Latest Articles
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WebPosition’s PageCritic provides a wealth of detailed data comparing the on-page keyword use on your page (live or unpublished) to the top ranked pages for a given keyword phrase.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
PageCritic Beta Announcement
March 8, 2011 By Webposition SEO Team
We’re pretty excited to be bringing you news of the PageCritic Beta, and even more excited that all WebPosition Standard and Premium subscribers automatically have access to see it for themselves and to start kicking the tires.
PageCritic analyzes how the keyword phrase you’re optimizing for is used on your webpage. It finds the top competition for the keyword and looks at how the keyword phrase is being used on those pages, too. Better yet, you can use PageCritic to analyze pages you haven’t released yet and compare them to the competition they’ll have when they’re published. In the Slideshare presentation below, we use an example site to show you how to create a critique, and start seeing how to identify on-page optimization opportunities.
Enjoy! (Full-screen view recommended)
When On-Page SEO Doesn’t Matter
January 18, 2011 By korbodo
Gerry McGovern’s article “How Google fails at SEO, and why it doesn’t matter” contrasts the on-page SEO of Google’s homepage to that of Yahoo’s, and makes the good point that Google’s success is not just about on-page SEO. Providing value to the searcher and answering their questions is more likely to help you attract, convert and retain a loyal following. But it got us thinking of some of the other factors we look at in SEO, and how Google stacks up to Yahoo and Bing on those fronts.
Google vs. Yahoo vs. Bing: Inbound Links
One measure is counting the number of roads that lead to Rome, or the inbound links. Using a few measures such as Yahoo’s Site Explorer, SeoMoz’s Open Site Explorer and Blekko’s /seo slashtag, we can see that Google completely crushes the competition.
| Google.com | Yahoo.com | Bing.com | |
| Yahoo’s Site Explorer | 2,043,383,285 | 1,449,256,115 | 50,423,427 |
| Google’s “link:” operator | 18,700 | 4,670 | 4,800 |
| SeoMoz’s Open Site Explorer | 45,741,998 | 9,620,352 | 1,421,268 |
| Blekko’s /seo slashtag | 47,844,678 | 3,964,300 | 2,336,509 |
Rankings for Search Engine Keywords
Another measure is to see how these sites rank for keyword phrases that people might use to find them. Using WebPosition Reporter, we created a keyword ranking report (use “rank#1″ as the password to view the details) that shows how the major search engines perform. Here is a summary:
| Google.com | Yahoo.com | Bing.com | |
| search engine | 4 | 10 | 2 |
| best search engine | 19 | not in top 50 | not in top 50 |
| top search engine | not in top 50 | not in top 50 | not in top 50 |
| search the web | 9 | 2 | 7 |
Now, low ranks for “top search engine” could be because the searcher is looking for an article or review and not an actual engine, and that article would most likely link to the engines, but it’s interesting nonetheless. We’ll run this report again to see if the results change, and let us know if there are other keyword phrases you’d like us to add in when we do!
WebPosition Gets Client-Friendly with Two New Features
August 12, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team
A few weeks ago, we announced the upcoming release of two new client-friendly reporting features for WebPosition Reporter. And soon after, we delivered on that promise with a new feature update that includes your most-requested capabilities – White Labeling and Secure Online Sharing.
White Labeling lets you brand a report with a preferred logo or graphic, and it includes
the option of adding a company name and /or URL. Once you save the changes, the report will display its new branding each time it’s downloaded to PDF or shared online via Secure Online Sharing.
Secure Online Sharing lets you grant clients or colleagues view-only access to an online, white labeled report. Once enabled, they can view that report’s data in full detail while you maintain full administrative capabilities to download report views, export data or modify the report’s settings. Set this feature once to give them secure access to the most up-to-date information any time they need.
Multiple clients? Not a problem. These features are set on a per-report basis. You can also enable, disable or modify the settings for either of these features at any time.
Both of these new features are available to paid WebPosition Reporter subscribers at no cost. And we’re very excited about new developments that are coming down the pipeline. So, keep the feedback coming and stay tuned as we continue building out this new online service.
WebPosition Going Forward
July 16, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team
We launched the all new, all online WebPosition Reporter on May 11th, and since then have had the opportunity to welcome customers new and old. Over the past two months we’ve received fantastic feedback from our subscribers about how we can make our product even better.
Our top request has been for a White Labeling capability, which we will be releasing later this month along with Secure Online Sharing. Secure Online Sharing will enable our customers to provide view-only access to their clients and colleagues, while keeping full editing, downloading and exporting permissions. Reports that are shared take advantage of the White Labeling feature, and will not have any mention of WebPosition on them. These two great features will be provided at no additional cost to our subscribers.
We moved WebPosition Reporter completely online for a variety of reasons. We wanted to provide a service our customers could access anytime, anywhere. A service that never required a customer to download, install, or update software. A service we could offer to more people on more platforms without requiring a complete re-write. We wanted to provide ranking report data that wouldn’t break every time a search engine changed some aspect of their results pages, as is the case with downloadable rank checking software. We wanted to provide the ability for customers to run high volumes of reports in short time-frames – minutes instead of hours or days – and do so without putting their IP address at risk. We wanted to deliver the data in a more user-friendly format that could be sorted and filtered according to a customer’s whim. We’ve been able to deliver on all of those things, and we’re very proud of the result.
We’ve provided the capability for our WP4 customers to export their historical Reporter data and import it into the new online version. Thanks to the feedback from customers who have taken advantage of the feature, we will be releasing an even more robust version of the import tool along with the White Label and Secure Online Sharing features next week.
Our focus is on improving and expanding our online product offering, and we are grateful for the opportunity to carry this torch forward.
Your Page Weight Still Matters
June 29, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team
These days, it’s easy to take it for granted that end users have high-speed Internet and can download almost any webpage in the blink of an eye. So to attract visitors, pages get stuffed full of flashy ads, audio, video and plug-ins. And in the rush to get the page up, efficient coding and image optimization fall by the wayside.
After all, it’s a competitive Internet out there, and that page needs its share of the traffic – now.
But consider the end user. According to eMarketer, a page can lose 50% of its audience if it takes more than 15 seconds to download. And many users still use dial up or don’t have access to high-speed broadband, especially in countries that are still building out their telecom infrastructures.
Even if a page loads quickly on a desktop, it may not function well on a smartphone. According to Chetan Sharma Consulting, US data traffic exceeded voice traffic in 2009, which means that the number of users conducting searches on mobile devices is growing. But not all users have 3G coverage to download overweight webpages.
Page weight still plays a key role in performance and user retention. Slimming down a page can increase traffic, save hosting costs and improve page rank. Here are some resources that can help you test your page weight to determine if a ‘less is more’ approach is necessary.
- WebSiteOptimization.com – Free webpage speed analysis
www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze - Webpositionadvisor.com – Free webpage size checker
www.webpositionadvisor.com/tools/page_size_cheker.php
If your page is overweight, you don’t necessarily have to redesign your entire website. It can be relatively easy and practical to create a low-bandwidth or mobile version, and the benefits could be well worth doing so.
Is Yahoo Flatlining?
June 21, 2010 By korbodo
We were doing some research into Father’s Day keyword positions for a SullysBlog.com post using WebPosition Reporter, and noticed something odd.
There was almost NO movement in rankings on Yahoo.
Unsure if Yahoo’s flat lines were an anomaly, we took a look at different report with over 200 keywords and saw a similar trend. There was movement in 12% of Google positions, 7% had some change in Bing and less than 3% had any change on Yahoo.
Almost as interesting is the volatility in positions on Bing – more up and down vs. a visible, gradual trend on Google. Perhaps once Bing receives an influx of traffic after the Yahoo cut-over, and therefore more user and click data, we’ll start to see more gradual trends at Bing?
The New WebPosition Reporter Launches Today
May 11, 2010 By Webposition SEO Team
Today marks the launch of the all new, all online WebPosition Reporter. This new release is completely web-based and lets users run and view search engine rank reports from a web browser on their Mac or PC – nothing to download or install. With this new online version, WebPosition introduces brand-new features, including filtering & sorting, downloadable data and competitor identification & tracking. Additionally, the new WebPosition Reporter runs reports anonymously, without involving users’ local IP addresses.
There are several subscription options available, including the Free Pilot Pack. We’re curious what you think – try it out at http://www.webposition.com and let us know!
