When conducting key phrase research little tips, tricks and tools can save time. Being a wizz at Excel helps, being able to create scraping tools is also great but sometimes you just need to copy and paste from sites to generate key phrase lists.

I’ve come across a neat method of using the ImportXML function on Google Docs to extract lists from a web page into spreadsheet (from there you can paste into the Google Keyword Tool to get volumes). Credit goes to this post for the how to us http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/data-scraping-wikipedia-with-google-spreadsheets/.

First you need a page with data on, could be a list of products, table of locations, for example list of dog breads, list of football teams, or a list of settlements in the uk ordered by population.

In Google docs you then use the ImportHtml function specifying the URL, that you want to grab a table and which table e.g. the 1st, 2nd etc.

=ImportHtml(URL, “list” | “table”, index).

For example

=ImportHtml(“http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…..m_settlements_by_population”,”table”,1)

A full explanation can be found on the help files http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75507 which also show other uses and variations.

You hit enter and hey presto you have a nice table with all the figures separated out.

If you look into the “ouseful” blog, linked above, you can then publish from google docs into RSS, then to Yahoo pipes into RSS then use the RSS on your site as content.

You can also import from RSS and product feeds.

With Chrome coming out on the Mac I’ve moved away from FireFox at home and work, it’s just too slow and does have the odd crash. There is still no extension support on the Mac version but these all work with no problems on Windows XP SP3.

Photo Credit – iVinay

Chrome Flags by josorek – https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jhejngphiacapbgllhagbpdkkdieeaej

PageRank by kalehrishi – https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/pneoplpmnpjoioldpodoljacigkahohc

Firebug Lite by andrei.pervychine – https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bnbbfjbeaefgipfjpdabmpadaacmafkj – Or use the one built into chrome Ctrl + Shift + I

IE Tab Classic by josorek – https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/miedgcmlgpmdagojnnbemlkgidepfjfi

No Follow Checker by Dan – http://www.chromeextensions.org/webmaster-seo/nofollow-checker/

Anyone else with any good extensions for chrome?

PHP Weby is a Free Directory script that can create a SEO friendly directory for you. It’s prety SEO friendly but it does lack an XML sitemap generator. So I’ve brushed off some PHP skills last used a few years ago and I’ve made a script that generates an XML sitemap for PHP Weby Directory.

All you need to do is add in your database details, the URL of the site and upload the php file. This then generates sitemap which you can then submit to Google and reference in your robots.txt.

For instruction and to download the file follow the link

PHP Weby Directory XML Sitemap Generator

The most popular question from clients to SEO’s is How Many Links Do I Have? My answer, it depends.

There’s a little more explanation to it. What seems to work well for me is to show the difference in the number of links different tools report for my Blackpool FC Blog.

There are multiple websites that you can use to get a total on the number of links your website has, I can think of six in total

Google Link Command – 6
Yahoo Site Explorer – (Inlinks, except from domain) – 1,297
Google Webmaster Tools – 197
Majestic SEO – 2,702
Linkscape – 516
Alta Vista – 319

Which is the best site to use to check links? To get a list of them all then Yahoo / Majestic SEO will give you a comprehensive report. If you need to check new links coming it’s very hard to do as you need to compare one month to another.

To get an indication of what is happening with your links you want to track the trend buy keeping a total every 2 / 3 weeks. Track numbers of all of the different tools above as you then get a good indication of the general movement.

Something I’ve read this morning on the icrossing blog is that Google Insight tool is now showing predictions on some search terms. By looking at previous years movement the next year’s traffic level is predicted. For example SEO.

Obviously it’s not going to be able to predict trends that pop out of nowhere e.g. Susan Boyle. Google have also stuck a disclaimer to treat the data as a estimate and not a prediction.

Enhanced WP-ContactForm is a popular Wordpress plugin which adds a neat contact form to your WordPress blog. This can be completed with two small changes to you contact page.

1. Add the tracking code to the form.

On line 185 of wp-contactform.php

$results = '<div style="font-weight: bold;">' . $success_msg . '</div>';

change to

$results = '<div style="font-weight: bold;">' . $success_msg . '</div><script type="text/javascript">pageTracker._trackPageview("/contact-sent/")</script>';

All you are doing is adding the track page view which throws a page view into Analytics after the success message is displayed.

2. Move the tracking code

The original Google Analytics tracking code needs to be placed before the line you just added to the contact form. In WordPress I have placed the tracking code on the footer so I just copy & past the footer and header into the page template. The move the code from the footer into the header. If you use a WordPress plug in to manage your tracking you might need to use a plugin that places the tracking code in the head of your template or have a little play around.

All done sent a test contact and in Google Analytics this will appear as a page view.

Now just add that page as a goal and then Google Analytics will start to track conversion rates.

If you want you can add similar tracking when the contact form fails, this will track if the user enters an invalid field. This is useful to track if you think people may be having problems filling out the form. Although the above method applies to Enhanced WP-ContactForm the same concept should be applied to forms that just refresh the page, add the page view just after the confirmation statement and move the tracking to the top of the page.

If your struggling to find good ideas for articles and blogs, or want to attract some more traffic then the keyword wuestions from Wordtracker Labs looks like a cracking tool.

Searching with keywords the tool returns that keywords in popular questions. For example SEO returns.

Question – Times asked
what does seo stand for – 15
what is seo – 10
how do i become a certified seo – 6
how to set up seo – 4
how important is domain to seo – 4
how does links to bookmark pages affect seo – 3
how to do seo myself – 2
how to write seo articles – 2
how to remove seo for firefox – 2
how to seo – 2
external seo work what is – 2
seo how – 2

No doubt that several SEO’s will be writing blogs based around these questions – e.g. Dave N. The data seems to all come from America so there’s nothing to do with football clubs, towns and city’s in the UK. The time asked number comes from the last 140 days from partner search engines based in the US.

So if you need to write some good content for clients have a search and I’m sure you’ll come up with some great articles.

There was a lot of press recently about the release of SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool in the last few months. That’s seem to have died down now an I’ve had the chance to use the tool at work and found it very useful.

It’s great for finding links that your competitor have that you should have as well. Of course you can use something like Yahoo Site Explorer but Linkscape enables you to grab the cream of the links quickly. The ones that are do follow and maybe based in the UK.

It’s help me to find a reason why a site has been penalised. It identified a site that had 10,000 links from only 52 domains, with around 8,000 using the same anchor text. It stood out as unusual and proved the theory about how the site had been penalised.

I’ve also used it to find duplicate sites from clients as all the site were from the same IP.

I do think that it will become essential piece for my day to day work. It is a tad expensive to sign up for if you are an individual so if you work for a company try to get your company to sign up for pro membership!

So, you’ve a beginner in the SEO industry, you’ve read a few blogs and chatted to a few people they’ve probably mentioned about using tools. There are plenty of them out there but it can be pretty daunting to start off with.

If your starting to work in an SEO company ask for a list of tools from the other SEO’s but its often better to start form a fresh this way you use tools suit you. Some of the tools that I’m using at the moment will totally confuse new users so it’s best to build up the tools as you understand more about SEO.

To start, FireFox, yes some people new to SEO will not use FireFox. I’ve come across web developers who’ve never used FireFox in the past and so called SEO experts who only use IE. From there you start to understand that FireFox supports plugins so extra tools can be added to the browser.

And the first tool……. Google Toolbar, yes you may think it’s useless but there’s a good reason behind it. To use the toolbar correctly you need to sign up to a Google Account. Once you have a Google Account, then you sign up to a Google Reader account. That’s the tool that you’ll get the most out of Google Reader.

From there you can subscribe to blogs, like this one or the ones in my blog roll. This is how I’ve learned SEO and this the majority of SEO’s learn. So if your new to SEO, start off with Google Reader.

Yahoo Site Explorer has had a face lift in the past week and there a new feature too. The old version did the job as far as I was concerned, all the tool does is give an indication on internal and external links to a page.

The new version is a little more compact than the last version but has all the same features.

The only new part I can see is the explorer button next to the listed URL’s, this means you start exploring the sites you that are linking to the site you are looking at. Head over to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com to check the new version out.