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Saw this and tried the following which isn't automated but is one way of doing it.

• First install SEO Quake plugin
• Go to Google
• Turn off Google Instant (http://www.google.com/preferences)
• Go to Advanced search set the number of results you want displayed (estimate the number of pages on your site)
• Then run your site:www.example.com search query
• Export this to CSV
• Import to Excel
• Once then do a Data to columns conversion using ; as a delimiter (this is the CSV delimiter)
• This gives you a formatted list.
• Then import your sitemap.xml into another TAB in Excel
• Run a vlookup between the URL tabs to flag which are on sitemap or vice versa.

Not exactly automated but does the job.

Hi Derek

There was a time when I was in the camp that content was enough,  however the statistics tell us that although content is a significant part of the pie chart of factors it is still only one of them.  Like you I held onto the hope that if I build great content and sat back that the people would find me and the rankings would come.  However mostly from this forum and from extensive reading elsewhere I have let go of this grip.

, would it be possible to rank well without putting much emphasis on backlinking if your content is significantly better than the rest of the ranking pages?

The short answer is if the niche is non-competitive then possibly but if there is any element of search traffic then no.

But all is not lost.  First however do not become fascinated with an actual word count for your posts as length does not equal quantity (in fact break it up into a 2-3 part articles if it is good.

But back to the question.  If you have good content and believe it is better than the others than you should work on publicising it and encouraging people to link to it through the many link building methods available.  Even when you say that you have a 2,000 word  article of good content I am immediately interested personally in seeing it.    Have you put it out on Google+ which is now open to everyone?

Do you Tweet it, Facebook it and put it on your Feedburner even? Have you emailed your friends, customers and colleagues telling them about it.  This isn’t link building per sé but it is a small part of the many things that go on.

** or has the game not changed that much?**

Again what I realise more and more is that the game IS changing every single day as new tools approaches come into play.  However saying that I would say pick 5-6 strategies and work these for 3-4 weeks while continuing to build the quality content you mention.  Work these hard (look here on SEOMOZ for some of them).  Track your performance for desired keywords.  Revise strategy, maybe change an approach and start again.

It is hard work and I consider myself a super-novice compared to others but it is about applicaton, assigning your SEO block of time per day then just doing it.  In fact I think SEO is even becoming a depreciated term  as I often think of it as site public relations more than optimisation.  If you publicise your site well the results is good rankings as people line up to link and publicise it for you.

Hope this helps ??? (send the link would like to see the site!)

Some other Useful SEOMOZ Resources to Have a Look At

• The Definitive Beginners Training
• An excellent SEO Powerpoint Deck from Rand which I 'borrow' from a lot
• This Q&A Forum will help but use the search function as well as nearly all the bog posts and articles are well thought out and well written from intro to advanced

Best of luck

Kieran

I read this post and it reminded me of when this actually clicked with me recently.  I have read thousands of words on blogging, writing good content and the list above resonates across the top bloggers that you can read who all beat this drum constantly.  I was recently in the process of putting a guest post together for a blogging forum when after a day I realised that I had put more effort into the guest post than any post that I had for my own blog.  So I **abandoned **the planned submission and used it on my own blog.  I had spent 2-3 hours tweaking, looking for good images, deleting wasted words,  working on all the formating and so on.

A lot of us who are email slaves and quick content junkies should revert back to our English High School class where we spent time on our essays for exams and tests.   I have even applied this logic to forum replies like this.  In the past I would have been much pithier and not as informative (I am being informative I hope !!)

It is worth looking at some of the blogging resources out there Problogger to see that they constantly expound on this topic.  Even guys like Matt cutts say it again and a again about making your content STAND OUT like just thereWe

You may say how do I do this for a product like a Blue Widget.  At first glance this may seem impossible.  But if I am looking to buy a blue widget and am doing research over the web I would like to see

• Product Information in depth
• Reviews
• Some usage of it
• How to use it in different situations.
• A user forum
• Some evidence of good product support
• Some social media juice about it and some fan love

Replace blue widget with website design (my area), cameras, puppy dog collars and so on.

You might say that this sounds like complete overkill but believe me it isn't as the effort will pay off as over time your site will become a rich resource of solid quality information that can't be gotten anywhere else and there will be good payoffs.

There is a well known saying you wont get better by doing the same things every day so work on your blue widget page today then move onto the red widgets and keep going.  Then revisit them all and polish again.

Hi

I would recommend starting with this to at least get an appreication for the business of SEO http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Read the questions and answers here on the forum and spend time looking at the blog posts and Webinars that indeed confirm that there is no magic wand

Update: On re-reading this I also realised that it may have been a bit trite.  The most important thing is that from the beginning you are thinking of it and it is part of your focus.  Make the entire team aware of the importance of this.

I'd tend to agree based on your response with irldonalb and your post is quite pertinent as there is an YouMoz Blog by chadburgess post that doesn't exactly point to this (it is realted to noindex but the tactics to get back on Google eyeline are still relevant)

To possibly (badly) summarize some of his tactics that relate to you

• Create some fresh content 1-X pages depends on your capacity and do some internal linking and Google will see this.
• Get some social juice going with your links and recruit some help of friends and associates to spread the word.
• Resubmit your sitemap to Google Webmasters

The full post is here and it is quite an interesting one - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/accidental-noindexation-recovery-strategy-amp-results

Good luck with it and report back with your success levels..

Kieran

See Googles statement on this

http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/privacyoverview.html

Unless the person is using an IP address cloaker the IP address that they are coming from should be taken at face value.

I would second / third this.  And don't put coming soon write a short spiel that says 2011 Super Widget is coming soon and should be this color and size and we will have ht charger when it comes out.  What other items do you think the widget should have as accessories.

Feedback from Matt Cutts recently hinted / said that having the keyword in the domain although helpful isn't as significant a factor as before.  And on the answer to your question.the order should not be significant really.  Having a Generic word may even help a little to give the site some color as may people go for the generic and having a descriptor may help.

Best of luck

Hi Adrian

Well done on ranking for Collectibles in the UK it is a competitive  space with lots of search – I didn’t see you at number one however so I would suggest you check with personalized search turned off.

**However I feel we may be held back by our Domain Authority score. **

Now you mention Domain Authority.  Your domain authority is currently 32 so growth is of course Welcome.  A lot of that comes with linking from high authority sites.  Your site looks like is a powerful source of information on collectibles on first glance but on closer inspection it also looks like that a lot of it is curated news.  I would think about developing your own news and information.

Your blog also is on the WordPress.com platform and is not self hosted. I would work to correct this and bring the blog back onto your local site as you are moving traffic off of your main site.

We are well set up for a content based strategy due to "News" nature of the site. My ownly concern with link building is i've heard that it could potentially negatively effect us.

I am not sure what you mean here.  Lnk building is something you should be thinking of even through organically spreading good news and articles that people link to and share on the Net.  If you produce an excellent article with an interesting slant on a collectible then it may get added juice and get links.

Or is the risk of link building only really associated with black hat methods?

Link building done well and professionally (as I with the ethics of a professional as opposed to paid) should be part of your marketing plan.  Many companies now employ full time Internet marketing experts doing just this as part of their brief.  Link building is not equal to black hat.

One last thing. I've been using the Google keyword Tool to judge competition for specific search terms. Is this useful for organic search? Or is it only relevant for PPC?

On accuracy of the Keyword tool irldonalb is right and the tool is inaccurate and should be used along with Insights and some of the tools here on SEOMOZ if you are a member.  But it is still a good indicator and shows the level of activity.

It is relevant to both search and PPC.  Google never claims for it to be 100% accurate either but it is used by most people these days as on of their go to tools for their keyword research.

Finally it IS worth while reading though here a bit (if you havent done so already for more ideas and tips for your SEO campaign.  I visit it regularly and it is one of the best references.

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

You should be able to write your .htaccess to cope with generic paths and URLs There are tons of good sites out there on how to write a good .htaccess and to be honest it is time and effort to wade through the site and get it back in shape.  I have been there and feel your pain.

Not all errors are bad but for instance if you are getting 404 errors and the actual pages do not exist anymore then you should do 301 redirects on your .htacess to point Google to the right page.  Doing this will sort out a lot of the errors.  But if you are getting 404s and the pages are there then that is a bigger problem

Restricted by robots is not an error as this is telling you that you don't want somewhere crawled.  Check the file to see if it is correct in what it is restricting.

How often are you pushing your sitemap out to Google.  If you are as active with pages as your posts suggest I would think about submitting a new one or automating its creation.

If you are actively working the content on the sties there can often be this level of SERPS  bouncing.but if you continue with the content I wouldn't worry too much about the errors for the moment and do the housekeeping above.  There are very few completely spotless sites out there and the Google Webmaser  tools and even the SEOMOZ tools here will always give you some level of errors.

hope this helps

Kieran

I havent seen any studies but you could create two pages with different meta and see the results. It is hard to be empirical with this I would think as Google now limits it to two lines but ther could be options for A/B studies that you could follow?

Hi Amy

_will losing links from these sites harm us? _

If you are worried about the link quality just put them into Open Site Explorer to see their weighting.  If they are spammy then delete.

_Perhaps more importantly, is my plan a terrible idea in the first place? _

If you know/feel/think that your link list is spammy then I would delete them and so it is a good idea.  This SEOMOZ link is worth a read as a refresher course on the topic if you haven't seen it already. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide

Good luck with your efforts

Sometimes OSE can take some time to index your pages.  The OSE index would not be as fast as the Google Index so that may be the reason.  Your post is quite pertinent as Rand Fishkin posted a blog post on the updates and upgrades that are being made to the system to improve the depth of the crawiling

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-september-update-feedback

Best of Luck

Kieran

If you create the embed code with your link back to the site then you will get the juice.  You cant actually put a link in a graphic as far as I know (yet!) so make sure the Widget code is attractively titled as well so people will actually like to use it along the lines (not saying this is the way to go by the way)

Fabolous Infographic - Visit The Site for More by [Jesse Walker - Uber Infographic Guy](hhttp://www.yourwigglywidgettysite.com / "Jesse Walker - Uber Infographic Guy")

Have you rung this business?  Ask them where they are located.  In theory there is nothing stopping someone from using your information for a location and they may have verified using and SMS and not the postcard.

Try the old fashioned way first.

Hi Simon

As a Man City fan I had to be brave and open the site but it looks like a nicely built Zen Cart site and he calls to action are good (wont be buying one by the way).

You say main keyword target in your question and this is often asked here and my first advice is not to focus on a narrow keyword set.  I would look at a list of keywords in the 3-4 word range and at least have list of 15-20 word sets and direct your pages in this direction.

The football / soccer shirt space is really busy and I would spread my wings in the keyword space a bit to try and capture some of the other keywords (I was prompted Arsenal Shirts for kids when I typed in a quick Google search)

I would also spend some serious time on your product descriptions and try and make them unique and richer for people and for search.  For instance at random I picked

_emulate the skills of star players like Aaron Ramsey, Marouane Chamakh and Thomas Vermaelen. _

and there were at least 4-5 sites with this identical text (and yours wasn't even there).  This does not help.

I would also look at making your URLs more search friendly.  Zen Cart has some plugins to accomplish this for you and wouldn't hurt either.

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&cPath=40_47&products_id=231

I have never had to do it but there are tools like PowerMapper which is quite pricey for what it does.  Does he actually want a visual one or more like a tree like structure.  This probably more 'doable; by dumpinghte XML into some formatting tool and importing it into HTML.

To be honest I don't know. The search volume is in the 40K region sotough space for those two words.

If I was you (hate that phrase  :-)) I would spend some effort on looking at something long tail   I had a quick look at keywords for this and there are some 'nice' candidates with relatively modest compeition.

• cheap Arsenal shirt

• new Arsenal kit 2011

• arsenal shirts cheap

• arsenal shirt sale

A lot of these sites are badly coded garbage.  I would ignore these sites.

Like the EGOL humour plus agree with EGOL 100% here.  100 hits and getting Facebook like is pretty good reward.  I assume that you are linking within your site as well to keep people on the site.

And to answer your question you should always try and write articles that are useful to the Internet community but also to you.  Socialize the pages as suggested but if you can write this quality on cities I am sure that you can also write it on Air Conditioners.