Posts Tagged ‘topology’

Why should you have LinkAider in your SEO toolbox

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

LinkAider is a professional webmaster tool built to automate many of your daily webmastering tasks. Today we’ll explore the ways you could use LinkAider to optimize your website to perform better in search engine results. As you all know – there are so many seo optimization/seo management software that cost from ten to a couple hundreds of dollars. However if you are already signed up for LinkAider, you can do the following tasks for free (yes no addition software is required):

Analyze your websites’ topology

Check who you really are linking to (we’ve written a great article on website topology analysis before). You should know that website’s structure matters in many ways: first, you want your visitor to be able to find and visit the pages he is looking for and second, you want search engines to know what the most important pages on your site are.

Use powerful and fast filters to condense and analyze web crawl results

Data filters gather a wide range of things: document types, source/destination paths, followed/nofollowed links, link types and more. Take a quick look at the screenshot below.

smart link filters

Filters can be saved for later use. And you can also share the filtered report with your colleagues or clients with a single click.

And by the way: size does not matter. You can crawl any size website with LinkAider and analyze a site of thousands of pages in a matter of seconds (this is a big advantage when compared to desktop tools. If you don’t believe us try sorting ten thousand lines in Excel or your favorite desktop link analysis software).

Check if you have dead ends on your site’s navigation path

You can see if you have pages with 0 outgoing links right in the site crawl summary report. Funny thing is that pages like this appear on so many sites. Pages with zero links give your users no opportunities. Thank god if your user came to such a page from somewhere on your site. Hitting “back” will bring him to the page he visited before. But if such user came from the search results – “back” button will lead him away from your site (and sometimes forever).

Your pages’ load time is important!

In a recent interview Google’s Engineer Matt Cutts stated that page load time will be a huge factor in seo starting in 2010. And according to eMarketer research 16% of people leave the page if it loads longer than 10 seconds and only every second person will wait more than 15 seconds. Also pages bigger than 150 kb sometimes (!) are not fully cached by search engines.

The good thing is that you can see slowest pages report in LinkAider. There is no need to check your site page by page with other tools – now you can get slow page report for the whole site.

slow pages report big pages report

Make your competitors link to you

Crawling your competitors site can reveal many hidden gems that you can use to improve your performance in search results. Here is a quick tip: find your competitors broken links and buy expired domains. You can export broken link report into an Excel file and start shopping. Don’t give up if you see that domain is not available at your favorite domain name registrar. The second place to check is the auctions. Take a peek at Sedo and the likes. Sometimes you can get a great domain name for a small $70 fee.

Take care of your duplicate content

Last but not least. Having duplicate content on your website often confuses your visitors and search engines. And you can find duplicate pages with ease with LinkAider.

So if you are ready – follow this link to signup for free. We promise, you’ll instantly find LinkAider extremely valuable for your seo campaigns.


Website Topology Tune-up and Maintenance

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

The real world of 2009 is very different from 2000. Webmasters and developers often had one key player back then that helped them create a logical site structure: the information architect. These roles existed in larger corporations when the large e-commerce sites we know and love today were under construction. However, the webmasters of today are expected to be Information Architect, Designer and Manager to create and run an organized, easily accessible and optimized site by themselves.

Typically, they have already developed a structure in their mind or sketched it out on a napkin during a lunch meeting. Seems unorganized but some of the structures remain in place today – but how effective are they for SEO and page ranking? Technology has evolved to be very out-of-the-box, but the extra help they may need is not available.

Get Informed

Watch Rand’s entertaining video about content categorization for large sites, such as blogs, news or enterprise sites. He provides some great examples and reasons for the model he selects.

Keep in mind that it is very easy to define site structure when starting a new site. Starting a fresh site is less complicated, everything is clear, organized and in just the right place where you’d like it to be. However, when your site gets a bit older, the content is growing in size and may be a little too haphazard. You add a page here and there. Some blog posts are moved to an archive section. You remove old pages, products. Content starts to get a little bit rushed and disorganized. The grand plans and structure you designed has now been lost along the way. When a year has passed – do you still know how your site is organized?

By the way, Bruce Clay refers to such technique as siloing. Siloing categorizes content on your site based on the theme. The theme and sub-topics are determined by target key phrases pulled from the content on your pages. Siloing categorizes the content both structurally and virtually, which means the content is categorized on the server (or at least how it appears to search engines), and virtually – it’s how contend is interlinked. Check out this article about siloing (a.k.a. page rank sculpting).

Link with Purpose

As you all know, search engine optimization is a lot about links. If you link much to a specific page, Google thinks that’s the most important page on your site. And yes, everybody links to their home page and top product categories, contact pages, and so on. Still – is this the right way for your site?

So – a site’s structure matters a lot. But keep in mind that
page rank sculpting doesn’t work with the “nofollow” attribute anymore! However, you can achieve the same results with robots.txt, javascript links and the meta robots tag.

Definition: nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not be included in the link target’s ranking. It helps to reduce specific types of search engine spam.

Get Some Website Tune-up and Maintenance

Still, there is one question we didn’t answer: How do you maintain and follow your site’s structure when you have an established (grown up but messed up) site? Can you still draw it on your napkin? Don’t worry – because LinkAider will come to the rescue. With LinkAider, you can see your “most linked to” page with a single click. Also, you can manage and reorganize your your pages and links in any way you like.

Build your site’s structure wisely and if you haven’t subscribed yet, do it now. It’s free.