Now that Master Site Manager has suspended offering its SEO Tracking services, most of our users have been asking,” Who do I recommend as a good replacement for Master Site Manager?”
Well it wasn’t an easy answer because I wanted to give our customers a recommendation that I felt was at least as good as MasterSiteManager.
And while I never would have admitted it while we were online, we did have a competitor that offered a very similar service with some extra “bells and whistles” that MSM just didn’t have.
After testing all our competitors software personally, I kept coming back to one particular company because they simply offered the best tracking, ease of use, interface and pricing.
Yes they are $5.00 more expensive then we were at the Starter level, but it offers some very cool features that we didn’t and is well worth the incremental price difference.
However, they do offer a free trial account that will let you track 1 URL and up to 10 keywords, which is all some people really need.
“WWW vs Non-WWW” – How you set up your site makes a difference to the search engines
Here’s what I mean. If your domain isn’t set up correctly from the get go, you are absolutely sabotaging your potential success and search engine rankings – because people are stupid or just lazy.
When a web site is set up on a web host, the web host or the domain owner needs to set up a 301 redirect for new site / domain so that the non-www. url points to the www versionn of the domain OR visa versa.
Many hosts do this automatically. However, WordPress for example often installs without the “www” by default.
What this means is that IF you go directly to www.domain.com AND domain.com (no www) then the site is not set up correctly on the server, and your rankings will suffer for it.
Here’s why – Google will come and spider BOTH versions of the domain, because it’s sees TWO unique sites addresses.
The problem is that both sites contain the same content so you get whacked for duplicate content.
Now some people will say that there is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty” and they validate their argument by pointing out the curation model used by news aggregation sites like Mashable.com. And they’d be right at least in part.
There is no duplicate content penalty on the web. However there IS “on-site”. What makes this worse is that the www and the non-www versions of your site that Google sees are EXACT copies and that will cause a problem.
Interestingly though that’s not your biggest issue.
The real issue as I see it is “Link Dilution.”
The term “Link dilution” is where you have other sites linking to you naturally because they like your site, they think you offer good value or because they’re talking about you or a comment you’ve made on your blog for example.
Now that doesn’t concern us really, what does though is HOW other people are linking to those sites.
Some people might link directly to the “www version” and some might link to the non “www version” of the site.
In other words, since people are sending link juice to both sites, neither site is getting all the link love it should be getting.
What this does when combined with Google spidering both versions (they see 2 sites remember) is that Google generates KW rankings for EACH site.
The problem is easy to fix though.
1) CHOOSE which version of your site you want to use – with our without the WWW.
2) Make sure that your web hosts uses a 301 redirect on the version you are NOT using, and have that unused version of your domain point TO the version of your site that you’ve chosen in Step #1.
In other words if you decide that default for your site is going to use the www prefex (http://www.yourdomain.com) then you want to go into your online web hosting control panel and set up a 301 redirect for the non-www version of the domain so that it points to the www.version.
Here’s how to check if this redirect is already set up on your existing site. (We’re going to assume the domain is set up to use “www” as the default in this case)
Go to your web browser and type in “http://yourdoman.com”
Now if your web hosting account is set up correctly, what you’ll see appear in your browser window is the http://www.yourdomain.com version of the site.
If however, the redirect doesn’t happen you should set one up ASAP. It’s not difficult to do - especially if your web host uses CPanel – you can always just call your hosting provider and have them set it up for you. It takes less then 2 minutes.
We’ve made some tweaks to MasterSiteManager that I think you’ll like. These new updates in no way effect the way that MasterSiteManager.com currently works for those of you out there that love it just the way it is.
But for those of you that wished we offered more “drill down functionality”, we’ve got you covered.
To be honest, it’s not so much a change in the way our software works, but rather “how” you can go about using it.
Here’s what we mean…
Some of the feedback we’ve received suggested that we offer “page specific keyword tracking”.
In other words, some people have asked, “Where do I rank for my chosen keywords on a specific page within my web site?”
Many people thought that you couldn’t track internal pages using MasterSiteManager, but you actually can, and it’s super easy!
With MasterSiteManager, you can track ANY URL.
This means, you can track things like your root domain, HubPages, Squidoo pages, Articles you posted or syndicated – anything… and this includes internal pages or blog posts too!
Here’s how it works:
Setting up your account to track specific pages WITHIN your blog or site for example and not just the root domain is easy.
Simply login to your account and go to the “Manage Web Sites Tab” then click the “Add new URL” button.
Now simply type in the full URL that you want to track.
Next, click on the “SEO Stats” tab at the top of the page
Next click on the “Keywords” link for the URL you just added.
Finally, click the “Add Keywords” button and type or paste in a list of the keywords you want to track.
The system will then pull the stats for that URL and where that INTERNAL PAGE ranks for each of the keywords you’ve entered.
As you can see it doesn’t matter what the url is. Once you put a specific URL into the MSM system, any keywords you add will be tied to that particular URL, and not your root domain.
“Allinanchor Rank” is Google’s proprietary way ranking of a web page according to just how many other web pages on the web link to the target page and have the keyword or keyword phrase in the actual link text that points back to the target site. The text (keywords) used as the link is called “anchor text”
So Google uses the name “allinanchor rank” and provides us with a special command that you can use in your browser to “look up” the allinachcor rank of any site.
The purpose behind this is that the allinanchor rank shows you which site has the most back links in the keyword phrase with the actual links pointing to their site.
Now some may argue with me on this but I feel that a web pages “allinanchor” rank is the single most critical measurement in determining how well a particular page will rank in the SERPS.
Reason being is because it takes into consideration not just the quantity of links to a web page, but also (and more perhaps more importantly) how many links are relevant based on the keyword or keyword phrase that is used within the link.
To use Google’s “allinanchor:” command to discover what your website or your competitor website’s allinanchor ranking is easy.
Simply type in the search box of Google: allinanchor:keyword phrase
Other helpful, but less important link commands that you can use to see who’s got links from pages that ALSO contain the keyword or keyword phrase in the Page Title, Text and URL as well.
These are:
allinurl:keyword phrase
allintitle:keyword phrase
allintext:keyword phrase
The bottom line is that SEO is actually pretty simple once you understand what it takes to win a #1 ranking in Google for your chosen keyword or keyword phrase.
So when doing SEO on your site or a clients site, your most important job is to get the lowest allinanchor ranking as possible.
Your goal is to get your allinanchor rank to #1 – meaning your site has the best “allinanchor ranking” for your keyword phrase. Another way to look at it is that if you obtain an allinanchor ranking of “1″, that
means, that you win.
In other words, you need to get more sites linking to your site, using your keyword AS the link text, then do your competitors and you win!
AND if you can also get a number 1 for the allinurl, allintitle, allintext for your keyword or keyword phase as well consider it game over. You will OWN the top spot.
Next time I’ll talk about how you can use some fancy mojo in MasterSiteManager to make compiling this data super easy!
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).
As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.
The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users).
The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago.
For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.
What are sites and Web hosts?
Traffic is computed for sites, which are typically defined at the domain level.
For example, the Web hosts www.msn.com, carpoint.msn.com and slate.msn.com are all treated as part of the same site, because they all reside on the same domain, msn.com.
An exception is personal home pages, which are treated separately if they can be automatically identified as such from the URLs in question.
Also, sites which are found to be serving the “same” content are generally counted together as the same site.
What is Reach?
Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users”+” who visit a given site.
So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that”+” 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com.
Alexa expresses reach as number”+” of users per million. Alexa’s one-week and three-month average”+” reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified”+” time period.
The reach rank is a ranking of all sites based solely”+” on their reach.
The three-month changes are determined by comparing”+” a site’s current reach and reach rank with its values from three month ago.
What are Page Views?
Page views measure the number of”+” pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of”+” the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted”+” only once.
The page views per user numbers are the average numbers”+” of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting”+” the site. The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user).
The three-month changes are determined by comparing a sites current”+” page view numbers with those from three month ago.
Page views per million indicates what fraction of all the page views by toolbar users go to a particular site.
For example, if yahoo.com has 70,000″+” page views per million, this means that 7% of all page views go to yahoo.com.
If you summed the fractional page views over all sites, you would get 100% (this is not true of reach, since each user can of course visit more than one site.
