Dear SEO SpyGlass users,

I am writing this as an answer to many questions that arose after Matthew Woodward published the results of his experiment where he compared the performance of the industry’s several top backlink checkers:

• SEO SpyGlass
• Majestic SEO
• Ahrefs
• Open Site Explorer (SEOmoz)
• Raven Tools

The experiment involved 3 websites and the average number of backlinks found on the three websites was as follows:

Needless to say I was surprised at these results. As you know, we run tests in-house on a regular basis, to make sure that SEO SpyGlass stands to its status of the most data-rich backlink checker. So it was quite surprising, why on the three sites tested by Matthew, SEO SpyGlass was observed as the poorest performer. Read more »

Editor's note: this post is brought to you by Kristi Hines, a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. If you're interested in more content on doing keyword research the right way, check out SEO PowerSuite's manuals on 4 Steps to Efficient Keyword Research and  Applying Keyword Difficulty Score.

Google has done several things in the last couple of years to make people wonder if keywords were still relevant when it comes to search optimization.  They've removed keywords from organic search data in Google Analytics. They've punished websites that have overused keywords in anchor text when link building. They've even punished websites that used keywords in their domain.

But the fact remains that keywords are still relevant. The average person probably doesn't type, "I want to find books about gardening" into a search engine. They type gardening books or books about gardening. Google confirms this. Read more »

If you are a small business owner who makes money off their website, you've probably heard about Google's Penguin update - the algorithm change that rendered a big number of previously used link building methods "illegal".

Penguin left many site owners scratching their heads, wondering which link acquisition tactics work after the update. One such method that still allows you to play it safe is so-called broken link building. It consists in finding broken links located on other people's sites, and getting them replaced with links back to your site. Read more »

Christmas is a magic time.  Even if you're not a kid. Even if you've made 5 minutes to read this list instead of finishing your Site Audit report.

Any SEO deserves a nice present for Christmas.  And you know that. Just sit back and enjoy the list we've prepared for you. Read more »

After a number of Google Updates, it looks pretty challenging to focus on certain SEO factors – meta tags have become less important and backlink anchor texts must be treated with utmost care, but fortunately there’s one huge and critically important factor you can start working on today – TRUST!

Let’s review the ways of making your ecommerce site more trustworthy for search engines and users. Read more »

If your website is stuck at the bottom of search results, and you can't find the reason for its ranking stagnation, run a comprehensive analysis of your SEO strategies. It can be that your SEO techniques are missing on some essentially important components, which is holding back ranking growth.

In the first series we learnt how to run such analysis for small websites. This part will tell you how to find and fix SEO issues for sites of a large size.

From this post you will learn how to:

• conveniently organize big amounts of SEO data;
• run comprehensive SEO analysis of big websites;
• research SEO data with the help of Excel;
• spot underperforming pages and find out the reasons of their poor performance;
• make the necessary adjustments to improve your current SEO strategies.

In a word, this guide will tell you how to run professional in-depth SEO analysis quickly and easily.

Ok, let it roll.

Read more »