Current chess engines are able to defeat even the strongest human players under normal conditions. However, when computers were less powerful, a human always won because a human chess player can intuitively determine what moves are worth paying attention to.

I have promised that I will spend less than 10 minutes a day with site analytics. It is safe to say that I am really fulfilling the promise. The WebCEO dashboard helps me to determine what data is worth paying attention and where I can outgame search engines.

There are three levels of dashboards in WebCEO, each giving you more details about the current situation with your sites.

1. Main Dashboard

You will see the Main Dashboard when you log into your WebCEO account. It’s a helicopter view of all the sites you are working on with WebCEO.

Here you can get the quickest idea of how your sites are doing. A quick tip is: if you see something in red – pay attention fast. Click on the cell with red numbers or arrows and you will be taken to a detailed report showing what has happened.

You can select a compact, standard or extended view for the most comfortable experience. The extended view is the best for mobile devices, you can easily surf the data with your fingers. The compact view helps you quickly scan dozens of sites and see where your attention is needed. The standard view is something in the middle

Another great thing about the WebCEO Dashboard is the ability to perform bulk actions. SEO agencies love this! Click the “Bulk actions” link right below the view icons and you will be able to rescan all selected projects simultaneously, change their properties and scan schedule at once, and even delete several projects at once, if you need.

The WebCEO product managers researched how professional SEO experts prefer to set their SEO dashboards. The results of this research were used to create the default Dashboard view. However, you can fine-tune Dashboards to fit your needs. Go to the Settings and check the columns you need. You can use different Dashboard views on your desktop and mobile, and you can add different columns on that different view. So you can have different Dashboards on your different devices!

The most interesting part of the Dashboard settings is the “Advanced tool settings” tab. Here you can polish data representation to perfection.

With the advanced settings you can set different presentation for starred and non-starred projects (I hope you know that you can click a star icon near a project/website in the Main Dashboard and this will mark the website as important).

Set Your Perfect Dashboard Now

2. Project Overview

To dig into more details about a specific project (in WebCEO we call your websites “projects”), click on its name in the Main Dashboard or select it through the Select project button at the top.

The Project Overview dashboard consists of widgets that summarize the information from all the tools you use. You can use the predefined widget sets: brief, standard or extended, or create your own sets.

Tip: if you work on client websites, create different widget sets to use for work and to use for reporting.

The Project Overview is great for reporting, because it is a summary from all tools. You can add and delete widgets, drag them in order to rearrange them, change their size or view to represent the information in the best way. The Project Overview can be printed, downloaded as a PDF or sent via email (check the Export button in the top right corner). You can also add it to the automatic consolidated report.

Customize Project Overview to Fit Your Client’s Needs

3. Tool Summary

The third and the most specific in the WebCEO dashboard family is the Tool Summary. You can see the Tool Summary for almost all of the WebCEO tools.

The Tool Summary dashboard consists of a widget set just like the Project Overview does. The only difference is that in the Tool Summary you will find only information from the specific tool in question. For example, you can use the Rank Tracking Tool Summary to investigate the ranking health of a site.

As with the Project Overview, the Tool Summary is great for client reporting because most clients do not want to forge through dense ranking tables. Beautiful graphs and diagrams will attract them and show that you are a professional who knows what is worth paying attention to. Remember that chess metaphor at the beginning?

Try the WebCEO Dashboards for Free

The post WebCEO Dashboard Anatomy appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There is a term called “breaking the fourth wall” which refers to the imaginary wall between a theater stage and the audience of a performance. Normally, it’s like a real wall because the actors and actresses never acknowledge the existence of the audience until the applause at the final curtain call. But some, such as the playwright who called himself Shakespeare, have been very good at directly communicating with the audience during a performance. This can make an actor, play, movie or TV show very popular. If you watched the “Deadpool” or “House of Cards” or “Fight Club”, then you have witnessed the breaking of the fourth wall. Marketers use this term to show that one must effectively talk directly to the consumer when presenting products and services.

SEO reports are often sent with a “check-box” approach that leads to losing touch with your clients. On the one hand your reports should be well-tailored for customers and on the other hand, clients should see the value they get from your SEO services. Graphs and pie charts with visitor traffic, keyword rankings and backlink quality trends are not the objective so much as the means to communicate to clients the status of their site performance.

Conducting SEO and reporting to clients is very similar to a theater production company putting on a great performance of a true story. It’s important to “break the fourth wall” and speak directly to your customers in order to engage them, earn their trust and make them take action.

In SEO reporting, breaking the fourth wall is possible. There are several customer-centric features built into the Web CEO SEO reporting software. Before breaking the fourth wall between you and your clients, don’t forget to sign up for a 14-day Free Trial in order to see our tools in action. Let’s talk about the techniques for doing this:

Ask prospective customers “How’s it going” with an Express SEO Audit Report

Pitching your SEO services with a well-tailored express SEO audit report would be a good welcome speech to your SEO leads. How can this help you break the wall? First of all, an express SEO report is much better than a generic proposition like this:

“Hi, I am SEO expert and I can help you bring your site to the top of Google. Would you like to know what issues you have on your site?”

C’mon guys, this is usually a giant pass for many people. You will go to the spam box every time. Folks hear such propositions every day. You will not break the fourth wall this way.

What sets an express SEO Audit report apart from most initial SEO propositions is that you are providing fascinating information to people upfront while providing a professional look and personal approach. The report your prospects will be provided with should not be just a once over SEO performance overview. A good SEO lead generation report should deliver a prospect-tailored SEO analysis with coverage of important on-page and off-page SEO analysis assets. The report should help educate customers on the current SEO status of their site with detailed advice. All you need to know is their website URL and the email address to send a report to. Once you express concern about your prospects’ sites by providing real issues with possible solutions on how to fix them, the wall between you and your prospects should open up in many cases.

Using the Web CEO Lead Generation Tools which enable the automated generation of a branded SEO audit report, you can easily capture, analyze and convert high quality SEO prospects. Here you can find out how to generate qualified SEO leads and turn them into your loyal customers.

Break down the changes in your existing customer websites via the SEO Events marks on SEO report graphs

SEO reporting has little or even no value when spikes and declines on SEO report graphs are delivered to clients without the context in which the changes took place at those specific times.

Don’t prepare and send regular SEO reports without explicit notes on the graphs which explain changes in rankings or backlinks. You should take client reporting seriously unless you want to lose customers because of a lack of transparency and poor communication about which SEO actions affected client sites.

The Web CEO Journal of Events can great improve communication and transparency within SEO reports that are automatically emailed to your clients. The journal of SEO events can be used in the following cases:

• Make announcements to all your clients about the dates of Google Updates on the charts of SEO reports
• Keep an SEO diary, describing your own actions in each of your projects, where you can decide at any time whether or not to make them visible to individual clients.
• Leave SEO notes or tasks for your team for more effective and coordinated team work.
• Auto-generate notes about when you emailed manual and automatic PDF reports.

Stay alert when your clients’ websites go wrong

Being timely, pre-emptive, empathic and decisive about dealing with any negative issues of your clients is also a strong “breaking the fourth wall” technique. A good SEO service provider should keep a close eye on the following SEO factors that negatively affect site performance:

• Website rankings drop
• Competitors outranking keyword positions
• Technical SEO issues such as dropped backlinks

The Web CEO Email Alerts tool can help you get you or your SEO clients alerted as soon as a new tool scan detects negative changes in a client’s ranking positions or technical off-site/on-site SEO issues, like broken internal links and lost important backlinks. Once you set up alerts for Rank Tracking, Technical SEO issues or lost backlinks, they are sent instantly every time a specific tool scanning is complete.

Go the extra mile by speaking the translated language of your customers.

Destroy the fourth wall inalterably by speaking in the native language of your customers. Talking with your foreign or domestic customers in their actual language will help you remove any language barrier and save a lot of time and money on translators. Besides, by providing non-English SEO services, you can take control of a new local SEO market where your competitors may have fumbled the opportunity.

WebCEO is used in 196 countries! We have built a multilanguage wiki community with the ability for everyone to crowd-translate our service interface tools and reports into 146+ languages. Read about our amazing Crowd Translation tool.  This tool is available for all subscription plans including the Free plan. You can already provide SEO services in Brazilian Portuguese (99.9 % translation completed), Spanish (88.1% translation completed), Italian (83.8% translation completed), Dutch (73.5% translation completed). View a sample of an SEO report translated into Brazilian Portuguese.

Let’s break the fourth wall together!

We are all ears and we are constantly working hard to break that fourth wall ourselves in order to hear your needs and the needs of your clients. Should you have any suggestions, feel free to contact our Support Angels at: www.webceo.com/support.htm or tweet us at @webceonews.

The post How to Create Client SEO Reports Which Break the Fourth Wall appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Those who run a local business, or provide SEO services for small business owners, now have a competitive edge over national brands, because the latter don’t have physical locations in cities where most of their customers reside. Local businesses can have the icing on the cake by grabbing the coveted real estate on the first page of local SERPs.

According to the Google research study “Understanding Consumers’ Local Search Behavior”, 4 of 5 consumers use search engines to find local information. Moreover, local-based searches lead to more conversions than non-local searches. But there is a flipside for the local market players, which is that there are constant changes and updates of the Google local search patterns.

Let’s face the problem: in the last few years Google has made it even harder for local businesses to get noticed in local SERPs.  In 2014, Google released the Google Pigeon Update that totally redefined the way we do local search. The local 7-pack block of Google Places results were shrunken to a 3-pack or “Snack Pack.” The redesigned local pack boxes lack call buttons and exact address information (we can only see directions and website link buttons now). The search giant explained it simply; it’s all for the sake of a better user experience and the unification of desktop and mobile search navigation. Maybe some positive-minded folks welcomed this brave new world, especially if they were in the top 3 of Places and saw an increase of the click-through rate to their websites. But most of the small business owners who were listed 4^th  or lower suffered from a drastic traffic drop and a dearth in phone calls. Then another unexpected update from Google followed: the shocking removal of its location filter in search settings. This caused a lot of discontent from many webmasters and business owners who used this feature to see how local results would look from the locations their clients reside in.

The difficulty of local SERP performance tracking intensifies because of the interplay between the dynamics of local SERPs and the personalization of the Google local search results. There are 3 major local search modifiers that embody the personalization of search results:

• Explicit location modifier is provided on the part of a searcher who adds an explicit geographical term (names of country, city, street, district, etc.) to the body of a search query.
• User location modifier is an automatic identification of the user location by device location service data like an IP address, GPS, Wi-Fi hotspots, in order to deliver the most relevant local information without the user having to manually add a location modifier to her search query.
• Browsing history stores some useful information about the user that helps identify the most relevant search results for a specific user.

There are 5 ways to look at local SERPs from the perspective of your prospects

With the above mentioned pitfalls of how Google serves local search activity, there is still some wiggle room for getting approximate ranking positions for your or your client’s location-based website.

Note that the following methods of getting local rankings for target keywords don’t give a rock-solid guarantee of explicit and accurate results. Each of these methods have obvious drawbacks. They are time-consuming, require manual multistep actions and results are difficult to report to clients.

1. Incognito mode or a logged out option can be activated by clicking on a “New incognito window” that is placed inside the settings bar at the top-right corner of your Google Chrome browser. This is a simple way to emulate an average search. On the one hand, an incognito window allows you to surf the web without caching your browser history and deleting all cookies after you close the window. But this doesn’t actually hide your IP address and location. This means that the results for your local business related terms might differ from those that your prospects see in their localized search. However, the Incognito mode  can be a good solution for those who check ranking positions from the nearby location to their prospects. But keep in my mind that if you enter a search query and get results for it, once you refresh the page or do a new search with the same search query, the results may differ from the previous check. Be sure to clear your cache or open a new incognito window.

2. Google’s AdPreview and Diagnosis tool provides a more accurate emulation of a search from the location of your targeted audience. It also allows you to emulate language, device type and set a Google domain for a specific region. You need to be logged in to use the tool.

This is how the second option looks like in practice:

The website we decided to monitor is http://www.harvesttablenewark.com/. Here it is shown in the 2d position in the local pack results.

3. The isearchfrom.com service is similar to the Google AdPreview and Diagnosis tool, however there is a caution under the settings that says:

That means that you shouldn’t rely on the results provided by this free tool which is supported on a rare basis. According to this tool, the Harvest Table site is ranking in the 2d position within local pack results.

4. Geo-location emulation in the web browser is one of the most reliable but timewasting methods. The whole process will be completed within 5 steps :

• Open your browser (Chrome)
• Press CTRL+SHIFT+I in order to open the Google Chrome Developer Tools
• Click on the Emulation tab next to the Console tab:

You can then click on Sensors and put the specific locality coordinates into the boxes of Latitude and Longitude. The longitude and latitude for a specific location you can find here.

• Open a new window and start your local search.

According to this method, my website is 2d in the “3-pack”.

5. Emulation of location via using a location-specific proxy. This is a relatively easy way to hide your local network data and get precise local ranking results for your website. The only problem with this method is the rake-through for a legitimate proxy for an accurate emulation of your targeted locality. This is how it works:

• Go to your browser settings (Chrome) and click on Show advanced settings
• Click on Change proxy settings and configure your Internet Properties by adding a location-specific proxy in order to transmit your emulated local address to the web.

Using this method of location emulation, I found my website in the 1st position of local pack results.

I want easy-to-read reports with more accurate local rank tracking now!

And that’s what we are here for! With the Web CEO Local Rank Tracker you can just forget these unhandy ways of local rank tracking that take a great deal of your time.

The WebCEO Rank Tracker in action:

• Sign up for a free 14-day trial.
• Add your site URL to the WebCEO new project wizard
• Go to the Rank Tracking tool and click on the Keywords tab in the settings of the tool. Add your targeted keywords and local terms.

• Click on the Search engines tab in order to add all the search engines you want to track your site positions on. We provide our customers with the ability to add country specific search engines (you can add up to 50!), including mobile ones and you should also add a specific location (e.g. state, city, ZIP code) in order to emulate search results as if you were tracking right from your customers’ locations.

• Scan your ranking report in order to see if your site has any positions among organic and vertical (3-pack, ads results etc.) local results. On the screenshot below you can see two digits (1:1) which means that our website has the 1^st position within the local pack Google Places results. We consider the local pack box on Google as the 1^st position and we see your site’s Google Places listing as a subordinate number to that first position held by the local pack When you click on a keyword in your ranking reports, you can see cached results for the keyword from the actual SERPs.

We also let you set a scan schedule on a regular (weekely, daily for an Agency Unlimited plan) basis  for you to keep a close eye on fluctuations, hopefully improvements, in the rankings you track in your local campaigns.

What other features of WebCEO can serve you in your local SEO?

1.  You can track your site listing positions for branded local terms on third-party local business listing directories like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Zomato etc. To do this, go to the Rank Tracking settings and click on the Alternative URLs and paste your business listing page URLs (if you have them) from business related directories.

And start tracking your Yelp and local directory business listings performance.

2.  Track your site positions alongside with your competitors’

3.  Submit your business details like name, description, address, phone number, categories etc. to high authority manually scoped local business-related directories in the Content Submission tool (Local section)

TL;DR

You must have noticed that the first  2 or 3 results pages are often saturated with local business listing sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, HappyCow, Zomato, etc, which can list your website among others or even present a special page for your business that gets a direct listing on Google, but your own URL won’t be shown in Google. If you really want to be easily found on the first page of Google local search results for localized terms and non-branded keywords, you should definitely evaluate your local business SEO strategy.

The post 6 Ways to See Local Business Rankings Like Your Customers Do appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It took years for Google to adopt and successfully release their critters on the world, which now devotedly guard the Internet search domain from mortal transgressors. Each of the Google animals live in their own area of the search world with specific rules and laws. You can tame these beasts if you are fully dedicated to what you do, like Martin Lacey with his head in a lion’s mouth, or Roy Horn being grabbed by the throat by a tiger or Daenerys Targaryen, the mother of dragons, who raised three dragons (don’t tell us you don’t watch that series).

Google critters are really friendly to those who feed them with consistent food like fresh content, yummy backlinks, rich context and original local SEO cuisine. But when they meet intruders on their territory, who give no value to them and their search visitors, they run amok and can even harm you.  For you to stay safe from feral Google critters here is a short interactive SEO infographic. Keep your eyes open on Halloween and use WebCEO to tame the Google beasts.

The post How to Save Yourself from Sneaky Google Critters appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

One of the primary reasons startups fail is a lack of capital. The overhead that comes with getting a successful business going is often more than the average entrepreneur can handle. The result is a 90 percent failure rate for startups.

While you can’t guarantee your business will be a success, you can work on lowering your expenses and keeping things affordable. Here are a few tools that will help you do just that.

1. Squarespace

Whether you need to build a great website or need a basic logo to get your business some recognition, the Squarespace platform can get you what you need with both free and paid options. Other CMS platforms may be more comprehensive, but check them out.

2. ClickBooth

ClickBooth has been named the #1 affiliate network in the world, and they’re continuing to grow that reputation as they bring both startups and major companies a cost-per-action (CPA) advertising platform that any firm can afford.

3. Google Drive

With 15GB of free storage at your disposal, not to mention excellent editing, collaboration, and sharing capabilities, GoogleDrive is your one-stop-shop for your collaborative needs.

4. MailChimp

Email marketing campaigns are made easy with MailChimp, which allows you to send and create scheduled emails, manage contacts, and track analytics. Sending some emails to a few contacts is entirely free, but it’s very affordable to upgrade to a larger package.

5. Buffer

Buffer allows you to organize and run multiple social media accounts, all from the same place. It’s a great, free way to maximize efficiencies on your social campaigns.

6. Trello

Most startups do their fair share of collaborating, and Trello is free project management software that can keep everyone on the same page with time stamping, multiple user interfaces, budget tracking, and more, for both mobile and desktop.

7. Square

Before you have the capital to install a commercial, all-inclusive point of purchase system, Square is a secure, easy-to-use alternative. It accepts payments through phones and tablets with highly secure processing. Once you download the app and purchase the hardware, it’s free to use.

8. Fiverr

When you need freelancers, consider this website that offers services for just five dollars. Fiverr has freelancers from more than 100 countries, and you may find some great people offering high quality services at an affordable price. Do not, however, purchase dishonest services such as backlinks or fake social media attention! You could, thus, destroy your business before it has a chance to get off the ground.

9. Kickstarter

Unless you’ve been lucky enough to land an angel investor that continually sends money, crowdfunding on Kickstarter could be your best option for raising funds. Kickstarter has helped fund more than 94,000 successful startups, and helped to keep thousands more in business.

10. Canva

Imagery and infographics are essential for a successful content marketing campaign, and Canva can deliver customized images at a great price. They’re also good for building templates and other features for unparalleled web design.

11. Google Analytics

The suite of free Google tools startups can use is remarkable, and Google Analytics is one of the best for understanding organic and referral traffic performance, customers, and advertisement campaigns through a collection of data, charts, and other tools.

12. WebCEO

Once you have launched a website for your startup business, you will want to measure and improve its SEO performance, including keyword research and analysis, targeted keyword rank tracking, backlink analysis, on-page SEO audits and competitor analysis. The WebCEO SEO Platform with its Startup plan will provide you with 15 SEO tools for $99 per month (Sign up for a free 14-day trial so you can test the platform).

13. SumoMe

Grow traffic through list building, heat maps, popup email boxes, and more through this comprehensive, free, website-enhancing tool. SumoMe is one of the many affordable tools your startup can use on your way to greatness.

The post Baker’s Dozen of Tools Startups Can Actually Afford appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

With the weather getting hotter, Google has been aggressively rolling out update after update. It all started with the Google Mobile-Friendly Update aka Mobilegeddon. Then it was followed by speculations about an additional Google Mobile Search Update dubbed Platypus and confirmations of a ‘Phantom 2 Update’. The latter update was first noticed on 4/29 and has been confirmed to be non Panda, Penguin or Mobile Algo related. It targets the overall quality of search results. Google Phantom 2 seems pretty similar to the Google Phantom Algo tweak rolled out in early May, 2013. Not long after that, Google Penguin 2.0 hit websites. This means we should be on the lookout for the next big Penguin update. Some experts have already confirmed information about an upcoming link spam penalizing algo update.

With another big Google Penguin Update always round the corner, you will need to keep your backlink profile audit constantly updated and free of suspicious link referrals.

What kind of backlinks are in Google’s favor

Most webmasters and SEOs understand link building too literally and treat it as the main way to increase popularity on the web and gain higher rankings. No, no, and again, no! Google sees your backlinks as one measure of your content credibility; something that is built upon relationships with people. Earning quality backlinks has become more holistic and complex, where you should build your link profile manually, with a long-term, solid perspective. In the Post-Penguin era Google validates and ranks only those links built in a natural, non-manipulative way:

Editorial links are a common definition for the kind of backlinks that are generated in an organic, non-promotional way via trustworthy industry-level sources.   Make use of some of the 7 ways to earn editorial links provided by Amanda DiSilvestro in order to pass editorial link juice to your backling profile.

Implied Links are one of the safest type of backlinks. These are not actual hyperlinks, but just mentions of your website name or domain name that can dramatically benefit your backlink profile bringing a strong connection between your brand mentions and your site.

Social citations. Though providing nofollow value, social links are in play and are used to measure the power of your content. Let’s see how it works. You write a post on your blog, or elsewhere. What’s next? You send a newsletter email to your clients about your new article. With this kind of scenario you would hardly get new traffic to your site and earn more than a few inbound links. You will need to be out there diligently promoting your content asset (unique and informative or interactive) on every single social network where your potential clients might be. You may still get only 9 or 10 likes or shares per post, but then Google will compare your performance to that of others in your industry. The most effective social networks and platforms for building social citations are:

• Twitter, which is one of the top social networks for generating social citations and where individual posts are now a full-fledged part of Google search results pages. Read about the prospects of the latest Google-Twitter deal for your business and learn what factors can help you get posts into Google organic search listings and generate a great portion of new traffic.
• LinkedIn is a perfect place for sharing links to your content (LinkedIn Profile/Group) and blog posts (Pulse) in order to build your personal brand authority and earn new professional connections.
• Facebook is the right place to keep your audience informed about your company updates, special offers, industry news etc. The more your audience likes and shares your Facebook posts, the more you will expand your target audience (their friends) and your social link profile (Google records how many likes and shares posts receive that have your domain linked in them).
• Reddit/StumpleUpon/Growthhackers are powerful social media platforms for direct links distribution and branded content promotion. Remember that you should be proactive and unbiased. Share not only your content but provide useful assets with links to other sources.
• Quora is one of the most authoritative Q/A expert communities where you can generate links (nofollow) back to your site right in your in-depth answers and grow your personal brand authority and awareness. Quora is also a great source for attracting well-targeted traffic with a high conversion rate.

In a link building perspective, quora links may be officially nofollow, but they are highly indexable and rankable by Google.

Guest Posting is still in play if done in an unbiased non-promotional way. Guest posting can do more harm than good if you write for your own SEO benefits. Your approach to guest blogging should be like your approach to charity, which is altruistic as well as good for building trust and authority to your persona and creating a strong expert connections network where you’ll see pay-offs down the road. If you link to yourself from a guest post platform, consider linking indirectly to your Twitter platform. Read more about ways to find guest blogging opportunities at Social Media Examiner.

Co-citation is another effective way to build relative links back to your site. Co-citations are the link references cited on a single source page to two or more external related sources. This means that you will want to be listed with your competitors as much as possible. The most powerful method of building co-citations is competitive backlink analysis. The WebCEO Competitor Backlink Spy tool will help you to prospect high quality, niche-related links from third-party websites in order to get listed alongside your competitors.

Google will be totally happy with your website if you balance your link building strategy with all the above mentioned backlink types. Google doesn’t like it when SEOs go overboard with one single link building technique in their strategy. Ann Smarty learned a lesson after big G disgraced her “baby,” MyBlogGuest, last year for abusing of link schemes.  (Read about link spam/toxic links over two sections below)

The backlink data you should take under control in order to claim higher rankings.

Here are some of the essential backlink factors that determine link quality.

# of Linking Pages – Links coming from multiple unique and relevant pages = a strong ranking factor

# of Linking Domains – The number of linking domains is critical for determining the quality of your link profile. However, the quality of linking domains is more important than their quantity. Having 1000 links on 100 high quality domains is better than having 100000 low quality backlinks on 100 domains with low authority.

Linking Domain Age – Google likes backlinks hosted on older domains more than those hosted on new ones.

Linking Domain Authority – Google pays more attention to the links from domains with a high Home PR (they are now replacing PageRank with rankings measured by others in the industry).

Linking Domains Diversity – Google may consider an excessive number of links coming from the same exact domain a negative manipulative link building technique.

Page Rank of Linking Page/Page Rank of Home Page – The age of the linking page and linking domain determines its authority. The higher the better.

Backlink Anchor Text – Google sees the anchor text as a descriptor of a linked page. A backlink with a relevant anchor text is a powerful ranking factor.

Linking Domain Relevancy/Page-Level Relevancy – Since the Hummingbird Update, Google seeks to understand the theme of each site and gives more value to the linking domains and pages that are relevant to your site’s theme.

Location of Backlink – Contextual links are more valuable than those placed in navigation sections of linking sites. Sitewide links are considered low quality and manipulative.

% of Nofollow Links – Having lots of links with rel=”nofollow” status should be part of a natural link profile. Google doesn’t count them but pay attention to their presence in your link profile.

# of Social Shares of Linking Page – Linking page is considered valuable if it has a number of social shares and likes, i.e. brings natural traffic.

Ahrefs Domain Rank/Ahrefs URL Rank – These measure how valuable a referring domain/page is by verifying the number and quality of the backlinks they get themselves.

Backlinks Velocity – It provides the trend of your backlink profile for natural/unnatural growth.

What is a toxic link and how do you identify one?

When some of the above mentioned factors are devalued or abused, Google may consider one of your backlinks as manipulative spam link. If your link profile includes more than 20% toxic links you are in the Google Penguin Penalty risk group. For your backlink profile safety, WebCEO has created a specific toxicity formula that helps to identify toxic links.

According to this formula and Google Penguin-proof link building guidelines, backlinks are considered toxic in the these common cases:

• linking page has an excessive number of outgoing links
• backlinks are part of a network of links coming from the same linking domain/subnet/IP
• high % of sitewide links (placed in footers, headers, sidebars)
• high % of links with the same exact (generic) anchor text
• high % of directory backlinks, backlinks from comment sections and guest post backlinks (if they are not nofollow).

If you have thousands of backlinks and don’t know if there are toxic links among them, be sure to use our Backlink Quality Checker to find and detox harmful links.

The Algorithm of the Backlink SEO Audit:

For an effective Google Penguin-friendly linkbuilding strategy, WebCEO shares its best recommendations based on Google guidelines, our tried-and-tested techniques and customer experiences.

Once you have the needed SEO backlink data and a comprehensive backlink quality check tool at hand it’s time to get your all-in-one backlinks report which should provide solutions to problems related to:

1. Linking Domains Analysis.

A weighted analysis of the linking domains to your site is the first thing you should start with, in your Backlink Profile SEO Audit. A comprehensive report should provide information on how many links are coming from one single domain, how many juicy links it passes, what % of toxic links and nofollow links it provides. Such data as Home PR, Ahrefs Domain Rank will show the authority of a domain.

2. Linking Pages Analysis.

The analysis of a linking page should include insights about what anchor text it uses, what page of your site it targets, its quality (Google PR, Home PR, Ahrefs URL Rank) and status (dofollow, nofollow or suspected toxic) data.

3. Broken Link Check

Using WebCEO’s “Chosen Links Watch,” be sure to check the availability of your most important backlinks to search engines (you may have just redesigned your site and accidentally eliminated a page that had a great backlink to it). If your backlink profile has a lot of broken inbound links this may negatively affect your overall rankings.

4. Backlink Anchor Text Analysis.

Pay special attention to your backlink anchor texts, because they are the cover of your backlink profile. Check the diversity of your anchors, the number of exact-match anchors, how much link juice your link texts pass, how many source domains use this or that anchor text etc.

5. Linked Pages Analysis. The quality of backlinks is partially identified by those of your website pages that they are linking to. Be sure to check your most linked pages and determine if the backlinks to the pages are related and descriptive and diverse.

6. Toxic Links Analysis.

Once you check your backlink profile for shortcomings and have found the most harmful ones, you should add them to your get-rid-of list.

7. Competitor link profile analysis.

Competitve backlinks analysis is crucial for identifying weaknesses and strengths in your current link building strategy. You may consider sites linking to your competitors as your link prospects.  Evaluate your competitors’ backlinks in order to pick the most relevant and valuable with a high page ranking as determined by independent sources like Ahrefs and preferably from EDU. and ORG. domains.

If you don’t have a backlink checker tool on hand to conduct an audit of all of this complex backlink data, sigh up free for WebCEO to try our Backlink Quality Checker reporting tools and the Technical Audit tool.

Reminder: Be sure to audit your backlink profile on a regular basis, such as once per quarter, in order to keep your site safe and forget about having Penguin mania.

The post How to Keep Your Backlink Profile Ever Clean appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Inspired by one of our customer’s detailed and sharp-eyed WebCEO review we decided to return good for good. Thank you, Brian and each of our 1+ million users, you help the Web CEO team to make our software (cloud and desktop) work well and even better for you.

The fact is that WebCEO was designed for tech savvy users: SEOs, website owners, digital marketing geeks, who know what they need from SEO software. Our task is to provide even more than they need. WebCEO products run well thanks to:

• Our R&D specialists who research the needs of users. The research work is complemented by our personal SEO experiences and case studies (members of the Web CEO team are encouraged to have minor pet website projects (Web CEO is major one)
• Our programmers who elaborately turn ideas into action features and tools.
• While our developers are the muscles of the project and the marketing and product management departments are the brain, the heart is our support. Our Support Angels are the true heart of Web CEO! They truly love their work and our clients. Users often reflect this in their reviews.

You, our customers make Web CEO a living organism: an eternal search optimization engine. Remember, you have the keys that start the Web CEO motor. If you’d like to write a review of us at G2 Crowd, here you can submit your review.

The post Web CEO: An Insider’s View of Our SEO Platform Development appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

If you’ve been working at least half as long in the SEO industry as we’ve been, you should know about the KEI acronym. KEI stands for keyword effectiveness index. It was created as a statistic that reveals the most effective keyword phrases and terms to use in optimizing your web pages.

The Keyword Effectiveness Index compares the number of searches (demand) a keyword gets per month (its popularity) divided by the number of pages in a search engines index (supply). The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. This means that, for a keyword with a relatively high KEI, you ought to have a better chance of getting to the top in the search engines and receive a good number of searchers for your effort.

This plain formula has stood the test of time, since the earliest days of SEO.

KEI is an important metric to rely on when you chose profitable keywords. However, the old formula has needed to be tuned slightly for the modern competitive Web. We at WebCEO updated the KEI formula to help you choose the best keywords for your sites with our Keyword Research tool.

Our KEI uses the number of global searches for a keyword divided by its bid competition coefficient to get a great estimate of the effectiveness of that keyword. We use bid competition instead of the number of pages in a search engines index, because bid competition reflects a keyword’s popularity better. A keyword that you wish to bid for can’t be unpopular by definition.

The higher the KEI the better, because this indicates that the search number is relatively high while the competition is relatively low.

The post KEI: A Fossil or An Essential Metric? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Are you sure you get the most from social media? Do you know what type of content your audience loves? Do you know how your competitors build their communities? What social channels should you concentrate on?

You have questions – WebCEO Online has answers. We have created a new tool to help you navigate through the chaos of social media and get the most of your social activity. The Social Engagement tool is available for all WebCEO Online users.

Discover What Content Your Audience Loves

Use the ‘Social Citations’ report to find out what pages of your site get the most Facebook shares, likes and comments, Google +1’s and tweets. The Social citations trend will show how your pages’ popularity changes over time.

Click on the image below to see a full-sized screenshot.

How to use this report:

The pages that get the most social engagement will be the pages your audience is interested in. Analyze what type of content (infographics, blog posts, video, images, how-to’s, etc.) and what topics attract the readers. Consider creating more content of the most shareable types to attract new readers and grow a bigger community.

Benchmark against Competitors

With the ‘Competitor Social Citations’ report you can learn how popular your site’s homepage is in Facebook, Twitter and Google+ compared with your competitors.

How to use this report:

Nobody knows for sure whether search engines use a site’s social media popularity as a ranking factor. We think they should and probably do. Use the ‘Competitor Social Citations’ report to estimate how hard you should work on your social media promotion to outrank your competitors.

Evaluate Your Social Media Marketing Efficiency

With the ‘Social Traffic’ report you can easily analyze what social channels are the most profitable for your site. All you need is to connect your Google Analytics account with the WebCEO (just two clicks and you get comprehensive data to analyze your website).

Click on the image below to see a full-sized screenshot.

How to use this report:

This report shows how many visitors the various social channels bring to you. Pay attention to the ones with the highest conversion rates. They are the networks you should focus on.

Bonus tip: Use the Social Engagement tool summary to get a quick overview of your social media promotion success. Here you will see social citations changing over time, your top 5 social media referrals, your Facebook engagement stats and your site’s social media popularity numbers. Click on the image below to see the full-sized screenshot.

The post A Must-Have Tool to Master Social Media Promotion appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

As you know, Panda is a Google filter that seeks to stop spammy (low quality) sites from ranking high in the SERPs.

In late May the Google Panda 4.0 update was discussed all over the SEO community. The web is full of theoretical advice on how to avoid the Panda penalty. We have some practical tips.

Avoid Exact Match Link Text

Part of any site development is planning how users will navigate the content. In terms of SEO it means that your internal links structure should be well-optimized. Internal links optimization is often ignored, although it is a great method to improve landing (important) pages’ search visibility and to broadcast your website’s theme.

However, if linking is implemented incorrectly, it can attract Panda’s attention. The first thing Google Panda may react badly to is if you have an excessive number of exact matching link texts. The exact matching link texts can set off alarms with Google that you may be trying to manipulate the algorithm and get higher rankings.

How to avoid this:

Go to the WebCEO Internal Links Optimization tool and check the “Link Text Analysis” report. The numbers you are interested in are highlighted on the screenshot below.

Analyze how diverse the internal link texts are. If you see that an exact link text is used with more than 20% of all your internal links, consider changing some texts to diversify you internal links profile.

Decrease Site Wide Links

When building a site’s navigation it is typical to create site wide navigational links to a domain’s most popular pages. Very often these links are found in the side bar or footer and are completely irrelevant to the topic of most of the pages that the link falls on. These links do not improve your page’s authority and should be minimized.

What to do:

Use the Page Authority Analysis report of the Internal Links Optimization tool to identify your most important pages for now. Are your landing pages (the pages you use to convert visitors into customers) the most authoritative pages?

View the details of a page you want to improve the authority of. You will get the list of the pages that are still not linked to your landing page. Use this list to find the best link donors. Remember that the best links are contextual links with natural link text places on the relevant pages, as opposed to links found in the footer of the page.

Avoid Duplicates

Panda uses multiple factors to identify your site’s quality. One of them is the absence of duplicate content pieces. You should use only high quality unique content; this is not even a point of discussion. However, sometimes duplicate Titles and Descriptions make their way to your pages and that can be very bad. It’s an easy mistake to make however.

How to avoid:

The On-Site SEO report of the Content Assistant tool will help you. Scan your website and get notified about all duplicate Titles and Descriptions found. Besides you will know if your site has other optimization issues preventing you from getting high rankings.

After you’ve discovered the duplicates, consider rewriting the Titles and Descriptions to be unique. Remember, that the Titles and the Descriptions are the pieces that prompt a searcher to click your link on a SERP. Make them descriptive and appealing.

Bonus tip: Ensure that your backlink profile is sound. Use the Toxic Links report of the Backlink Quality Check tool to find and remove harmful links.

The post How to Avoid the Google Panda Penalty with the WebCEO tools appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.