Author Archive

Finiding Links Made Easy

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

One of the least appreciated, most hated, and most boring parts of marketing a web site in the era of links mean something is finding new links.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a program where you could:

  • Enter keywords
  • Find the top ranked sites for those keywords
  • Gather all the relevant links that are pointing at those sites
  • Give you the email address to as many webmasters as it can find
  • And let you manage as many campaigns and keywords as you can think of?

The latest product from SEO Shop is just such a program. Introducing Link Hound!

Link Hound was designed from the ground up to make finding, and managing, link campaigns as easy as possible. Any tool can hand you bulk data and wish you good luck, but Link Hound tries to do as much of the work as possible for you. Once you select a keyphrase to target you are presented with a lengthy list of domains to choose from, pick your top competitors and you have your link base to start with.

And then we change the rules.

Using your pre-set filters you can fine tune your link list before you even see it. No more wading through thousands of .cn worthless links to find the handful of great great .edu links. We show you the links you want to see and nothing else. On top of that, Link Hound also tries to find the most appropriate email address on that site for you to use as a contact point to request your own link. If we find an appropriate email address it is added to your link report, right where you want it.

There are plenty of other great features, like unlimited campaigns and the ability to import and export your campaigns in popular formats like CSV and Raven Tools for pro users. But there is no need to take my word for it, head over to Link Hound right now and test it for yourself. Then see if this isn’t going to be the best $29.95 you’ll spend on link development this year.

Posted in SEO Shop | 2 Comments »

phpProposal.Com Launched

Monday, March 29th, 2010

We build a lot of tools here at SEO Shop to automate tasks that are repetitive or better left to a program to do for us. It allows us to spend more time with our clients and their web sites. One of our tools is a semi-automated proposal generator. It allows us to quickly generate a proposal for a potential SEO or PPC client by entering some basic information and pressing a few buttons.

If you are looking for an SEO proposal template, phpProposal is the software tool that you are looking for. This easy to use, and easy to install proposal management system was designed to help us with our proposal routine, and it can help you manage your proposal process. Here are just a few of the features in phpProposal:

  • Creates stunning PDF and HTML Proposals effortlessly.
  • Easy access Dashboard gives you quick at-a-glance information and system statistics.
  • Allows for unlimited employee, profiles, and client accounts.
  • Allows for unlimited created and saved proposals.
  • Built in profile support for multiple business names, contacts, and other data.
  • Built in user manager allows adding, editing, deletion of employee and/or client accounts.
  • Built in proposal manager allows creation, modification, updating, and deletion of proposals.
  • System uses very basic HTML templates for proposal look and feel in output.
  • Built in template manager allows for the creation, modification, and deletion of all proposal templates.

phpProposal is ready to go right out of the box, but with easy to alter SEO and PPC proposal templates, phpProposal is the perfect tool for any SEO company looking to make the process of creating proposals just a little easier. You can see a working demo at http://phpproposal.com/demo.php or you can ask question in our pre-sales support forum.

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Posted in PHP, SEO Shop, SEO Tools | No Comments »

$100 Google Adwords Challenge : Day 7

Monday, March 8th, 2010

$100 Adwords ChallengeWeek one of the Google Adwords Challenge has already ended and the learning curve has been pretty steep for me. A lot of things in Adwords seem to run contrary to common sense. After letting the ads run for a week its time to see where we are.

Total Impressions: 2,723
Total Clicks: 7 (CTR : 0.26%)
Amount Spent: $1.74
Total Gross Sales: $0.00

I do need to note that I edited an ad 2 days in and lost the stats for those 2 days. I know. Not terribly scientific of me, but it was real late when I did it and didn’t realize what I had done until it was done. So lesson #1, do not edit ads once you start them, create new ones.

Long tail vs Short tail

Looking at the last week I noticed a few things right away. The one short tail, generic, term I was using was killing my CTR. Yorkshire Terrier generated over 2,000 impressions an 2 clicks for an amazing CTR of just 0.09%. I put that term in there just to see what it would do for a generic term. I’ve since paused that particular keyword and may come back to it later, but for now, I will focus on the long tail terms.

Minimum Bids

One of my biggest surprises was seeing Google basically refuse ads if you don’t bid enough. Roughly half of my ads say “Below first page bid” on them. However they were also showing up an average position of between 4 and 9. Some keyword phrases were no longer being served ads while other were. At this point I have gone through and raised the minimum bids on one campaign to the Google suggested minimums and left the rest where I had originally set them.

Quality Scores

Quality Scores are a new thing for me, wouldn’t it be great if you got a quality score in your webmaster account for every page on your site? When the ads were originally created they all had a score of 7. After a week none of them are a 7, most are 5 and 6 and a few are down around 4. I asked Sean, one of our PPC guys what was up. We discussed the possible issues of low bids, and even lower CTRs, affecting the quality score of the ads. Then he went and took a look at the landing pages themselves.

I admit it, the cobbler’s kids have no shoes around here. We have used Shopsite Pro to build Animal Charms, and I love the cart software. but we built an offline inventory management tool to make adding product and changing prices a lot easier on us. The ease of changing prices is most important because our products are tied so closely to the daily whims of gold and silver prices. However, we left a fwe features out of the tool because we didn’t think of them.

The biggest issue is also one of the most basic SEO rules. Good headings and on page content. We auto generate new category pages as we add new categories, but we don’t autogenerate headings and basic content like that, I have to go in and do that using the web interface. I had forgotten to do that.

now that many of those issues are resolved, or are being resolved, I’m waiting to see what happens with the quality scores. Since I did not raise the minimum bids on some ads, but have fixed the content issues of the landing pages, I can see how the quality score is affect with and without increased bids. Add that to the removal of the horrible CTR phrase I was targeting and I expect to see better results over the next 7 days.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Google Adwords | No Comments »

Moderator Link Mod for phpbb3

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

One of the things we’ve done here on our SEO Forum is provide a way for users to identify mods and admins easily by putting them all at the bottom of our index page. then we figured that since our mods work extra hard at keeping our forums clean from spam and rabble rousers we should reward them in some way. We chose to give them all a link along with their name and a way to control the anchor text.

phpbb3 moderator link modThe mod allows everyone to add a web link and the anchor text for that link in their user profile. Then, when someone is promoted to moderator or admin status they are automatically put in the moderator link box at the bottom of the home page of your forum.

If you have any questions about the mod feel free to ask them in our forum thread for the Moderator Link Block.

Posted in PHP, SEO Tools, phpbb3 | No Comments »

$100 Google Adwords Challenge : Day 1

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Let me start by saying right out, I am not a PPC guy. We have David Ogletree and Sean Bannister here for that. They are great at what they do and could probably do this challenge in their sleep. But this blog series isn’t for them, its for the rest of us that are just starting out in PPC as a way of supporting and marketing a real web site with real product.

The idea for this came when I got yet another $100 Adwords coupon in the mail. I’ve been getting these off and on for a couple of years now and usually just toss them in the trash. This time the coupon wound up lost on my desk for a couple of weeks. When I found it again I thought that it might be worth using it to learn a little bit more about Adwords and PPC, so I signed up for my first Adwords account. Now, how to spend it effectively.

My wife and I run a small jewelry shop online, Animal Charms. The purpose of the site isn’t so much to make us rich, but to give us a steady revenue source to donate to animal charities and rescues across the US. The site has done well enough on its own, we are able to write donation checks every month, and we get to help many animals, but it can always do more. This seemed like the perfect site to use for our $100 Adwords Challenge.

Long Tail or Short?

The first step was to decide what terms to target. I could go short tail and hammer the most popular terms, while this might offer a faster return, it will definitely burn through my limited budget very quickly. I decided to aim for the long tail terms, and more specifically, target a few very specific dog breeds.

In the end I decided to target German Shepherds, Yorkshire Terriers, Schnauzers, and Pomeranians. Then, just to round things out, Silver Dog Charms, a more generic term.

Choosing the Keywords

Now it is time to pick the keywords to bid on. I decided, again, to focus on the long tail, and hopefully less expensive terms. For Yorkshire Terriers I chose 14 keywords to target. These keywords were selected based on my knowledge of the jewelry industry, what product is currently selling well on the site, and the Google Keyword Tool. Some of the terms I selected include yorkie, yorkie charms, yorkshire terrier pendants, and silver yorkshire terrier.

Setting the budgets

The next step is to set my budget. I only have $100 to work with, and I want to have this campaign last roughly a month, so I set my daily budget at just $4 per day. To me this already feels like it isn’t quite enough, but its how much I have to spend. The goal here is to let Google make money for me with me having to pay anything for it. I also set the Max CPC (Cost Per Click) at just $0.25 per click. If the max amount is spent on each click I’m looking at just 16 extra clicks per day. Again, not a lot, but if the long tails convert well, it should be enough to at least break even on the $100 coupon.

Yorkshire Terrier AdTurning it all loose

Now that I have written my ads, picked my keywords, set my destination URLs and budgets, I’m ready to start making it rain with Google’s money. I plan to let the the campaigns run for a few days to build up some stats and then go back and modify them as needed.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Google Adwords, PPC | No Comments »

Get WordPress Posts Indexed in Minutes

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

One Ping OnlyWordPress is the hands down leader in CMS software. Unfortunately, like many common tools, most users rarely go beyond the basic install and use the more powerful features.

Ping Services

One of these power user features is Ping. A ping is an alert sent to web sites that alert other sites that new content has been published and happens every time you update, save, or publish a post. WordPress comes with a single ping service, pingomatic. However, there are hundreds of ping services out there and limiting your self to just one is like using a single ping in a submarine. It give you a little information, but rarely is it enough to help you.

You can find the ping list in WordPress under the settings tab under ‘Writing’. If you look at the list at the bottom of the page most of you will see one ping service, maybe 4 or 5 if you are aggressive. We’ve put together a list of over 160 ping services. That’s right, 160 ping services. Using this list we have seen blog posts indexed but the various search engines in minutes. Not hours, days or even weeks, minutes. This does not mean that you will automatically rank for the topic your post is about, but you can’t rank if you aren’t indexed and getting indexed fast allows you the opportunity to rank faster.

Mega Ping List

Below is our mega ping list. Feel free to copy the entire list and paste it in to your ping services window in WordPress.

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://a2b.cc

http://a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://audiorpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://bitacoles.net/notificacio.php

http://bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping/

http://blo.gs/ping.php

http://blog.goo.ne.jp

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php

http://blogdb.jp

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://blogoole.com/ping/

http://blogoon.net/ping/

http://blogpeople.net/ping

http://blogroots.com

http://blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://blogsdominicanos.com/ping/

http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2

http://blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://blogsnow.com/ping

http://blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://blogupdate.org/ping/

http://bulkfeeds.net

http://catapings.com/ping.php

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://fgiasson.com/pings/ping.php

http://hamo-search.com/ping.php

http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/

http://imblogs.net/ping/

http://lasermemory.com

http://lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://mod-pubsub.org/ping.php

http://newsblog.jungleboots.org/ping.php

http://newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://packetmonster.net/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.blogg.de/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogoon.net/

http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc

http://ping.fc2.com/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/RPC2/

http://ping.kutsulog.net/

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.namaan.net/rpc

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.snap.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://ping.wordblog.de/

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc

http://pingoat.com/

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

http://popdex.com

http://popdex.com/addsite.php

http://r.hatena.ne.jp/rpc

http://rcs.datashed.net

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.britblog.com/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping

http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.technorati.jp/rpc/ping

http://rpc.twingly.com

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.wpkeys.com

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz

http://snipsnap.org

http://snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php

http://topicexchange.com

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://wasalive.com/ping/

http://weblogues.com

http://weblogues.com/ping/

http://weblogues.com/RPC/

http://webmaster-talk.com/ping/66385

http://xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php

http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php

http://zing.zingfast.com

Or you can download the Mega Ping List text file.

Ping Plugin

The mega ping list is just one part of the equation though. A failing in WordPress is that the developers decided that every time you save a post, edit a post, or even schedule a post for future publishing is ping worthy. this is simply not the case. And if you are like me and you tend to edit your posts frequently, your site can actually be labeled as a ping spammer and banned from many ping services.

To solve that problem we recommend, and use, Chip Bennett’s Ping Optimizer. The cbnet Ping Optimizer limits the pings sent out by WordPress to one publish click. No more edited post pings, no future publishing pings, just real pings for real posts. We highly recommend that if you are going to use our mega ping list you should also be using the Ping Optimizer plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cbnet-ping-optimizer/

WordPress is a great tool, but like any tool, you need to customize it to get the most out of it for your particular situation. Our mega ping list used in conjunction with the ping optimizer is another refinement of that tool and will help get your blog posts indexed faster than ever.

Posted in SEO Tactics, Wordpress SEO | 37 Comments »

Free SEO Tools

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Here at SEO Shop we develop many of our own tools. These tools generally automate some repetitive process, or handle a function that is ideally suited to letting a computer do the work leaving us free to focus on developing new processes and guiding all of our internet marketing for our clients. After William and I talked for a while we decided that we would start releasing these tools and code snippets for free to help other SEOs just starting out, or maybe even show some more established SEOs some of the tools we have developed and perhaps give them some new ideas.

To go with our previously released phpBB3 Mod we’ve just posted a new Ajax / JavaScript to RSS program and a simple, but effective, php 404 reporting script.

The Ajax program was something William put together so that we wouldn’t have to rely on a third party javascript to embed and RSS feed in to our seo forum. It currently shows the last 10 posts in the RSS feed by rotating through them one at a time. We are happy with the particular method for ourselves, but if anyone would like to see new features added to it, let us know and we’ll see what we can do to work those in to our work schedule.

The 404 reporting script is a simple php routine designed to email the admin any time a 404 error is detected. you can get this same information fro your analytics package, but we’ve found that people are more likely to correct an issue, or take advantage of random traffic, when their email is getting flooded with alerts than when they just look at a report each month.

We have also added a collection of basic free seo tools. Many of these tools are older, and all of them are what we would consider basic tools, but they can still be quite useful. Feel free to use them all you want. The more popular ones, or the ones we get the most requests for improvement on, we will add back in to our development stream and see what improvements can be made.

We intend to release new tools from our current collection on a fairly regular basis, and we are always developing new tools.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Ajax - JavaScript, PHP, SEO Tools, phpbb3 | 1 Comment »

Refining Signature Use in phpBB3

Friday, January 29th, 2010

One of the biggest link building arguments is the use of signature links in forums. Forum posters love them, forum owners hate them. Without taking one side or the other on the issue we built this mod that may improve the value of a signature link while at the same time helping to reduce the amount paid forum poster spam that we get.

Introducing the single sig per page mod for phpBB3.

The purpose of this mod is to limit the number of signature links on any one forum page. The first time a user posts in a forum topic his signature will appear normally. Any subsequent posts that user makes on that page will not show their signature.

Why do this?

There a few reasons why we are doing this.

  1. Reducing the number of outbound links per page is always a good thing. Assuming that you allow 3 links per sig, and there are 20 posts per topic page, you have just added 60 outbound links to that page, and in many cases, the same links 3 or 4 times. Adding this mod can cut that number in half, or more, and also removes all duplicate links.
  2. If forum links do carry weight, this allows those links to carry more weight because the PR that is sent to each link may be improved by passing it to fewer links.
  3. Once forum spammers realize that they can’t camp in certain areas of your site and run up their post count they will go away, we hope.

The mod is incredibly easy to install yourself. You just need to edit a couple of lines of code.

##############################################################
## MOD Title: Signature displayed once per page
## MOD Author: William Cross < william@seo-shop.com >
## MOD Description: To reduce outbound links on threads, this MOD
## will display a poster's signature only once per topic.
## MOD Version: 1.0
##
## Installation Level: Easy
## Installation Time: ~ 1 minute
## Files To Edit:
##             viewtopic.php
##
## Included Files: N/A
## License: http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php GNU
## General Public License v2
##############################################################
## For security purposes, please check: http://www.phpbb.com/mods/
## for the latest version of this MOD. Although MODs are checked
## before being allowed in the MODs Database there is no guarantee
## that there are no security problems within the MOD. No support
## will be given for MODs not found within the MODs Database which
## can be found at http://www.phpbb.com/mods/
##############################################################
## MOD History:
##
##   2010-1-28 - Version 1.0
##      - Successfully tested with phpBB 3.0.6
##
##############################################################
## Before Adding This MOD To Your Forum, You Should Back Up All Files
## Related To This MOD
##############################################################

#
#-----[ OPEN ]------------------------------------------
#

viewtopic.php

#
#-----[ FIND ]------------------------------------------
#
// Output the posts

#
#-----[ AFTER, ADD ]------------------------------------------
#

$signat[$poster_id] = 0;

#
#-----[ FIND ]------------------------------------------
#

$user_cache[$poster_id]['sig'] = bbcode_nl2br($user_cache[$poster_id]['sig']);
$user_cache[$poster_id]['sig'] = smiley_text($user_cache[$poster_id]['sig']);
$user_cache[$poster_id]['sig_parsed'] = true;
}

#
#-----[ AFTER, ADD ]------------------------------------------
#

  $signat[$poster_id]++;
  if($signat[$poster_id] >= 2){
    $user_cache[$poster_id]['sig'] = '';
  }

#
#-----[ SAVE/CLOSE ALL FILES ]------------------------------------------
#
# EoM

To get the most out of this mod we recommend setting your forum to display 20 or more posts per page. That’s it. Let us know if you have any thoughts on this mod or if there is a mod that you would love to see that can help you with your SEO efforts.

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Posted in SEO Tactics | 1 Comment »