SEO tool review: Craawler

There is a lot of SEO tools out there. Choosing the tool depends on a task and a project at hands. You can select SEO tools by task such as keyword research tools. But more often you’d need a tool that can quickly analyze a website for main SEO elements. There’s a number of those too. But this time I’d like to share my experience with Craawler.

I was recently talking to Tom Johns, a creator of Craawler: SEO & Spellcheck Robot and wanted to share my interest in the tool with you. Here’s why this SEO tool caught my attention and why this SEO tool may of use to you:

1. It’s simple, quick and easy to use: put your domain name in and choose a language for the spellchecker
2. It’s free (not event ad-supported), and, according to Tom, he’s not going to make it a paid SEO tool, ever.
3. In my chat with him Tom sounded like a cool guy, who wants to develop an interesting thing.
4. Although I believe that clean spelling is important, I’ve never seen an SEO tool that allowed you to check your spelling.
5. It gives you a very quick domain snapshot: IP address, host location, pages indexed by Google.
6. It quickly checks if the site being reviewed has robots.txt and sitemap.xml properly setup.
7. Craawler looks at canonical tags on the page.
8. Advanced options allow you to exclude certain pages of your website from the crawl.
9. Advanced options also allow you to exclude words from the crawl. I guess this should solve my #1 problem below.

These are some things that I’d recommend improving on:

1. Spell checker seems to have a limited library of terms. For example, things like SEO, internet and copywriting showed up as spelling errors.
2. A larger site takes longer to check through. I realize that Tom is saying that the tool will respond as quickly as my hosting servers, but still, checking my site took a few minutes.
3. No option to save reports. For example, after I ran my website and waited a few minutes, I accidentally closed the browser window. The next day I wanted to check on results again, but had to run the entire report again.
4. No option to export results. That would be handy to solve me previous problem. Also, it would be cool to save results in a PDF or XLS file.

After all, every tool is useful at its own time. Craawler is great for a quick SEO site review. I really hope Tom goes on and improves the tool. I strongly suggest you use the tool and provide Tom with recommendations to improve it.

Need a complete website review?

On-page SEO factors affecting rankings (Part 2)

Yesterday I started looking at on-page SEO factors affecting rankings for top 5 performers on Google.ca for “calgary web design”. Today we’ll look at the contenders and their on-page SEO elements in more details.

On-page SEO review for top 5 listings

#1: Calgary Web Design | SEO | Web Designer

Now let’s look at on-page SEO for WedgeIM in more details:

• WooRank score: 54.2, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/wedgeim.com
• Descriptive meta title: This “Calgary Web Design | SEO | Web Designer” title contains high traffic keywords that the company targets. It does describe what company does though. This title raises a question: is this a company or a freelancer. There’s nothing wrong with either but I prefer to be clear on that from the beginning.
• Promise in meta description: This description offers a promise of no-hassle answers, clean design and easy-to-navigate sites, as well as asks the user to give them a call. I’d include a phone number in this description. There’s enough space left for it too.
• Site links: This is the only website that has site links in Google listing. Site links are granted by Google to show a list of most popular pages on the website. This shows that the site is well trafficked. According to WooRank it gets over 1000 visits per month. It’s not a lot but considering the key phrase “Calgary web design”, it’s enough to get site links from Google.
• Landing page: This is where we land after clicking on the search listing. Are we in the right place? Based on latest website design showcase, we are in the right place. Good! Does this page look like a web design shop? At first it looks like a modern Web 2.0 web design with an image scroller and bold calls to action. However, looking at more details, it appears that the website is based on a Joomla website template with a few things unfinished.
• Headings: H1 tag is one of the most important elements on a webpage. It appears that H1 is missing here. According to WooRank the page has 5 H2′s and 8 H3′s, which is not so bad, but all H2′s are the same “Making beautiful websites since 2004…”. Not the best way to do it.
• Image alts: Also, according to WooRank, the page has 26 images and 18 of them are missing alt tags. Adding unique alt tags to those 18 images might help the company to solidify its #1 position :)
• Address / email  / phone number: The page has contact details of the company spelled out in text on the page. This is exactly what you would want to do to be considered more credible according to Google, especially if you’re running a local business.
• Canonical issue: This page is missing canonical tag (has a www. vs. non-www issue). As a result Google views the URL with www. and without as two separate websites with exactly the same content. This raises a duplicate-content issue, which is bad. The fact that the website still ranks #1 interesting.

#2: Web Design Calgary & iPhone Apps by Mediumrare Inc.

And on-page SEO for Mediumrare in more details:

• WooRank score: 51.2, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/mrare.ca
• Descriptive title: The page title “Web Design Calgary & iPhone Apps by Mediumrare Inc.” sounds pretty descriptive to me. It identifies the keyword, the service and the company. Best one so far.
• Promise in description: This description is a humble (can compete…) overview of services the company offers. It invites the user to make the next step and check the portfolio. No promise made, but clean and within the character constraints.
• Landing page: This page is about creativity. It can be seen the headline and the graphics. To me this one looks as a very clean and unique website design showing that the company is in fact a web design agency.
• Headings: This page has 1 H1 and 8 H2′s. That’s what I like to see. However, H1′s text is “mediumrare” and like embedded into  the logo on the page. Ideally, I’d like to see H1 showcasing a target key phrase for the page (i.e. Calgary web design by Mediumrare Inc.” or something like that.
• Image alts: 2 out of 2 image alts are missing. Adding those in and planing a key phrase in there should help the company make this page more relevant to its target search term.
• Canonical issue: No canonical issue here. All great! Google views the www. version and no-www version as one page.
• Contact info spelled out: This one also has the contact details spelled out in text. Google like to see things like that!

#3: Calgary web design – Apis Design

Here’s on-page SEO for Apis Design in more details:

• WooRank score: 61.8, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/apis.ca. That’s the top scored site according to WooRank. Let’s see what we have here.
• Descriptive title: The title is descriptive, includes the key phrase and the company name. I’m not sure if adding “inc.” at the end would make any difference though.
• Promise in description: Describes the service being offered, has the keyword phrase mentioned and promises “we build websites that work”. Adding a recommendation for next step could make this description more actionable. Like, “get a free quote today” or “call us today (and list a number)”.
• Landing page: The page showcases a visual scroller of featured website projects as well as shows strong calls-to-action such as “improve communication” and “reach the masses”. This website is custom-built, no templates involved, a good sign of a true web design agency. Their websites might be more expensive, but they will be unique, professional and, according to the promise, they will work.
• Headings: The page has no H1, 3 H2′s and 7 H4′s. Not the best case. As mentioned above, I like to see at least 1 H1 per page containing a target key phrase. In addition, H2′s do not contain any text. In this case, they’re just images. I’d highly recommend adding the text to these H2. It won’t be a big deal if it’s left as is, but there might be a good opportunity in adding text.
• Image alts: out of 7 images, 1 is missing alt attribute. Not a big deal, but for the sake of consistency I’d recommend specifying an alt attribute here.
• Canonical issue: no issues here. We’re great!

#4: Calgary Web Design – Web Design Calgary – Calgary Web Design

Now on-page SEO for Calgary Web Design Network in more details:

• WooRank score: 50.2, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/calgarywebdesign.ca
• Descriptive title: Although it contains the keyword and appears relevant this title looks like plain keyword stuffing. It does not identify the company.
• Promise in description: The description identifies the company as well as the key phrase, which is actually the same in a lot of cases. Its description is a bit too long to fit into the Google snippet so the user only sees the initial portion of it. It outlines the service, but does not more to the next step. I’d recommend shortening the description and adding a call-to-action.
• Landing page: The page does not really look visually relevant to the query “calgary web design”. Although it displays various computer related images, there’s nothing that says “a web design agency”.
• Headings: According to WooRank all major headings are missing. Adding headings to the page will likely increase its relevance for focus key terms.
• Image alts: 6 out of 38 images on the page are missing alt attributes.
• Canonical issue: Just like WedgeIM this site may have duplicate content issues and, as a results, may be devalued in rankings.

#5: Calgary Web Design, SEO, E-Commerce, Graphic Designers & More | Web Candy – Calgary Web Design and Web Development

Let’s look at on-page SEO for Web Candy in more details:

• WooRank score: 53.7, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/webcandy.ca
• Descriptive title: This title is descriptive and includes the company name. However, it also looks a bit keyword-stuffed. There are many opinions on the length limit for meta-titles. My personal take is that 70 characters (including spaces) is enough space to tell your audience about the focus of your company and mention your company’s name. Also, with so many different things in the title, the value of each key phrase is diffused.
• Promise in description: With the length of over 150 characters this description does describe the business, but puts it a bit more for search engines than for people. There’s a clear promise “Your best source for Calgary Web Designers” but it gets truncated due to character limitation and the potential customer does not see it.
• Landing page: This landing page is relevant to the search query and actually very useful. It’s got a functional display area that tells you about the company’s services. It’s got a sitemap-like menu of things the company does, which allows users to see all in one place, and very well-organized.
• Headings: The page is missing H1, it’s got one H2 and one H3, which appears very weird. Adding at least a H1 to this page and ensuring it contains target terms will likely help the company be more relevant for their target search queries.
• Image alts: no image alt attributes are missing. That’s great!
• Canonical issue: no problem here either!

On-page SEO factors affecting rankings (Part 1)

If you simplify things a bit you can divide search engine optimization into two areas: on-page SEO and off-page. By now you and I know that it’s all about the balance between the two and both have to be developed in order for the site to rank high for select queries. Today and over the next 3 days I’ll take a look at an SEO experiment and see how much on-page SEO affects website rankings.

The on-page SEO experiment

The following on-page SEO experiment will have 3 major parts. First, I’ll look up and identify 5 websites competing for “Calgary web design”. To de-personalize the results I’ll use this plugin for Firefox. I’ll also narrow the results to those coming from Google.ca.

Then I’ll look up each one of 5 contenders using free site rankings tool WooRank. This will give me the score for each websites as well as highlight some insight into on-page SEO elements of each of the 5 websites. I will also showcase each of the websites as well as provide some comments.

Finally, I’ll provide you with summary thoughts or the verdict regarding on-page SEO elements that are important in affecting your website rankings. Let’s do it!

Calgary web design, top 5 listings in Google.ca (de-personalized)

You can see right away that titles showcase the target key phrase “Calgary web design” and it’s featured as the first 3 words of the title (except for #2 where the 3 words are switched). You will also notice that 4 out of 5 have “Calgary web design” in the Description of the article mentioned at least once (except for #1). Finally, you will notice that 4 out of 5 have their titles within the limit of 65-70 characters of title length (except for #5, which is running over a bit).

Tomorrow, I’ll look at each one of them in more details. For now, let me know if you have questions or comments and have an awesome day! In the meantime, feel free to follow me on Twitter where I share SEO things I find on the internet.

Other articles in on-page SEO series:

• On-page SEO factors affecting rankigns (Part 2)
• On-page SEO factors affecting rankigns (Part 3)

Search rankings update, Jan 29, 2011

Just checked my rankings for “online marketing Calgary” and noticed a change – got down to #5 from being #2 a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a few first thoughts about what changed:

• The term online marketing Calgary is no longer in my title. Also, this terms is not part of first 3 words of the title. This is likely one of the most important things affecting my ranking.
• My description tag does not work properly for some reason. Looks like Google picks up random text from my homepage, not what I have in the meta description tag. Will look into it right away. My competitors’ descriptions are proper and under the length limit of 150 characters.
• I slowed down on link building recently. My guess is that everybody else have speeded up on it :) or just remained the same.
• I’ve been recently trying to maintain a frequency of new content (once every two days on average). I’m not saying it didn’t contribute to my higher rankings. In fact, I do think that consistent content development contributes to rankings. I’ll have to look more into it and wait.
• It’s worth noting that traffic from Google organic results remained the same as last month and bounce rate dropped significantly.

I’ll keep looking at numbers and will be updating your shortly. Feel free to ask specific questions in comments to this article. Ta-ta!

Social media for start-ups in Calgary. Event in review.

Earlier this week I attended a great social media meetup in Calgary organized by the Podium Ventures team. The room was full of people who came to hear Cameron Chell of Business Instincts and Tish Bell of BizBoxTV speak about ways start-up businesses can use social media. Here I’d like to summarize some of the key thoughts and discussion points from the eventing.

Cameron started with a well-laid out presentation on key differences between Start-ups 1.0 and Start-ups 2.0. Here’s the flavour:

• Idea vs. Execution: ideas were more important than the execution. With social media it’s the other way around. Your success depends on how well you can execute.
• Secret vs. Live: before social media it was important to keep your idea to yourself as something precious, so that others don’t steal it. With social media, everybody is able to monitor everybody and everything and know of things in an instant. As a result execution AND acting NOW becomes paramount.
• Exclusivity vs. Participation: before the age of social media only the elite few had an opportunity to build great things. If you belonged to a closed group of people in power you could make it. Today, the more people you get to participate openly, the faster your product succeeds or fails (in this case, failure is great).

Something that was cool and interesting was Cameron’s comment “#1 contributor to killing a start-up is passion (ego) of the owner, you need to let it go”. In other words “be passionate about WHY and let your customers determine HOW”.

Tish Bell took over from Cameron with a series of exciting slides and here’s a summary of key points:

• Marketing is no longer about making stuff but about telling stories.
• Research shows that people WANT to connect with brands. For example, “liking” the brand page on Facebook. It gives people a sense of belonging to something great.
• It’s important to monitor the conversations on Twitter / Facebook / etc. This will give you a better idea of what people are looking for and what they’re happy / unhappy about.
• Keep it sharable and significant – the new KISS method for social media.
• In your social media spills on Twitter and elsewhere be a human being, not human doing. Let’s make it clear once and for all that people don’t generally care how you do it in the bathroom and what you have for lunch.
• Although video is the most engaging form of communications online, not all videos are created equal. Ensure your videos are authentic, speaking to the right audience honestly and openly.
• A cool quote from Gary Vaynerchuk: “If content is king, community if God”.

There and other great points are available in the presentation below. Thanks a lot to Chett at Business Instincts for the deck!

For those who missed the event missed out on a great Q and A that followed the presentations. Here’s a few great discussion points:

• Connecting social media profiles (automating posting to multiple social media profiles). Tish Bell: Be careful with that, consider different audiences on different networks. Twitter and Facebook lingo differ.
• How do you plan social media if it’s so fluid and a start-up owner should be flexible? Cameron Chell: Have a plan and be ready to change as a reaction to change in your key metrics. Planning is still crucial.
• To time or not to time (on scheduling posts with tools like Hoot Suite). Some things can be timed, some can’t. There’s multiple ways to engage in social media, here’s a relevant article on 5 ways to stand out on Twitter. So, use multiple engagement tactics for better results.
• How do you use social media in B2B? Cameron Chell: the B2B misconception is that social media is for selling, so we end up looking for people that will buy from us. Cameron uses social media as a way to engage with people beyond selling, on personal level (as a result, relationships become deeper). He uses it to get feedback and monitor industry players and trends.
• If someone follows you on Twitter, how do you respond? Tish Bell: thank the person, be open, look a person up, see what they’re doing, reply with a questions or recommendation (don’t sell your stuff here though).
• What do you say in response to “I tried Twitter and it’s dumb”? Robert Christianson, one of the attendees suggested starting by conducting a search at Search.Twitter.com that is relevant to your business. This will allow you to see the chatter that’s going on around the topic of interest. Tish Bell: Look up your competitors, they are probably using social media.

I’m pretty sure I missed a few gems, but I hope you add things in comments to this review. Thanks a bunch to organizers, participants and Boom Town for hosing us.

Review of “online marketing Calgary” rankings

Just wanted to take another snapshot of my search rankings for the term “online marketing Calgary”. This time I got to #2 bypassing Vovia. Please note that the results are “depersonalized” and are based on Google.com. So, what was done to create this change in rankings?

• regular blogging activity, I’ve recently created a number of resource pages as well as a few relevant posts
• link building campaign focusing on terms “online marketing Calgary” and similar terms
• change in site architecture (please see the main navigation)
• online community participation, answering questions, commenting on relevant blogs, found through StumbleUpon.

One last thing I wanted to note is that prior to focusing on the term “online marketing Calgary” I wanted to rank well for “digital marketing Calgary“. Over time I’ve reached #1 on Google.com. Then, I changed focus to Online Marketing related terms and for the first few months I was still dominating. However, today I noticed that I’m #4. Morale: if you don’t do the work to rank  high for a particular terms, others do, and over time you loose positions.

Online marketing Calgary in Google, Take 2

Slowly but surely I’m improving my ranking for the selected term. I started showcasing my results for online marketing Calgary in the post on September 30th. It’s been exactly 6 weeks and I wanted to share my story with you again.

I’m #3 now, just passed Anduro Marketing, which is a good company ran by good people. I again used the depersonalizer tool to make sure that the results are clean. I monitored the results weekly and noticed that while Google.com showed me 3rd, Google.ca showed me 4th. Today, both .ca and .com agreed!

Here’s a couple of things that might have contributed to my site’s growth:

• Online marketing participation: I participate in online community discussions (through blog comments mostly). As a result I get two things: 1) link to my site (not the most valuable here) and 2) people’s interest in me as a commenter.
• Offline marketing participation: As some of you know I volunteer and participate in Calgary’s marketing community by helping organize events and volunteering at non-profit organizations. This results in a number of links from various influential websites (which I am super grateful for).

There’s probably a few other things that contributed to it but let’s leave it for future discussions. I will continue monitoring the site and will let you know of changes and possible reasons soon. For now, please stay warm as winter is finally here. Stay warm, Calgary!