Maintaining an SEO Campaign with Spreadsheets

SEO isn’t a sprint, it’s a rat race, and keeping track of your progress is as essential a task as you will find in the SEO process. Sloppy SEO starts with ignorance of writing down your links and your website’s expenses. Sometimes it can be as easy as just jotting down your current linking partners and a few potential new ones. Being able to have some records of your website’s link building campaign & expenses has many advantages. For one, if you decide going out of house with SEO, your outsource company knows your progress and what approach to take. Yes, there are many tools out there on the web that do some of this for you, and you could easily register with one of them for this very task, but not everyone has this advantage.



Web/Blog Directories

First things first, you’re going to want to keep track of your directory listings. This is as basic a link as there is, and it’s fairly easy to track. Either with Google Spreadsheets or with Excel, create a new spreadsheet. For those who haven’t started submitting to directories, browse Google for a few web directory lists, and then copy and paste your findings onto the first column of your spreadsheet*. Then on the top row, create some columns with the following names: (A1) Directories, (A2) Pricing, (A3) Date Submitted, (A4) Date Link Confirmed, (A5) Notes. The pricing column is good to keep track of so if you come across an extra few dollars in your budget, you have an idea on which directories you could afford to submit to if you wanted to go in that direction. Always have a date submitted column so you know whether or not you have submitted before. The fourth column is optional, but it lets me know if I actually end up getting a link from there or not (use Site Explorers for this). And the Notes column helps me keep track of miscellaneous information, such as if I had to create an account, if my site got rejected, etc.

*For those who have started submitting to directories and have no progress recorded, try and use Site Explorers or Backlink Checkers to find out which directories you are listed on. You could also try by finding a list and going by memory, or even starting over all together & by submitting to all of them. Based on your individual situation, use your own judgment.
Article Submission

If you’re SEO campaign is legitimate, chances are you will try and submit your articles/posts to article directories. It’s vital to keep track of which articles you have submitted where and when, so you know what to submit, where the submit it, and when to submit it. Create another spreadsheet, and this time put the article/content directories on the top row. Then, make the second row for account/author information (most sites require you to register an account as an author). Next, make the first column all of your different article titles. Now, when you submit an article to a site, mark down the date in the appropriate box (you don’t want too many articles in a short amount of time; I like 2/3 a week per site).

Social Bookmarking

It’s good to keep track of social bookmarking so you know which pages you have bookmarked on which sites. Start by creating another spreadsheet, and make the top row different bookmarking sites. As we did with article submissions, make the second row account information. Then make the first column all of the different URLs of each page on your site (depending on your site, you can use all or some of the pages on your site). Mark down the dates of when you submitted each page at each site to know if you have bookmarked it yet.

Link Partners

Based on what tools you have available, you can keep track of your inbound links. For those who don’t have any paid tools, let’s use what we have. For now, we can use Yahoo! Site Explorer to export the first 1000 results to a TSV file. You can also use Open Site Explorer, or any number of smaller backlink checker tools. On your spreadsheet, mark down any of your top links, any sites that come up a lot in the backlink checkers, which sites linked to you without request or submission, and any other interesting notes. Try and come up with a rough draft of different link partners and the number of page links you have pointing to your site.

Competitors Links

Using the same tools, you can find who is linking to your competitors. Perform the same tasks as you did above but for at least a couple of your top competitors. Once you have a decent list of different websites linking to them, you will have an idea of who is linking, and what they’re linking to. If a lot of sites are linking to a particular piece of linkbait on a competitor’s site, check out what it is and how you could improve it, or all together creating a 2.0 version of it. Get thinking about what you need to add to your site to start building your link portfolio.

Expenses

A great SEO campaign practice is to keep track of expenses that are SEO related. Keep track of any tools you are paying for and how much they cost. Mark down any paid directories you are in, any featured content you are paying for, and even any online advertising you’re dishing out to. This can help you understand what you are missing and what you have too much of. For example, if you get an extra few bucks in the budget, you can see how many tools, directories, or advertising you are paying for, so you have a better idea on where to put the money. On the other hand, if you need to cutback expenses in the future, you have an idea on what you can cut back to meet your new budget.

In SEO there are truly so many things you can keep track of, and the more you do, the more prepared you are for changes in staffing and even in algorithms. You can see your progress, which link building techniques you’ve put into play, and where improvements could be made (by analyzing your competitor’s links).

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What is a Nofollow Link?

A Nofollow link refers to backlinks that tell the search engines to not go any further, hence “nofollow”. By adding the no follow tag in a backlink, these links don’t transfer link juice. Remember that link juice is what determines Page Rank, and the more link juice you have, the higher the page rank a page has. Ways to identify this type of link is looking for a term that looks as follows: <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>. Notice the only difference from this and a Do Follow link (a link that does transfer link juice) is the rel=”nofollow” add on.

Nofollow links were originally made to stop spamming in blog posts, because users would be able to spam blogs with links back to their site that would transfer link juice, and this was abused shortly after its introduction. Nofollow links aren’t isolated to just blog posts though; nofollow links can be found in certain article directories, and anywhere a webmaster wants to put them.

When using a website to “buy a link”, legally they have to add the nofollow tag, because Google made the rule that you cannot buy and sell links that transfer link juice. Despite this rule people every day buy links without using the nofollow tag, and you will come across many cases in which they get away with it. If Google catches this, your rankings could be lowered significantly or dropped altogether.

A landmine of solid, quality links that have the nofollow tag is Wikipedia. Any URL or link added to Wikipedia that is outbound is a no follow link. Don’t let this stop you from attempting to get a link on Wikipedia – even though it doesn’t transfer link juice, nofollow links should still be targeted as part of your link building campaign; on my list, getting a link on Wikipedia is one of the top link building techniques out there. Wikipedia offers one of the top places to get a quality nofollow link, and if you pull it off and get one on their site, it can be very rewarding. The link is not only trustworthy in Google’s eyes, but also provides a decent amount of traffic (I’ve had links in average Wikipedia pages provide 50 visitors a week per link).

As said before Nofollow links are still desirable. You can build up large numbers of links to your page through techniques such as blog comment posting. By adding a few quality sentences, you can get a link back to your site on a blog that pertains to the subject of your website.

Some sites change their policies on whether or not to use follow or nofollow links, so when considering whether or not you want to pursue a website for a link, make sure you check their links to see if they are Do follow or nofollow. Make sure to check periodically, because chances are you won’t be notified if the website changes its policies on whether or not to tell the searchbots to follow the links.
If you have any more questions on nofollow links, please provide them in the comment section below.

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Dmoz: The Legend That Once Was

Once upon a time there was a highly regarded directory that was both free and user-friendly. It started as a non-profit website that blossomed into one of the greatest resources that can be found online. But suddenly this project started to get backtracked, and as time passed, the chance of being accepted into this directory was next to none. Unfortunately, this is a true story. Dmoz.org (named after directory.mozilla.org), or better known as the Open Directory Project (ODP), is the highly regarded directory from above, as you may now have noticed.

Beginning in June 1998, this website was registered under the name Gnuhoo directory. After criticism shortly after being launched, it changed its’ name to NewHoo, but months later Yahoo! Asked the name to be changed (Because of the “hoo”), and finally after Netscape acquired it, it became the Open Directory Project in October 1998. After Netscape was acquired by AOL (who then partnered with Time-Warner), things settled down, and before our very eyes, a legend had been born. In record breaking time ODP had obtained 1 million URLs 16 months after being launched in 1999, and just four years later it obtained 4 million URLs. In around 2003-2004 this website reached its’ peak, and ever since around 2006 this website has not been the same. Currently dmoz.org has 4.8 million sites listed, meaning only around 800,000 have been added since 2003. In the past few years next to no submissions have been added, and more and more skeptics are starting to question whether or not submitting their URL week in and week out to get listed is such a good idea. Many have given up hope, but if you intend to have a stronger SEO campaign, sticking with it is the best course of action.

The first website I worked for submitted their URL to ODP in March, 2010. As of the writing of this article, it has been nearly a year since this, and we have gotten no responses from ODP or a listing. If you think that’s bad, our partner website submitted their listing in 2007 and has gotten the same result. Unfortunately sometimes there is no way to find out if your submission was rejected, so the process can be frustrating. My advice – stick with it. Ways to keep trying to get your listing published are submitting the URL on a weekly basis, and secondly becoming an editor. There is hope – I applied to become an editor and I was rejected one day after my submission, meaning that someone is checking and maintaining the website to some extent. Register to become a volunteer editor in your designated category, because there is a chance that you will be able to review your own submission, and if so you can then see the exact guidelines needed to be accepted. This will give you information on what your submission needs for the next time around.

Any website can download ODP Data, so being listed in this directory gets you benefits that not even most paid directories can offer. This means that you not only get a link from dmoz.org, but you also get a link from any website that downloads the directory listings and publishes them on their site. One could argue that not many people would do that, but they would be terribly misinformed – Google, the empire that has the most influence in the history of the World Wide Web, has their own directory (directory.google.com), and it is based solely off the data of the ODP (the only difference is that they order their listings by Page Rank).

As you now know the Online Directory Project is a big deal, and just because it isn’t being maintained properly and frequently, it doesn’t mean you should lose all hope and just give up. SEO can be frustrating and difficult, and Dmoz.org is the epitome of that. Like some link building techniques, getting a link on ODP is not fool proof, so submit, hope for the best, and move on.  Remember, some websites still do get accepted from Dmoz.org, so there is always a chance for you to get listed. So if you get in after multiple, consistent site suggestions over a long period of time (but by no means is doing this a guarantee), just remember who told you to stick with it .

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Top 10 Free Web Directories

If you ask any SEO for some basic link building techniques, they will mention directory submission. The best place to start is to find a list of freebie directories that you can easily get listed on. When I first started searching for free web directories to submit to, I was baffled when I found little to no Top 10 or Top 100 lists of free web directories to submit to. I’m also doing this for people who have not started searching for these free, easy links, as well as people who might have skipped over a few key free web directories. Like always, you should know that there are many free web directories with value, but these are the ones that I found to be the ten most important.

Top 10 Free Web Directories

1. Dmoz.org
2. Jayde.com
3. Hotfrog.com
4. Somuch.com
5. buscopio.net/eng
6. freeprwebdirectory.com
7. directory-free.com
8. the-big-brain.com
9. geniusfind.com
10. searchsight.com

Had a tough time ordering these, they all are pretty solid links if you can get into them. If you want to know more about Dmoz.org, check out my blog post on them. I would also like to say that buscopio.net has a very high page rank (7) but the problem is that I have tried submitting to them, and you have to do it over email, and I see very few links accepted on the site, so it will most likely end up being another tough site to get accepted on. An honorable mention to lutonengineering.com, which doesn’t have a high PR, but it always seems to come up as a very solid link in all the site explorers I use.

Notice I only did a top ten. There are so many free web directories to submit to (over 5000), so take advantage of some of them. Yes, some aren’t even worth the minute you spend on the directory adding your site, but sometimes you can get lucky with some of these free web directories. For example, I submitted to a very lowly visited directory (Alexa ranking over 1 million), but it turns out that so few people submit that my website has been the most recently submitted link on the directory, earning it a high spot on the home page. It has been this way for months, and no one has had their link accepted since my submission. My advice: use Google searches, directory lists, and anything you can find in about an hour. You should come up with a good list after 60 minutes, and usually anything after that is close to worthless (but don’t let that stop you if you really want to go above and beyond). Most SEOs will tell you not to bother with these endless lists of directories, and Google has taken away a lot of value from some of them, but if you’re out of link building ideas and have an hour or two, it wouldn’t hurt getting a few free listings.

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Creating the Perfectly Optimized Page

To get Google to list your pages, half the battle is having the page being optimized for the keyword being searched (the other half is anchor text links). Today we will look at a few tips to create the ideal page for a term.


One thing that webmasters forget to do before uploading all of their pages on to the Web is having a plan for optimizing different pages for different keywords. If you are lucky enough to have not done this yet, read this carefully, as this can save you a lot of time and resources: create a keyword plan. Make sure you have analyzed and discovered the keywords you want to target, and split them up into various pages, so each page is optimized for one or two keywords in particular. Unfortunately the website I am currently consulting was not blessed with this knowledge and set of planning skills, so having to backtrack and manually change each page numerous times for optimizing different keywords became frustrating.

Once you know which keywords are being targeted by which pages, you need to make sure you include the keyword(s) in the Meta tags. Make sure the keyword is in the title (while still making the page title accurate), include it in the Meta keywords (although this has lost its value over the years), and finally in the description. In the description, you want to include it an ideal two-three times without making it look like you are keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is adding the keywords more times than needed, and this can end up hurting you in two ways. The first way is that the page is no longer accurately describing the page being linked, so you can lose traffic that way. Next is that the Googlebots aren’t stupid, they can see when you are going after certain terms. Try and include it twice (three times if you can make it flow). After this, continue down the page and include the keyword in the body text of the page. The ideal number of times to include the word in the text is 5-10 times, but this can fluctuate based on the size of the text (by no means is 5-10 accurate for every circumstance, so don’t live and breathe by this number). Again, overstuffing the keyword into every sentence in the text can be identifiable by the search engines.

Sometimes it can be hard giving advice of when and when not to use the keywords on the page, so it’s up to you to make sure the page is as accurate as possible, and when possible use the keyword. For example, if I wanted to optimize my home page’s description for the keyword Music, I would try and do something like this: “My Music Site – Library of different genres of Music, a community of Music lovers, and a website for the fans to get as close as possible to their favorite musicians.”

Lastly you want to focus on any media content you have. Any videos or pictures you upload, you want to make sure their file name is made up of the targeted keywords. For example, if you are targeting the keyword “Pencil Case”, you might want to feature a picture of a pencil case on the page, saved as pencil-case.png.

Remember with the Panda (Farmer) Update – Google is focusing on the user’s experience. This means that whenever at all possible, make sure you are as clear and informative in your content, even if it means giving up writing your keywords a few times.

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