As you may have already read on our social shares on Google+ and Twitter, February and March have been two very interesting and challenging months for our team. We’ve worked intensively on a new version for GeoRanker, a version accompanied by an entirely different design, loaded with features that have been on our to-do-list for a long time. The new GeoRanker portal is almost complete. For the next couple of weeks we’re releasing the portal in Beta, allowing you to test the app out and help us fix any missed bugs or errors. So, here’s what you should expect from the platform…

Updated reports structure

As the GeoRanker reports grow in content and richness, we believed it was necessary to take serious measures to simplify the navigation through our reports. Thus, the GeoRanker Beta Portal is structured in 4  major sections:

1. Rank Tracker - specially designed to keep constant track of your website’s SERP evolution. Thanks to your new monitor reports, SERP changes will be automatically checked by our crawlers and saved into your account.
2. HeatMap Report - this section provides you with two colorful, highly intuitive heatmaps (one for organic results and one for advertisers), that will give you a quick overview of all sites that rank for a particular query in different locations. This is great if you want to start a competition analysis or develop new link prospecting strategies.
3. 1st Page Report – lists the TOP10 sites that rank for your keyword in each analyzed city/country.
4. Advertisers Report – use this tool to get a quick overview of your Adwords competition and optimize your PPC campaign accordingly.

Smooth and clean interface

Instead of viewing the whole information on a page, we sorted everything into 4 distinct sections. The color scheme of the new GeoRanker platform is lighter, HeatMap results have become easier to distinguish and functions, such as creating a PDF report, configuring a monitor, updating or deleting a report, are now far more accessible.

Analyze unlimited keywords and locations

We know that this has been bugging many of our customers, who needed to generate mass reports for hundreds of keywords, this is why we decided to drop keyword limit! The new platform works with credits, you can use your purchased credits to generate a report for as many keywords as you need.

Google Places Prospecting made easier

The Local Map Reports displays on a map the top results for a particular search based on their physical location. This feature is now available in the 1st Page Reports and in the Advertisers Reports.

Global / Local Distinction

Creating reports is just as easy as before, only we’ve added a new distinction to the whole process, to ease your navigation on GeoRanker. As you log in to your account, go to the top menu and click on “New Report” to generate a SERP analysis. If you own a website with an international target, “Global Reports” are just the right thing for you. They are designed to analyze SERP rankings in different countries and continents all over the world. On the other hand,  ”Local Reports” is designed for sites with a regional or national target. Select this option whenever you wish to create a country specific report, monitoring SERP results in different cities within the same country.

Export reports as CSV or PDF

Reports can now be exported either as a whole, either section based (Rank Tracker, HeatMaps, 1st Page Reports or Advertisers Reports). There are two ways of as a whole go to “My Reports”, to the right of the designated report click “Action” and then click the “Download as PDF / CSV” button. Your downloadable report will be ready for download within few seconds!

API integration for other platforms

If you’re a tool developer or a SEO agency, gaining direct access to our API might just be the right thing. We created a separate section to support you in understanding how the GeoRanker API works and how you can implement it into your current projects. For more information got to apidocs.georanker.com.

Having said this, we happily invite you to test the new GeoRanker platform in Beta. Please note that we are still going through few testings,  if you encounter any bugs or errors, please report them to us. We wish you a happy browsing experience and looking forward to getting your feedback!

Why you should upgrade to Monitors?

1. Ranking History and Alerts on Rank changes features will be soon added to our local SERP analysis tool. Starting with this new release, GeoRanker has started to store all of your past and future reports. In March all this data will become available in your account.

2. Time Saving - with monitors you won’t have to worry about updating each of your reports manually. Use our tool to set the desired update frequency (daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly) and let us take care of the whole SERP crawling process.

February is big month for our team, as it marks one year since we publicly released the first GeoRanker Local Ranking Reports.  We are happy to celebrate our first aniversary with the release of My Monitors - a new section in your GeoRanker accounts, that will open the way to an entire set of new features and SERP tools.  In this post we are going to introduce you to GeoRanker Monitors and explain why it is important for you to upgrade your old reports to monitors.

What are Monitors?

Monitors are a new type of SERP Reports that can be created only by registered users (including free and paid subscriptions). Compared to our standard reports, they store information about your ranking history, thus enabling you to access and compare SERP reports generated on different dates (this is a feature we are planing to release in May). They also contain the “Update Frequency” feature, through which you can create reports that will automatically update every day, week or month.

Generating GeoRanker Monitors

Monitors can be generated through the same form featured on our homepage at georanker.com. To create your first monitor enter all your usual ranking information: keywords, website URL, country, language and other settings. Once you’re done, scroll down to the end of the form and right before the big “Generate Report” button you will find the settings for your monitor. To find the settings more easier I attached a print screen and highlighted the areas for the report monitor settings (see right photo).

1. Tick the box below “Create a monitor to this report” and GeoRanker will start saving the ranking history for your report.

2. Frequency: use this setting to configure how often you want GeoRanker to update your rankings.

Once you have clicked the “Generate Report” button your new analysis will be saved as a monitored search in your account’s MyMonitors section.

Updating your old Reports to Monitors

At the present moment there is no way to convert your old reports into monitors automatically. What you can do is re-generate each report and make sure to save is as monitor (by following the above described steps). Even if it takes some to do so, we highly recommend you to upgrade to the new GeoRanker Monitors.

Create a New Report NOW

If you find this update useful, don’t forget to spread the news on your favorite SM platforms.

Many of us are aware with Google’s latest updates. It’s ever changing algorithm in the guise of “Penguin” and “Panda” has rocked the SEO platform. This has made it essential for webmasters to ponder their back-linking strategies. “Panda” shook the landscape on April 2012 and shortly after “Penguin” was introduced, just like a one-two punch.

Quick History of Google and SEO

In the mid-90s Google was largely considered as nothing more than a web directory. This made specialist at the time think, that for a website to benefit from a top ranking position, you have to repeat keywords in both on-site content and  Meta keyword tags, and this strategy worked those days. Changes took effect as soon as Google advanced in technology making the game of cat and mouse we see today.

With Google’s updates in 2012, webmasters noticed that SEO has become more intricate and complicated. Google’s “Penguin” and “Panda” update many webmasters have been struggling to comply with Google’s changes. Basically, the “Penguin” and “Panda” update were introduced to penalize duplicate content, paid services and poor quality websites.

How do I Build Back-linking Post Penguin?

Back-linking building is just a part of the overall SEO program. And if your back linking strategy is not up to par with Google’s updates, you’ll end up wasting your effort and money. Provided you have the complete steps in search engine optimization process, getting quality back-links will never be a difficult task again.

Researching Links

The first thing to consider when creating back links is research. One easy way to get loads of information is to simply research your competitor’s back links. Learn what works and doesn’t work by studying their back link profile. When determining is a site is a good place to place links to your website, considering the following measures will greatly help.

• Check website authority
• How many back-linking setups does the website already have?
• What is website’s Page Rank?
• Is it niche-related?
• Is it a paid service or directory?

Organizing your Back-linking Research

Provided you have gathered a list of websites, it is crucial to organize them into one of the following categories: Links to improve page rank, Links to improve SERP’s and Links to increase target traffic.

The Importance of Natural Back-linking Building

The ability of Google to determine unnatural back-linking strategies and campaigns has made many webmasters rethink their SEO strategies. In the case of back-linking to your website, you should prevent creating links too quickly, only if they are naturally occurring. The rate of building links should fall under 10-12 per day for a given URL.

You may be wondering why you can’t simply build plenty of links daily when websites that go viral do. It is only Google that can somehow tell the difference, but they will never share many details of their algorithms. It is really important that you stick to these latest updates unless you want to risk ending up like several websites that have been penalized or have seen their rankings drop.

Top Ways to Build Effective Back-linking Setup Post “Penguin”

It is clear that many webmasters have attempted to go around Google’s rules. For a short time they found initial success by constantly struggling to stay ahead of Google’s updates by using black hat techniques. Below are some ways of getting good quality links.

• Social Media Marketing
• Blog/Forum Commenting
• Guest Blogging
• Niche Directory Submission
• Offering valuable tools and information for free or link bait
• Advertising your website offline and online

There are other better ways to build links to your website, traffic, page rank, and increase your SERP’s. But remember to build them naturally to avoid being penalized by Google.

 As we are approaching the end of the year and the Christmas holidays, there’s still so much going on in our offices. 2012 has been an important year for the Local SEO industry and it has also been a crucial year for our team. Below I will try to summarize what’s been going on in the past 12 months and give you a quick behind-the-scenes look at KeywordSearchRankings.com.

Looking back at Local SEO in 2012

From the top changes of the year I want to mention first of all the unexpectedly growing popularity of local searches. It is clear that international searches are over-saturated, SERP results are filled with time-honored, well established websites and companies that have invested a huge amount of time and money into their online authority. Nowadays it is almost impossible for start-ups to compete with such deeply rooted opponents, this is why more and more SEOs are turning to optimization campaigns for a perticular geographical area. 2012 also brought a series of algorithm updates (Panda, Penguin, the shift from Google Places to Google+ Local, etc.) which forced all of us to reshape and reorganize our understanding of the way search engines work.  These changes may have been less dramatic to those who remained loyal to natural, whitehat optimization techniques, while campaigns based on unnatural link building and over-optimization led to massive rank dropping.

How far have we come in the last 12 months?

We’ve told you a little bit about how the Local SEO industry evolved. During the past year our team has been just as active, here’s a little bit about the changes our tool has been through. So far, we haven’t talked a lot about the history of our tools, therefore allow me to guide you through a quick intro: the KeywordSearchRankings.com platform is less than a year old. Our tool’s very first version was launched in March 2011 under the name KeywordWatchTower.com, but KeywordSearchRankings was born over one year later, we released its first beta version in February 2012 to 1000 testers. To us the past 12 months have been crucial, thanks to our first testers we were able to better understand which path KeySR is following.

Here are just some of our most important achievements in 2012:

• February: first beta release of KeywordSearchRankings.com
• April: launch of our official blog.
• November: we were pleased to inaugurate a completely new tool design. In order to make the reports more accessible and easier to follow, we reorganized our analysis structures, redesigned and improved the heatmaps feature and integrated Google Maps, thus enabling our customers to track the top local SERP results from one particular area or city on maps.
• December: in order to make the tool even more accessible, we spent a great deal of time to rethink our pricing plans. Starting with this month anyone can register a free account to generate reports for 50 keywords per month. We also introduced the Starter Plan at $19.00/month, offering small businesses the possibility to monitor 500 keywords each month.

Where do we go from here?

Wo work constantly to improve and further develop our tools, therefore prepare yourself for an exciting and very promising future. We rather not reveal too much about our plans, but here are a few of the things you should expect in 2013:

• Up until this point, all of our registered users could generate and save reports in their accounts. They can also update reports at any given moment, by accessing the “My rankings” section and then clicking on Actions -> Update report. As of today this will no longer be necessary, since we just finished implementing a brand new feature, that enables our users to set automatic update rates (daily, weekly, monthly) for each of their reports. The new feature is available in each user’s account, in the “My Monitors” tab.
• Among the plans for the first quarter of 2013 we are going to include a major re-branding campaign. KeySR will soon be replaced by  GeoRanker, a platform packed with lots of new features and a new name, that is easier for you to keep in mind and also will better reflect the work and the goals our team aims to accomplish.
• Some of you might already be familiar with SEO-Report.co, this is another SEO tool that our team has been developing. In 2013 we are going to fusion KeywordSearchRankings.com with SEO-Report.co, thus complementing our local SERP reports with lots of useful information concerning onpage and offpage optimization aspects. We believe this is going to spare SEOs of a lot of meticulous work and help them gain even more useful insight into their campaigns.
• Our platform is currently available in English, Romanian, Russian and Brazillian Portuguese. Another thing we expect to do in 2013, is to release our tools in many more languages, including German, Spanish and French.

Predictions for 2013

We’ve said so much about our past and our future plans. Now, we were hoping to keep this section short and instead invite you to fill it in. Obviously local searches seem to become more and more relevant and SEO compaigns with global tragets are no longer relevant to the majority of local and even national business models. Together with the growing popularity of local SEO strategies, we hope for our services to help SEOs and business owners to analyse, monitor and gain priceless insight into their online marketing strategies.

So, what do you think the future holds? What will be the biggest changes in Local SEO? How do you plan to pursue online advertising (and especially SEO) in 2013?

It’s no secret that local search changed dramatically over the last 10 months, and as 2012 comes to a close, it’s important for local businesses and search engine optimization firms to continue to adjust their strategies to ensure success in 2013 – especially when it comes to content.

To get the most out of your local organic search campaign in 2013, developing a solid content marketing strategy that utilizes a diverse mixture of content channels to promote your web content is essential. Creating and distributing exceptional web content can have a substantial impact on your overall local search optimization efforts, and there are several benefits that come with executing this strategy.

Among the benefits that a diverse content marketing plan can have for local search optimization campaigns are:

Increasing Your Online Footprint and Gaining More Exposure

It should go without saying that web content, by nature of the medium, is highly diverse, which means it shouldn’t be hard for you to create diverse content. Among the web channels that Internet users consume web content are:

• text based web content such as blog posts, articles, and whitepapers
• other graphically driven content such as videos and infographics
• audio content including podcasts, mp3/4s, etc.

Each of these mediums, whether they fall on popular web blogs or media rich websites like YouTube, offer an opportunity for your company’s brand to impact a web user. Not all Internet users consume the same types of content, therefore utilizing each of these mediums will allow you to reach a wide range of users who are consuming content on each of the different types of channels.

Not all web users are consuming content on all of the channels. Some just like to watch videos. Some prefer to read blog posts. The diverse content strategy is huge for brand exposure, because it allows your brand to get in front of potential customers who are interested in what your company has to offer. If you’re not utilizing each of these mediums, you’re missing out on reaching these potential customers, and potential sales.

Show Off Your Expertise and Industry Prowess

Creating content affords your company the opportunity to show off how much you know about your industry. By creating a mixture of blog posts, informational videos, or how-to whitepapers that web users can use to educate themselves on topics within your industry, you’re putting your best foot forward when it comes to establishing yourself as a trustworthy source for information. This credibility greatly increases the chances of your company converting a web user into an actual client.

The best example I can think of off the top of my head to further illustrate this concept is what you’re reading right now. In this blog post, I’m not trying to sell you on anything, but rather I’m educating you on a highly valuable content marketing tactic that is going to greatly aid you in your local search marketing efforts.

Establishing Contextual Relevancy Through Link Building

Another important benefit that diverse and exceptional content garners for businesses is its potential to draw natural and contextually relevant links back to your website. Link building has always been an essential ingredient for local search optimization After Google cracked down earlier this year on spammy link networks and other unethical link building strategies, content marketing took center stage as the premier method of building quality back links.

One of the overlooked factors for building links with content marketing is the contextual/topically relevant angle. Google values links that come from related content sources.

To further illustrate this point, lets say your company sells running shoes online. Some of the contextually relevant content pieces you might consider posting with links back to you website are:

• an off-site blog or guest blog post on a website related to health and wellness or athletic training.
• a page on HubSpot or Squidoo about what to look for in a quality running shoe.
• for local businesses competing in a local market, establishing a relationship with a local business related to your industry for guest blogging opportunities is also a great way to channel your content while building a local relevancy with the search engines.

Build a Reputation as a Local Authority With Google

So I’ve provided an overview of ways to channel your content and to build links, but what impact does all of this work have on the local search results? In short, it makes you an authority with Google and the other search engines. Each of these content marketing strategies works to not only build trust with consumers, but it’s also building trust for your website with Google – and the more Google trusts your site, the better rankings you achieve!

Another factor that plays into building authority (and rankings) is Google’s inclusion of social signals into its algorithm. The more popular your content is on the social media networks, the better it ranks (and the more likely you are to get a quality link back to your content from users who are reading your content.) Are you starting to see a pattern here on what it takes to rank well organically in the local results?

When it comes to local search optimization success in 2013, it is all going to hinge on great content. Make sure your company is well prepared to be a leader in your industry by developing useful content that will help drive top rankings in your local area.

While you should be using tools like Twitter and Google Alerts to keep your pulse on the latest trends in your industry and creating up-to-date content around these trends, there’s also something to be said for creating “evergreen” content that people will always need.

What’s the best way to generate blog content that will stand the test of time and consistently bring you a stream of traffic month after month, year after year?  One effective method is to identify relevant keywords and topics that are frequently searched in Google.  The best way to get started is with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, also simply known as the Google Keyword Tool.â

 Google Keyword Tool (GKT):

Although the Google Keyword Tool is designed for Google’s Pay Per Click customers, it’s extremely useful for analyzing the organic search volume of a given keyword.  If you type in any word or phrase, it will return a list of up to 800 keyword ideas, along with their Global/Local monthly search volume, the average PPC cost per click, and the advertiser volume.

The GKT can be confusing at first, but if you start playing around with the tool, things will start to make sense and you’ll have the opportunity to unlock some valuable data.  Some important items to note when using the Google Keyword Tool:

Use “Exact Match”

There are 3 modes you can use when looking up keyword volume:

• Broad Match - The broad match searches will give you a significantly inflated result.  Broad match takes into account all the traffic from keywords related to the keyword you entered.  While this can be useful for evaluating the size of niche, it’s nowhere near an accurate reflection of potential search engine traffic.
• Phrase Match – This number is based on the searches where your keyword was mentioned as part of a larger search query.  For example, a phrase match search for “dog training” would be counted, but so would “dog training tricks”, “dog training tips” etc.  Like the broad match mode, this often gives a significantly inflated number over the type of search engine exposure you can expect to realistically generate.
• Exact Match – This number is based on the searchers who typed in your exact keyword into Google over the past months.  Select this mode when estimating the search volume of your keyword term.

You’ll Likely Get Less Traffic Than Shown

Although the exact match search mode in the GKT can give you an idea of the search volume of any given keyword, that doesn’t mean that everyone who searches for the keyword will visit your site.  That will depend on a huge variety of factors – your search engine ranking, the number of PPC ads running etc.  Generally, the site listed in the #1 organic position will get approximately 36% of the clicks, the #2 position 12%, and the #3 position 9.5% of the clicks.

It’ll also depend on where you rank locally.  With Google’s push for localization, don’t be surprised if a high rank in one country doesn’t mean a high rank in another country.  If you want to know where you’re ranked for a keyword in multiple locations, you can use a tool like the one here at keywordsearchrankings.com.

On the other hand, as your blog starts to gather authority through backlinks and social media sharing, your blog posts will start to rank and gain traffic for long tail search terms that you weren’t even targeting.  This cumulative effect can take awhile to get going if you’re a new blogger, but established blogs will benefit tremendously.

Identifying Profitable Blog Post Ideas

Once you log into the Google Keyword Tool, go to the left menu and select “exact”, under Match Types. In the main box, under “Find keywords based on one or more of the following:”, and next to “Word or phrase”, type the word “dog training”. Click search.

So now that you have some background information, here’s an example of how you can use the Google Keyword Tool to locate profitable blog post ideas in your niche.

You’ll get a list of keyword ideas related to dog training, some which you’ll be able to use as the basis of your next blog post.  As you can see, the keyword “dog training” itself gets approximately 60,500 exact match searches every single month (at time of writing on Dec 3, 2012), and 33,100 local searches in the United States.  It has an approximate CPC of $1.98, and a high level of advertiser competition.  Even if you don’t have much experience doing keyword research, it should be obvious that this is a very popular keyword, and fairly profitable as well, with a decent number of advertisers in the niche.

A Quick Intro To Basic Competition Analysis

But wait right there; common sense should tell you that this keyword is also extremely competitive to rank for.  You can confirm this by looking at the sites in the top 10 positions in Google.  While in-depth keyword competition analysis is beyond the scope of this article, generally, you can get a rough idea of the level of competition by looking at a few key factors:

• What’s the average PageRank for sites on the front page? What about the PageRank of the individual pages?  A top 10 search result with lots of PR0 and Pr1 pages usually indicates lower competition, while search results filled with PR4+ usually indicates stiff competition.
• Do they have the keyword in the title?  Search results where the top sites have high PR and the keyword in the title usually indicate a very competitive SERP.
• How old are the domains on the front page?  Older domains usually have more authority and trust.  If you see multiple sites that are only 1-2 years old in the SERPs, this usually indicates weaker competition.
• Do a search to see how many webpages have the keyword in the title using the search operator allintitle:.  E.g. allintitle: dog training.  As of Dec 3, 2012 there are 2,580,000 webpages with the keyword Dog Training in the title.  That’s a lot of pages targeting this particular keyword.

A good, free way to analyze competition for a keyword is to use a plugin like SEOquake.  This plugin works with both FireFox and Chrome, and lets you quickly retrieve the PageRank, number of pages indexed, the number of backlinks, and the age of a site when you’re looking through the search engine results.

If you’re looking for more in-depth analysis, there are other paid tools that can let you quickly analyze multiple search results or dig deeper into a site’s backlink profile, but a free plugin like SEOquake will give you a quick estimate of the level of difficulty you’ll face in ranking for a keyword.

Finding Longtail Keywords

But the point of this brief exercise wasn’t to show you that dog training is a competitive keyword.  You’ll notice that by typing in “dog training” into the GKT, you also get a list of 800 terms related to dog training.  By going through this list (you can use the available filters to make things easier), you’ll be able to identify both short tail terms and long tail keywords that can be the basis of profitable, evergreen blog posts.

Here’s a quick summary of how you can generate evergreen, high ROI blog post ideas using the Google Keyword Tool and basic competition analysis:

• Search for keywords related to your niche in GKT
• Go through the list of related key terms, noting the search volume, CPC and Competition
• Use common sense: just because a keyword shows up in the GKT, doesn’t mean it should the basis of a blog post.  Know your audience.
• Do a quick competition analysis
• End up with a list of low-competition search terms with strong advertiser demand.

Don’t Forget: Search Engines Aren’t Your Only Source Of Traffic

While search engine rankings are an important component of building successful, profitable blog, don’t forget that its only one component.  If you have a new blog, it may take awhile to build the authority and trust required to rank in the top 3 search engine spots – even for less competitive keywords.

This doesn’t mean that the GKT and the strategies discussed above can’t be useful.  Remember, if people are searching for the keywords in Google and there are advertisers, this means that the topic is relevant to people in the niche and potentially profitable, whether they find your site through Google or otherwise.  Even if your competition analysis shows that you might have difficulty ranking for a keyword, don’t let that stop you from crafting compelling content around the keyword and using blogger outreach, guest posting, social media etc. to generate traffic to your blog post.

Yesterday Google announced the addition of the Communities feature within Google+ which enables anyone to create or join groups devoted to certain topics or areas of interest. Gundotra, Google’s senior VP of engineering gave the following statement:

“We started Google+ in the first place to make online sharing as meaningful as the real thing. Too often, our online tools miss the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions, and Google+ aims to fix this. Fortunately we’ve got a vibrant community to guide us.”

Google+ seems to be rapidly gaining users and popularity and perhaps even becoming a threat to Facebook and other social networks. According to Gundotra, Google+ already has 500 million registered users, of which 135 million are active. In order to find out more about Google+ Communities and how you can create your own community, check this page.

We regarded the launch of this new Google+ feature as a good opportunity to create a group, through which we can test out and discover all functions and uses of the new Google+ communities. Thus, we launched an international group dedicated to Local SEO experts and enthusiasts. The main aim of this community is to gather in one place all people are connected to the Local SEO and SEM industry and wish to ask questions and participate in discussion on this topic.

So, if you’re into Local SEO and intend to participate in any future discussions or simply want to stay connected to news and findings concerning Local SEO or Google+ Local, you’re warmly welcomed to join us on the Local SEO Community on Google+.

I thought it would be interesting to analyze 32 sites that were penalized by the Penguin Algorithm. I also thought about looking over some sites in order to discover the reasons for which they were penalized by this new algorithm. Thanks to colleagues from SEOpedia I managed to collect 32 sites.  Before starting the analysis I thought I would discover something different from what I already knew.

I am telling you honestly, I was convinced I could draw some clear conclusions based on these websites and somehow to infer Penguin’s formula. I’ll detail below. In order to do this case study I used MajesticSEO, which I think is the best tool for checking and discovering backlinks.

The penalties were:

Penguin, manual penalizing due to the links.  For 3 of the websites the reasons were unknown. 25 out of the 32 sites, have been penalized by Penguin, 3 for unnatural links and  3 websites for unknown reasons. Somehow all the penalties were directly related to links. The below chart explains our findings more clearly:

TLDs: many domains had the extension .biz , but I don’t think this could have been reason for a penalty. Sites didn’t have good links, and two of them had content in English.

What were the reasons for the penalties?

The reasons behind the penalties are multiple, but mainly due to low quality links. Types of links, anchors, links to internal pages, link schemes, links sitewide/footer.

• There are sites which have been penalized even though they have the great anchor text profile, but the majority of the links are irrelevant like blog comments and web directories.
• There are sites penalized on an single anchor text (money keyword) because the types of links, without insisting very much on that particular anchor text. The remaining pages rank very well.
• There are sites penalized because they bought links, or have links that Google consider to be manipulative ( links used just for passing PR).
• There are sites penalized for obvious reasons:  high percentage of exact match anchor, spam links over 90%.
• There are sites penalized for many sitewide links and exact match anchors.
• There are sites penalized for a keyword or two, where the webmasters insisted too much on that anchors. You could think also about over optimization, but i’m not so sure.
• There are penalized sites that had very good links, diversified and relevant, placed in the content, achieved slowly, during a time process (good link velocity), but they used in a exaggerating way exact match anchor text.
• There are penalized sites that have a very good anchor brand percentage, small percent of exact match anchors, many partial anchors, but the types of links are irrelevant. At first look, they appear manipulative.
• There are sites penalized for links schemes, types of links. There are 2 websites that have:  202 Root Domains and only 36 Class C IPs,  195 Root Domains and 27 Class C IP. This clearly brings up something suspicious and I think that they worked with a web directories network, hosted in the same place.

 What do the analyzed websites have in common ?

• Over 90% of the links lead directly to the Homepage. Here a few questions arise: Is there only one important page on this website? Does the Homepage deserve to get all the links? Naturally,  the content receives links, no matter what kind of content (video, text, images, charts). This type of content is usually posted in a blog posts or an article pages. Page Rank flows in the site, even if the external links are directed to internal pages. This type of links are called “deep links”.

Below, I will bring into discussion two terms, Link Ratio and IP Ratio, two terms that are being mentioned and taken into consideration far to less in link building campaigns.

• Link ratio or link diversity is the total number of domains divided by the total number of links. In an ideal case, this ratio would be 1, meaning one link comes from one domain. This won’t happen, yet we have to do what is required to tend with this ratio to 1. For the Homepage, the link ratio is very low. The average for the Homepage link diversity is 0.2044 and 0.2013 for the entire domain. This is considered to be very low and indicates many sitewide links.

• IP Ratio is the total number of IPs divided by the number of Root Domains. In the ideal case it would be, of course, 1. Here we have the same principle as in Link Ratio. If the ratio is low, then you can quickly see if there has been a manipulation in terms of link schemes or link farms. IP ratio is 0.6793 which is pretty good, except for the 2 sites that are at 0.1782 and 0.1391.

• Another common aspect is represented by the much higher Trust Flow and Citation Flow of the Homepage than for the whole domain. Keep in mind that domain authority is more important than homepage authority. Although the percentages are close, the numbers say otherwise. Here is the homepage average: Trust Flow: 28.5, Citation Flow: 36.5. And the domain average: Trust Flow: 22 and Citation Flow: 27.

• I am making a comparison of these variables above with some very strong domains. I have selected seomoz.org, searchengineland.com, searchenginejournal.com, bbc.co.uk and emag.ro.  All this websites have a natural link profile and are authorities in their fields.  Do you notice how the value of the variables is lower for the Hompage than for the whole domain? This means that these websites have many links pointing towards their internal pages ( deep links).

All the websites had very few links toward internal pages. Deep links percentage is very small.

• Regarding the anchor text, there was nothing in common, absolutely nothing. As I already mentioned in the above lines, I have seen many penalized websites that had a good anchor mix: brand anchors, brand+keyword, partial anchors. The only aspect these sites have in common,  is the fact that there are no anchors on generic terms such as: here, click, site, there, article or others. Think about how people normally link to websites. Think about how you normally link. Do you use only keywords as anchors? Or only brand names? Or would you rather go for short, generic words, as for example: use, click here, more information, etc?

• However, percentage of anchors and exact match anchors linking domains (money keyword) are quite high. I have considered exact match anchors the plural and the singular of the targeted keyword.  There are many situations here. For example, for the domain Shoes.com and the title “Original Shoes Online”, I have considered exact match anchors , all the anchors containing: shoes, online shoes, original shoes and original shoes online. Keep in mind that all this data represents an average for the 32 analyzed domains.

• Partial anchors percentages are not very accurate, there are many negative values ( you’ll see it in the Excel, there is a link at the end of the article). To calculate the number of partial and generic anchors I decreased from the total number of anchors, the number of brand anchors and exact match anchors. The minus values are because of the link that appear and disappear, being impossible for the crawlers of  MajesticSeo to be always updated. That is why I can’t put it in a graph. I can make a comparison between the graphs above. The remaining percentage up to 100% is represented by the partial match anchors.
• Another common thing is represented by the dominant presence of the penalized keyword in almost all anchors. It’s pretty obvious that all the links included targeted keywords in their anchors.

Anchors profile below is from a website that I have made link building for a period of time of 6-7 months in a very competitive niche. Do you notice the large percentage for “other anchor text”? If you have the targeted keyword in the Title, H1-H2 and meta-description I think it’s very obvious for both engines and users what keyword is that page relevant for. For this reason I don’t think it matters anymore what kind of anchor I use for that page.

Conclusions:

• Do you think I discovered the Penguin formula? Well, here’s the secret: there isn’t any formula, although I first believed I could find something. Penguin acts for sure in a very interesting way.  It usually hits the competitive keywords in every niche. There was a case of a website that dropped from position 5 to position 15 for the targeted keyword, so not all Penguin penalties are severe ones. Everybody wants to rank number one for the most searched keyword and tries to achieve many backlinks with exact anchor text for just a keyword or two.  About the penalties reasons I wrote above.
• There are no ideal percentages of how to use anchor text, meaning 70% brand anchors, 10% exact match, 10% partial match and 10% generic anchors. Depending on each niche, this percentages can be higher or lower. Each niche/ keyword is treated differently. You need to analyze the competition  before starting link building process.
• There is no general, success guaranteeing formula for link mixing and there is no point in insisting on a certain type of links. Backlinks must come from different sources and the best way to obtain them depends on the site you’re optimizing.
• Every single niche or site needs a different strategy for link building and a different approach. Make a detailed analysis of the competition, make an average of data and try to bring towards your website links as to reach 10% – 15% less than average.  For an average of 40 % exact anchors, try to bring 25%- 30% exact anchor links or even less.
• Definitely, you must not insist on a single keyword or a single type of links.
• Penguin is subjective, you should keep that in kind.

Although this is not the best analysis you can do and not a very exact one (I found that no analysis is 100% accurate), I did manage to get some ideas about future link building campaigns, Penguin updates and links in general. Links are penalized each day and for us to have the certainty that we won’t be penalized, we must chase links that stand the test of algorithms and the test of time. Be as selective as you can when it comes to link building. Not all links are good, they can hurt sites too.

Here‘s where you can download a file containing my entire analysis (note that some of it is in Romanian).

Have you ever asked yourselves how SEO professionals run their Local SEO campaigns? Do you think they are doing some kind of magic for reaching Google’s Top Positions?

Here is the list with the most important steps to be followed:

Step 1 - Keyword Prospecting

You can start with a predefined keywords list or you can create your own list.

Here are some Keyword Suggestion Tools and Tips that will help you:

Google Analytics - provides the list with the keywords users are searching before reaching your site – you can discover high conversion long tail keywords with a low competition level. For this your site should be updated from time to time with high quality content.

Google Webmasters Tools – provides the number of impressions, clicks and CTR ( Click-through rate ) click for each different referring keyword – Try to improve the CTR for the keywords with the biggest number of impressions as your website already ranks in a good position.

After analyzing the first two options you should already have a short list with keyword ideas. You can use the next tool for finding new ones.

Google AdWords – Keyword Tool – provides keyword suggestions starting from a list of keywords. You will be able to see the Global Competition Level, the number of Local and Global Monthly Searches and if you’ll be logged in your google account it will provide also the approximate CPC ( cost per click ) which is an important decision factor for adding the keyword to your list.

Now, the keyword list is beginning to increase. It’s time to apply some filters in order to keep only the important keywords and expressions. In Local SEO, all you’ll be interested in is what your Local USERS search for and the  BEST TOOL to use for filtering your keyword list is:

Google Trends - this tool has an incredible advantage, as it provides statistics on a local basis. You are able to compare & trace the interest for each keyword on any city in the world.

Through the following example we aim to show you that there are about 4 times more users located in Miami, FL searching for “pizza delivery” than there are in Miami, FL searching for “pizza delivery Miami”. This example also reveals that the trend is positive only for the search which is NOT including the location name. ( blue color )

Analyze each of your keywords with Google Trends and choose only the ones with a positive trend on the targeted location.

Step 2 – Analyze Metrics

Generating a Local Ranking Report – In order to find out the website ranks at the beginning of a SEO campaign, using KeySR you can run a depersonalized local ranking report as an user located in the targeted location/s.

This will help you to:

- analyze the website’s current ranking status on each different location

- analyze the Local SEO Competition Level on each location by using the Organic HeatMap Reports. When you spot keywords with similar SERP rankings in all locations ( same HeatMaps colors on different locations )  - then you’ve hit the JackPot – as probably none of the competitors has run a Local SEO campaign for that certain keyword on the selected locations.

- identify Local SEO Competitors and analyze their Local SEO Strategy in order to build a better one ( InSite SEO, BackLinking Structure, Social Media Activity )

Monitoring the Local Rankings is an important step as it will offer you a clear view of  your achievements in each targeted location.

At this point you already have a filtered keyword list and you also know the other competitors SEO strategy. Now it is time to create your own strategy. And the first step you can do, is to implement what you’ve seen top ranking sites are doing and afterwards add more Local SEO factors.

Step 3 – Local In-Site SEO

Since the web is already filled with huge lists of Local SEO InSite factors, I will mention only the most important ones:

- Place NAP ( Name Address Phone Number ) in a visible area of your website, zipcode shall also be visible

- Using Geo Tags / Microformat / Structured data – for the search engines to understand exactly which is your targeted location

- Add Google Maps on the Contact page

- create a Local.KML file and add it to sitemap.xml

- use targeted location name in the sites URL, Title and MetaDescription

- optimize images with local terms in Alt and Titles

- internal links ( do not exaggerate ) – use geo terms in the anchor text. Build an internal linking structure, in order to distribute the Google Juice to the most important pages and subpages.

- add good quality content to your site. Use targeted keywords next to targeted locations names. Inviting guest authors is a good strategy to do this, as long as you carefully verify the content quality.

Do not copy content, do not spin, do not create too many internal backlinks, do not use iframes to get text from other  websites etc… Most of the Generic SEO “Do Not’s” also apply to Local SEO. So, if you want to find out more information on this topic, all you need to do is google it.

If you followed all the above described steps, your website should already be in a nice shape. The next thing to do is to increase the Local SEO Authority Level.

Step 4- Local Off-Site SEO

For Local SEO – Social Media is a very important factor as it can bring direct and indirect benefits.

Direct – Google is able to see the Social Media behavior +1s, Likes, Shares, Tweets, Pins, Followers, Subscribers etc.

Indirect – some of the SM users will consider your content useful and will mention it by sending backlinks ( do follow or no follow – these days it is no longer an important distinction)

What you can do is:

- create profiles on as many Social Networks as you manage, share content ( yours or others if it is useful). Here’s a list of social networks you can start with: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, InBound.org, Reddit, Scoop.it etc

- remember to use Local terms, if possible

- be active on local communities and forums – active means No Spamming – but being helpful

- add and verify your location/s to Google Places

- complete an Advanced Local SEO Link Prospecting Process

- add your website to local directories by using each time detailed NAP – this will bring you citations which for Local SEO almost the same important as backlinks

- ask users for reviews on google local and other specialized review sites

- create content that backlings  your site and use guest blogging to get backlinks from sites/blogs/forums which rank on top positions on the targeted area ( use Local Rankings to identify those sites )

Monitor! Monitor! Monitor! Local Rankings Positions, Keyword Trends, Website Traffic, Backlinks, Competitors Local Rankings, stay connected to high quality Local SEO Communities and improve your Local SEO strategy according to the newest things you discover.

If you need to check or compare your site position on Google from different custom locations in the same country, best chose is to generate a GeoRankings Report – by using the new Custom Location Feature from KeySR.

Just follow the next steps:

1) visit www.KeySR.com
2) enter keywords
3) enter website URL ( optional )
4) select only one country and an ajax Custom Cities field will appear
5) enter location name or zip-code and click on the Add button. You can add multiple locations
6) set the other custom options as the number of citites, alternative search engine, default search engine
7) click Generate Report – button

The Report shall look similar to the next one:

Here you can find the direct link to the report:

http://www.keywordsearchrankings.com/keywordreport/bingo-SERP-Position-Report-5c9ff53200