Video tutorials - Digital Marketing Agency

If you’re not currently using SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer to keep an eye on your competitors, then you’re missing out on a wealth of information.

Open Site Explorer keeps its very own index of the internet using a similar crawling process to Google, with the ability to return the majority of links to a certain website or page – information normally reserved for the webmasters of a particular domain.

With links to a website still being such a powerful factor in Google’s ranking algorithm, knowing where your competitors are getting links from and how you can match or even better them is essential.

One of the most basic uses of Open Site Explorer is to see which links your competitors are getting, and if they are “easy-gets” like relevant directories, then going ahead and acquiring those links yourself.

Open Site Explorer also uses Moz Metrics, which are some superbly useful numbers to allow you to quickly size up how powerful and competitive a website is.

Watch our extensive tutorial below for a complete run down on how to use this great piece of software.

Keyword research is an important aspect of any serious SEO campaign.

Knowing the right keywords to target based off real search volumes and competition can help you to decide exactly how to structure your approach for some serious results.

Using the Google Adwords Keyword tool and a bit of imagination, you’ll be miles ahead of your competitors.

For example if you run a website that sells used cars, will your customers be searching for “Used cars”, “Second hand cars”, or “Used automobiles”? And what are the search volumes for each of these terms?

Answering these questions will allow you to really optimize your site for your users and get lots of new traffic – and the good news is that it doesn’t take too much effort.

Watch our complete beginner guide to researching your keywords below and set your website up for success –

When it comes to SEO, video shouldn’t be ignored. After all, YouTube is the second biggest search engine worldwide behind Google itself!

Although the rules of the game are a bit different when it comes to video, it still plays to carefully select the text data that surrounds your videos.

This includes some clever research with the Google keyword tool to find out which keywords will bring you the best volume, and then working these through your video title, description, and tags.

It’s also good to keep in mind that the search results will cut-off your title and description after a certain number of characters, so you should keep your title’s short and sweet and your descriptions compelling to start off.

Check out our video below for a full run-down on best practices for YouTube SEO.

Optimizing the meta data on your website can make a huge difference to your performance in search engines.

Carefully created page titles and page descriptions can mean the difference between ranking well for key terms and not being found at all.

In this complete begginer’s guide to meta data we take a look from the ground up at how the meta data on your website relates to the Google search results and the specific considerations for each of the different meta tags.

In summary:

• Title Tag – Used as the top line of your search result. Also a very strong ranking factor for Google.
• Description Tag – Used as the description in search results. Not used as a ranking factor but very important for click-through rates.
• Meta Keywords – No longer used by Google at all. Best to avoid using them or simply ignore them if you’ve created these in the past.