So, today we started to gather this information from MajesticSEO. So, don’t be surprised to see a major increase in the number of backlinks. Yahoo Site Explorer wasn’t very reliable lately.
Here is one example of how this looks like on one of the sites we track:

We will work to even improve this data in the future by collecting some of this data internally, so stay tuned.

We also plan to break this information further, so we can show the number of sites linking to you domain and to break this information to follow/no follow links.

Now, that is a nice start, but Google are probably more advanced than just counting the keywords as part of their content analysis. We should expect them to look for more keywords within the page that are related to that target keyword. As an example, think about “seo software” as a keyword. Google (and the other search engines) would probably want your page to cover not just “seo software”, but also have related keywords like “download”, “free seo software”, “seo tools”, “rank tracking”, etc. It really makes a lot of sense to do that. Otherwise, a page that has content about adult sex and “seo software” at 6% density would be counted as related to “seo software”.

OK, so what we need is to make sure that our page covers most of the relevant keywords. But, we don’t really know what those keywords are, right?!
So, our approach would be to compare your page to the leading results in Google for that keyword. They must be doing something right to get to the first page. The comparison highlights keywords we are not using enough in our page.

Here is one example of what we can show:


So, you see that we don’t have “search engine optimization” in our page, but 6 out of 10 of the leading results have that. The average keyword density for it is 0.37%, while ours is 0. On the leading results that have this keyword, it is used in the HTML tags: title, H2, H3-H6, meta keywords (in the head section), description, …

If we want to dive in and see exactly how this keyword is used in those pages, we can press the “more info” link, and see this:


Here we see exactly how it is used in each page and what the rank of that page is within these results.

This new feature is available in all packages, but has different limitations. In the basic accounts (not advanced or professional) it is only there so you can taste it…
For agency packages, only the agency user can see this screen.

Please let me know what you think of it.

We started collecting Facebook data last week, and today the data is available on a new screen called “Facebook”, just below the Twitter one. Here is how we show the data:

On the upper part, we show a graph that sums up the different mentions of your website on Facebook. That includes shares, likes and comments. Simply put, anywhere any of your website’s pages is mentioned as a link, we count that. This allows to see the development over time for your Facebook presence.

The lower part of the screen shows the breakdown of the different Facebook mentions(shares, likes and comments) of your website’s pages. This data only shows the current status.

For sites with many URLs mentioned on Facebook, it will take a few data collections to gather all the mentions. This is because of technical reasons.

It allows to export all the rankings to PDF and CSV, which was requested by many users. Up until now, some users exported every single search engine by itself, and unified the results manually.

A PDF/CSV report, attached to an email, is certainly not as good as being able to view all the data. Here is why:
1. You can’t filter the data.
2. You can sort it.
3. You can’t configure view issues, like the amount of results per page.
4. There is a limit to the amount of info you can give in a single attachment. I mean, if I was to send all of the data in some of our accounts, the report would be hundreds of pages long, which is not very user friendly.
So, I don’t recommend on using the mailed reports instead of online access, but I can see the benefit in a few scenarios, like when an SEO has a client that just can’t figure out all of our data and prefers a simple, one page, attachment with the rankings.

Anyhow, here how it works. There is a new tab in the settings screen, called “mailed reports”.

As you can see, the form at the bottom of the screen allows to add more reports. Each of those reports will be send as an attachment, to the email defined for this domain. The reports will be sent right after new data is collected, so that the information is fresh.
Few interesting details:
1. You can define the report to be sent weekly/monthly even if the data is collected daily.
2. All reports are sent as attachments of the same email. So, there might be one email with a few attachments to it.
3. Format of the report is either CSV or PDF.
4. You can test to see how the report looks like by pressing the “test report” button next to it.
5. For white label clients, the report will be sent from their email and the signature will have their company name.

Here is one example of an email with reports you might get:

Hope you enjoy the new feature. Please let me know what you think of it.

Update – Allowing to Merge the PDF Reports
Two improvements that were added to this feature. Both related to PDF:
1. PDf reports can now be merged into one PDF attachment. Just look for the check box in the mailed reports admin screen.
2. In case you have an agency account or use our white label, you can have the branding (your logo) on all pages.

If you didn’t just land from another planet, you’ve probably heard that Adobe & Apple are having a fight, which results in Iphone and IPad not supporting the flash. This means that SheerSEO’s flash charts were not seen on those devices up until now. This is something we can’t allow, and once we realized that these two companies are not going to resolve their issues soon, we decided to invest the time to fix this.

What we did was to implement a fall back mechanism, so that the flash charts are still going to work the same on all platform, except IPad/IPhone, which will fall back to use JavaScript charts.

Here are two pictures of the charts in IPhone:

One note: you might need to refresh your browser’s cache to have the new code working.

Creating a PDF report is simple. Just go to the rankings screen> current tab. Or, if you using the professional package, to the current competitors tab. From there, look for the pdf export link at the bottom of the page:

Pressing this link creates the pdf report. It will come out with the same setup the online report has. So, if you are sorting it by one of the columns, selecting a specific search engine, or comparing it to a date in the past, it will show the same in the export as in the online screen.
Here is a screenshot of one such export:

So, the new feature we just added to our SEO software, allows you to do just that. Here is the screen:

Notice the “Compare To” selection. It has two options: one is to compare to last sample, which is the same as what we had until now. Second option, is to compare to a selected past date. That’s it – fairly simple.

This selection, as all other selections made on this screen, effects the export to CSV. So, if you compare to last month, and then press the export. The same “compare to” selection will appear on the exported CSV.

Another little change we did for the export to CSV, is that now we don’t show all search engines in one table as before. We only export the selected search engine rankings. This allowed us to also export the “URL in search results” column, which many users requested.

If you need something different you can contact us, and we will try to find a solution.

As for the polling frequency, you can now also order daily polling. So, the options are either daily or weekly.
As for the features, there are 3 features set for the agency packages mentioned above:

These new options is already available in the pricing page: pricing page, so you can order new packages with the links there. If you are an existing customer and want to upgrade, you’ll need to contact us in order to upgrade, because we still don’t have a UI for upgrading agency accounts. This will be added soon. For now, just email us for those requests.

Why Blog Reviews Are Important
If you don’t know why backlinks are important, then you should probably go and find yourself some beginners SEO tutorial, really!
Now, there are plenty of ways to get backlinks.
Those include: web directories, forums (in signature and in a post), link exchanges or just asking for someone to add your link in his recommended links page.
We don’t know exactly how Google analyzes backlinks, but it would be very surprising if they don’t apply some logic to see how natural the link looks like. Most of the above sources, might look suspicious. For example, a link from a signature of a forum post is almost totally unnatural. It is obvious that someone is trying to promote a site and this is not a real recommendation. When you look at a link that is in a links page, like “recommended sites” section in some websites, this is too, usually a result of some kind of link exchange or paid link, so this is not very natural link. So, what would be the perfect natural link? I think, it is a link Embedded within a blog post or a forum post. This is not science, but common sense. I remember stating this argument in some SEO forum about two years ago, and a group of SEOs argued that a link is a link. But, as a software developer, I know how easy it is to create such algorithms that would try to estimate how natural the link is, and it is naive to think Google developers don’t think the same. So, we want a natural looking link, from a relevant website, and a link from a blog, relevant to your niche, embedded within a review of your service, is probably as perfect as a link can get.

Why not do this yourself?
Honestly, you could do that yourself. Just look for relevant blogs, find their contact details (usually either web form or email), and send them an offer . That should work, but the problem is that this would take a lot of your time to do this manually, and I myself never got to do this thoroughly just because this is a time consuming and boring task. Another issue, is that you never remember who you’ve asked in the past, so this process becomes messy and the bloggers stop taking your seriously.

The Solution
Our new feature allows you to automate this entire process, and make it an easy and manageable task. You’ll be able to get a few blog reviews for your website each month, from great sources, and it will all be managed from your account. Although this is automated, you are still in full control, and decide which blogs you want to communicate with, and what offer you are sending them. So, this is not the same as paying some cheap resources to do that for you, and discovering that they created more damage than any good.

OK, it’s time to show how this thing works.

Creating a Blog Offer
The first thing you need to do, is create a blog offer. This blog offer will contain both the details that we use to search for relevant blogs, and the details that would use to communicate with the blogger. Think before you create those blog offers, cause we have limits on the amount we allow per month.
Here is the screen used to fill the blog offer:

The “offer name” is simply the name we use internally for your blog offer.
The keyword and localization are used to search the relevant blogs for your website. Make sure you use the most effective search terms for your website.
The rest of the details in the blog offer are used to fill the request that is sent to the blogger. Probably, the most important factor for the success of the request, is the message. You should offer money for the review, Remember that the blogger needs to spend time for writing the review. Also, he/she exposes your service to his users, which is worth some money too. You should leave the amount you offer for subsequent emails, but make sure the blogger understands you are willing to pay for this service. The amount should not be written, because the blog offer will be used for multiple blogs. Here is an example:
“Hi, My name is xxx and I’m the owner of xxx, which is a site for …
I like your blog, and I’m interested in being reviewed on your blog.
I’m willing to pay for your time and efforts.
Please let me know if you’re interested,

Your name.”

Submitting the Blog Review Requests
Once you finish filling the blog offer details and press the “add offer”, it will take a minute or so for SheerSEO to find the relevant blogs. Those blogs will be shown in the second tab of the blog reviews screen, called “blog selection”. See screenshot:

You see here a list of blogs that should fit the keyword you selected for this profile, but some might be wrong for you, and this is why you need to still chose which of those you want to use.
As you see, the list provides the PageRank and the Alexa rank per each blog, which should help you chose the right blogs for you. Of course, common logic should help here too, like you shouldn’t ask your competitor to right about you(:
When you press the submit button (triangle button on the actions column), SheerSEO will send an email or fill out a contact form with the details you have set in the blog offer. Sometimes the contact form needs a captcha, so you would be asked to fill this on the screen.
Once you submit to a blog, it will show an indication for that on the screen. You can also indicate that this blog in irrelevant by pressing the reject button in the actions column. The blogs offers, with all the information regarding the blogs found, and the indications regarding the requests made will stay on your account, so this helps you also organize the communications done during this process.

A Word About Spam
Some may see this type of work as spam. I tend to disagree with that, because we communicate with the blog owner using his/her contact form or contact email. If this is a secret, he/she shouldn’t put that on a public page over the internet. We don’t just send this from a program, but you are in control of who you send this offer to. Also, the blog is selected to be relevant, and assuming you send a review offer that makes sense, and not some kind of advertising for your products, this is not spam. This should be exactly the type of offer the blogger wants to hear about.