I am thrilled that so many of you truly find Smart PageRank useful for your SEO work. Over the past week, the daily Alexa has been under 10k! While this is certainly a feat that excites me, it has also posed some interesting challenges.

First of all, Google and Yahoo are giving me fits! When I make a call to Google (and sometimes Yahoo), my code often received the following error:

“We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google. “

I am doing my best to remedy the situation so that you always receive the most useful information possible. If any of you have some ideas, please feel free to post a comment to help me out!

As the title of this post suggests, I have an update almost ready for the PageRank Backlink checker. This update will add the ability to know if there is a nofollow tag in the site that links to you. You can also see the anchor text that they use. This should be ready for live rollout in the next couple of days.

As always, feel free to give me new ideas or suggestions on ways that I can improve Smart PageRank. Many of you have sent me emails and I sincerely appreciate them. Many of your suggestions have greatly improved Smart PageRank.

As always, happy SEOing!

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If you’re an SEO junkie, you may visit SEOmoz often. If you don’t, you need to. In my opinion SEOmoz has the 2nd best SEO blog (Aaron Wall’s SEObook is my top choice). SEOmoz’s most important piece of content may be this excellent compilation, Search Engine Ranking Factors. In this compilation, SEOmoz gathered 37 of the most knowledgeable SEO experts. They surveyed the experts on the most important Google search engine factors. These were the experts’ top 10 factors.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

Here are some of comments regarding the top factor. I’ll go through 1-3 factors per blog post in the next couple of days.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag

I thought anchor text and backlinks would be more important. However, Keyword Use in Title Tag was by far the most important factor. It got a 4.9 out of 5. The closest other factors, Anchor Text of Inbound Link and Global Link Popularity of Site, only had a 4.4.

So, if there is something to check on your website, it’s the title tags. Do your have keywords with search volume in your title tags? If you don’t, it’s time to do some keyword research and fix your tags. If you have a site that’s already ranking for a couple of terms, adding keywords to your title tags will immediately bring you more search traffic.

How else can you take advantage of this factor? Right now, I’m doing an SEO internship for a company with a couple of websites. I may be offered a job if I meet certain traffic goals. Many of the pages on their sites do not have great title tags. This includes high PR pages. Starting with the high PR pages, I’m gonna optimize the title tags to bring more traffic.

Also, you can search around and buy a site with good PR and backlinks but crappy title tags. Most of the grunt work (aka link building!) has been done for you. All you have to do to increase traffic quickly is insert keywords in the site’s title tags.

With this factor being so important, I’m surprised that many webmasters don’t optimize their title tags. I think the reason for this is because keyword research can be tedious. I personally like doing keyword research, but for many webmasters keyword research is not an enjoyable task. If you don’t like keyword research, you could easily outsource it for cheap.

A couple more things. Don’t spam you title tag with keywords. That’s just cheesy. Google can easily detect that. Also, your titles will be less readable.

By adding keywords to your title tags, you’ll get more links from auto generated sites. I know those links don’t count for much, but it’s still a link.

Optimized title tags will get you more clicks on the SERPs. Why is this? Well, when anyone searches on Google, the search term they use is bolded. Bold text increases visibility and clicks.

What has been your experience with optimizing title tags?

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Just because online tools are free doesn’t mean they are low quality. Because of the open source movement, APIs, and the generous online community, many free tools today are high quality.

For keyword research, my favorite free tool is the Google Adwords tool. I use this tool countless times every work day. It is the only free tool I know of that gives the estimated value of contextual ad clicks. The data of this tool is more useful than other tools because it is based on Google’s search engine. Google’s engine accounts for over half the global search volume. In comparison, Wordtracker, a popular paid keyword tool, accounts for less than 5% of the global search activity. Also, the Adwords tool gives a lot of related search terms including synonyms. The only thing I don’t like about this tool is the lack of specific numbers for search volume. Instead, there are just 5 levels of search activity.

Many people use the Overture tool, but it has become less useful. It is not very precise, since the singular and plural forms of a search term are lumped together. Its results are old – from January 2007. Also, Overture is slow and crashes a lot.

For researching the competition, you can’t beat the SEO for Firefox extension. This tool is super convenient because it works right on the SERPs. On each result on the SERPs, you can find out the PageRank, age, number of links pointing to the domain and specific web page, and other site information including number of Bloglines subscribers and del.icio.us bookmarks.

Also, I use the good old Google search engine to get the big picture of my competition. I like to search with quotes. This gives the number of competing web pages that are optimized for the specific search phrase.

For tweaking the keywords of a web page, I like using SEO Book’s Keyword Density Analyzer Tool. This tool helps me whenever I work on pre-exisiting sites. For example, an SEO client asked me for help in ranking for more search terms. I did some keyword research in my client’s niche. After I found relevant keywords, I checked the content of my client’s web site using this tool. Then, I added the keywords to web pages that were missing them. You’ll be surprised how often web sites are missing tons of relevant keywords in their content.

For tracking web pages in the SERPs, I like using Earners Forum Keyword Tracker Tool. This tool keeps track of your keyword rankings in Google. All you have to do is enter the search phrase and URL of your web page. You can track hundreds of keyword phrases and web pages. Also, this keeps track of the changes in your rankings.

What about a PageRank (PR) and backlink checker? Of course, I like using our tools here at Smart PageRank.

Check out our PageRank checker. I like our tool because it has extra features not found in other PR checkers. For example, you can be emailed whenever your PR gets updated. Also, this tool will tell you if a web page’s PR is fake.

Our backlink checker has a great feature. Instead of just giving the number of backlinks, it will also give the PR of each of the backlinks. This is helpful in knowing the real link popularity of a web page.

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Welcome to the Smart PageRank blog. I have done quite a bit of SEO work with my emphasis being on building PageRank and link-building strategies. I have always wanted to have a personal blog where I can share ideas with others and make comments on news affecting the webmaster’s world.

Feel free to say ‘hi’ and introduce yourself here as a reader. Please do not spam comments with URLs, however, as I will have to delete those.

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