Great Free SEO Tool

I discovered a great free tool for internet marketers or anyone wanting to check their Google ranking. By Google ranking I don't mean the page rank number that you find in the Google tool bar, but where you are on the search results page. For instance, if you are fifth from the top your rank would be "5." If you are fifth from the top on the second page your rank would be "15." This tool tracks that ranking over time. If you have a lot of sites you're trying to track, it comes in very useful. The tool is called Rank Checker Ace which is also the domain: http://rankcheckerace.com.

Rank Checker Ace has a simple, easy to use interface:

To add a site, all you do is click "New Url" then fill in the details of Url name, keywords, search engines such as Google or Bing you want to track for.  Here is a how-to on how to add a site you want to track.  Here is their complete how-to guide.

If you like the tool, you consider donating to it.  I did.

Update:
Please note that after I wrote this post Rank Checker Ace became Pro Rank Tracker.   It still is free but only for up to 50 terms, and it still is a great tool to check your rankings.  I am going to pay because I use it so much.

Google PageRank is Not Dead After All

I don't know if you noticed, but Google updated its toolbar PageRank last week on December 6th. This was a surprise for many of us since it hadn't been updated since February, 2013.  Because of the inactivity many internet marketing and seo experts speculated PageRank was dead. They were wrong.

My sites went up in pagerank.

I for one am happy Google did not pull the plug on PageRank.  Many of my sites went up.

PageRank shows how popular a website is.  It is only one factor in 200 or so that determines ranking in Google search results, however, so it is definitely not as important as it once was.

If you'd like to see improvement in pagerank and ranking in search engine, visit Ducktoes Internet Marketing.

SEO Experiment on Ducktoes Blog

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about an internet marketing expert who said all you have to do to never worry about a Penguin update again is write four or five blog posts a week.  So I decided to experiment with my Ducktoes blog and have written 15 posts in three weeks.  So far I have only moved up one place in ranking but we shall see.

I write about the SEO experiment's progress here.  We shall see soon enough or maybe in a few weeks.  It takes awhile for things to progress on Google ranking.

I'm hoping to be number one for the keywords "Calgary computer repair."

Penguin Christmas present to my own website, if it works, that is.

Learn SEO from Matt Cutt's Videos the Short and Easy Way

I try to follow every word Matt Cutts says and learn what is good for SEO and not so good.  I watch the videos.  However this can take a large amount of time that I don't have.  So recently I was really, really happy to find The Short Cutts website.  It gives you very short answers to the questions posed until you have time to watch the whole thing.

Click here to go our Calgary SEO Services website.

Do Not Get Sucked into The Blackhole of Blackhat SEO

Do get sucked into the black hole of black hat SEO.

Do not get sucked into the blackhole of blackhat SEO. It may not really be bottomless, but it is hard to return.  You will have all your SEO juice squeezed out of you as you pass on to the other side of Penguin. Then you'll be requesting removal from unsavory sites and disavowing, disavowing, disavowing until you want to puke or else abandoning your domain and starting over.  Whois and Google Webmaster Tools will seem like good friends.

Do not use article sites unless they are very reputable and you have wonderful, articulate things to say and nofollow your links.  Do not use automatic anything.  Do not hire a cheap company from India or anywhere else that will give you a million and one links....that's a lot of disavowing coming your way.

In my last post I showed you an article on how to improve your SEO by blog posting. Another way is to familiarize yourself with everything that Matt Cutts says.  I'll talk about that more in my next post.

Never Worry about Penguin Again?

While using Scoop It to find more information about web design, I came across and scooped this article:
http://blog.red-website-design.co.uk/2013/10/14/never-worry-about-a-google-algorithm-update-again-using-this-one-trick/ about never worrying about a Google algorithm update again. This sounds great to me, since I spend a lot of time worrying and one major worry is Google updates.  The trick, according to the article, is to write four or five posts in your blog every week.  This is huge, huge, huge if it works and in the also huge in the amount of workload but definitely doable and if it effective, I will be ecstatic.

I know that having a blog works for SEO but I didn't know it worked that well.

I am experimenting to see if it really does improve my SEO and writing about it on my Ducktoes Blog.

Another Amazing Case Study: Site Speed Does Not Seem to Improve Ranking

According to this article on site speed and ranking by Moz Google has indicated that site speed is one signal that is important to ranking. However, when we at Ducktoes SEO of Calgary tested this, we didn't find that increasing the page speed of the site increased its ranking.

What We Did
We took two of our SEO clients websites that used a highly customized Divi theme for Wordpress which made them slow to download from the web. We streamlined their code to make them download much faster. We waited for Google to index the faster loading sites. No increase in ranking for either site.  We waited a month.  No increase in ranking.

One of the sites we made a lot faster. Their site speed went from 40 to 89. It took about 60 hours for my web developer to streamline the code so it wasn't cheap to speed it up. However, the increased site speed didn't help the ranking.

The other site we put on a much faster and expensive hosting platform, after cleaning up the Divi theme.  It went from 23 to 74 in page speed. There was no increase in ranking for this site either, in fact it went down in from 9th on the first page to the middle of the second page. 

Both sites went up to the top of the first page when we refreshed their content and created relevant backlinks.

Many other SEO consultants agree with us.  If page speed is a ranking factor, it is a minor one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/17bmyh6/is_pagesite_speed_actually_important/