Recently, I’ve had some conversations with friends and prospects who’ve hired other SEO agencies, and I’ve heard some startling stories about how many other agencies do not include reporting as part of their process. Excuse me?

Reporting is no more than measurement, really, and to realize success or failure, all things must be measured. Would you go on a diet to lose weight and yet never step on the scale? Would a parent send a child to school, but not care about seeing a report card on the child’s progress? How do you know if you’re successful if you don’t measure your progress?

Measurement is a key to understanding where you started, where you stand, and how far you have left to go. It’s really that simple. So my first rule for companies is:

Never hire an SEO agency that doesn’t provide at least monthly reporting.

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Advanced Web Ranking is a piece of software that automates the ranking process.  It uses automated queries to pull data from search engines to provide you with a “moment-in-time” glance of the location of your website (or your competitor’s site).  The software itself is fairly straightforward to use at the basic level.  Essentially you add a set of keywords along with the websites you want to determine ranks for.  From there you select the search engines you want to test on.

The beauty of the software comes with the reporting capabilities.  There are all sorts of reports you can run based on the data;  Competition, Current Rank and Visibility reports to name a few.  Of course, if you don’t like the default reports then you can make your own.  This is the first step to streamlining the process.  Data is of no use unless you can analyze and apply it.  So when setting up the report, remove the useless data and add in the fields that are of utmost importance to your rank diagnosis.

After setting up the report, now we can get down and dirty with some of the advanced tools and services built-in to the software.  We will start with the easiest.

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Our most recent #seo411 Twitter chat session discussed the features of the new Google search algorithm, Caffeine, and its effects on SEO. Here’s a review of what we talked about in case you couldn’t make it.

Special thanks to @tim_eschenauer, @MediaCollective, @seoinnovators, @inflatemouse, @keywebconcepts, @sullivan_s, @AvelynAustin, @janetdmiller, @Jstatad, @ReneeRevetta, @Kaitlyn07 for contributing their SEO knowledge to this week’s chat.

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BLOG SEO

Our most recent #seo411 Twitter chat session covered SEO for Blogs.  Here’s a review of what we talked about in case you couldn’t make it.  If you’re experimenting with or want to get started with optimizing your blog for SEO, hopefully this #seo411 session will help you to get your blog started on the right track.

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About two months ago, Google announced that it would begin allowing website visitors to opt out of Google Analytics tracking in the near term.

Why Now?
What Google wasn’t so clear about was WHY it chose to implement this new direction in user privacy now. The blog post simply stated that the move was made because:

As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy.

OK, sorry, not buying it. (more…)

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