#Robots.txt vs Meta Instructions

[seoservicessingaporet]

On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO vs. Technical SEO — How to Optimise Each Properly

In the realm of search engine optimization (SEO), three distinct pillars play a crucial role in enhancing your website's visibility and organic search performance: On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO. Each of these components contributes differently to your website's search engine ranking and overall online presence. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore the nuances of each strategy and provide insights into how to effectively optimize each one.

On-Page SEO: Crafting Content for Search Engines and Users

On-Page SEO involves optimizing the individual pages of your website to make them more search engine-friendly while providing value to your visitors. Here's how you can properly optimize your on-page elements:

Keyword Research and Usage: Start by conducting thorough keyword research to identify relevant terms and phrases. Integrate these keywords naturally into your content, including the title, headings, and body text.

High-Quality Content: Create engaging, informative, and well-structured content that addresses the needs of your target audience. Valuable content not only attracts users but also encourages them to stay longer on your site.

Meta Tags: Craft compelling meta titles and descriptions that accurately represent the content of each page. These tags serve as a preview in search engine results and can significantly impact click-through rates.

Optimized Images: Use descriptive file names and alt tags for images to make them accessible to search engines and visually impaired users.

Internal Linking: Establish a logical internal linking structure to guide users through your site and help search engines understand the relationships between your pages.

Off-Page SEO: Building Authority and Reputation

Off-Page SEO focuses on activities beyond your website that influence its online reputation and authority. Consider these strategies to optimize your off-page SEO efforts:

Backlink Building: Acquire high-quality backlinks from reputable and relevant websites. These links act as endorsements, indicating to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy.

Social Signals: Engage with your audience on social media platforms to increase brand visibility and encourage social sharing of your content. While social signals may not be direct ranking factors, they contribute to building an online community and driving traffic.

Influencer Outreach: Collaborate with influencers and thought leaders in your industry to expand your reach and credibility. Their endorsement can attract a wider audience and potentially lead to valuable backlinks.

Technical SEO: Optimizing the Backend of Your Website

Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of your website to improve its crawlability, indexability, and overall user experience. Here are key technical optimizations to consider:

Site Speed: Ensure fast loading times by optimizing image sizes, using browser caching, and minimizing code and scripts. A faster website enhances user experience and can positively impact search rankings.

Mobile-Friendliness: Design your website to be responsive and mobile-friendly, as Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing. A mobile-friendly site is not only user-friendly but also ranks better in search results.

XML Sitemap: Create and submit an XML sitemap to search engines, guiding them to index your pages accurately. This helps search engines understand the structure of your website.

Robots.txt: Use a robots.txt file to instruct search engines on which pages to crawl and index and which ones to exclude. This is especially useful for preventing the indexing of duplicate or irrelevant content.

SSL Security: Implement an SSL certificate to secure your website with HTTPS. Secure websites are favored by search engines and provide a safer browsing experience for users.

In conclusion, a successful SEO strategy encompasses a balanced approach that incorporates On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO. Each pillar plays a vital role in improving your website's visibility, authority, and user experience. By optimizing each of these components, you'll be well-equipped to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of search engine optimization and achieve sustainable organic growth for your online presence.

Learn how to optimise your website using On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO. Discover efficient methods for increasing visibility, authority, and user experience for long-term online growth. Discover the secrets of appropriate optimisation with the help of SEO Services Singapore.

[technology24]

What is Robots.txt File | Robots.txt And SEO | Complete Setup | SEO in 2021

What is Robots.txt File | Robots.txt And SEO | Complete Setup | SEO in 2021

What is robots.txt is one of the simplest files on the website, as well as one of those files where we can easily do anything with ease. Here, if you remove even one character from your world, it can destroy your SEO, and prevent search engines from accessing important content on your site. In this article, we will tell you what is robots.text, why is robots.text important? What is…

[seo1code-blog]

How to Install and Setup WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

Do you want to properly install and setup Yoast SEO plugin? At WPBeginner we use WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast because it is the most complete SEO solution for WordPress websites. In this article, we will show you how to install and setup Yoast SEO and utilize all the awesome features that come with it.

Features

Yoast SEO is the most comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin with many built-in tools and features. Here is a quick overview of some of those features.

Change post’s SEO title and meta description on a per post basis.

Title and meta description support for taxonomies (e.g. category and tags).

Google search result snippet previews.

Focus keyword testing.

Meta Robots configuration:

Improved canonical support, adding canonical to taxonomy archives, single posts and pages and the front page.

RSS footer / header configuration.

Permalink clean ups, while still allowing for Google Custom Search.

Breadcrumbs support, with configurable breadcrumbs titles.

XML Sitemaps with:

XML News Sitemaps.

.htaccess and robots.txt editor.

Ability to verify Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Tools

Basic import functionality for HeadSpace2 and All in One SEO. (You can also use the SEO Data Transporter to transfer functionality from themes like Thesis, Headway, Genesis etc).

Easily add noodp, noydir meta tags.

Easily noindex, or nofollow pages, taxonomies or entire archives.

Images

Configurable removal of post types and taxonomies

Pages or posts that have been noindexed will not show in XML sitemap (but can if you want them too).

The premium version of the Yoast SEO comes with even more features.

A redirect manager that allows you to easily set up redirects.

Video tutorials to help you understand each feature of the plugin.

Premium support provided by the folks at Yoast to help you make the most out of your site’s SEO.

For more features and details you may want to see our comparison of Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack.

Video Tutorial

Subscribe to WPBeginner

If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

How to Install Yoast SEO Plugin

First, thing you need to do is install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will notice a new menu item in WordPress admin bar labeled SEO with Yoast SEO logo on it.

Now that you have installed and activated the plugin, let’s take a look at how to properly setup this powerful plugin.

How to Setup WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

You should remember, that the settings that we select are the ones that we recommend. Other experts may have their own preferences and discretion, so advanced users can ignore anything that they do not like.

If you are a beginner, and you want to use Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin like we do, then please follow along the steps carefully.

Step 1. Data Transfer

Most of you probably have another WordPress plugin like All in One SEO pack, or a theme framework like Genesis dealing with your SEO data.

If you want to successfully use this plugin, then you need to make sure that all of your previous data has been transported to this plugin before you deactivate the other one.

To accomplish this, we recommend using SEO Data Transporter by StudioPress. If you’re setting this up on a new blog, then skip this step.

Step 2. General Settings

Clicking on the SEO icon takes you to settings page for the plugin. Click on ‘General’ tab and you will notice a button to open configuration wizard. We want you to ignore this wizard, because we will be taking you step by step through each option.

Step 3. Features

Let’s switch to the ‘Features’ tab and enable the advanced settings page.

Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.

You will notice new items appear under the SEO option in your WordPress menu.

These items include Titles and Meta, XML Sitemaps, Social, Advanced, and tools. We will be showing you how to setup each one later in this article.

Step 4. Your Info

Next, you need to switch to the ‘Your Info’ tab. This is where you will provide information about your site and the person or company behind it.

First you need to provide a site name and an alternate name for search engines to consider. Your site’s name could be your site’s title.

If you do not enter anything here, then Yoast SEO will automatically use your site’s title as your website name. Search engines like Google can display this information in search results like this:

The next option is to choose whether this website is run by a company or an individual person. If you choose company, then you will be asked to provide a company name, and you can also upload a company logo.

On the other hand, if you choose a person, then you can add the name of the person behind the website.

Step 5. Webmaster Tools

If you know a little bit about SEO, then you have probably heard that each of the popular search engines, Google, Bing, Yandex, and Alexa allow site owners to add their sites using webmaster tools area (see our guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google webmaster tools).

Webmaster tools let you see insights and other relevant data about your site from specific search engines.

In order to verify your site and see those exclusive data, you have to add a meta tag to your site, or upload a file. Most beginners are afraid to add meta tags, so Yoast put this option in to ease the process. Simply add the meta code that you received from the search engines in the respective fields.

Step 6. Security

The last tab in general settings is labeled Security. This has only one option which disables advanced part of the WordPress SEO meta box. We recommend that you leave it disabled. Disabling advanced metabox will prevent your authors from making advanced changes like noindex and canonical settings (which is good).

Step 7. Titles & Metas

Titles & Metas section under Yoast SEO has several tabs in it. We will cover each one of them.

1. General

Here you can choose the symbol you want to use a separator between titles. Default option is dash, you can use it if you are unsure which symbol to choose.

On this page, you can also disable readability and keyword analysis tab which appear under the Yoast SEO metabox when you are writing post. We recommend that you leave them enabled.

2. Homepage Title

Next, we will work on defining the title for our homepage. By default you will see these fields pre-filled with title-template. So what is the difference between a title and a title template, you may ask.

In instances like your homepage, you may want to create a static title, description, and keywords. But for posts, the title will vary from one post to another.

Title templates allow you to define a way that the title and other meta information is pulled and organized.

Let’s take a look at the image below for the home page settings. By default the template variables in the title field work fine for most website however you’re welcome to change it. The next option is to enter your site’s description. Once you are done, click on save settings button.

Note: If you are using a static homepage, then you will see links to edit your homepage and blog page to add title and meta descriptions.

3. Post Types Titles & Metas

By default WordPress comes with several post types such as post, page, revisions, attachment, and navigation menus. Users can also define their own custom post types.

Yoast SEO allows you to set titles and meta for posts, pages, media, and other custom post types. This site-wide title and meta description will be used if you forgot to add title and meta description for individual post.

We recommend leaving the description fields blank for all post types here. We also recommend using only the post title as the title template.

Remember Yoast SEO plugin also adds an SEO meta box in your post edit area. For maximum SEO benefits, we highly recommend you to manually enter title and descriptions for each post, page, and custom post type on your site. Otherwise Yoast SEO will use the title as defined here and will automatically add description for your posts and pages.

Read our WordPress SEO Tip for Beginners on optimizing blog posts.

4. Taxonomies

On the taxonomies tab, you can configure titles and meta for categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and post format archives.

Default template variables should work for most sites. As for descriptions, please remember that Yoast SEO picks up descriptions from your categories and tags.

If you do not have any description for terms in your categories, tags, or custom taxonomies, then WordPress SEO does not add meta description in archives for these terms. Check out our guide on categories vs. tags.

5. Archives

On the Archives tab, you have title and meta settings for author and date archive pages, and special pages such as search and 404 pages.

We recommended that you check disable author archives for single author blogs. If you are running a single author blog, then your main blog and the author archives contain exactly the same content. The setting is there to prevent duplicate content.

Leave other settings as they are and save changes.

6. Other

The other tab has some additional settings. Like you can disable picking up descriptions from Dmoz or Yahoo directories for your pages. If you are unsure what to do here, just leave all of them unchecked

Step 8. Social

As we said earlier, Yoast SEO is a powerhouse packed with many features to provide comprehensive optimization.

One great feature of the plugin is that it integrates your site with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ social platforms.

Clicking on the Social link under the SEO menu will take you to setup these platforms. We will show you how to configure each of them.

1. Accounts

The first tab under the social settings is for all your social accounts. This allows Yoast SEO to tell Google about your social profiles. You need to simply add the URLs and Twitter username for the main social profiles of your site.

2. Facebook

On the Facebook tab, first make sure that open graph meta data option is enabled. Checking this allows WordPress SEO to add Facebook open graph meta data in your website’s <head> section.

This will help Facebook pick up the right thumbnail and page information when a post from your website is shared on Facebook.

The next option is to provide a thumbnail for your homepage with SEO title and description. This image and description will be used when someone shares the homepage of your site on Facebook.

After that you can provide a default thumbnail image URL. This image will be used for all articles that do not have a thumbnail or any other image in it.

The next option is to associate your website with a Facebook profile. This profile can be a user profile as well as a Facebook app. In most cases, Facebook profile is the way to go.

You can add a Facebook admin which will give you access to Facebook Insights for your site.

3. Twitter

As for Twitter, you can add Twitter cards into your site’s head section.

You can also choose the card type to use. We recommend using summary with large image.

4. Pinterest

Pinterest uses Open Graph meta data just like Facebook. Make sure that you have open graph meta data box checked under Facebook settings.

After that you just need to enter the site verification code provided by Pinterest. Simply visit your Pinterest account settings to add and verify your site. You will be provided with a meta tag that you need to enter here.

5. Google+

If you have created a Google+ page for your business enter its URL here, and then go to your Google+ business page and enter your website’s URL in about section.

Step 9. XML Sitemaps

Sitemaps are essential for your WordPress site. It is the quickest and easiest way to get indexed and notify search engines about your content. Sitemaps also allow you to tell search engines how to prioritize your content.

WordPress SEO by Yoast makes it super easy to add XML sitemaps in WordPress. The XML Sitemaps settings is divided into different tabs. We will walk you through them.

First you need to make sure that XML Sitemaps are enabled.

After that you need to click on the ‘User Sitemap’ tab and make sure that author/user sitemap options is disabled.

Move on to post type tab and disable any post type that you don’t want to be included into sitemaps.

By default, Yoast SEO disables Media Attachments from sitemaps.

Repeat the same process for taxonomies. If there is a taxonomy that you don’t want to be included into sitemaps, then you can exclude it here.

The excluded posts tab allows you to remove individual posts,pages, or custom post types from XML sitemap. Simply enter the post IDs in the field and save changes.

See our tutorial on how to find post IDs in WordPress.

Step 10. Advanced

The advanced settings page allows you to configure breadcrumbs, permalinks, and RSS feed related settings.

1. Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are great for internal linking because it defines a clean path or trail to the page you are on. These breadcrumbs also appear in search results giving your site extra advantage in the search.

Make sure that you click on ‘Enabled’, this will reveal more breadcrumb settings.

The default settings should work for most websites, but if you want to change something then go ahead. Once you are done click on the save changes button.

2. Permalinks

Just to be clear, we are talking about the Permalink settings in Yoast SEO tab, not in the setting tabs.

This section does not allow you to create SEO Friendly URLs in WordPress. It assumes, that you have already done that.

So let’s take a look at what type of features this section offers:

WordPress by default adds a category base in each category url i.e /category/.

By clicking ‘Remove’ you can strip that part from your category URLs. This is something that a lot of people want. But you can leave it unchecked if you do not want your category urls and page urls to conflict if they are the same name.

Next option is to redirect attachment URLs to parent post. WordPress allows you to attach images and other media to posts. But all of those attachments get their own URLs which in most cases are unnecessary. Therefore by checking this box, you redirect all your attachment page URL to the original post URL.

The next option is to remove stop words from permalinks. Stop words are common words used in plain language. Yoast believes that by removing these, you will create cleaner URLs. While it does make the URLs smaller, we disagree with Yoast. This is why we have left it unchecked.

The next option on the permalinks page is to remove ?replytocom variable from comment reply links. It disables the links for the users with javascript disabled.

Most web crawlers when they visit your site have javascript disabled, so they do not see the URL and can quickly move on. This increases the crawl efficiency particularly if you are running a site with lots of comments.

Redirect ugly URLs to clean permalinks option is not needed in most cases. We advise you to ignore it unless you know what you’re doing.

3. RSS

RSS Feeds are often used by content scrapers to copy content from your website. Yoast SEO allows you to add a backlink to your own site for each post in your RSS feed.

This way, you will get backlinks from their site, and Google will know that you are the original source.

There are options to add your author link, Post link, blog link, and blog description. So get creative. This can also be used to add advertisement to your RSS feed.

For advanced users: How to Add Custom Content and Completely Manipulate your RSS Feeds.

Step 11. Tools

As you can see that we have spent a good amount of time getting these settings just right, so you probably want to export the settings as Backup (just incase if you accidentally mess things up in the future). You can also export settings to use it as an initial guideline for all of your future sites that you are going to use this plugin on.

The bulk editor allows you to edit post titles and descriptions in bulk. We do not recommend using it. Duplicate descriptions and titles can cause damage to your SEO.

The other tool is file editor, we strongly urge beginners and even intermediate level users to stay away from these settings. Tiny mistake there can make your site inaccessible for search engines or make it useless.

Step 12. Search Console

Search Console section in the Yoast SEO plugin, allows you to connect your WordPress site to Google Search Console tools (formerly webmaster tools).

You can add your WordPress site to Google webmaster tools and then verify it using Yoast SEO plugin.

Simply click on get Google Authorization Code and you will be redirected to Search Console website where you will get a code. Copy this code and enter it in the plugin settings to complete the verification.

After the verification, you will be asked to select a profile. You will need to select your website from a dropdown menu.

Yoast SEO will now fetch your Search Console data into WordPress. You will be able to see Desktop, Mobile, Feature Phone tabs on screen.

This is where you can see crawl errors related to your website and mark them as fixed after setting up redirects (we will discuss redirects later in this article).

Yoast SEO Premium

The basic Yoast SEO plugin is free and works really well for millions of WordPress sites around the world. However, it comes with an even more powerful Premium version.

Step 13: Redirects

Yoast SEO Premium adds a powerful redirect manager. This allows you to quickly set up redirects on your WordPress site. You can quickly fix 404 errors in your Google search console by setting up redirects and marking them as fixed in Search Console.

Step 14: Customizing and Maximizing the Benefit

Just installing and setting up this plugin is not enough. In order for you to really maximize the benefit of this plugin, you need to customize the settings on per post basis.

Now this would not be a chore if you do it every time you write a post. Let’s take a look at how you can maximize the benefits by customizing.

WordPress SEO for Individual Posts and Pages

When editing any post or page in WordPress you will now see a metabox below the post editor labeled Yoast SEO. This box comes with tons of SEO options allowing you to improve that post and page.

You can click on the title in the snippet preview to edit it. You can also click on the edit snippet button to add title and meta description for the post or page you are editing,

You should write a custom title, and meta description rather than letting it auto-generate.

Sometimes your post title, and your SEO title might not be the same. Every time, you should write a custom Meta Description because the excerpt generator only picks up the first paragraph which might not be the most important one.

Make sure you select a focus keyword, so you can get analysis on how strong your page is for that keyword. For more details check out WordPress SEO tip for beginners – how to optimize your WordPress blog posts.

Once you click Save the post you will see analysis of the post below snippet preview. This gives you even further insights about your specific post or page.

Use the free analysis as a reference point. Don’t kill yourself over it, but usually it is pretty accurate.

WordPress SEO for Category and Tag Archives

Just like your post and pages, you can also override the SEO title and meta descriptions for category, tag, and author archive pages.

Visit Posts » Categories page and click on the edit link below any category. On the category edit page, scroll down to bottom and you will see the Yoast SEO meta box.

[andreacaskey]

Google to treat nofollow link attribute as a ‘hint’

Google has announced Tuesday that today the nofollow link attribute (i.e. rel=”nofollow“) will be seen as a “hint” rather than as a directive for ranking purposes. In addition, Google is adding two additional link attributes, in addition to the rel=”nofollow” to provide a bit more context about the content you’re linking to.

Until this change, any link with the rel=”nofollow” attribute added to it would not be counted at all by Google for use in its search algorithms. Google said it is now time for link attributes to “evolve”. New attributes for sponsored content and user-generated content (UGC) are joining nofollow, and the three will function in the following ways:

rel=“sponsored“: The new sponsored attribute can be used to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.

rel=”ugc“: The ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts.

rel=”nofollow“: The nofollow attribute is for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page, Google said.

Today vs March 2020: Today Google will treat the nofollow attribute as a hint for ranking purposes. Meaning Google might count a link as credit, consider it as part of spam analysis or for other ranking purposes.

On March 2, 2020, Google will use it also for crawling and indexing. That means will Google use it as a “hint” as to what should be indexed or crawled but it is better to use robots.txt or meta tags for that purpose anyway.

History. Google launched the nofollow link attribute in 2005 as a way to fight comment spam. It then expanded it to be used as a way of “flagging advertising-related or sponsored links” that might get you in trouble with link schemes.

Hint vs. ignore. Google said each of these methods will be considered “hints” about how to treat the links rather than an instruction to ignore the links. The company said it is making the change because it can now collect data on the individual links, including the words within anchor text, and evaluate links in aggregate to better identify link schemes while still considering the link attribute signals.

“Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at,” Google said. “Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns. By shifting to a hint model, we no longer lose this important information, while still allowing site owners to indicate that some links shouldn’t be given the weight of a first-party endorsement.”

Will the search results change? Google told us that it does not expect significant changes to the search results as of a result to this. However, Google is now able to begin looking at how to use this data in its search ranking systems and changing to the hint treatment will give Google more flexibility in how it treats links with these attributes in search.

“All the link attributes — sponsored, UGC and nofollow — are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search,” said Google.

No change needed. There is no need to change your nofollow links today, the company said. You can leave nofollow attributes in your UGC or sponsored links. “There’s absolutely no need to change any nofollow links that you already have,” however Google added, for sponsored content it “recommend[s] switching over to rel=”sponsored” if or when it is convenient.”

Multiple link attributes supported. You can use a combination of one or more of these attributes in a single link tag. You can tag a single link with rel=”ugc sponsored” or rel=”nofollow ugc”. The first would hint to Google that the link came from user-generated content and is sponsored.

Result in more comment spam? Google said no, this should not result in more comment spam. Google wrote, “Many sites that allow third-parties to contribute to content already deter link spam in a variety of ways, including moderation tools that can be integrated into many blogging platforms and human review. The link attributes of “ugc” and “nofollow” will continue to be a further deterrent. In most cases, the move to a hint model won’t change the nature of how we treat such links. We’ll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes. We will still continue to carefully assess how to use links within Search, just as we always have and as we’ve had to do for situations where no attributions were provided.”

Why we care. Google told us there should be no significant impact to the search results as a result of the change. If Google starts counting nofollowed links on large and respected sites that simply implemented a nofollow link policy as a blanket rule and now Google counts those links, you might see those links start counting for sites; if and when Google decides to change how it respects the nofollow attribute. For example, all external links on Wikipedia are nofollowed, if those links start counting, and you have a lot of links from Wikipedia, you might see your rankings improve.

At the same time, you can bet this will result in more work for your SEO agency. You will now need to adapt your client recommendations on what link attributes you should apply to specific links, based on the criteria above. Plus, the toolset providers that measure links will need to adapt as well.

The nofollow link attribute has been a staple of the SEO industry for almost 15 years and now it is changing for the first time, in a big way.

The post Google to treat nofollow link attribute as a ‘hint’ appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google to treat nofollow link attribute as a ‘hint’ published first on https://likesandfollowersclub.weebly.com/

[seopowerzone]

Which is Better for SEO: Meta Robots Tags vs. Robots.txt?

Which is Better for SEO: Meta Robots Tags vs. Robots.txt?

[ad_1]

Robots meta tags, or meta tags, are pieces of code that provide instructions to search engines for how to crawl or index web pages and content. There are three types of robots meta directives:

Robots.txt: Use robots.txt if crawling of your content is causing issues on your server. Don’t use robots.txt to block private content.

Robots meta tags:Use robots meta tags if you need to control…

[connecticut-seo-adwords]

SEO-Friendly Design: Why Your Web Dev Project Needs a Search Agency

Seo (SEO) can be an afterthought when producing or upgrading a new site. Take a look at it in this manner: Having a strong structure is essential to building a house, and having a strong SEO friendly site style is a similar example ... so, why is SEO frequently a lower priority?It might be that

there's so much going on in the website development process that SEO ends up being, "We'll get to it later." Or, it may be that your web development company just does not specialize in SEO, even if they state they do. With the continuous evolvement of the search and digital landscape, you need a company that's knees deep in SEO best practices to guarantee your website launch is successful.Is Your New Site SEO Friendly?One of the very first deliverables we recommend to

new customers is an< a href =http://www.verticalmeasures.com/services/search-engine-optimization/onsite-seo-audit/ target=_ blank > Onsite SEO Audit. We begin with an audit due to the fact that even the most stunning website or well-optimized material isn't really going to be found by Google if your total website isn't SEO friendly. If SEO is considered throughout the initial site advancement stage, you can avoid SEO problems down the road.According to Moz, these prevail however quickly avoidable, SEO errors you can find when web advancement firms own the website: Site discovery and design stages: Keyword research study: You desire your site to rank for the keywords your consumers are searching for. Even if you

're not constructing a new site from scratch, we recommend digginginto analytics to guarantee you're targeting the correct keywords for your business, and identify terms that might assist you gather more conversions and leads.Information architecture: When keyword research is performed, those insights can be used to

layout the material on your website, and the relationships in between that content. This is typically a partnership between SEO, user experience(UX )and strategy.Website wireframe and design evaluation: It is necessary that your website wireframes are evaluated by an SEO strategist. An SEO strategist will look at the general website design for things like," Does the page have enough material?"Or, "Is the page full of excessive material?"as

can be the case with the parallax, scrolling web pages. Style review isn't really always needed if the wireframes inform enough of the website story.Website material stage: Material optimization: Keyword research can assist form the target keywords for a page, however we likewise recommend that an SEO strategist further enhances it and adds metadata so that your material gets found.Image optimization: Your images also require to be enhanced. The file size shouldn't be too big. Your images ought to have a descriptive file name

and in plain English, and consist of an alt tag.Rich snippets

or schema recommendations: While an SEO strategist is evaluating your content, they can make suggestions for rich snippets or schema. This kind of structured information enables you to add code to your material so that search

engines can quickly identify what type of content it is.Website development stage: Analytics and online search engine tools: To track efficiency after your site goes live, analytics and search engine tools have to be established, and code

has to be implemented on your site. We suggest Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Web Master Tools, and Shouting Frog, however your company may have other tools as well.Keyword map: You'll wish to appoint(or" map" )target keywords to particular pages on your website. This ought to be a living, breathing document, and can help determine

content spaces and ideate tasks for the future.Website crawl:

After all the material on your website is executed, we suggest crawling your site to determine any missing meta titles, descriptions and broken links. If you do this, you can repair the problems prior to your website is live.301 reroutes: If you have an existing site, it's important that you set up 301 redirects. These redirects will map every page of your existing site to a

page on your brand-new website. It's not just essential for search engines, but UX. There's nothing even worse than the excitement to check out a short article just to encounter a"Page Not Found"error.Site efficiency: Because page load time can impact user experience, and eventually conversion and leads, you'll wish to evaluate your desktop and mobile speed performance. Google has a totally free tool that allows you to easily carry out tests, but there are other tools out there too.txt file: You'll desire a robots.txt file to be developed and implemented. This file permits you to give instructions to web robotics, such as prohibiting pages that should not be crawled.XML sitemap: Your XML sitemap is a sign to online search engine that the pages included in your sitemap are of excellent quality and ought to be indexed. It's crucial that you produce and implement a sitemap on your new website.Measurement: If your present site has analytics, you need to pull a measurement report for the

past 2 years. Thiswill enable you to develop a standard information for when the brand-new site goes live. You'll likewise wish to run a keyword ranking report to develop your baseline.Post-launch stage: Hooray, all the months of work have paid off, and your new SEO-friendly site has actually launched! There are several items you'll wish to review

post-launch. These consist of: Ensuring the XML sitemap and robots.txt files are implemented.Verifying your 301 redirects.Performing an everyday check of the index for the very first couple of weeks to see how much of your website has been crawled vs. indexed and monitor the shift of URLs in the search engine.Crawling SEO information to assist catch any 404-dead links, numerous redirects or loops, and other problems before they become major problems.Monitoring analytics to compare data one week after launch to the information previously pulled.Measuring keyword rankings to compare to your standard keyword rankings report.Are you in over

your head?If you remain in the midst of your site development project, don't worry! You can employ a firm, such as ours, that< a href =http://www.verticalmeasures.com/services/search-engine-optimization/ target =_ blank > concentrates on SEO to do an audit of your site prior to

it goes live to make sure

any concerns are caught prior to the huge launch day. There are many crucial inputs that go into your new website style; ensure SEO is among them.

Source

http://www.verticalmeasures.com/search-optimization/why-your-web-development-project-needs-an-seo-agency/

[lxryrestate28349]

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.

In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.

Here are the tags the extension will review:

Google Analytics (ga.js)

Google Analytics (dc.js)

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords Remarketing (legacy)

AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)

Doubleclick Floodlight

Google Tag Manager

How It Works

Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.

Green tags – everything is good. No problems.

Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.

Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.

Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.

Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.

Level of Detail

Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.

Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.

Recordings

Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.

Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.

Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.

All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).

Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.

To record:

go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.

Refresh your page.

Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.

Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.

Click Full Report.

This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!

Builtwith

The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).

How It Works

When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:

Analytics

CMS

Web Server

Framework

Advertising

Analytics and Tracking

JavaScript Libraries & Functions

Mobile

Content Delivery Networks

Etc., etc., etc.

Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.

It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.

This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.

Moz Toolbar

The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.

How It Works

The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:

Custom Searches

Link Metrics

Page Overlay

On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)

Social Metrics

Data Export (CSV)

If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.

Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.

Page and Domain Authority

Links to and from that page

Is there schema on the page?

Is the page redirecting properly?

Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?

Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?

Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?

What’s the page load time?

I could go on forever…

It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?

Redirect Path

If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.

How It Works

You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.

How/When I Use It

I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.

It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.

Web Developer Checklist

You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!

How It Works

When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.

How/When I Use It

I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.

Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.

TableCapture

TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.

How It Works

While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.

Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).

Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.

FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.

How/When I Use It

I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.

When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.

Ghostery

The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.

How It Works

When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.

How/When I Use It

While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.

First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.

Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.

Page Load Time

Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.

How It Works

It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.

How/When I Use It

Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.

Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.

Character Count

Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.

How It Works

All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.

How/When I Use It

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.

If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.

I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?

You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.

How It Works

The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.

You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.

Supported websites:

Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox

Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page

Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages

Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget

Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column

Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches

YouTube – data shown under the searchbox

Amazon – data shown under the searchbox

eBay – data shown under the searchbox

Etsy – data shown under the searchbox

UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings

Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page

KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords

Majestic – Anchor Text Report

Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report

How/When I Use It

After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.

All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.

It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.

Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.

It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.

Bonus Extensions

These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.

MockFlow

If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.

Color Zilla

http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3

[ramonlindsay050]

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.

In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.

Here are the tags the extension will review:

Google Analytics (ga.js)

Google Analytics (dc.js)

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords Remarketing (legacy)

AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)

Doubleclick Floodlight

Google Tag Manager

How It Works

Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.

Green tags – everything is good. No problems.

Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.

Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.

Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.

Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.

Level of Detail

Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.

Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.

Recordings

Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.

Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.

Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.

All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).

Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.

To record:

go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.

Refresh your page.

Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.

Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.

Click Full Report.

This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!

Builtwith

The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).

How It Works

When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:

Analytics

CMS

Web Server

Framework

Advertising

Analytics and Tracking

JavaScript Libraries & Functions

Mobile

Content Delivery Networks

Etc., etc., etc.

Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.

It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.

This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.

Moz Toolbar

The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.

How It Works

The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:

Custom Searches

Link Metrics

Page Overlay

On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)

Social Metrics

Data Export (CSV)

If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.

Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.

Page and Domain Authority

Links to and from that page

Is there schema on the page?

Is the page redirecting properly?

Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?

Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?

Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?

What’s the page load time?

I could go on forever…

It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?

Redirect Path

If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.

How It Works

You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.

How/When I Use It

I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.

It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.

Web Developer Checklist

You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!

How It Works

When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.

How/When I Use It

I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.

Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.

TableCapture

TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.

How It Works

While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.

Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).

Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.

FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.

How/When I Use It

I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.

When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.

Ghostery

The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.

How It Works

When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.

How/When I Use It

While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.

First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.

Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.

Page Load Time

Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.

How It Works

It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.

How/When I Use It

Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.

Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.

Character Count

Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.

How It Works

All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.

How/When I Use It

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.

If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.

I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?

You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.

How It Works

The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.

You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.

Supported websites:

Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox

Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page

Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages

Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget

Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column

Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches

YouTube – data shown under the searchbox

Amazon – data shown under the searchbox

eBay – data shown under the searchbox

Etsy – data shown under the searchbox

UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings

Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page

KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords

Majestic – Anchor Text Report

Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report

How/When I Use It

After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.

All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.

It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.

Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.

It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.

Bonus Extensions

These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.

MockFlow

If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.

Color Zilla

http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3

[repumktg61602]

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.

In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.

Here are the tags the extension will review:

Google Analytics (ga.js)

Google Analytics (dc.js)

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords Remarketing (legacy)

AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)

Doubleclick Floodlight

Google Tag Manager

How It Works

Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.

Green tags – everything is good. No problems.

Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.

Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.

Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.

Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.

Level of Detail

Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.

Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.

Recordings

Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.

Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.

Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.

All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).

Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.

To record:

go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.

Refresh your page.

Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.

Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.

Click Full Report.

This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!

Builtwith

The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).

How It Works

When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:

Analytics

CMS

Web Server

Framework

Advertising

Analytics and Tracking

JavaScript Libraries & Functions

Mobile

Content Delivery Networks

Etc., etc., etc.

Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.

It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.

This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.

Moz Toolbar

The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.

How It Works

The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:

Custom Searches

Link Metrics

Page Overlay

On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)

Social Metrics

Data Export (CSV)

If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.

Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.

Page and Domain Authority

Links to and from that page

Is there schema on the page?

Is the page redirecting properly?

Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?

Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?

Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?

What’s the page load time?

I could go on forever…

It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?

Redirect Path

If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.

How It Works

You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.

How/When I Use It

I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.

It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.

Web Developer Checklist

You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!

How It Works

When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.

How/When I Use It

I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.

Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.

TableCapture

TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.

How It Works

While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.

Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).

Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.

FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.

How/When I Use It

I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.

When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.

Ghostery

The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.

How It Works

When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.

How/When I Use It

While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.

First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.

Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.

Page Load Time

Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.

How It Works

It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.

How/When I Use It

Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.

Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.

Character Count

Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.

How It Works

All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.

How/When I Use It

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.

If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.

I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?

You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.

How It Works

The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.

You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.

Supported websites:

Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox

Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page

Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages

Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget

Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column

Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches

YouTube – data shown under the searchbox

Amazon – data shown under the searchbox

eBay – data shown under the searchbox

Etsy – data shown under the searchbox

UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings

Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page

KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords

Majestic – Anchor Text Report

Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report

How/When I Use It

After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.

All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.

It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.

Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.

It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.

Bonus Extensions

These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.

MockFlow

If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.

Color Zilla

http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3

[inetmrktng75247]

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.

In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.

Here are the tags the extension will review:

Google Analytics (ga.js)

Google Analytics (dc.js)

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords Remarketing (legacy)

AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)

Doubleclick Floodlight

Google Tag Manager

How It Works

Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.

Green tags – everything is good. No problems.

Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.

Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.

Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.

Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.

Level of Detail

Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.

Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.

Recordings

Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.

Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.

Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.

All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).

Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.

To record:

go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.

Refresh your page.

Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.

Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.

Click Full Report.

This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!

Builtwith

The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).

How It Works

When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:

Analytics

CMS

Web Server

Framework

Advertising

Analytics and Tracking

JavaScript Libraries & Functions

Mobile

Content Delivery Networks

Etc., etc., etc.

Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.

It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.

This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.

Moz Toolbar

The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.

How It Works

The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:

Custom Searches

Link Metrics

Page Overlay

On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)

Social Metrics

Data Export (CSV)

If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.

Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.

Page and Domain Authority

Links to and from that page

Is there schema on the page?

Is the page redirecting properly?

Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?

Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?

Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?

What’s the page load time?

I could go on forever…

It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?

Redirect Path

If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.

How It Works

You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.

How/When I Use It

I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.

It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.

Web Developer Checklist

You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!

How It Works

When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.

How/When I Use It

I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.

Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.

TableCapture

TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.

How It Works

While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.

Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).

Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.

FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.

How/When I Use It

I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.

When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.

Ghostery

The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.

How It Works

When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.

How/When I Use It

While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.

First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.

Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.

Page Load Time

Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.

How It Works

It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.

How/When I Use It

Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.

Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.

Character Count

Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.

How It Works

All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.

How/When I Use It

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.

If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.

I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?

You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.

How It Works

The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.

You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.

Supported websites:

Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox

Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page

Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages

Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget

Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column

Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches

YouTube – data shown under the searchbox

Amazon – data shown under the searchbox

eBay – data shown under the searchbox

Etsy – data shown under the searchbox

UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings

Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page

KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords

Majestic – Anchor Text Report

Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report

How/When I Use It

After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.

All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.

It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.

Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.

It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.

Bonus Extensions

These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.

MockFlow

If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.

Color Zilla

http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3

[repmrkting17042]

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.

In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.

Here are the tags the extension will review:

Google Analytics (ga.js)

Google Analytics (dc.js)

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords Remarketing (legacy)

AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)

Doubleclick Floodlight

Google Tag Manager

How It Works

Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.

Green tags – everything is good. No problems.

Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.

Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.

Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.

Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.

Level of Detail

Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.

Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.

Recordings

Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.

Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.

Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.

All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).

Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.

To record:

go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.

Refresh your page.

Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.

Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.

Click Full Report.

This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!

Builtwith

The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).

How It Works

When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:

Analytics

CMS

Web Server

Framework

Advertising

Analytics and Tracking

JavaScript Libraries & Functions

Mobile

Content Delivery Networks

Etc., etc., etc.

Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.

It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.

This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.

Moz Toolbar

The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.

How It Works

The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:

Custom Searches

Link Metrics

Page Overlay

On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)

Social Metrics

Data Export (CSV)

If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.

Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.

Page and Domain Authority

Links to and from that page

Is there schema on the page?

Is the page redirecting properly?

Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?

Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?

Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?

What’s the page load time?

I could go on forever…

It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?

Redirect Path

If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.

How It Works

You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.

How/When I Use It

I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.

It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.

Web Developer Checklist

You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!

How It Works

When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.

How/When I Use It

I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.

Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.

TableCapture

TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.

How It Works

While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.

Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).

Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.

FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.

How/When I Use It

I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.

When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.

Ghostery

The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.

How It Works

When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.

How/When I Use It

While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.

First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.

Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.

Page Load Time

Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.

How It Works

It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.

How/When I Use It

Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.

Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.

Character Count

Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.

How It Works

All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.

How/When I Use It

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.

If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.

I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?

You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.

How It Works

The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.

You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.

Supported websites:

Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox

Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page

Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages

Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget

Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column

Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches

YouTube – data shown under the searchbox

Amazon – data shown under the searchbox

eBay – data shown under the searchbox

Etsy – data shown under the searchbox

UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings

Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page

KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords

Majestic – Anchor Text Report

Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report

How/When I Use It

After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.

All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.

It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.

Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.

It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.

Bonus Extensions

These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.

MockFlow

If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.

Color Zilla

http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3

[constructionsworkr3053]

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.

In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.

Here are the tags the extension will review:

Google Analytics (ga.js)

Google Analytics (dc.js)

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords Remarketing (legacy)

AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)

Doubleclick Floodlight

Google Tag Manager

How It Works

Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.

Green tags – everything is good. No problems.

Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.

Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.

Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.

Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.

Level of Detail

Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.

Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.

Recordings

Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.

Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.

Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.

All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).

Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.

To record:

go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.

Refresh your page.

Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.

Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.

Click Full Report.

This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!

Builtwith

The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).

How It Works

When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:

Analytics

CMS

Web Server

Framework

Advertising

Analytics and Tracking

JavaScript Libraries & Functions

Mobile

Content Delivery Networks

Etc., etc., etc.

Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.

It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.

This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.

Moz Toolbar

The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.

How It Works

The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:

Custom Searches

Link Metrics

Page Overlay

On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)

Social Metrics

Data Export (CSV)

If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.

Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.

Page and Domain Authority

Links to and from that page

Is there schema on the page?

Is the page redirecting properly?

Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?

Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?

Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?

What’s the page load time?

I could go on forever…

It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?

Redirect Path

If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.

How It Works

You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.

How/When I Use It

I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.

It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.

Web Developer Checklist

You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!

How It Works

When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.

How/When I Use It

I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.

Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.

TableCapture

TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.

How It Works

While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.

Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).

Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.

FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.

How/When I Use It

I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.

When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.

Ghostery

The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.

How It Works

When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.

How/When I Use It

While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.

First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.

Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.

Page Load Time

Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.

How It Works

It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.

How/When I Use It

Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.

Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.

Character Count

Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.

How It Works

All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.

How/When I Use It

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.

If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.

I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?

You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.

How It Works

The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.

You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.

Supported websites:

Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox

Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page

Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages

Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget

Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column

Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches

YouTube – data shown under the searchbox

Amazon – data shown under the searchbox

eBay – data shown under the searchbox

Etsy – data shown under the searchbox

UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings

Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page

KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords

Majestic – Anchor Text Report

Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report

How/When I Use It

After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.

All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.

It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.

Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.

It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.

Bonus Extensions

These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.

MockFlow

If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.

Color Zilla

http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3

[realestate63141]

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.

In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.

Here are the tags the extension will review:

Google Analytics (ga.js)

Google Analytics (dc.js)

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords Remarketing (legacy)

AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)

Doubleclick Floodlight

Google Tag Manager

How It Works

Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.

Green tags – everything is good. No problems.

Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.

Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.

Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.

Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.

Level of Detail

Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.

Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.

Recordings

Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.

Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.

Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.

All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).

Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.

To record:

go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.

Refresh your page.

Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.

Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.

Click Full Report.

This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!

Builtwith

The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).

How It Works

When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:

Analytics

CMS

Web Server

Framework

Advertising

Analytics and Tracking

JavaScript Libraries & Functions

Mobile

Content Delivery Networks

Etc., etc., etc.

Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.

It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.

This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.

Moz Toolbar

The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.

How It Works

The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:

Custom Searches

Link Metrics

Page Overlay

On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)

Social Metrics

Data Export (CSV)

If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.

Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.

Page and Domain Authority

Links to and from that page

Is there schema on the page?

Is the page redirecting properly?

Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?

Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?

Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?

What’s the page load time?

I could go on forever…

It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?

Redirect Path

If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.

How It Works

You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.

How/When I Use It

I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.

It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.

Web Developer Checklist

You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!

How It Works

When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.

How/When I Use It

I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.

Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.

TableCapture

TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.

How It Works

While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.

Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).

Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.

FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.

How/When I Use It

I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.

When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.

Ghostery

The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.

How It Works

When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.

How/When I Use It

While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.

First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.

Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.

Page Load Time

Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.

How It Works

It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.

How/When I Use It

Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.

Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.

Character Count

Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.

How It Works

All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.

How/When I Use It

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.

If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.

I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?

You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.

How It Works

The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.

You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.

Supported websites:

Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox

Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page

Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages

Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget

Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column

Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches

YouTube – data shown under the searchbox

Amazon – data shown under the searchbox

eBay – data shown under the searchbox

Etsy – data shown under the searchbox

UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings

Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page

KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords

Majestic – Anchor Text Report

Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report

How/When I Use It

After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.

All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.

It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.

Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.

It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.

Bonus Extensions

These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.

MockFlow

If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.

Color Zilla

http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3

[mortlend40507]

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.

In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.

Here are the tags the extension will review:

Google Analytics (ga.js)

Google Analytics (dc.js)

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords Remarketing (legacy)

AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)

Doubleclick Floodlight

Google Tag Manager

How It Works

Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.

Green tags – everything is good. No problems.

Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.

Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.

Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.

Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.

Level of Detail

Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.

Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.

Recordings

Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.

Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.

Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.

All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).

Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.

To record:

go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.

Refresh your page.

Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.

Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.

Click Full Report.

This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!

Builtwith

The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).

How It Works

When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:

Analytics

CMS

Web Server

Framework

Advertising

Analytics and Tracking

JavaScript Libraries & Functions

Mobile

Content Delivery Networks

Etc., etc., etc.

Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.

It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.

This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.

Moz Toolbar

The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.

How It Works

The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:

Custom Searches

Link Metrics

Page Overlay

On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)

Social Metrics

Data Export (CSV)

If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.

Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.

Page and Domain Authority

Links to and from that page

Is there schema on the page?

Is the page redirecting properly?

Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?

Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?

Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?

What’s the page load time?

I could go on forever…

It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?

Redirect Path

If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.

How It Works

You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.

How/When I Use It

I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.

It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.

Web Developer Checklist

You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!

How It Works

When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.

How/When I Use It

I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.

Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.

TableCapture

TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.

How It Works

While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.

Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).

Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.

FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.

How/When I Use It

I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.

When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.

Ghostery

The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.

How It Works

When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.

How/When I Use It

While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.

First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.

Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.

Page Load Time

Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.

How It Works

It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.

How/When I Use It

Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.

Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.

Character Count

Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.

How It Works

All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.

How/When I Use It

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.

If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.

I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?

You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.

How It Works

The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.

You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.

Supported websites:

Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox

Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page

Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages

Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget

Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column

Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches

YouTube – data shown under the searchbox

Amazon – data shown under the searchbox

eBay – data shown under the searchbox

Etsy – data shown under the searchbox

UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings

Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page

KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords

Majestic – Anchor Text Report

Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report

How/When I Use It

After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.

All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.

It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.

Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.

It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.

Bonus Extensions

These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.

MockFlow

If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.

Color Zilla

http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3

[restatebrk24219]

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.

In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.

Here are the tags the extension will review:

Google Analytics (ga.js)

Google Analytics (dc.js)

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords Remarketing (legacy)

AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)

Doubleclick Floodlight

Google Tag Manager

How It Works

Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.

Green tags – everything is good. No problems.

Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.

Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.

Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.

Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.

Level of Detail

Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.

Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.

Recordings

Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.

Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.

Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.

All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).

Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.

To record:

go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.

Refresh your page.

Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.

Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.

Click Full Report.

This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!

Builtwith

The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).

How It Works

When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:

Analytics

CMS

Web Server

Framework

Advertising

Analytics and Tracking

JavaScript Libraries & Functions

Mobile

Content Delivery Networks

Etc., etc., etc.

Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.

It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.

This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.

Moz Toolbar

The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.

How It Works

The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:

Custom Searches

Link Metrics

Page Overlay

On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)

Social Metrics

Data Export (CSV)

If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.

Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.

Page and Domain Authority

Links to and from that page

Is there schema on the page?

Is the page redirecting properly?

Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?

Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?

Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?

What’s the page load time?

I could go on forever…

It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?

Redirect Path

If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.

How It Works

You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.

How/When I Use It

I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.

It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.

Web Developer Checklist

You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!

How It Works

When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.

How/When I Use It

I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.

Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.

TableCapture

TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.

How It Works

While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.

Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).

Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.

FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.

How/When I Use It

I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.

When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.

Ghostery

The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.

How It Works

When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.

How/When I Use It

While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.

First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.

Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.

Page Load Time

Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.

How It Works

It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.

How/When I Use It

Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.

Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.

Character Count

Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.

How It Works

All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.

How/When I Use It

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.

If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.

I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?

You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.

How It Works

The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.

You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.

Supported websites:

Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox

Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page

Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages

Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget

Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column

Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches

YouTube – data shown under the searchbox

Amazon – data shown under the searchbox

eBay – data shown under the searchbox

Etsy – data shown under the searchbox

UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings

Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page

KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords

Majestic – Anchor Text Report

Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report

How/When I Use It

After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.

All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.

It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.

Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.

It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.

Bonus Extensions

These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.

MockFlow

If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.

Color Zilla

http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3

[seo75074]

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

The Best Chrome Extensions for SEOs and AdWords Professionals

Working in Search Engine Optimization or Digital Advertising forces you to accomplish tasks quickly. Either everything is an emergency or you just need to find a way to be more efficient because there’s so much to accomplish.

In my experience, Chrome extensions have been one of the easiest ways to take care of those problems so I can get work done faster. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite extensions to help you do the same. Even more, I’ve expanded this blog to include specific scenarios where these tools will make you faster and more productive!

Google Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant is a great tool. It helps webmasters verify that their Google tags are installed and working properly. Sure, you can dig into your code and find that, but this extension makes it so much easier.

Here are the tags the extension will review:

Google Analytics (ga.js)

Google Analytics (dc.js)

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords Remarketing (legacy)

AdWords Remarketing (new remarketing tag)

Doubleclick Floodlight

Google Tag Manager

How It Works

Go to the page you want to check and click on the extension. That will open a dropdown menu which shows you all of the tags installed on that page and if there’s something to worrying about.

Green tags – everything is good. No problems.

Gray tags – there’s no tag found on the page.

Blue tags – there are suggestions for improvement.

Yellow tags – there were minor problems with tag code implementation.

Red tags – there were critical implementation issues.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool in a variety of instances, but the first is tag checking. When I’m conducting an SEO or AdWords audit, one of the things I look for is accuracy of information. If I need to rely on GA or AdWords data, I need to make sure all of the tags are working properly and collecting the information the team needs to analyze properly.

Level of Detail

Tip: When you click on the icon, you can see more details about each problem. If you want more detail than the Tag Assistant gives you by default, you can right click on the chrome extension in your browser and click Options. Then you can choose how much information you want to see when there’s a problem.

Now, when you dig into the issues, you’ll get more detail than you would’ve if you left it on default.

Recordings

Another cool feature is recordings. But before we start on that, we need to fix two settings.

Follow Links Across Tabs – right click on the extension and go to Options. Right under Global Options, check the box for Recording: Follow Links Across Tabs.

Validation and Debug – Open the Chrome Extension and click on the 3-dot menu to the right side. Turn on Auto Validation and GA Debug.

All of the above allows you to automatically analyze tags across tabs and pull information from the debugger (which we need for detailed information).

Now, when there’s a problem with one of your tags, you can open up tag assistant and see what the problem is in detail.

To record:

go to the extension and click Record, but make sure your on a page that begins the flow of pages to your site.

Refresh your page.

Navigate through an important flow of pages on your site and click some buttons like add to card to record those actions.

Go to Google Tag Assistant again to click Stop.

Click Full Report.

This shows you if anything is wrong and what the problem is within that flow of pages/actions. Pretty neat stuff!

Builtwith

The Builtwith chrome extension does exactly what the name says. It profiles the website and tells you what technology the site is built with. I’m not just talking about the CMS (although that is part of it).

How It Works

When you open the extension, you can see all of this stuff and more:

Analytics

CMS

Web Server

Framework

Advertising

Analytics and Tracking

JavaScript Libraries & Functions

Mobile

Content Delivery Networks

Etc., etc., etc.

Each section covers the technology used in each category and is accompanied by a link and a description.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool often. As an SEO I need to know what kind of platform the website I’m analyzing is built on. I also need to know which tools they use. My site recommendations need to change if they’re using WordPress vs Drupal or even coding the site by hand (it happens more often than you think). This impacts whether I recommend a specific plugin, or give instructions for coding.

It also helps for me to understand how they’re tracking actions on their site. Is it all through GA or are they using Google Tag Manager? Maybe it’s Adobe Analytics. If it’s GTM, my recommendation might be to upload one of our Recipe packs instead of providing instructions for tracking Events in Google Analytics.

This extension helps me move forward as I work without having to dig into the code much to find the answers. It also helps me to better customize my recommendations for each website.

Moz Toolbar

The MozBar has helped me out on a number of client calls and SEO audits when I need to quickly answer a question about info on a page such as page title, heading tags, how many no-follow links there are and where they’re located as well as Page Authority and Domain Authority.

How It Works

The information you’ll be able to see is based on your account subscription. If you have a free account with Moz, this is what you’ll see:

Custom Searches

Link Metrics

Page Overlay

On-Page Links (Followed, No-Followed, External, or Internal)

Social Metrics

Data Export (CSV)

If you have a MozPro subscription, you get a ton of extra info in the toobar.

How/When I Use It

I use this tool every day, but it’s most useful for website audits, especially when I have to drill down to a specific page or two.

Current title tag and meta description when I’m writing new ones to improve CTR.

Page and Domain Authority

Links to and from that page

Is there schema on the page?

Is the page redirecting properly?

Does the page have a canonical tag? Is it the right one?

Are the heading tags descriptive and organized?

Are they using alt text? Does it have keywords in it?

What’s the page load time?

I could go on forever…

It definitely comes in handy during competitive audits! Keyword help, anyone?

Redirect Path

If you’re performing a full website audit, this chrome extension won’t be helpful, but if you’re looking at a single page or a small group of pages it comes in handy. Redirect Path displays different kinds of errors like 404s and 301s (and many more), as well as client side redirects. You can see them quickly and all in one place.

How It Works

You just click the icon and it gives you a dropdown displaying all redirect paths for that page. You can click on any of them to get more detailed information like server, modification date, content type, language, etc.

How/When I Use It

I love this tool because it shows you all of the paths at once, in order. So maybe it was a 301 redirect to a 404 page, which is very helpful to understand. It also looks at JS and meta refresh redirects.

It’s fantastic for testing rewrite rules, landing page redirects, finding redirect chains, etc. Oh, and it has a copy to clipboard feature, which is pretty awesome.

Web Developer Checklist

You can use the Web Dev Checklist extension to get a quick review of the site you’re looking at. With a single click, you’ll see everything from best practices to usability and code quality. There’s a big list!

How It Works

When you click the icon, you’ll get a dropdown like the one below. Pretty quickly, you get an idea of where the site falls short and where its on its game.

How/When I Use It

I use this in meetings a lot. Sometimes new clients will want to know, “are we doing this”? “Are we using this thing?” And I can say, nope, but we can! For example, they might say, “How can I get more info on my pages in SERPs? I keep seeing stuff below my competitors’ result”. And I open that up and say “we can get more info into SERPS by using Schema. It doesn’t look like your page has that yet”.

Or maybe they say “There’s a page showing up in SERPs that I don’t want in there. How do I remove it”? I open up my Web Developer Checklist and see that they aren’t using robots.txt. Easy fix. I’ll then offer to make and send them a robots.txt file for review and then add it to Search Console to fix the problem.

TableCapture

TableCapture is a super helpful Chrome extension that converts html tables so they can be pasted into Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Open Office.

How It Works

While on a page with an HTML table, click the icon for TableCapture. It opens up a dropdown with a list of tables on the page for you to choose from.

Then you can choose to copy the table or open up Google Docs to paste it. It pastes beautifully with no problems.

Oh, I forgot to mention that, if the table includes links, you can choose to bring them in with the table information. You can find that under Options. Click Extract link URLs from table cells. Be aware that it will pull the link in beside it, not as anchor text. For example: Link test (http://ift.tt/2z8K0po).

Here’s a page with a few tables on for you to test: http://ift.tt/2xpafDz.

FYI: George, the developer, is super helpful. If you have any questions, he’s on top of it pretty quickly.

How/When I Use It

I find this extension super helpful for any kind of research, like reviewing competitor websites, gathering lead gen ideas, etc. I’ve heard it can be really useful for financial analysts and journalists, too.

When I’m doing PPC work, often a client will say, “I only want to target people in these locations”. Then I’ll need to pull together a list of zip codes. So I can go to a table with a list of them, use TableCapture and get the list into an uploadable format for AdWords. It’s so much easier than doing it manually.

Ghostery

The internet can be a scary place. Everything you do is tracked by someone. Many webmasters are gathering information on how you interact with their websites and collecting data about your preferences so they can build a profile for you and optimize their marketing and advertising methods. Ghostery allows you to combat that tracking, to an extent. It’s designed to improve your privacy by allowing you to see which website is tracking what and lets you make more informed decisions regarding what you share.

How It Works

When you open the extension, you get a list of trackers the website is using. It also gives you the option to block those trackers for a better browsing experience.

How/When I Use It

While most people probably use this to block ads, I use for other reasons.

First, it’s really helpful for troubleshooting slow loading pages. If a page loads too slow, I can turn off trackers to see if that is what’s effecting the load time.

Second, I use this to stay up-to-date in SEM. When I’m doing competitor research, I can see which ad networks our clients’ competitors are using and if they’re remarketing/retargeting.

Page Load Time

Speaking of page load times, this one is another favorite of mine. The Page Load Time extension does exactly what it sounds like: it shows you the time it takes to load the page you’ve just navigated to. When you open it up, everything gets broken down for you so you can see why the page is loading slowly.

How It Works

It’s always on, so whenever my page finishes loading, the chrome extension displays the time it took. If you click the icon, you’ll get a little window showing the events and how long each took to load and in which order.

How/When I Use It

Page Speed is a Google ranking factor. That means if your site/page is too slow, it’s not showing up in SERPs. On top of that being a Google priority, slow load times are also a bad user experience. Nobody wants that and we certainly don’t want it for our clients.

Whether I’m look at it for SEO or for SEM, I need to know why the page is loading slowly. So I pop open Page Load Time to ID the culprit and get to work on showing the client how to fix it.

Character Count

Character Count tells you how many characters you’ve highlighted on a webpage. It sounds simple but it’s glorious.

How It Works

All you do is click the chrome extension to turn it on, highlight some text on a page, and the number of characters you’re looking at appears at the top right corner of the browser.

How/When I Use It

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times per week I use Character Count. I write a lot of ad copy and review a lot of websites, so it comes in handy to know how many characters are on a page.

If I’m advertising for a client, the first step is to look at the page they want traffic to land on. I skim the site and look for text that clearly defines the goal of the page and highlight it. Is it short enough to be a headline in AdWords? Maybe it will fit in the description if not.

I also use character count for writing meta descriptions. Again, the copy on the page is the key. I want the general idea of the page in less than 155 characters. Can I find that somewhere?

You might also want to look into Word Count if you do this kind of work often.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a keyword research tool that allows you to find similar keywords and provides Google search volume and Cost per Click data for that term, so it’s great for SEO and SEM. It keeps me from having to switch back and forth between all of my keyword tools, too, which is a time saver.

How It Works

The Chrome Extension is always on, so every time you do a search you’ll get Google volume for that keyword as well as CPC data.

You can also see keyword data in the following platforms. It doesn’t just apply to Google Search.

Supported websites:

Google.com – the data is shown right under the search textbox

Google Search Console – the data is shown in the Search Analytics page

Google Analytics – data shown in the Organic and Search Engine Optimization -> Queries pages

Google Trends – data shown in the queries widget

Google Keyword Planner – data shown in a new column

Google Search – data shown under main keyword as well as related searches

YouTube – data shown under the searchbox

Amazon – data shown under the searchbox

eBay – data shown under the searchbox

Etsy – data shown under the searchbox

UberSuggest – data shown alongside keywords in this awesome keyword suggestion tool

AnswerThePublic.com – data shown in popup on each spoke of the wheel, data also shown in the alphabetic listings

Soovle.com – data shown next to each keyword all over the page

KeywordShitter.com – data shown under the main text area next to keywords

Majestic – Anchor Text Report

Moz Open Site Explorer – Anchor Text Report

How/When I Use It

After I do a Google search for a keyword I’m thinking about using, I can go to the bottom of the search results and get all of the similar words that people search for and save them via the Add All Keywords button on the right of the screen.

All of those keywords show up in my favorites along with the data I need to finish my research. I can then copy or download them into any document of my choice. You can print them too, but I never use that.

It gets better. I can then go into Google Analytics or Search Console and, in any report with keywords listed, I’ll get monthly volume and CPC data for the keywords that are already bringing people to their site.

Keywords Everywhere has a new feature that lets you upload keywords (up to 10,000) and it returns data for all of them.

It might seem like a long process, but I like the extension because I don’t have to sift through a bevvy of keywords that aren’t useful. Most of these are going to be relevant. I encourage you to give it a try. It’s wonderful.

Bonus Extensions

These tools aren’t necessarily related to SEO or PPC advertisers, but they can certainly be useful in this industry.

MockFlow

If you’re into user experience and site layout, but aren’t a designer, this one is essential! MockFlow lets you design wireframe concepts quickly and easily. If you don’t have access to all of that fancy development software, this one will be really helpful.

Color Zilla

http://ift.tt/2z8yBG3