Webmaster tools is far the most underutilised tool on your web marketing arsenal.

Webmaster tools is not just essential for your SEO strategy but it can also be very very handy for your Web analysis and pre-strategy plan.  A smart strategist can use this data to improve how search engines crawl and index your site’s content but it also can understand and explore opportunities looking through SEO eyes.

Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google released an excellent video about usage of Webmaster tools, enjoy.

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Why reinvent the wheel when you can get your competitors blueprints and improve your website accordingly?

It is relatively easy to research the successful concepts, techniques & methods your competitors have tried and tested. Review your competitors work based on the following topics:

• On Page Optimisation
• Link Building
• Social Media

So what are the methods of attaining actionable info from your competitors?

1. Select the right Competitors to analyse

Firstly, knowing who your main competitors or industry leaders are is an important first step for any business. But which competitor should you analyse?

Identify the competitor that your feel best resembles your own business. Make sure they have a good online presence. You can check this by searching in Google your most competitive keywords and identify their performance. If you are seeing consistent results you are then on the right track and can be assured that you have chosen a good competitor to analyse. There are also free tools available that can compare websites.

2. Insight into Competitors Website Structure

Now that you have a good understanding of who your real competitors are the next step is to commence the analysis. Understanding your competitors website, structure, content and size is the starting point of your analysis. This is because it can unearth the complexity of the strategy being adopted, there are several tools capable of crawling your competitors websites.

3. On Page Optimisation:

The next step is to look at the on page optimisation of the site. Does your competitors website have any common themes or topics consistent throughout the site? Is there a clear indicator that the website is consistent, relevant and topical, which attracts search engines.

Review the list of pages specifically focusing on the page titles, descriptions and URL structure to identify any consistencies throughout the website. For example, can you identify the keyword being targeted on the page? This can be determined by identifying consistent keywords reflected in the URL, Page title and description that are being used to set the relevancy of the page. This is a very important part of the competitors analyse and should be completed thoroughly to identify any patterns.

Take this even further to understand the level of on page optimisation undertaken by the competitor you can look at whether image optimisation has been taken into consideration. This can be identified by the use of alt tags and title tags. Additionally, internal links should be reviewed to see if the use of no-follow is incorporated, this can help funnel Page Rank to the most valuable pages within your website.

4. Competitor Keyword Intelligence

Often site owners target a vast range of keywords in the hope of increasing their exposure and opportunities to generate traffic. This sounds great in theory, but the reality is only a small percentage of keywords actually provide quality traffic. The key here is to unearth the successful keywords and focus solely on them.

Trying to identify the competitors’ keywords that are performing can be difficult and time-consuming process. However there are plenty of software available that can analyse the website and provide the top performing keywords, try these sites complete.com and Spyfu.com. Once the list of potential keywords has been identified it is important to validate the list of keywords using similar software.

5. Competitor Backlink Analysis

It is staggering the amount of website owners, SEOers, and online marketers that again try and reinvent the wheel when it comes to generating or sourcing new inbound links.

Backlinking competitors using the range of tools available or even through search engines (using the appropriate operators) allows you to generate an inclusive list of URL’s linking to your competitor. Inbound links to your website play a very important role in the search engine’s algorithm. Quality links from credible sites will typically have a great impact than that from poor quality irrelevant website. So the key here is to determine from your list of backlinks which are good quality sources worth perusing for your website & which can be disregarded. Use Page Rank to initially gauge the quality of the website.

Background Information

Understand what other online assets your competitor may have. This is important as it could unearth any new initiatives your competitor is using or planning on using.

To do this you can use the list of domains your competitor is linking to and use Whois to check the information of each of the websites. Additionally, use DomainTools.com, which allows you to complete a review IP lookup this will indicate other websites that your competitor has hosted on the Server IP address. This will identify any of the website that are actually owned or run by the competitor. It also indicates if your competitor has a network of sites linking back to their site.

Now that you have completed the initial competitive analyse it the most important stage is to put your findings into practice. Firstly, you need to determine which strategies are going to be worth using on your website. Obviously not all strategies are going to be suited and some may need refinement to suit your requirements. The final step is to monitor your efforts and refine where needed to ensure you are on the right track.

That’s not the end of competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis is an on-going process for all areas of your SEO campaign, it should be actioned on a regular basis to ensure that your website and business is striving for continued success.

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I found this clinic on Google Maps Reviews!

Since my last post about business and google Maps, I received some emails asking around the risks of self-review.

Besides the possible brand damage and SEO problems, You now can incur in legal problems.

That’s what happened to a Plastic Surgery Company in New York.

False reviews cost the company a wooping $300,000 in an agreement that portends significant change in local search marketing.

New York State Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo secured a $300,000 settlement with Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company that “flooded the internet with false positive reviews”. A press release claims that this is believed to be the first case in the nation against “astroturfing” on the Internet.

From the release:

Lifestyle Lift employees published positive reviews and comments about the company to trick Web-browsing consumers into believing that satisfied customers were posting their own stories. These tactics constitute deceptive commercial practices, false advertising, and fraudulent and illegal conduct under New York and federal consumer protection law. The settlement marks a strike against the growing practice of “astroturfing,” in which employees pose as independent consumers to post positive reviews and commentary to Web sites and Internet message boards about their own company.”

“This company’s attempt to generate business by duping consumers was cynical, manipulative, and illegal,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “My office has and will continue to be on the forefront in protecting consumers against emerging fraud and deception, including ‘astroturfing,’ on the Internet.”

So there you go, on your own risk.

Lucio Ribeiro

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What do you see? Opportunity, Trap or  Threat?

Google and
- Toyota
- Australia Post
- Cadbury
- Nestle
- Virgin Blue
- Myer

Google and

- Bendigo Bank
- Woolworth
- IBM Australia
- Qantas
- Harvey Norman

Google and

- David Jones
- Fosters
- Crown
- Medibank Private
- Optus
- Rio Tinto

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3. Set up your own Google Bitch Hot trends

Google has now rolled out a special embedded gadget you can use on your wesbite or blog. Use this gadget to see what people are searching for on your own website. For example, show your readers which American Idol contestants are searched for the most.

Google Trends is a great way to see what’s popular on the web — people tend to search for what they care about — and the Trends gadget makes it easy for you to put Trends on your website. Just cut and paste a small snippet of code, input your search terms, and you can show your readers, for example, how SEM and SEO is far more searched than Social Media and you can use as justification and prove of a post argument.

The gagdets are

• Based on search query volume
• Updated daily
• Scale is based on average traffic

Get one for your blog / website acessing Google Trends.

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro

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“Now Google Profiles are being promoted as a way for people to tell the world who they are and, to some degree, being offered as a way for people to claim their identity in Google’s main search results” , says Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land.

What does it mean?

It means that now “Profile results” section will appear at the bottom of a Google search page, when it finds a strong match in response to a name-based search

What is it?

To give you users control over what people find when they search for your name, Google have begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. We’ve also added links so it’s easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn.

Brief: Now you can create Google Profiles and after verify your details that potentially can show up in the Google web search results

When you (google-ego) or others search for your name on Google, a link to your Google profile may appear at the bottom of the search results next to your profile picture.

As more complete/detailed your profile more chances you have to have your profile exposed.

How to do it?

There’s no charge to have a page, and you dont needto  use any particular Google services, either. Just sign-up here. or Google “me”

After signing-up, you can provide a variety of information about yourself, levering what you want or not to be public/shared.

That’s my profile page -

Hey Lucio You look handsome

Extra Feature

“Verified name” and a “Verified email”

Should you get a verified name? Danny Sullivan answers “Right now, it doesn’t influence whether your profile will rank better in profile results. But if you’re trying to convince people to trust that the page is really controlled by you, it probably makes sense.”

Why Do I need to do it?

According to Google:

• Receive messages. Enable the ‘Send a message’ feature to allow anyone with a Google Account to email you without revealing your email address.
• Add photos. Enhance your profile by embedding photos from Flickr or Picasa.
• Create a page about you. Write a short bio in the About me tab, reveal your superpower, and tell people what you still can’t find using Google.
• Add your contact information. Share your information with your friends and family, so they always have the most up-to-date information. You control who sees it.
• Add links to your other profiles and sites (they dont add any SEO benefit). Make it easier for friends to see your other content on the Web. You can link to Google content, including your Blogger blog, public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items as well as other pages on the Web such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook,  LinkedIn and your company.
• Ever searched for yourself on Google and come away dissatisfied, especially if someone else you share a name with seems to dominate the results? Ever looked for someone else and been disappointed that you couldn’t find the person you wanted? Google’s new “Profile Results” aim to correct both problems.
• Show your location. ‘My places’ includes all the cities you’ve entered on your profile. Your current location and where you’ve lived are displayed on a map.

I think the Google Profile could be interesting. It sounds like they intend to make this one of the top results when someone searches for your name. Right now, unless you have a personal, search-optimized blog, there’s no telling what people will see. And I’ll bet that most people look first to Google, not Facebook or LinkedIn, when they’re searching for personal or contact information. (Who ever heard of Facebooking a blind date?)

Danny Sulivan has the guide in more details here, and the guys from SEO Roundtable go into step-by-step process to get your email and profile verified and Google has published their own post

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro

http://marketingeasy.net

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Another day I wrote about a sneak seo scam. Today I’m covering another SEO anti-linking tactic used for BlackHat(ers).

When you decide Optimize your website for Search Engines (SEO) the most logic step you need to take is to Analyze your competition; then you can find tendency to links for your area/segment.

The one I like to use is Link Diadnosis, it gives you Link per Domain, and you can sort by

• link type;
• link anchor text;
• PageRank;
• page internal+external links.

After running some reports you can have all the important information about your competitor’s links.

Then you can decide to to the right thing or to do the wrong thing.

The right inbound link strategy would be to contact potential linkers and develop any kind of relationship with them (offer to write a guest post, comment, etc) or,

you can decide the wrong thing….

It works like this:

You email a “Cease and Desist” letter to the webmasters linking to your competitor website, asking them to remove the outbound links to YOUR competitor’s website.

You present yourself as the “owner” of your competitor’s brand, asking them to remove the link.

This is how the email looks like:

_______________

Dear Sir/Madam

I am contacting you on behalf of www.Insurance.com, located in Sydney, Australia. We manage Insurance.com’s Internet monitoring function for brand identity issues on the Internet.

We’d like to discuss the use of the trademarked name of Insurance.com or one of its subsidiaries on your website.

As owner of the name, Insurance.com (and/or its subsidiaries) owns the exclusive right to reproduce and use its trademarks and authorize any reproduction and use. Insurance.com does not recognize the use of its name in the above-referenced site as authorized. Therefore, your use of this trademark is a violation of its rights.

Insurance.com demands that you cease and desist from using its name in any manner and that you remove all use of its trademark from the referenced website.

Please address these issues immediately. Please contact me with any questions.

Sincerely,

Trademark Administration
Insurance.com

—————–

I can think of many websites removing links trying to avoid legal problem. I can imagine the guy from IT panicking together with the Legal department.

I should agree is indeed a clever scheme but stupid strategy.

Cheers

Lucio Dias Ribeiro

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