Linking is the most important aspect in SEO optimization. Obtaining quality links and a creative linking mix is very important for your linking profile.

Below is a process broken down into 2 steps to help clearly identify and visualize a new linking mix for your website

Step One: Analyze Your Current Linking Mix

To create a new linking mix you need to first analyze your current website’s links. By running a backlink analysis you can understand how many links you currently have as well as what type of links.

First go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter in your website. Then select in-links and export the links to Excel.

Once the links are in Excel analyze the top 200 links. Identify each link by link type. Below is a legend to help identify the links:

After identifying your top 200 links you will need to pull the same report for your top 3 competitors.

Step 2: Analyze Your Top 3 Competitors Linking Mix

Follow the same step above in analyzing your linking mix for your top 3 competitors. Place each competitor in a separate tab in the Excel workbook.

Once you have your top 3 competitors as well as your own websites top 200 links and identified each link type you will want to create a pivot chart to visualize your results.

In your Excel workbook create a new worksheet and add your websites as well as the top 3 competitors into the new worksheet. Label your headers with a Link Type, Company, Link Type Count.  Then create your pivot chart. Your chart should look similar to this (please review the “how to” at the end of the post):

Once your chart is created you are able to identify where your competitors excel in linking types and quantity. Above you can see competitor 3 excels in blogs and competitor 1 excels in partner links.

After analyzing the linking chart you are able to create a new linking mix based off your current linking mix and a comparative mix of the top 3 competitors.

How to Create Your Pivot Chart

1. Open a new Excel workbook
2. Place your top 200 links from Yahoo Site Explorer in the first tab
3. Place the top 3 competitors links into the following tabs
4. On the fourth tab create a header with a Link Type, Company, Link Type Count (place a 1 under each row).
5. Gather each competitor and your websites data and place it into the fourth tab.
6. Then select insert Pivot Table.
7. Place the Company in the Column Label, Link Type in Row Labels and Sum of Link Types in Values.
8. Once your pivot table is created select pivot chart.

How to Visualize A New Linking Mix is a post from: Costa Rica SEO Blog

http://searchengineland.com/google-now-personalizes-everyones-search-results-31195

This is extremely important for all search users whether they be professionals in the space or businesses looking to  sell more online.

Why? Because SEO ranking reports will fall out of sync over time with what users see if the users don’t opt out of the Personalized Search. Meaning we’ll being paying less attention to rankings reports and more attention to conversions/traffic.

Should create a lot of headaches for those SEO’s who focus solely on rankings and not on their clients bottom line.

All Google Search Now Personalized is a post from: Costa Rica SEO Blog

First off, if you don’t know, you are a web analytics discussion waiting to happen. But for today’s discussion- where do your search engine conversions come from? From Google paid search? From natural search? From the new Bing engine?

Even with the recent Yahoo! and Microsoft collaboration announcement, we can take a look at search engine conversions without looking at the actual search engine. A past set of statistics is resurfacing, presented by the SEO expert Rand Fishkin.

Approximately 88% of search engine marketing spend is spent on PPC (paid search). About 11% of search engine marketing spend is attributable to SEO (natural search). However, PPC accounts for about 10% of total search clicks, while SEO accounts for about 90% of search engine marketing clicks. The 2009 predicted SEO spend is over $2 billion.

With these kinds of numbers you must consider where your search engine conversions coming from. Where is your Internet advertising focus?

If you are not incorporating some level of SEO into your website, are you missing out on 90% of your visitors? Of course not. However, you are likely missing out on some portion of visitors, and you may not be attracting the type of visitor who is likely to result in a search engine conversion.

This substantial predicted 2009 SEO spend means, among other things, that you have more competition headed your way for search engine conversions. Your competitors are realizing the value of SEO. As SEO can take a few months of optimization efforts before results are seen, 2010 is where your competition will start to stand out. Have you begun your SEO efforts?

Where Do Your Search Engine Conversions Come From? is a post from: Costa Rica SEO Blog

Sorry for taking so long to get out another blog. Been busy with growing the business. Here is a list of awesome tools that I typically use to find keywords for PPC and SEO:

1. Google Keyword Research: Pretty much the standard for all things keyword research. Google just started releasing volume numbers for search terms. Before you had to rely on a number of other tools that were…well not Google. Be careful when looking at these numbers for SEO because their the data is pulled via PPC.

2. Spyfu: This used to be a free tool. However they’ve recently moved to a small fee. This is an excellent competitive research tool. My absolute favorite is the KOMBAT feature. It shows you the overlap and missed opportunities for keywords between your client and competitors.

3. KWMap: Visual thesaurus. Need I say more.

4. Google Insights: Google trends on Steroids!

5 Google Search Based Keyword Tool: HOT OFF THE PRESSES! This tool is pretty sweet. It will make recommendations for keywords that you PPC accounts are currently missing.

Got any tools you’d like to mention let us know!

List of PPC & SEO Keyword Research Tools is a post from: Costa Rica SEO Blog

http://knol.google.com/k/knol

Everyone knows that Wikipedia ranks number 1 for almost anything. How the hair will the search giant play fair with this new product on the market. I can see some people up in arms down in Wiki HQ

Step Aside Wikipedia Here Comes Knol is a post from: Costa Rica SEO Blog