• Keyword research
• Site comparison
• Rank tracking

Only recently have I gotten a handle on the tasks (and I’ve been trying to find a solution for weeks). Originally, I was using Brad Callen’s SEO Elite software. It was “o.k.”. I used it for rank tracking. But I was never happy with the software – at least, not 100% happy. I mean, it did what it was supposed to do, but the problem is that the program is a bit “clunky” and just plain ugly for one thing – and it’s slow. To do a backlink analysis takes a looong time, especially if you check off a few of the factors (like PageRank and domain age). If I have to measure 10 competitors’ sites it takes all day. Not cool.

So then I started programming my own. I made a dashboard that allows me to see sites’ rank for specific keywords, as well as other domain-related info such as backlinks, etc. A lot of this comes from various APIs. I store all the info in a database and run the scripts via cron. I like doing things myself, because I can get exactly the data I want. And once I store it in a database, I own it and can run whichever types of reports I want.

But I still needed a good tool to do site comparisons. I tried SEO SpyGlass, and I like it, but it was too limited for what I really wanted. I wanted something to do it “all”.

Oh yeah, and I needed SEO software that could run on a Mac. There’s not a lot to choose from in the world of OS X SEO software. (BTW I was running SEO Elite from a VirtualBox Windows XP install.)

I hate buying something only to find out it’s not really what I needed. So I finally (after hearing about for about a year) tried something called Market Samurai. I don’t know why I never tried it before, but it was probably because of the name – it doesn’t sound like it’s primarily SEO software. But they have a free trial, so I was able to take it for a test drive. (You can try Market Samurai for free here.)

It does all the things I used SEO Elite for, and I think it compares well with SEO SpyGlass as well. I bought it right before my trial ran out, and I’m very happy with it. It’s a very well-made, feature-rich, and well-supported SEO program. It’s way more solid than most SEO scripts and programs I’ve seen over the years.

And, another factor that led me to make the purchase decision was the fact that the license allows you to install and use Market Samurai on two machines. It works out perfectly for my wife and I: she has a Windows 7 laptop and I have a MacBook Pro, and we can each run a copy of Market Samurai. (It’s an Adobe Air app, so it can run on both OSX an Windows.)

My wife uses it for mainly keyword research (on her real estate site) and I use it for SEO stuff – mostly comparing site metrics and finding ranking factors.

So, how does it fit into my daily SEO tasks? Well, I use my custom-coded scripts for my daily tasks. But when I see a site I want to gauge or a site where I want to analyze their backlink anchor text, I use Market Samurai. I often export the data (you can throw it into a CSV) and use the data within other scripts. So it’s not my “main” SEO tool but it has a lot of supporting uses for me.

Would I recommend it? Overwhelmingly, yes – because I’m totally satisfied with my purchase. But everyone’s different: If you don’t already have an SEO tool, then just get it. It does almost everything you will need to do. If you have a tool that doesn’t work for you, check out the trial version and see if this would be an improvement. If you already have a tool you use and are happy with, then maybe try Market Samurai – but I’m a believer in using what works for you.

If you want to give Market Samurai a try, get your Free Trial copy here.

So, if you’re an affiliate, you need to understand how to properly use the tools provided to you so you can benefit from them as well (and actually rank, and sell stuff). The most important (and common) tool you can find is the datafeed.

A datafeed is usually a CSV file containing the products from a particular merchant. The fields consist of the product name, description, price, link, and maybe a few others. Merchants on affiliate networks such as Shareasale will typically have datafeeds.

Here’s how you should use a datafeed, with SEO in mind…

• Change the content. As you pull in a datafeed, you should always make some alterations. For one thing, I like to “clean up” the data – because I often find weird mistakes, strange abbreviations, or undesirable formatting. Secondly, I like to replace words and/or phrases with different ones. I do this across the board, just because it will make my data slightly different than what everyone else has.
• Add to the content. You can get as fancy as you want with this, but the fancier the better. At the very basic level, you can make what’s already there more “wordy” – just another variation on replacing words (as noted above). But the better option is to add totally new additional content. If you can scrape content and add a snippet of info to your product entry, your site will have the datafeed content plus the scraped additional content. One example of this (that I do) is a t-shirt site I own. The products all come from the merchant’s datafeed, but in addition to that data I write an additional few sentences or paragraphs about the shirt. If applicable, I embed a related YouTube video. Get creative and you can probably think of tons of ideas like this, for your datafeed.
• Re-format the content. Again this is basic, but can only help – especially when compounded with the other changes. If the datafeed uses bullet points, take out that formatting and use CSS or just dashes and linebreaks. If the description comes before the price, put the price after the title but before the description. If there is no “sale” price…add one! Put a strikethrough on it and put it in red. Pull out the first hundred characters of the description and make it into a short description, and re-order the sentences – and use that on your site’s landing page to link to the product. Get the idea?
• Re-do the images. For images, you should download them (either by actually downloading, or if not possible by caching). You should re-name them with the product name. You should re-create the thumbnails in a different size (even if only slightly different.
• Do not link to the merchant. (If you can help it.) Mod_redirect is your friend. I have been saying for a while now that learning htaccess is one of the most important things a web developer can learn, and this applies to aff. marketing as well. Maybe more. You can avoid linking to the merchant through various means, and if you can’t do it super-clean via htaccess directives you can do it through other means as well (with your favorite scripting language). The end result needs to simply be that all links and all assets either are being served from your site or they look like they are.

I probably don’t have to say it, but if you have scripting skills and can at least find your way around a server, you’re ahead of the game. To do any of the above manually will take a long time and become tedious quite quickly. I recommend learning PHP, becoming familiar with mod_rewrite, and learning how relational databases work. (A little regex can’t hurt either!)

There are other aspects to using datafeeds, but this list covers the big issues and will get you around most of the SEO issues that plague an affiliate. And surprisingly, most affiliates don’t even implement one of the changes on my list! So if you do what I suggest, you may end up in the top 5% of affiliates – thus giving you an advantage in your site’s optimization and avoiding  having exactly the same content as everyone else (including the merchant).

Datafeeds are a starting point, best used as a basis to build upon. To use them effectively, you must enact the fundamental rule of SEO which is to provide value (by adding it, in this case).

The headline of a recent Webmaster Central blog entry should say it all: “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking“. But if you want to know more, you can read or watch Matt Cutts elaborate further.

Now, another minor point: it might not be a total waste of time to at least fill in a few keywords. I say this because of the Bing webmaster blog taking a somewhat neutral position on meta keywords. It makes me think that perhaps Bing “pays attention” to the meta keywords, at best. But I don’t see it as any sort of actual ranking factor whatsoever.

Update: I found this excellent and balanced perspective on the meta tags issue by John Andrews. I recommend it highly.

That recently happened with my idea for SaturationChecker. It’s a simple script, but what it accomplishes can save the SEO-minded site owner a great deal of trouble and help them improve their site.

Here’s how it works:

1. User submits the URL for the site they wish to check
2. SaturationChecker (SC) then attempts to find either  an XML sitemap, or an HTML sitemap file, or an RSS feed. (In that order.)
3. If a source for URLs is located, SC then checks each URL successively and writes it to the database. Each URL is recorded along with its status, and whether or not the URL was found in Google’s index.
4. The unindexed URLs are then available to the user, so they can be targeted for promotion or perhaps simply rotated to the top of the XML sitemap file.

It’s up to the user to find a way to get the unindexed URLs “found” by Google; what SC does is simply shows where the deficiencies lie in a site’s index saturation. (So, if a site had 100 pages, yet only 50 of them were in Google, that site would have only a 50% index saturation.)

This tool was developed for my own use, and as such it’s a bit rough around the edges. (It works for me.) I do wish to polish it and then make it available for others’ use at some point in the future.

Some additions I will be adding will be:

• The capability to track if a URL is added to the index, then dropped again. (This may indicate the URL was found, and added, but then dropped due to an on-page problem or simply a better page coming along from a competing site.)
• A percentage report, as given in the example above. Very simple to code, but I haven’t added it as of yet.
• Prettiness. The thing has no style, and if I release this for public consumption I want it to look nice!

Since I haven’t released this yet, consider this post as “pseudo-code” for you coders out there to make your own. It’s a fairly simple script – I began it one night in my hotel during this year’s SEOmoz seminar and had the basic functions, and finished the rest of it today. (And I happen to be a coding perfectionist.)

Additionally, I’m open to new ideas – so feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions and I’ll see what I can do.