
Closing down seokeywordsearch.com 
==================================

I've decided to shut down my experimental SEO keyword graphing tool to
focus on other activities. Sorry if you came here looking for it but it
is no more. I wish I could suggest a good alternative to you but AFAIK
there still isn't a tool that can take a keyword, expand it and then
produce a graph showing you all the related terms and how you should
think about planning your web site pages.

If anyone wants to buy the domain seokeywordsearch.com let me know
before I let it go as it will probably get snapped up by some domain
squatter.

If you want to build you own I suggest you look into some of the
force-directed layout algorithms out there including
[D3](http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/force.html), a javascript library.

[![SEO Keyword
Diagram](/images/uploads/2011/09/Keyworddiagram-1024x565.png "SEO Keyword Diagram")](/images/uploads/2011/09/Keyworddiagram.png)


Closing down seokeywordsearch.com


![Choosing a domain name using Morphology and
Phonetics](/images/uploads/2011/02/Morphology-300x98.png "Choosing a domain name using Morphology and Phonetics")Anyone
buying a domain who is concerned about competitors or domain name
squatters sneaking in should consider:

​1. The homophones (i.e. same pronunciation) for the prefix (if any),
root and suffix (if any) of the domain name (e.g. fone and phone) 2. The
plural form or singular form for nouns (e.g. -tune and -tunes) 3. Other
tenses of verbs (e.g. -stack and -stacking (gerund) or -stacked (past
participle)) 3. The hyphenated form for compound words

I've paid 3x for a plural version of a domain that someone grabbed after
I'd just bought the singular form. Unfortunately consumers tended
towards the plural form when recalling the name which made the purchase
necessary. That's another strategy domain squatters may use against you
when you purchase a domain name - they see the registration change, know
that the name is worth something to someone and so they immediately grab
the plural form.

A good domain name finding tool would include phonetic and morphological
tools to help you find domains where all relevant forms are available
(startup idea for someone).


Domain Name buying tip: Know your phonetics and morphology


In a [previous
post](/2010/09/continuous-link-and-seo-testing-announcing-linkcheck2/)
I provided a utility called LinkChecker that is a web site crawler and
link checker. The idea behind LinkChecker is that you can include it in
your continuous integration scripts and thus check your web site either
regularly or after every deployment and unlike a simple ping check this
one will fail if you've broken any links within your site or have seo
issues. It will also break just once for every site change and then be
fixed the next time you run it. This feature means that in a continuous
integration system like TeamCity you can get an email or other alert
each time your site (or perhaps your competitor's site) changes.

As promised in that post, a new version is now available. There's many
improvements under the covers but one obvious new feature is the ability
to dump all the text content of a site into a text file. Simply append
*-dump filename.txt* to the command line and you'll get a complete text
dump of any site. The dump includes page titles and all visible text on
the page (it excludes embedded script and css automatically). It also
excludes any element with an ID or CLASS that includes one of the words
"footer", "header", "sidebar", "feedback" so you don't get lots of
duplicate header and footer information in the dump. I plan to make this
more extensible in future to allow other words to be added to the ignore
list.

One technique you can use with this new 'dump' option is to dump a copy
of your site after each deployment and then check it into source
control. Now if there's every any need to go back to see when a
particular word or paragraph was changed on your site you have a
complete record. You could for example use this to maintain a text copy
of your WordPress blog, or perhaps to keep an eye on someone else's blog
or Facebook page to see when they added or removed a particular story.

**Download the new version here:-
[LinkCheck](/images/uploads/2011/01/LinkCheck1.zip)**
\<-- Requires Windows XP or later with .NET4 installed, unzip and run

Please consult the [original
article](http://blog.abodit.com/2010/09/continuous-link-and-seo-testing-announcing-linkcheck2/)
for more information.

LinkCheck is free, it doesn't make any call backs, doesn't use any
personal data, use at your own risk. If you like it please make a link
to this blog from your own blog or post a link to Twitter, thanks!


Web site crawler and link checker (free)


First there was [Continuous
Integration](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration), then
there was Continuous Deployment, now there's Continuous Testing.

Testing can (and should) be integrated throughout your web site
development process: automated unit-testing on developer's machines,
automated unit testing during the continuous integration builds and then
further automated testing after your continuous deployment process has
deployed the site to a server.

Sadly, once deployed, most sites get only a cursory test through a
service like [Monastic](http://montastic.com)that pings one or more URLs
on your site to check that the site is still alive.

BUT, how do you know if your site is still working from a user's
perspective or from an SEO perspective? Serious bugs can creep in from
seemingly small changes that aren't in code but are in the markup to a
site, these are often not tested by any of the aforementioned tests. For
example, a designer editing HTML markup for your site could accidentally
break the sign up link off the main entry page, or the page you had
carefully crafted to be SEO optimized around a specific set of keywords
could accidentally lose one of those words and thus loses rank in search
engines causing your traffic to go down. Would you even know if this has
happened?

Based on a small test I ran on some local startup web sites, the answer
appears to be 'no'. These sites often had broken links and poorly
crafted titles (from an SEO perspective). Of course they could have used
any of the many SEO services that can check your site to see if it has
broken links or poorly crafted titles and descriptions (e.g.
[seomoz.com](http://seomoz.com)), but that's often a manual process and
there's no way to link such tests into your existing continuous
integration process.

What would be nice would be if you could include a 'Continuous Link and
SEO test' on your Continuous Integration Server. This test could be
triggered after each deployment and it could also run as a scheduled
task, say every hour, to check that your web site is up and that all
public pages are behaving correctly from a links and SEO perspective. It
would also be nice if there was some way to get a quick report after
each deployment confirming what actually changed on the site: pages
added, pages removed, links added, links removed.

This is what my latest utility 'LinkCheck2' does. It's a Window command
line application that produces a report, and it will set an error code
if it finds anything amiss. You can run it from the command line for a
one off report or call it from your continuous integration server. The
error code can be used by most CI servers to send you an alert. If you
are using the changes feature you'll get an alert when something changes
and then on the next run it will automatically clear.

![Continuous Testing with
LinkCheck2](/images/uploads/2010/09/LinkCheck2.png "Continuous Testing with LinkCheck2")

LinkCheck2 also includes the ability to define a 'link contract' on your
site. This is a meta tag you add to a page to say 'this page must link
to these other pages'. LinkCheck2 will verify that this contract has
been met and that none of your critical site links have been dropped by
accident when someone was editing the markup.

At the moment LinkCheck2 checks all links and performs a small number of
SEO tests (mostly around the length of titles). If there is interest in
this tool I may expand the SEO capabilities, please send me your
feedback and requests.

Use of LinkChecker.exe is subject to a license agreement: in a nutshell:
commercial use is permitted, redistribution is not. Please contact me
for details.

**[NEW VERSION AVAILABLE, CLICK
HERE](/2011/01/web-site-crawler-and-link-checker-free/)**



Continuous Link and SEO Testing - Announcing LinkCheck2


One thing that struck me while I was building my "Seo Keyword Search and
Mapping tool" was that keyword analysis really can reveal a lot about
what people are thinking about and what they are looking for. Seo
keyword analysis really is the largest scale unprompted recall survey
you can possibly do. You can apply it to almost any industry and it
gives you a detailed picture as to what customers of that industry
really want.

**[My SEO tool is now offline, I sold the domain and codebase some time ago]**

So what can you use this new found understanding of your customers to
do?

Well, obviously you can create AdWord campaigns around it - that's why
Google provides the information to you in the first place. And clearly
you can craft better landing pages with more keyword friendly titles,
headings, body content and images on the page. But why stop there?
Here's four more things you can do with the information:

​1. Plan your next blog post using it - make sure you've covered all the
topics people are asking about for your industry

​2. Create a [digital sign using the keywords](http://blog.signswift.com) that are most interesting to people who visit your retail locations

​3. Use them in Twitter campaigns

​4. Use them to craft better direct marketing messages whether email or postal


Thinking about how Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can be applied to other areas of business


Today marks the release of my [SEO Keyword Mapping tool](http://seokeywordsearch.com) at [http://seokeywordsearch.com](http://seokeywordsearch.com).

This released version lets you create a keyword map for any combination of up to three search phrases.


SEO Keyword Search and Mapping Tool now available


There's a post over on Search Engine Land that has a good list of SEO
Myths and things to
avoid: [http://searchengineland.com/36-seo-myths-that-wont-die-but-need-to-40076](http://searchengineland.com/36-seo-myths-that-wont-die-but-need-to-40076)

There are however two points with which I take issue:

> "14. **It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page
> frequently (e.g. daily.)** This is another fallacy spread by the same
> aforementioned fellow panelist. Plenty of stale home pages rank just
> fine, thank you very much."

Yes there are stale pages that rank highly but that doesn't mean
updating your site regularly isn't going to boost your search engine
rankings; the stale pages may be at the top of their category for other
reasons.  If you aren't \#1 on the keywords you care about then I highly
recommend adding fresh, relevant content to your site on a regular
basis.  I've observed competing sites leap up from 2 to 10 spaces in the
rankings when they updated their site and then gradually drop back over
the following days or weeks.  *Google does care about recency so this
isn't such good advice as written.*

> **36. Great Content = Great Rankings.****Just like great policies
> equals successful politicians, right?

I'm not sure what the author means by this point.  Content and in-bound
links form the backbone of SEO efforts.  So don't stop adding great
content to your site!


SEO Myths


In a previous post I explained some of the issues with ASP.NET MVC when
trying to implement an SEO-optimized web site.  In this post I'll begin
to explore some possible solutions.

Step 1: Master View - some additions

First let's make it easy to set the `meta description`, `page title`,
`meta keywords` and `canonical url` by adding the following to the
`head` section of the master view:

```markup
	<head id="Head1" runat="server">
	<title><%=ViewData["PageTitle"]%></title> <%-- This gets wrapped here, so it sees a title tag and doesn't emit two --%>
	<%=ViewData["PageDescription"]%> <%-- These are wrapped elsewhere so they vanish if not set--%> <%=ViewData["PageKeywords"]%> <%-- These are wrapped elsewhere so they vanish if not set--%>
	<%=ViewData["CanonicalUrl"]%> <%-- These are wrapped elsewhere so they vanish if not set--%>

	<meta name="robots" content="noodp" /> <%--Don't use Open Directory Project descriptions--%>
```

Note how we are not wrapping the canonical URL, and meta tags around the
ViewData here (even though it would be more correct to do so). We do
this so that when those tags are not present the entire tag disappears
from the page instead of rendering a tag with an empty string in it. For
the title tag however, that's universal so let's do it 'properly'.

In tomorrow's post I'll show how we can set the Canonical URL using an
attribute.


ASP.NET MVC SEO - Solution Part 1


[![How SERPS changes over time for the top 100 ranked
sites](/images/uploads/2010/03/SERPSOverTime-300x207.png "How SERPS changes over time for the top 100 ranked sites")](/images/uploads/2010/03/SERPSOverTime.png)Being
an engineer at heart I like to measure things and to take them apart to
see how they work.  Search engines however are somewhat opaque - they
use hundreds of different algorithms to create Search Engine Ranking
Pages (SERPS) and those algorithms are a closely guarded secret and the
subject of much debate and investigation in the SEO community.

So, since I wanted to learn more about SEO I decided to track and graph
the top 100 ranked entries for a particular keyword over several weeks
and here is the result.  Click to enlarge it.

Some observations:

​(i) volatility is clearly a lot less in the top ranked sites - moving
one position from 4 to 3 is going to be a lot harder than moving from 94
to 93.

​(ii) some sites can have stunning leaps for a short time but then get
reset back to their former position - presumably getting the 'recent
content' lift but then failing to capitalize on it with more frequent
updates.

​(iii) search engine optimization (SEO) is not something you can do once
and forget, it's something you need to stay on top of with frequent
updates to your site and constant in-bound link building efforts.

I plan to compare this chart against some other keywords I've been
tracking to see how they compare.  I also want to track each site to
determine what caused the particularly stunning leaps or falls in the
rankings and learn from it.  Maybe a chart like this could help identify
which keywords are more volatile than others and therefore which ones
you can make most progress against.

It's early days, I just generated the first chart a few hours ago, so
stay tuned for updates on this project.


How SERP rankings changes over time - SEO


Whilst ASP.NET MVC is clearly the best thing to hit .NET web development in
a long-time it seems like the framework itself is somewhat challenged
when it comes to SEO.   For starters the concept of a page has all but
disappeared - sure you can have a ViewPage but there's no code
associated with it.  And sure, you have ASP.NET Routing so you can do
anything you like with routes but the catchall route
{Controller}/{Action}/{id} is as much a liability as it is a benefit as
it catches things you really didn't want it to catch and generates
routes you really didn't want to generate all too easily.

Convention over configuration is nice and all that, but sometimes a bit
of configuration is necessary to bring your house into order, especially
when the convention doesn't allow things you really want for SEO.

So let's take a look at all the things we really want to be able to do
when creating an SEO friendly web site and see how we can get ASP.NET
MVC to handle them.

For SEO we need:-
-----------------

​1. The ability to define a **canonical url** for a page.  To use that
canonical URL whenever we generate a route.  To include that canonical
url in the page header to instruct search engines that this is the
canonical url for that page.

​2. The ability to define **multiple alternate URLs** for a page.  
Plans change and your site changes too but you don't want 404 errors,
you want the user to land on the same page even if you changed the URL
to improve its SEO keyword content for example.  Ideally you'd like to
301 redirect these **legacy urls** but having them at least display the
right page and including the canonical url in the header for that page
is good enough.

​3. The ability to use **hyphens in urls**.  But since Controllers are
classes and Actions are methods and the convention is to use them as
parts of the URL this isn't supported out of the box.

​4. The ability to define **title**, **meta description** and **meta
keywords** tags for a page in such a way that you can enforce rules
around them such as requiring every public page to have a title tag, or
ensuring that the length of the title tag is reasonable, or ensuring
that your product name is on the end of every title tag.

​5. The ability to build a **sitemap.xml** file that we can submit to
Google or Bing containing every URL that we want them to index.

In my next few posts I'll explain how we can overcome all of these
shortcomings of ASP.NET MVC to create a great SEO-friendly web site.

Stay tuned!


ASP.NET MVC meet SEO; SEO meet ASP.NET MVC


Creating a sitemap.xml file for Google and other search engines can be
accomplished in MVC using a simple ActionResult that returns the
appropriate XML blog. The problem however is in generating the list of
URLs to go into that sitemap.xml file.

In ASP.NET MVC there is no distinction between an action method that is
a page and one that is a service call. To remedy that let's create an
ActionFilterAttribute that can be applied to any method to mark it as a
page and to record the URL that we want that page to show up as in our
sitemap:

```csharp
/// \<summary\>
/// This attribute indicates that a method is an actual page and gives the data for it
/// \</summary\>
[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method, Inherited = true, AllowMultiple = false)]
public class MVCUrlAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
	public string Url { get; private set; }
	
	public MVCUrlAttribute(string url)
	{
	this.Url = url;
	}
	
	public override void OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext filterContext)
	{
	string fullyQualifiedUrl = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.Url.GetLeftPart(UriPartial.Authority) + this.Url;
	// We build HTML here because we want the View to be easily able to include it without any conditionals
	// and because the ASP.NET WebForms view engine sometimes doesn't subsitute \<% in certain head items
	filterContext.Controller.ViewData["CanonicalUrl"] = @"\<link rel=""canonical"" href=""" + fullyQualifiedUrl + " /\>";
	base.OnResultExecuting(filterContext);
	}
}
```

You may wonder at this point why we can't just use the Routing table to
figure this out. The issue is that multiple routes may map onto one page
but we still want it to show up just once in the sitemap otherwise we
will get slammed for duplicate content. We also want to be able to mark
each page with its canonical URL.

Now we can use reflection to find all of the 'pages' in our ASP.NET MVC
Application and then build a sitemap.xml file from them.

```csharp
	List<string> allPageUrls = new List\<string\>();
	// Find all the MVC Routes
	Log.Debug("*** FINDING ALL MVC ROUTES MARKED FOR INCLUSION IN SITEMAP");
	var allControllers = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetTypes().Where(t =\> t.IsSubclassOf(typeof(Controller)));
	Log.DebugFormat("Found {0} controllers", allControllers.Count());
	foreach (var controllerType in allControllers)
	{
	  var allPublicMethodsOnController = controllerType.GetMethods(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance);
	  Log.DebugFormat("Found {0} public methods on {1}", allPublicMethodsOnController.Count(), controllerType.Name);
	  foreach (var publicMethod in allPublicMethodsOnController)
	  {
	    var mvcurlattr = publicMethod.GetCustomAttributes(true).OfType\<MVCUrlAttribute\>().FirstOrDefault();
	    if (mvcurlattr != null)
	    {
	      string url = mvcurlattr.Url;
	      Log.Debug("Found " + controllerType.Name + "." + publicMethod.Name + " \<-- " + url);
	      allPageUrls.Add(url);
	    }
	  }
	}
```

Building sitemap.xml for SEO ASP.NET MVC


Many friends have asked me for advice on optimizing their site for
search engines so I thought I'd put together some notes here collecting
the advice I've handed out recently.

​1. The first thing to do is to get a Google analytics account and add
the tracking code to all your pages.  Unless you are measuring your
current site's performance you'll never know how much you've managed to
improve it.

​2. If your site is a simple static site consider whether it would be
better to create it using a content management system like WordPress
than to try to do it yourself in HTML using Notepad (or some better
tool).  WordPress will mostly do the right thing for you in terms of
building a search engine optimized site.

​3. Next, go to Google Adwords and figure out what keywords
you should care about.  Start with the keyword phrases you think people
might use to find your site and then use their keyword tools to expand
those phrases to generate lists of keywords and their related volumes.
 Look at the local search volume for local services or the global
numbers.

4. Use the Google Adwords downloadable keyword tool to generate a CSV of
all the ones that make some sense to you or if you prefer a more
graphical approach, try my [SEO Keyword Search
tool](http://seokeywordsearch.com) which can give you an idea about how
they are related and how important each is.

​5. Armed with a list of keyword phrases sorted by volume you are now
ready to start crafting pages for your site that will be found by people
using Google, but before you start writing pages, check your domain
name.  Is it really the best domain name for what you are offering.
 Sure it's nice to have a fancy company name and a domain name that
matches but will people be finding you by word of mouth or will they in
fact be using search engines, email links, links from other web pages,
...?  If you plan to be the next Amazon.com one day, go ahead and use
your fancy company name, otherwise, consider naming your site something
highly functional that includes the keywords you want to be found using.

​6. Make a plan for how you will map keywords to pages.  How many pages
do you need? What words should be optimized on each page?

​7. Build your site pages.  For each page, make a note (comment in HTML
maybe) of the keywords for which you are optimizing that page.  I
suggest putting them in the HTML so you remember never to change them by
accident.  Using those keywords create an URL for the page, a Title, an
H1 heading and ideally some bold text and some images with ALT text
including those keywords.  Create a meta keywords tag including just
those words (arguably search engines mostly ignore the keywords meta tag
now).  Create a meta description that is actionable because this is
likely to be the line your customers see in Google - use verbs, explain
why your page is interesting, encourage them to click through to you.
 Don't use the same description on every page on you site, make it
relevant to the page it is on.

​8. If you ever move a page that has been indexed, be sure to use a 301
redirect to transfer the user to the new page and to tell the search
engines where to go.

​9. Make sure all your pages are accessible through links on the site.
 A site map down the bottom of the page listing all the pages on your
site is a good way to do this.

​10. Use Google.com/Webmasters to check your site for mistakes.

​11. Update your site frequently so that Google thinks that it's
newsworthy and so that they index you more often.

​12. Consider putting your blog on your site (or using WordPress make
blog and site the same thing with Pages and Posts as appropriate).

​13. Get the free tools from SeoMoz, use them to check each page of your
site to make sure you have URL, Title, H1, B tags all containing the
keywords for that page.  Make sure your meta description tag is what
you'd want the user to see if they found your page in Google.

​14. Once your site is keyword optimized now it's all about inbound
links from relevant sites but only ones that aren't 'nofollow' on their
links.  SeoMoz has a toolbar for Firefox that will show you whether
links on a page are nofollow.  Visit relevant sites where you can
comment and include a link back to your site.  If SeoMoz shows the link
backs in pink, don't bother commenting, go find somewhere else that will
give you some credit for your work in crafting relevant comments.

​15. Do not pay for any links from directory sites or otherwise.  Google
and Bing discount them and may even penalize you for doing them.

​16. Do list your business on Bing and Google local business listings

​17. Some of the free press release sites and article sites can be
worthwhile - write some articles and seed them, but check them with
SeoMoz first to see if the links are marked 'nofollow'.

​18. Don't do anything "black hat"!  No hidden white text just for the
search engines, no cloaking, no browser detection to show different
content, ...


Seo for beginners


Here's an example of the [SEO Keyword Search
Tool](http://seokeywordsearch.com) in action, untangling the subject of
'digital signage' and some related keywords.  Larger boxes indicate more
searched-for terms, thicker lines indicate stronger connections.

[![SEO Keyword
diagram](/images/uploads/2010/01/KeywordDiagram-1024x565.png "SEO Keyword diagram")](/images/uploads/2010/01/KeywordDiagram.png)


The Blog of Ian Mercer.

Topic: seo