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Archive for the ‘SEO Tools’ Category
Top 5 WordPress SEO Plugins You Should Be Using
Friday, June 22, 2012
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WP SEO by Yoast
I will go ahead and say that WP SEO by Yoast is the holy grail of all WordPress SEO plugins. At Schipul, we install this on all WordPress sites. The Yoast plugin makes it super simple to add meta descriptions, title tags and meta keywords to your page or post. One of my favorite features is the “snippet preview” which shows you exactly how your page will appear in the SERPs. There are lots of other features Yoast offers including permalink clean up, RSS enhancements, robots.txt, XML sitemaps and more.
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WP Mobile Detector
Google seems to give more clout to websites that offer mobile versions of their site and I can see this becoming even more important as responsive web design takes over. Mobile users prefer a mobile version of a site so why not give that to them? You can easily make your website mobile ready with the WP Mobile Detector. This plugin will automatically detect the type of device being used to browse the site. It even gives you a variety of compatible mobile themes to choose from.
Image Credit: InkThemes
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SEO Rank Reporter
There are many factors that people consider when deciding the success of an SEO campaign. Most of the time it seems that people are mostly concerned with their site’s search engine ranking, which makes sense because many people would rather change their search query to be more specific than click over to page 2 or 3. The SEO Rank Reporter plugin has made it easy for you to keep up with your ranking in the SERPs. Simply type in the keywords you want to track and the URL and voilà! A couple of neat features I must mention — you can customize your date range, track visits and easily export your results into a .CSV.
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SEO Smart Links
Internal linking is great for SEO and helps reduce bounce rate. I strongly advise linking to other blog posts or pages using relevant anchor text. However, this can be a tedious and time consuming task because you have to hunt down the page that is associated with the phrase you are trying to interlink to. SEO Smart Links has decided to make our lives easier by automatically linking keywords and phrases in a post to other corresponding pages, posts, tags or categories. You can even assign nofollow attributes and open links in a new window.
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Redirection
This plugin truly is a must-have. Redirection allows for 404 error monitoring as well as simple 301 redirect setup and management. It is especially useful when migrating from an old page to a new page. Hooray for no more lost traffic!
What are some of your favorite WordPress plugins?
Google Updates AdWords Keyword Research Tool and Introduces New Features
Thursday, October 13, 2011
By far the best free keyword research tool around is Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool. If you haven’t noticed already the interface may look a little different. Google has been busy rolling out changes for not only Google Analytics, but now the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
Here’s a brief overview of some of the changes you’ll notice:
First, Google says one of the new benefits is the ability to see search data from the original Keyword Tool and the Search-based Keyword Tool.
What you’ll notice immediately is the new keyword box. It now allows for a keyword search to be performed with a combination of keywords, a URL and a category.
You can also compare your keywords by match type using one or more match types at the same time. For example, I can get both sets of search data for a broad search term and an exact search term at the same time just by checking both boxes under the match types.
The change that I’m most excited is the new “starring” capability. This allows you to star keyword ideas, which then saves them while you search for new ideas. Gone are the days of having to download your selected keywords between searches!
In addition, you can now download starred keywords only, all results, all keywords for certain queries or keyword ideas in bulk.
Finally,you have the ability to search within terms using the “more like these” option. So you star or select your keyword phrases that you like the best and search within those phrases to find even more related keyword ideas.
For SEOs these changes will definitely help when conducting keyword research for clients. We’re excited to see future updates to Google’s keyword research tool!
If you like free SEM tools like the Google Keyword Research Tool, definitely check out Schipul’s SEM tools.
Google Introduces Google Analytics Premium
Monday, October 3, 2011
Last Friday, Google announced the release of the Google Analytics Premium. Users now have the option to go premium for an annual flat rate fee, which still has not been disclosed.
What’s included in this premium account?
The premium package includes a number of exciting upgrades and new features including more insights and around the clock support from a Google Analytics expert.
Some of Google Analytics Premium’s new features:
- 24/7 live support
- custom training and support
- lifted data limits
- attribution modeling
- more custom variables
- data collection & reporting guarantees
“Premium is everything you need to give everyone in your business the ability to make better data-driven decisions to move from data to insights to action faster than ever.”
Along with this release, Google reassured current users by stating they will continue to develop and enhance the free version of Google Analytics that we all know and love.
Google Introduces Faster, New Way to Submit URLs Using “Fetch as Googlebot”
Monday, August 8, 2011
Google’s Webmaster Tools also features a new option to submit your new and recently updated URLs for indexing by Google. In order to submit a URL, first you have to fetch the URL as Googlebot. Once the URL has been fetched and deemed successful, Google will give you the option to submit that URL to their index. After submitting, your URL will be crawled by the Googlebot, usually within a 24 hour time frame. Once the URL has been crawled, it will be considered for inclusion in the Google index.
How to submit a URL Using “Fetch as Googlebot”
In Google Webmaster Tools, select the URL of the site which you want to submit. Once you are on the dashboard for that website, click Diagnostics in the right hand side menu.
Once the drop down menu expands, click “Fetch as Googlebot.” Then click fetch once you have entered the URL you wish to submit to Google. If the URL has been successfully fetched, you will see a “Submit to Index” link appear.
Photo Credit: Google Webmaster Central Blog
After you click the “Submit to Index” link, a dialog box will appear (like the one pictured below) that gives you the option of submitting the sole URL, or the URL and all of its linked pages. We recommend the latter, “URL and all linked pages,” especially, for newly launched websites.
Photo Credit: Google Webmaster Central Blog
Google places a maximum limit of 50 individual URL submissions per week, per URL. If submitting URLs with linked pages, the maximum drops down to 10 submissions per month, so submit carefully. The fetch as Googlebot page will always give you an updated count of your submissions and how many you have remaining.
