Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Anyone have a suggestion for a simplistic (scaled down) version of a keyword research tool that I can put on our website? We need our clients to be able to perform some basic keyword research on their own without getting lost in the details of something too robust.

We would like to control aspects of the tool, capture the data from the site visitor and move those results (from their searches) into a database or other web application.

We are designing a .BIZ site where we will push a high percentage of  the traffic ourselves. In other words, we aren't relying heavily on SEO for being found.

I have a two part question:

1. Is there really any reason for a young start up .biz company to buy a $100 / year .XXX extension?

2. We don't have the .com (and can't afford it at the moment) but we do have the .co

Does the .co have any upside to it that the .biz does not in SER?And do we get penalized for using the .biz? In other words, do SEs prefer the .com and nothing else will do quite as well?

Thanks!

Hello fellow SEOMOZ rs.

We are building out a platform on WordPress that provides a free blog for a market niche in a multi-site WordPress environment. The client we are building this solution for now wants the people signing up for the free blogs to be able to search for each other (based on categories and keywords), to build a list of favorites from other bloggers in this community (sort of like building a team), review each other (leaving a publicly viewable review and score of each other) as well as create a forum that is outside the blogs that each of them have.

Here is a summary of the goals for the WordPress Plug in (s)

1. Search for other sites within the multi-site environment
2. Scoring / Review system for other users (who also have blogs on the system)
3. Ability to build and maintain a list of other users in the community (like a prefered list or team list)
4. A shared Forum area that we could admin from the multi-site platform that they could log in with using the same credentials as their multi-site blog credentials.

My question for you all is:

Does anyone have experience in a single plugin that will work in a multisite environment that would handle some or most of the goals listed? If not a single plugin, how about recommendations for individual plug ins that might help with this?

Thanks for any recommendations!

Check out http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/anti-splog

This is a free tool that we utilize in our multisite environments and it also controls sign ups (which I believe could be the choke point for your issue):

(cut from above link:)

Signup prevention– these measures are mainly to stop bots. User friendly error messages are shown to users if any of these prevent signup. They are all optional and include: Limiting the number of signups per IP per 24 hours(this can slow down human spammers too if the site clientele supports it. Probably not Edublogs though as it caters to schools which may need to make a large number of blogs from one IP)

I hope this helps

Paul

It seems to be going OK. We have have not decreased or increased traffic significantly but I believe that the natural results will be increasing since we are also "hosting" locally. hosting locally also influences search results.

I completely understand. We had the same response to both! Maybe SEOmoz will help us out here and kick in some automation.

Paul

I am facing a very similar situation for a large established client of 10+ years. We decided to do a change of address in Google Webmaster and move him to a local domain extension (similar to your .ae). According to Google recommended guidelines and past experience, a change of address is in order for you. Get rid of the duplicate content and make that site local.

Regards

Paul Hoover

We use woorank.com (the pro version) for running automated reports. I do understand your frustration with the various options out there. We too have tried several (including Raven) as well as seoengine but found seomoz to be the overall winner.

Still, we use the woorank for generating the big picture reports but again (to your point) they do not have strong on page results.

If you are up to the technical challenge, try SEOengine. @ http://www.seoengine.com/ I personally trained with one of the founders there and he is very sharp. It is a little more involving than most SEOs want to be for report generation but I recently heard they had a new product that automated this for you.

Good luck!

Paul

Google's guidelines suggest creating a single account for each Google Analytics account. This way, one main account will be associated with each GA code that is installed. It is possible though that (especially if the account is pretty old and the GA was installed a while / year + ago) that the old design company used their main account for many GA accounts. If they did use a single account (that controls many GA installations) it would not be an account that they would likely be willing to transfer (being that other of their accounts would be connected to it), Their other option would be to allow you or the client access to the account but I suspect that that could cause some strife down the road should they decide to delete the account.

This said, I would ask them to simply turn over the account associated with the GA account. If they do not, you will end up having to start from scratch. Sorry of the bad news, but GA accounts are not transferable and this reason is (I believe) part of Google's logic in recommending a sing account for each installation.

Thanks for the tip about HARO!

Most of our clients are competing for a very specific set of keywords and we are mainly focused on the success (rank / position) of their keywords. We have followed the recommendations of Matt Cuts related to blogs and articles within those blogs containing natural content that points back to the sites. The article marketing is basically just backlinking the blog articles to get them better PR and more traffic.

But your comment creates some good thought about the use of our articles and the energy we put into them.

Check out http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/anti-splog

This is a free tool that we utilize in our multisite environments and it also controls sign ups (which I believe could be the choke point for your issue):

(cut from above link:)

Signup prevention– these measures are mainly to stop bots. User friendly error messages are shown to users if any of these prevent signup. They are all optional and include: Limiting the number of signups per IP per 24 hours(this can slow down human spammers too if the site clientele supports it. Probably not Edublogs though as it caters to schools which may need to make a large number of blogs from one IP)

I hope this helps

Paul

Hello fellow SEOMOZ rs.

We are building out a platform on WordPress that provides a free blog for a market niche in a multi-site WordPress environment. The client we are building this solution for now wants the people signing up for the free blogs to be able to search for each other (based on categories and keywords), to build a list of favorites from other bloggers in this community (sort of like building a team), review each other (leaving a publicly viewable review and score of each other) as well as create a forum that is outside the blogs that each of them have.

Here is a summary of the goals for the WordPress Plug in (s)

1. Search for other sites within the multi-site environment
2. Scoring / Review system for other users (who also have blogs on the system)
3. Ability to build and maintain a list of other users in the community (like a prefered list or team list)
4. A shared Forum area that we could admin from the multi-site platform that they could log in with using the same credentials as their multi-site blog credentials.

My question for you all is:

Does anyone have experience in a single plugin that will work in a multisite environment that would handle some or most of the goals listed? If not a single plugin, how about recommendations for individual plug ins that might help with this?

Thanks for any recommendations!

Google's guidelines suggest creating a single account for each Google Analytics account. This way, one main account will be associated with each GA code that is installed. It is possible though that (especially if the account is pretty old and the GA was installed a while / year + ago) that the old design company used their main account for many GA accounts. If they did use a single account (that controls many GA installations) it would not be an account that they would likely be willing to transfer (being that other of their accounts would be connected to it), Their other option would be to allow you or the client access to the account but I suspect that that could cause some strife down the road should they decide to delete the account.

This said, I would ask them to simply turn over the account associated with the GA account. If they do not, you will end up having to start from scratch. Sorry of the bad news, but GA accounts are not transferable and this reason is (I believe) part of Google's logic in recommending a sing account for each installation.