Happily this approach seems to be the Panda- and Penguin-proof one. And of course it makes good long-term sense. It's Google's job to give the searcher the best page, rather than a crap one that's used some clever tricks to get a good rank. Google doesn't want to promote that page and the user doesn't want to see it. Going forward they'll get better at their job and good content will be king.
With this in mind, is a keyword strategy the right way to go?
Brian Clark says yes.
In The Business Case for Agile Content Marketing, he says that Google is getting smarter but still needs help. And that it’s still important to gently tweak your content so that Google knows exactly who are the right people to deliver it to. If you don't use the words "green widgets" in the right locations and frequency, then the search engine won't know that's what your page is about.
I'm not going to try to fine-tune Scrutiny to analyse your content in line with Google's latest update, because they don't tell us anyway, it's constantly changing and different search engines will weight things differently. Instead it will help you get the basics in place, get you thinking about the right keywords and synonyms and show you how well (or not) you're using those words.
After crawling your site, Scrutiny's SEO window will show you a list of your pages. See those with missing title, description or headings can be seen by choosing the appropriate option from the 'Filter' button.
Simply type a keyword or phrase into the search box and the list will be filtered to show only pages containing that phrase. You'll also see a count in various columns to show you the occurrences of the phrase in the url, title, description, headings.
It will also count occurrences in the content, but this is a feature that you have to turn on in Preferences. (switched off by default, only because it slows the crawl and uses disc space).
Scrutiny is free to use unrestricted for 7 scans, and then only 55 GBP for a lifetime licence. More information and download at Scrutiny's home page.
Hello!
ReplyDeleteIf I want to search for more than 1 specific keyword or phrase, do I have to separate the terms with a comma or semicolon?
Thanks for your help!
This currently only test one keyword or phrase at a time, this is the first suggestion of searching for more than one at a time. I've made a note of this as an enhancement suggestion.
ReplyDeleteTo be clear, are you looking for pages that contain all words or phrases, or any of them?
I'm not sure how the results would be displayed - you'll notice that Scrutiny displays a count of how many times your word/phrase occurs in the title, headings, content etc. I'm not sure how that count would be displayed if you are entering more than one phrase.
Any thoughts on what this would look like would be welcome.
Hi Shiela,
ReplyDeleteI'd like to use Scrutiny to find all the exposed email addresses littering my site, but my agency has 10 bureaus. It would be great if I could search for all 10 @bureau.gov address components and get a list of pages with offending content.
We're getting away from exposed email addresses and more into forms, to help fight phishing.
Larry
Hi Larry, yes you can. If you make a text list (separated with carriage returns) then use Scrutiny's 'search pages' feature and paste your list into the 'search for text' field (you can drag the dialog bigger in order to expand that field and see your list) and select 'multiple terms', the result should be all pages containing at least one of your email addresses.
ReplyDeleteThe multiple term feature is new. What it won't do at present is tell you in the results which of the terms was found on each page.
Cool. Thanks Shiela. I'm testing that solution now!
ReplyDelete