I’m excited to announce a new feature was launched today at SheerSEO. We now track Twitter mentions of your site in Twitter. The buzz around Twitter is so big, and it seems it has become such a valuable way to promote your services, so it is high time to track that also.

Many users may not find this very useful cause they don’t use Twitter. But, I believe that ignoring Twitter today is a mistake. With so many users and so many tools that allow you to add simple buttons on your site for people to follow you or retweet about your service, it simply is a very useful way of creating a buzz about your site.

Enough with the words, let’s see what we got:

As you can see the “Twitter” screen has 2 tabs. One called “Tweets” and one called “Trends”. The Tweets screen shows you all the tweets that mention your domain. This is more powerful than searching on Twitter for 2 reasons. First, it also searches for your domain on shortened URLs (Twitter allows only 140 characters, so many URLs are shortened through services like bit.ly, digg, etc.). Second, Twitter limits the search to around 10 days, and we save this data for good.

The other tab, called “trends”, shows the amount of tweets that mention your site per week. This could be an indicator to the buzz around your site. Here is a screenshot:

Hope you like the new feature,
Eyal

Up until now, you could use SheerSEO to track your keywords in one localization (combination of country and language). So, for example, you could track your keywords for United Kingdom, or United States. But what happens if you have audience in multiple countries, like we do, or if you happen to live in a country that has multiple languages, like Canada or Belgium. At last, we got the solution for you.

SheerSEO now supports tracking multiple localizations for SEO. I think this is a great feature that you can’t get in desktop tools.
Here is one of our main search terms, “seo software”, in different localizations:

You can see we rank differently for each country.

Here is how you can set this up. First of all, you need to see what is your default localization. This is found on your account settings screen. If you are set wrongly there, it is time to fix it. Now, each search term you want to track in a different localization than your default one, just go to the search terms admin and add a line in the following format: “search term**localization code”. There is a list of those localization codes at the bottom of the page. So, for tracking “seo software” on UK, you need to add the line “seo software**uk” in the search terms admin page.

I’ve just launched a new feature that will help viewing historical rankings.
Up until now, SheerSEO only enabled viewing historical results in a graph showing a single search term’s rankings over time. This is nice, but some times people want to see the many search terms at the same time, like the table in the current rankings.

To help this problem, the history tab in the rankings screen is now divided into two sub tabs. One called “Single Search Term Graph”, which is the what we used to have as the history tab, and one called “All Search Terms Table”, which is the new historical rankings snapshot.

As you can see, it has a date selection box. The date you set at this box will be used as the end date for the snapshot, so the latest sample in our database that is before that date will be shown.

For a long time I an frustrated with this indication in SheerSEO.
It shows an estimation of the number of sites linking to your site according to Google and Yahoo.

While this estimation might be helpful, it is not very accurate and causes a lot of confusion for people that think that this is number of back links.

In about a week I’ll be adding a new indication to SheerSEO that will show the number of back links according to Yahoo Explorer.
I am thinking about removing the “Number of Referrers” Indication once the number of back links indication is in place.

Any thoughts regarding this?

One of the issues that keeps being asked for lately is the segmentation of keywords.
The idea is that there should be an easy way to group keywords in relation to importance, activity or simply by subject. Once this is defined it could be used for sorting and filtering.

There are a few ideas on how to do that. One is with tagging, same as done by Gmail.

Any thoughts, ideas?

With Microsoft re-branding of their search engine and with the cooperation between the 2nd and 3rd biggest search engines, Bing and Yahoo, I decided it is high time to support Bing.

I got to admit this was never a big issue to our clients that we didn’t support Bing, but this was mentioned from time to time.
So, finally the Bing support was launched today. Since this implementation is new, there might be issues to fix. Please feel free to give any feedback.

We have recently added XML API to SheerSEO. This should be useful for those of you who wish to write their own UI or for applications that want to embed SheerSEO data in their current interface.
It currently only supports showing the current SERPs and the historical SERPs search terms, but if there will be a demand we’ll add more to it.
The XML interface requires an API key that will be issued by us.
If any of you are interested in using the API please contact us.

Just wanted to share with you a funny search I did on the new Bing search engine.
While developing code for tracking SERPs on Bing I tried monitoring bing.com website to see how it is ranked. The most obvious search string I could think of was “search engine”, so here is what I got:

First I thought I had something wrong with the implementation, but no, Bing thinks that Bing is not in the top 200 results for a “search engine” (:
No matter how you look at this, seems Microsoft needs to do some work on their search engine.
The first “search engine” Bing recommends is dogpile, then comes Ask & AltaVista. Google is in the 17th position and Yahoo at the 9th.