Hi Reda,

Not exactly. Google doesn't determine rankings just by looking at how well optimized a site is for individual words. They look at many other factors both on and off the site, so it's really hard to say why you're ranking slightly higher for one.

To be honest, I wouldn't stress over individual keyword rankings too much. You'll end up driving yourself insane. With so much personalization in search results today, what you see in search results isn't necessarily what someone else will see. I think its better to look at overall trends and just make sure you're moving in the right direction.

Tim

Hi Reda,

Not necessarily. In most cases, switching the word order like that will return similar, but not exactly the same, results. Take a look at these searches:

• https://www.google.com/search?pws=0&q=ssl+audit
• https://www.google.com/search?pws=0&q=audit+ssl

The Top 10 basically contains the same pages for both searches but they appear in a slightly different order. So if you're ranking well for one keyword, chances are you'll be ranking well for the re-ordered phrase but you might not be in the exact same position.

Hope this helps

Tim

Hi Shailendra,

It sounds like your off to a pretty good start, but there are a couple other things you should consider including. KEI and KOI might give you a rough idea of the competition, but they don't really tell you how difficult it will be to rank for those keywords.

I'd run your keywords through Moz's Keyword Difficulty Tool which gives each keyword a score between 1 and 100 based on the Page Authority and Domain Authority of the top ten results. Using this tool can help you weed out keywords that your site simply isn't strong enough to compete on.

Another option (if you have a little money to spend) is to run a small AdWords campaign and see which keywords have the highest conversion rate. This will help you identify keywords that don't necessarily have a ton of monthly searches but can help your website reach its ultimate goals.

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hey Ruben,

I don't see the dark square you are referring to. Did you already get this resolved?

Tim

Hi John,

Federico is right, rel="dofollow" doesn't exist. To expand upon that a bit, every link is assumed to be "dofollow" by default unless you add rel="nofollow". So if you want link juice passed through your links, you don't need to do anything special - just build the link as you normally would. If you don't want link juice passed, you would need to add the rel="nofollow" tag.

Tim

Rather than submitting your articles to a syndication service, I would recommend using them as guest posts on individual blogs. My Blog Guest for finding blogs that may post your articles.

Article spinning/syndication might result in a bunch of links, but most of those links will be of very little value. On the other hand, getting links from a handful of high quality blogs can go much further towards improving your site's authority.

I also like the Google Analytics IQ Lessons. They won't teach about the principles of SEO, but understanding your analytics is a huge part of quantifying the performance of your SEO work.

Excel FTW! A pivot table could handle this for you as Basil said. Or if you wanted to do a one-off formula, it would look something like this:

=(B1-A1)/B1

Where B1 is your number from the more recent time period and A1 is the number from the previous time period.

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hmmm, that's a bit more complicated. I'm sure there's a Macro out there that can do it, but I don't know one off the top of my head.

I think this can be done without a Macro but it will take a little bit of manual work. Here's what I would do:

Place your two sets of keywords in Columns A and B. Select all of Column B and cut (ctrl+x) it. Then in Cell B1, right click, select Paste Special > Transpose. Then, move Column A down one so the list starts in Cell A2.

This will create a matrix with one set of keywords in Column A and the modifiers in Row 1.

Next, in Cell B2, enter this formula:

=$A2&" "&B$1

Copy this across all cells in the matrix and you'll have 10,000 unique keywords. You will then have to remove the formulas by copying the entire sheet, right clicking in Cell A1 and selecting Past Special > Values.

Finally, you'll have to do some manual work of cutting and pasting all the separate columns into one long column of 10k keywords.

I know this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it's the best I can think of for know. I've updated that spreadsheet example to give you a better idea of what I mean - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsNfzI57aVSXdGFKME1pamRnZkJNandZWVpoVkFXZkE

Or, if you want to send your initial set of keywords to me, I wouldn't mind giving it a shot myself. Feel free to send it to tim@prontomarketing.com.

Best,

Tim

If I'm correctly understanding your goal here, I think this can be accomplished by just using an Excel formula. You shouldn't need a Macro to combine two columns.

Place your keywords in Column A and the modifiers in Column B. Then, in Column C, enter the following formula:

=A1&" "&B1

Copy this formula down the list and it will combine the contents of the two cells separated by a space. Here's an example I put together in Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsNfzI57aVSXdGFKME1pamRnZkJNandZWVpoVkFXZkE

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hi John,

Federico is right, rel="dofollow" doesn't exist. To expand upon that a bit, every link is assumed to be "dofollow" by default unless you add rel="nofollow". So if you want link juice passed through your links, you don't need to do anything special - just build the link as you normally would. If you don't want link juice passed, you would need to add the rel="nofollow" tag.

Tim

Excel FTW! A pivot table could handle this for you as Basil said. Or if you wanted to do a one-off formula, it would look something like this:

=(B1-A1)/B1

Where B1 is your number from the more recent time period and A1 is the number from the previous time period.

Hope this helps!

Tim

I'm not sure if there is a good, free tool out there, but Rand covered this in a Whiteboard Friday a few months ago. Check out the attached video. At item #4, he discusses using some search operators to get a basic idea of your competitors' citations. This can be done by searching for the competitor's name, address and excluding the results for their own site. Like this:

competitor "1234 competitor ave" -site:competitor.com

The results are sometimes a little messy but its a great place to start. Hope this helps!

[Local SEO Checklist for New Sites](Local SEO Checklist for New Sites)

I also like the Google Analytics IQ Lessons. They won't teach about the principles of SEO, but understanding your analytics is a huge part of quantifying the performance of your SEO work.

Hi Shailendra,

It sounds like your off to a pretty good start, but there are a couple other things you should consider including. KEI and KOI might give you a rough idea of the competition, but they don't really tell you how difficult it will be to rank for those keywords.

I'd run your keywords through Moz's Keyword Difficulty Tool which gives each keyword a score between 1 and 100 based on the Page Authority and Domain Authority of the top ten results. Using this tool can help you weed out keywords that your site simply isn't strong enough to compete on.

Another option (if you have a little money to spend) is to run a small AdWords campaign and see which keywords have the highest conversion rate. This will help you identify keywords that don't necessarily have a ton of monthly searches but can help your website reach its ultimate goals.

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hi Reda,

Not exactly. Google doesn't determine rankings just by looking at how well optimized a site is for individual words. They look at many other factors both on and off the site, so it's really hard to say why you're ranking slightly higher for one.

To be honest, I wouldn't stress over individual keyword rankings too much. You'll end up driving yourself insane. With so much personalization in search results today, what you see in search results isn't necessarily what someone else will see. I think its better to look at overall trends and just make sure you're moving in the right direction.

Tim