I’m happy to announce a new feature, which could be very beneficial to many of our users. You can now see your real visits from organic search. This data is very important when used within the rankings reports. The best way to explain this is by showing it, so here is how it looks for sheerseo.com (we track our own site in the online demo):

The “Real clicks” column on the right is the data taken from Google Analytics. This new feature is only available in the advanced and professional accounts.

Enabling Google Analytics data collection

To activate this feature, you need to share your Google Analytics data with the user we are using to collect the data, .

You can share your reports with our user only for viewing, so this keeps your data protected. Also, since the sharing is done on google analytics interface, we are not exposed to the login details of your Google Account, which makes it safe too. In Google Analytics, each domain is managed by a profile, and each user has access to one or more profiles. You can either share data with our user for the entire account, so all domains (profiles) that belong to that user will be shared with us, or you can share a single profile and thus allowing us to access only that single domain’s data.

I’ll describe how to do the sharing for a single profile:

1. Login to Google Analytics, and go to the settings screen. Find the desired profile, and click the “edit” link.

2. Find the section (at the bottom) called “Users with Access to Profile”, and click the “add user” link at the right of this section.
3. In the “Add User Access To Profile” screen, select “Add new User access for Profile” option, email address should be “” and access type is “view reports only”. The screen should look like this:

4. Press the “save changes” button.

Now, it is time to activate the feature on SheerSEO. This is done by going to the settings screen > account settings tab. And on the “activate” button. This will launch a process that will try to fetch data from Google Analytics for the domain account, and if that works, data will be collected immediately and will show up in the rankings screen. If this didn’t work, you’ll see an error message. Failure will probably be caused because the sharing of data wasn’t done properly.

About the data collected
This feature is only meant to show the real users coming in to your site from specific organic queries. It doesn’t replace the Google Analytics or equivalent site, cause we only take very limited data. We pull this data weekly, and in each collection we take the last 30 days.

Future Plans
One plan is to also use this data to propose more keywords in the search terms admin screen.
Another plan is to add getclicky data.

I’ve heard recently that keyword density is obsolete and should no longer be a factor in SEO. I want to get to the bottom of this issue in this post, and describe the new improvement to SheerSEO keyword density feature.

First of all, let’s start by explaining what keyword density is. Search engines are automatic processes that have to parse web pages for their content to figure out what a page is all about. There simply is no better way a software can figure out what is the content of the page without parsing the content. They can figure out something by looking at the links to that page, but that is very limited. So, this means that Google and the other search engines must parse our web pages to figure out what our content is about, and the most obvious way would be to simply take the content of the web page, clean all the html code, js, css and just stay with the content that the user is seeing on the screen. Then, count how many times each keyword appears, and maintain that list and use it to categorise the web page. Here is how this looks like for our home page:

So, a search engine looking into this page, knows “seo software” is what this page is focused on.
To compare this page to others, it isn’t enough just to count the words, cause that would mean you won’t be able to compare this page with short ones. So, search engines need to look at the percentage of the keyword in the overall count of words in the page. And the final formula for keyword density is: (number of times the keyword appears)*(number of words in the keyword)*100/(number of keywords in the page).

The first improvement we did now in sheerseo is to add the percentage of each keyword, and not just the count as was before. BTW, people say that more than 9% density would be considered as spam. This makes sense.

Now, this is how Google probably done this in the early days, probably in their early versions, somewhere in 2001-2002. But, the problem is that now we’re in 2010, and they hired an army of developers and math/algorithms doctors. So, they probably still count the keywords, but they must have a lot more methods that enable them to assess the quality of the page and to categorise the content. One obvious thing, they must be doing is to treat the HTML tags of the page differently. For example, a text that appears in an H1 tag, means a lot more than just a little font at the bottom of the screen. Same goes to the title tag, which appears at the top of the browser window, which SEOs noticed is very influential on the categorisation of the page.

Thus, it makes a lot more sense to use a weighted keyword density, that would not only count the number of times each keyword appears, but also take into consideration the html where that keyword was found. This is exactly the new feature that was added to SheerSEO’s keyword density screen. It shows up in the same screen as the obvious keyword density appears in. Here is a screenshot for the weighted keyword density of our home page:

The weight that is used per tag is:

The weights are of course debatable, but this is a much improved way to see how search engines are looking at our pages. This is still not even close to all the algorithms that Google have in order to analyse a web page, but this is a big step forward. Hope you all like the new feature and find it useful.

One of the most confusing things about SheerSEO, is the way you should work with multiple domains. There isn’t a single day I don’t need to answer questions about how to get setup with multiple domains and how much will it cost to use our services for multiple domains. So, we’ve added today two new pricing plans, that are built for agencies.

Up until now, you could only upgrade each domain and pay according to the plan chosen per that domain. If you have 4-7 domains you get 20% discount, and if you have 8+ domains you get 40% discount. Though this is surely the most flexible way of doing upgrades, it is pretty confusing for most people. So, we’ve now added two pricing plans that are built for SEO agencies. The first one is called “small agency”, and allows up to 10 domains and up to 1000 search terms (per the entire set of domains). The second plan is called “agency”, and allows up to 50 domains and up to 2500 search terms. 

The advantages of these plans over the price per domain account are:

1. These plans allow you full control over the domains. As long as you are within the limits, you don’t need us to upgrade/downgrade/cancel domains. All modifications can be done from the master account admin tab within the settings screen.
2. The pricing is great if you have enough domains to use most of the limits.

The disadvantage is that these plans are not dynamic, so you can’t add anything to the limits if you need to, nor reduce the limits for better pricing. Also, the polling is weekly, and that can’t be changed too. If you need a more dynamic package, just use the regular upgrades per domain with bulk discounts as we done so far.

The prices are 49$/month for the small agency plan, and 199$/month for the agency plan. Orders should be done from our pricing page: http://www.sheerseo.com/seo-monitoring-tools/pricing.html

I’m happy to announce a new feature in SheerSEO, web directory submission. So, I’ll start by explaining what web directories are all about. If you are an SEO veteran, you should probably skip this part.
Web directories are sites dedicated to organize lists of websites, organized into categories. A few years ago, this was how people used to find things on the web, with Yahoo being the most used web directory, but this is no longer the case, since we have good search engines, like google. Still, these web directories have the benefit of giving you a back link to your website, with a helpful text you determine. Don’t hold your breath till you get visitors from those directories, but you might get some link juice from them, and all you have to do, is to simply submit your site to them. For the very best directories, it is very hard to get accepted, like DMOZ, or you’ll need to pay some cash like with Yahoo web directory. But there are plenty of free web directories, that you can try being accepted to, and this is where this feature will come handy.

The Pain
If you ever tried submitting to those directories, you’ll probably found it very tedious. The problem is first to find directories that are free for submission, and don’t require anything like reciprocal link. Just finding such directories, that are really beneficial too, and have decent PageRank and reputation, will take some time. Then, when you try to submit your site to them, you’ll find that you need to fill the same details again and again. Those include details like the site owner, the email for confirmation, the site’s description, the relevant category, and so on. If you were to manually submit your site to 50 directories, that would probably consume a day of work at best.

The Solution
Our new directory submission features can save a lot of your work here. I’ll start showing the process using SheerSEO.
First, we need to fill the details, but in this case we do this just once, and SheerSEO will remember those details for you. We store those details in “submission profiles”, you’ll find that in the “directory submission” screen->”profiles” tab.

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can create multiple profiles here, and later edit/delete them.

After we have at least one profile, we can move the next stage of selecting which directories to submit to, so let’s move to the “directory selection” tab.

Web Directory Selection

 As you can see above, you can chose here your directories by their Alexa rank and page rank. At the moment there are about 80 web directories available, but many more will be added in the future. You can select up to 10 directories to be submitted at once. You should also select your preferred profile for each submission. Once you’ve finished selecting, you can press the submit button at the bottom and this will lead you to the next (and final) step of the submission, which will happen in the “submission” tab.

So, here is how it should look like:

web directory submission

Now, all that is left to do is fill in the captcha (if needed), select the category which best fits your site, and submit.

There are three features here, that will make you life easier:

1. This is an AJAX interface, which means you can submit each directory, without having the screen refreshed. Only the status field will refresh after the submission, and will either tell you that the submission was successful, or let you know what caused the failure.
2. If you can’t see the captcha image clearly, you can refresh the image with the link on the right side of the image. This is AJAX interface, so it will not refresh the entire screen, just the relevant image.
3. One of most annoying things in direcotry submission, is selecting the category. There are usually hundreds of categories, and you certainly don’t want to spend much time on finding your relevant category. This is why we try to remember your choices, and those will be used in the next submissions you perform. But still, it will take about ten directory submissions, until we can be successful in guessing your selections. Until then, we just don’t have enough data to do good guessing.

A word for the SEO professionals

SheerSEO is built both for SEO professionals and website owners. SEO professionals usually have multiple websites to take care of, and use our master account feature. The master account allows to have a separate login for each domain and a master login to all domains. The master login is supposed to be used by the SEO pro. and the domain logins are supposed to be used by the clients. This feature will only be available to the master login by default, cause some SEO pros will not want to expose that to their clients. You can turn on this feature to the clients accounts in the master account admin screen (one of the tabs in the settings screen).

Summary

Hope you’ll find this feature useful. Remember it is still fresh and kind of betta, but I promise to keep improving it. It is a web directory semi automated service, which includes the following capabilities:

1. Choosing desired web directories according to their Alexa rank and PageRank.
2. Keeping common details like link URL, confirmation email and site description in submission profiles.
3. Submitting multiple directories simultaneously.
4. Semi automation. Most things are automated for you, but you are still the one to pick the captcha and the relevant category, so you are in control of the procedure and avoid being marked as spam.
5. Category guessing. The categories selections are remembered by the system, and once there is enough data, SheerSEO will be able to guess you categories.

I’ve launched a new feature today, which was requested tons of time by various users. For those of you that have many keywords to track, it is hard to watch the data. While there may be 600 keywords you want to track, only a small number are the them are the most important, and might generate 90% of the traffic from search engines. This is typical in SEO. So, until now, it was hard to browse all the results and look for the most keywords. This new feature should help with this issue, by allowing you to filter the results by groups of keywords you define.

So, if this sounds like something you need. Here is how to do this. You go to the Settings->Groups screen, and you should see something like this:

Then, just write the new group name and press the “add” button next to it, and now you have a new group defined.

Next step is to define the keywords in that group. So, make sure the group selection box shows the group you want to define. In the example below the group is called “top”.

And now simply check all the keywords you want in that group. When finished, press the “Submit group changes” button. That’s it, group is now defined. All we need to do is to use it.

So, now we have a group defined and we want to filter our results. So, go to the rankings screen and you’ll notice there is a new selection box on top of the results, called “Group Filter” (see below)

Use this selection box to select the group you want as filter, and walla, you see just the keywords in that group.

This also works for the competitors rankings for those of you with the professional account.
Note that this affects the Excel reports, so if you are using a group to filter the results on the screen, that will also be what you see in the CVS file when you press the export link.

Since there are so many settings screens now, I’ve gathered them all as tabs in a new screen called “Settings”.

Please let me know what you think of this feature,
Eyal

I’ve added a new feature to SheerSEO. A Summary screen. It shows summarized data, collected from several indicators within the site. Currently it gives only a few indications, but more will come in the near future.

Here is a snapshot taken from the demo account, where we monitor our own site, sheerseo.com:

As you can see the graphs show results per week. Also, at this point, this is only available to our advanced and professional users, since the most important data here relies on search volume and average CPC, which are only collected for those packages.

The graphs are:

Hope you enjoy this feature, and I’ll be happy to hear any comments or questions regarding it.