on it. And so, you leave it there.

But digging a little deeper you would have discovered that they actually first searched for ‘sharepoint connector for dynamics crm’. Even though your site wasn’t optimised for that term, they found you anyway (down on the 3rd page of Google) because they were looking for that specific term.

Here’s what really happened…

They found your site (even though you’re on the 3rd page, they were pretty keen) and browsed through your offerings. A week later they resumed their research and came back to your site. How? Simple. They remembered your brand name and searched for that. For your brand name you rank well (this is not hard) and so you got another customers.

See the opportunity here? Imagine if you could rank for the initial term ‘sharepoint connector for dynamics crm’ on the first page, instead of the third. That’s the benefit of proper keyword research, coupled with analytics analysis.

Don’t make the mistake of doing first pass keyword analysis and being mis-directed. The opportunity cost is too high.

It’s a neat little example of a VSTO Office add-in that is both useful and appropriate.

After install (it’s a simple ClickOnce app) a new toolbar will appear in Excel (that’s it over on the right in the screen shot below).

You’ll need an AdCenter account set up to use it.

Start with the Keyword Wizard and seed it with a keyword term (I used ‘microsoft dynamics’ in the example below).

I’ve opted to include all the options for Campaign association and keyword term inclusion. (I limited the keyword suggestions to 10 for the sake of brevity in the example). I included monetization as well as search volume details.

As you can see, the returned data (based on Bing search engine usage and adCenter analytics is pretty comprehensive. The searches are based on historical as well as future forecasts. The clicks an impressions are based on adCenter usage.

Benefits

The benefit of using a tool like this is that it can highlight areas to target.

For example, if you are a Microsoft Dynamics consulting company you may have neglected to include Great Plains related keywords in your advertising and site page titles, but the above will show that they are relevant.

Likewise, it’s useful knowing that people are searching on the full term ‘microsoft dynamics ax 2009’ – by targeting the full version (and not just leaving it at ‘microsoft dynamics ax’) you open yourself to not only more searchers, but also more specific searches – and conversions are more often made on specific terms.

Try It

You can download and try the Add-in from here. They also have a bunch of useful video tutorials.

And this is true especially for SEO and SEM efforts. Too often though, SEO is an after thought, or your Google AdWords campaigns get delegated to the junior developer to take care of. Consider you company. How often have you off-loaded proper Page Title tag construction to a developer, instead of a marketer. Or perhaps it’s worse. You have an automated Title tag generated from the first paragraph of content. It’s a wasted opportunity.

Or consider your AdWords campaigns. Take a look at your campaigns now. Pick and Ad group and check how many different ads you are running (and thus testing with). If it is only one ad then you are making the classic AdWords newbie mistake. Instead you should be testing multiple ads, and always improving the CTR. It’s an ongoing process, and not one you can simply set and forget.

The good news? A huge number of AdWords advertisers are in this newbie category, wasting money daily and making Google one of the most profitable internet companies on the planet. Don’t fall into this trap. Take your AdWords campaigns seriously and get working to turn them into profit generating strategies.