It is relatively standard practice nowadays to do keyword rank checking with tools such as SEOmoz, Authority Labs or Conductor. It just makes sense to us as SEOs to keep an eye on them, whether you are of the school that you should be reporting them to your clients/boss or not. But something I haven’t really done much of until now is tracking my competitors’ sites (their markup, structure and content). I think observing your competitors in a structured and routine fashion is something that absolutely makes sense, and doesn’t need to be a big task.
Tom
10 .htaccess File Snippets You Should Have Handy (on SEOmoz)
In the Moz Q&A, there are often questions that are directly asked about, or answered with, a reference to the all-powerful .htaccess file. I’ve put together a few useful .htaccess snippets which are often helpful. For those who aren’t aware, the .htaccess file is a type of config file for the Apache server, which allows you to manipulate and redirect URLs amongst other things.
6 Months Later: Google Penguin Reactions, Predictions, Tools and Tips (on Distilled)
In the 6 months since Google gave birth to the Penguin algorithm update it has had a dramatic effect on the SEO industry. For years Google’s rhetoric had been about quality of content and links, but they’d been unable to back up what they said you should (and perhaps more importantly shouldn’t) do with what the industry saw worked.
The Role of APIs in the Future of Search (on SEOmoz)
People talk a lot about APIs in the SEO industry (me especially) – the tools you can build with them, the competitive analysis data you can access, the reports you can automate. However, we tend not to discuss the wider picture, the thousands of APIs out there for other things, and, most importantly, the profound effect that APIs are going to have on the web, and thus the SEO industry, in the coming decade.
How Authorship (and Google+) Will Change Linkbuilding (on SEOmoz)
Google’s relationship with links has changed over the last 15 years – it started out as a love affair but nowadays the Facebook status would probably read: “It’s Complicated”. I think Google are beginning to suffer from trust issues, brought about by well over a decade of the SEO community manipulating the link graph. In this post I’m going to lay out how I think Authorship, and Google+ are one of the ways that Google are trying to remedy this situation.
Monitor Which Social Networks Your Visitors are Logged Into With Google Analytics (on SEOmoz)
Recently Mat Clayton from Mixcloud provided a great snippet of Javascript that could be used to record whether visitors to your site were logged into Facebook or not. I extend that idea to present similar code for Twitter and Google+ and then wrap it all up in Google Analytics goodness. Using this code you can monitor which social networks your website visitors are logged into.