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