Clicky is, after Google Analytics, probably the biggest Web Analytics tools catering for everyone from the hobbyist up to 100K+ views a day sites. I did use Clicky for a site several years ago, and was very interested to see how they had grown and whether they are a serious alternative to Google Analytics which I currently use for my sites. Google is free and Clicky charges $4.99/month for the basic version, $9.99 for the pro version and then increasing amounts depending on the daily traffic. The question is, is it worth it, and to put that to the test I have been using Clicky on SeededBuzz for the last few weeks.
Firstly – Clicky has a much easier interface to use, it is cleaner, better laid out with double top navigation, and it is obvious what information/options are available. One of the main criticisms of Google is that it powerful but difficult to configure and navigate.

In terms of features, Clicky has nearly everything the beginner up to a serious users will want, including Goals and Campaigns. The only feature from Google which I would immediately miss was the segmentation of visitors by new or returning – Clicky does give segmentation by country and other parameters such as browser but in my experience they iare less useful in terms of getting and keeping visitors.

It is difficult to compare the data given by both system – they always give different figures but which is right/wrong is very hard to tell. I did see that Clicky have introduced a different definition of bounce – a bounce is a one page visit that lasts less than 30s, and anything more than 30s is a real visit. It is a debatable point and will depend on the type of site you have – if you have a very low pages/visit count it should give a more accurate/real measure of bounce.

Clicky does have several features missing from Google, the obligatory Twitter integration which is flexible in the different terms to can search and track; a URL shortener, but what that has to do with Web Analytics I will leave it to others to work out; and finally Spy. Spy is probably the most voyeuristic part and quite addictive – it gives you a real time feed of users on your sites, what pages they are looking at, and what external links they exit through. I even spotted a colleague at SeededBuzz checking a page I had sent them and saw that they followed the external link correctly. Remember Big Brother is watching you.

Overall, Google is still more powerful in the number of features and functions it offers, but in reality do most people use them? Clicky is much cleaner and easier to use for the beginners, but it is up to you to decide if it is worth paying for the convenience. I think like a lot of things in life, if you start using one the inertia to move to another system is quite large, and for me I will be sticking to Google. I would be interested to hear from anyone who is long term Clicky user who would want do a test run on Google and post their results.

Ooophs  – it nearly 4 months since I last posted to this blog – things have been very busy with SeededBuzz and a few other projects, but that is no excuse as all you bloggers know – so I promise to do better in future.

So when I left off, I was starting to look at PluginSEO as a tool to help drive organic traffic. Once you have installed the tracking code and setup the configuration (see my first PluginSEO post), you leave it for a few weeks and then start to get suggestions on how to improve your SEO.

The dashboard is split into several sections, first is the activity and results from your site for new links found and any movement in your keywords, but more interestingly for me is the link activity of your ‘competitors’, which give a good insight into how active they are and where they are getting links from.

The site then processes all this information to make specific, actionable suggestions on how to improve your SEO. Some are fairly obvious such as blog about a certain keyword, but some are more interesting in terms of identifying Social Media conversations which you should join as they involve your keywords. Other areas find sites you could/should get links from but from what I could tell they are only going a couple of steps away from your competitors to find sites and so it does seem quite limited – there are a lot more sites out there that have relevance, influence and you are more likely to get links from. In a similar way, they also suggest keywords you should be using or at least tracking.

So overall, I think if you are very new to SEO and want something to help direct your activity it is a start. If you are more serious about SEO and can identify a good list of competitors or similar sites, it might be worth it just for the activity tracking which will save you a lot of time on following other sites.

Final note, they have just changed their charges so there is no completely free version for small sites, but there is a trial and a promise that if your organic traffic does not increase month on month, you pay nothing.

I would love to get comments from anyone who has used PluginSEO or knows of other entry level SEO advice/management tools.

And next week I am going to look at the web analytic site/tool Clicky which we have installed on SeededBuzz and how it compares to Google Analytics.

WooRank is a new site just launch by a team in Belgium which does an SEO audit on your site and gives it a WooRank – not sure what it means but the higher the better.

So no messing about I went straight in for an SEO analysis of SeededBuzz – we came out with a rank of 46.9 which is a tad under the current average of 48.7 but not too bad given the age of our site and we are just building links and content. However, there were a few embarassing spots – who forgot to put the meta description on the home page

So in case of full disclosure our WooRank SEO analysis is here.

The challenge now is who out of the SeededBuzz community has the best rank – go on take the Woo test and leave your rank/link below

I was wondering how many blog posts get written without any consideration for which keyword may drive traffic via natural search. My guess is close to 100%, amazing as it sounds.

For those who are well versed in search marketing, you’ll know that if you want to generate high levels of traffic via Google and other search engines, keyword research via Google’s keyword generator or specialist tools like Wordtracker is the basis for deciding on your sites content strategy and link building strategy.

On this blog post I want to focus on keyword based post writing. To illustrate what I mean I am going to take a look at one of the most viewed Seeds that has been submitted – How to make her Valentines unforgettable

What I like about this title is that is shouts ‘click me’, if you’re a man anyway. However, the chances of more than a few people looking for that keyword combination is slim. The copywriting challenge is to combine a little commercialism with creativity.

So using the Google keyword tool I searched for ‘valentines her’ to get suggestions and this is what I got.

One thing you should note is this data is for last month so the volumes are going to go crazy soon. Take a look at this Google Trends data on this search.

So as for our rather good Valentines Seed, what about something like:

“Buy a Valentines gift for her that’ll make her day unforgettable”

What does this do for us?

• The heading on your page will contain the keyword phrase “valentines gift for her” as well as the additional frequently used combination word “buy”. Other good combination keywords when you’re looking to be found for ecommerce terms, for which ‘gifts is one, are “best”, “online”, “cheap”, and “cheapest”.
• The meta page title will also contain the keyword phrase, and this is the highest rated page ranking factor.

What other changes could you make?

• The body content, you could also mention the phrase ‘valentines gifts for her’ in the opening paragraph.
• The phrase could be in bold to emphasize it.
• Any images inserted could also have the alt tag as the same keyword phrase.

This is not keyword stuffing or jeopardizing your journalistic integrity. This exercise is about working with the search engines to help them determine what your post was about, which in this case is a term that’s just about to receive millions of searches.

Managing expectations

What I am NOT saying is that if you made those changes on this you’ll suddenly rank #1 on Google for this term. As you’ll know, there are many more ranking factors to take into account. However it’s a great start.

When combined with some other SEO tips we’ll be covering in later posts and links from Buzz posts that are hopefully contextual, which in this case would mean that the link anchor from your site contains reference to ‘valentines’ and ‘her’ in some combination, you’d have a potent cocktail that could drive some great search terms to the top.

The action plan

• Plan to write great content on topics that other bloggers and readers can have an opinion on and develop.
• When you decide to write on a topic, spend just a few minutes doing keyword research to understand what people search for when looking for the kind of information contained in your proposed post.
• Write your post using these keywords in the places that Google looks in assessing what your post is about.
• Seed your content on SeededBuzz.
• Use any other post promotion tools at your disposal as well (we’ll be sharing some of these in future posts).
• Start tracking your rankings on the keywords either manually or via tools like Sheerseo.
• Let us know how you got on. We love success stories.

Pluginseo launched late last year and were a finalist in the London Seedcamp 2009 – they claim to offer “a simple way to get more and better quality search engine traffic to your site”, so I thought I would put them to the test and use it on one of my sites.

First their 60 second signup is really that – grab the javascript you need to put into your site onto the pages you want to track, add the keywords you think that are relevant, and put in the URL of your competitors. Being honest my application actually got corrupted, but my email to their support line got an instant reply and fix, so no complaints there. And then once I added the javascript, the tracking started reporting immediately, so so far fairly idiot proof.

One option was instead of adding javascript tracking, you gave them access to your Google Analytics account – I have multiple sites under the same account and there was no explanation of what they actually retrieved so I would be reluctant to use that.

The guts of the site is the reactor which tracks the good and bad changes to your SEO environment such as keyword ranking, inbound links and makes the suggestions on how to improve. I have had nothing reported yet, but it has only been live a few hours so I should give it some time before judging it. Possibly the most interesting part for the beginners is how it learns from its competitors, I will wait to see what it does with the varied list I entered.

They also show you the competitor sites which rank for you keyword (for those too lazy to look at google themselves) and also relevant content which might inspire you to write your own (or plagarise depending on your preference). Finally they have their own analytics, so for a small site they could become a single stop for measuring changing, improving your site.

However, pluginseo does not solve the big problem we all have, in how to get good quality inbound links, which is exactly what seededbuzz is going to do for you. I will report back later as I get more advice from pluginseo.