Latest Articles
Explain SEO to your parents (and their friends)
July 29, 2011 By korbodo
Last weekend I had dinner with my folks and they had some friends over.
“What do you do?” they asked.
“I help people’s websites show up in Google and other search engines,” I said.
“So how do you make that happen?”
I’ll spare you what I ACTUALLY said, and instead give you this little deck to send family members and friends who are still trying to understand what the heck you do hunched in front of the glow of the monitor every day. Enjoy!
Can’t see the video? Try THIS.
You asked for it! PageCritic Beta II
July 6, 2011 By Webposition SEO Team
Thank you to all our customers who sent in feedback about the new PageCritic Beta! The number one feature request we received was “just tell me what to look at!” – so we got cracking on it.
If you haven’t taken it for a spin yet, WebPosition’s PageCritic provides a wealth of detailed data comparing the on-page keyword use on your page (live or unpublished) to the top ranked pages for a given keyword phrase. So much data, however, that you told us it took too long to analyze and pull out the nuggets of wisdom to act on. Message received.
Today we’re announcing the Top Findings feature for PageCritic: a prioritized list of on-page SEO findings. We look at how much impact to search engine rankings that part of the page has, how big the gap is between you and your top 20 competitors for keyword usage in that part of the page, how highly each competitor is ranked and weight the findings accordingly.
Part of what’s so fascinating about these findings is that sometimes the message is to “back off” on your on-page keyword use, or that you’re maxed out on on-page optimization and it’s time to crank up your off-page efforts.
Here’s an example of Top Findings in action. We created a PageCritic critique for the keyword phrase “best eco-friendly bags”, using a website on the 2nd page (reusethisbag.com) and leaving the default search engine (Google.com) in place.
And here are the Top Findings (click to see full size):
What do we see? In several parts of the page, the keyword weight is much higher than the competition – most importantly, in the Body of the page. That means that for the number of words in a given part of the page, the keyword is being used at a higher rate than the competition.
You’ll see that the word “Body” looks like a link – because it is! Each section of the page has its own nitty-gritty comparison against the top 5 ranked pages for the term. Let’s dive in and see the details on this (click to see full size):
One nice feature about PageCritic is that you can simply run your mouse over the URL in the table on the right and the corresponding data points on the left are highlighted, allowing us to hone in on two points of interest – the word count and the weight. See how the word count is the smallest? And the weight is way up there? That means that although the frequency (the number of times words in the keyword phrase were found) is in line with the competition, it’s on a much smaller amount of content to begin with, pushing the weight up.
Ahh, you might say, but the #5 site has a similar weight! And you’d be right. Two things: first, the body of that page also has twice as many words along with higher keyword prominence; second, on-page SEO is only one part of a multi-faceted puzzle. Our mission with PageCritic is to point you to those areas where you are most likely to find on-page SEO opportunities – without having to review each and every competitor page yourself!
We hope you enjoy this new feature, and let us know if you have some interesting findings you’d like to share!
Learn more at WebPosition.com
