Noble Samurai

Hello Samurai,

In the recent batch of updates, we made some changes to the data that some of our international users receive.

These changes have improved the quality and accuracy of non-English and non-US results in the SEO Competition and Rank Tracker modules.

What’s Changed?

Previously, Market Samurai wasn’t able to “read” or “understand” Google results pages in languages other than English.

This meant Market Samurai had difficulty working out where sites rank for a keyword (the main function of the SEO Competition and Rank Tracker modules) when it had to read results in Arabic or Tagalog (for example).

So to get around this problem, Market Samurai would search English-language versions of Google for non-English keywords.

Unfortunately, this meant Market Samurai would often report slightly different results.

So… We taught Market Samurai how to “read” 41 languages.

With this improved language and region support, Market Samurai is able to give you full SEO Analysis and Rank Tracking for all languages and regions – (9,594 different language and region variations in total – 234 countries x 41 languages… and that’s BEFORE you look at Market Samurai’s multi-Search-Engine and multi-Match-Type options for Rank Tracking).

And this means smart Samurai who are doing SEO in multiple languages, or attacking foreign and non-English-language niches (where the competition is low, and the pay-offs high) can get even more accurate keyword data.

Brent

P.S. – If you don’t have access to Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module or Rank Tracker, you can get a 12-Day Market Samurai Trial here, or Upgrade To The Full Version and get lifetime access at the discounted price of $149.

15 Comments »

Hello Fellow Samurai,

Today, I want to share with you 2 NEW Features that we’ve just added to Market Samurai’s SEO Competition analysis module.

With these new tools, you can conduct even more in-depth, and more powerful SEO analysis.

NEW FEATURE: Internal Backlink Counts

Backlinks remain one of the most important factors for increasing the rankings of a webpage in search engine results pages. They are like “votes” from other webpages – the more “votes” (or links) a web-page receives, the more authority it has, and the higher it will rise in the search engines.

Previously, Market Samurai’s SEO Matrix (in the SEO Competition module) would look at backlinks from external, 3rd party web-sites.

Now, Market Samurai gives you the ability to analyze backlinks to a web-page, from other web-pages within the same web-site.

This is valuable because, when it comes to SEO Analysis, there are three BIG reasons to pay attention to internal links:

How to Analyze Internal Backlinks

Just like with external backlinks if you’re conducting SEO Competition analysis inside Market Samurai, you want to compete against web-pages that have as FEW internal backlinks as possible.

This is because pages with few internal backlinks will be the easiest to beat.

NEW FEATURE: Index Count

This second feature is also part of the SEO Competition module.

It’s a new column called “Index Count” that shows the number of pages from that web-site that are known to Google.

This is an important factor in measuring the performance of a site.

The number of pages indexed indicates how much attention Google pays to a web-site. Usually – the higher the figure is, the more attention Google is paying to the web-site, and the more valuable Google perceives the web-site to be.

(In fact, if you run a large web-site, and you notice that your “Index Count” is dropping – then usually your search rankings will be dropping too.)

How To Access These New Features

If you already own the full-version of Market Samurai, these new features are available for you to keep. (Yes, this update is completely free)

If not, then you can get access to these tools by upgrading your copy of Market Samurai here. The cost is $149 (currently, with no ongoing fees) and gives you updates to a lot of neat updates – like the ones we’ve released today!

Once you have access to the SEO Competition module in your full-version copy of Market Samurai – open the SEO Competition module, and ensure the “BLP” (Page Backlinks) and “IC” (Index Count) columns are selected. Then press Generate Results.

By default, Market Samurai shows the external links for a website; you can use the drop down just above the table (marked in the screenshot below) to select one of two other options: “Internal”, the number of internal links to a website, and “Total”, the total numbers of links, including internal and external links.

The index count is shown as its own column, IC:

You will notice that, for both features, we have made the results clickable – so that you can click on any “Index Count” or “Page Backlinks” numbers to visit the raw data source for yourself.

Mike

85 Comments »

Hi Team,

I’ve got something exciting to share with you about Market Samurai.

We just released an improvement to the SEO Competition module that makes backlink anchor text analysis of web-pages that have a lot of back links much faster, and easier to complete.

This latest update has resulted in a MASSIVE speed increase for completing backlink anchor text analysis.

In one test, we found a 9,400% speed increase. That’s a speed up of nearly a factor of 100.  In fact, the improvement is even better than that: previously, the more backlinks you analysed, the slower the process went – twice as many backlinks could take nearly four times as long to analyse. Now few pages will take longer than 10 minutes to analyse.

The low-down on backlink analysis

The backlink analysis functionality in Market Samurai allows you to check two items:

• the PageRank of the pages linking to a URL; and
• the text contained within those links – for example, the link in the previous item to Wikipedia has the text “PageRank”.

The text is important – this is the most powerful factor Google takes into account when ranking your website for a keyword. So knowing the kinds of keywords being used in links to a page is essential to understand how Google will rank that page.

How do I do backlink analysis with Market Samurai?

First open up a project in Market Samurai and enter the SEO Competition module. Then generate the top results for your keyword or enter your own custom URL.

Now just click on the down-array to the right of the link.

Next, press the Anchor Text Analysis button to see a detailed link-text analysis for that webpage. Alternatively, you could also analyse the PageRanks of the backlinks.

A new window will pop-up showing you the information you asked for.

How much time will this save me?

Well, if you were trying to analyse a webpage with, say:

• 300 backlinks, which in some cases might have taken over 10 minutes, might now take around 1 minute;
• 600 backlinks, which might have taken over 40 minutes, should take around 2 minutes;
• 1000 backlinks, previously taking more than 90 minutes, should take 3 or 4 minutes.

Of course, the exact numbers depend on the page, your internet connection, the speed of your computer, and many other factors.

So, good luck investigating your niches – and please leave a comment if you enjoy this new update or if you have some thoughts on backlink analysis you’d like to share!

Mike

P.S. – If you don’t own Market Samurai yet, or your Market Samurai trial has expired, you will have lost access to the SEO Competition analysis tools. This means you will not see the benefit of this improvement until you upgrade your copy of Market Samurai to the full version.

If you already own Market Samurai, you can open the software right now and begin benefiting from this improvement.

48 Comments »

Lately, we’ve been getting a lot of emails from people wanting tips on how to analyze the SEO Competition matrix – so I wanted to share with you this Market Samurai technique – from outside the Samurai dojo.

Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton are the guys behind Commission Blueprint – two people that many of you will know already.

Although we’ve never mentioned them before, literally thousands of Market Samurai users have been using the Commission Blueprint affiliate marketing strategy since it launched around a year ago – including some of our own staff.

(And, while I’m ashamed to say it, for a while they produced better training on how to use Market Samurai than we were producing ourselves.)

Rather than looking broadly at the SEO Competition matrix, they focus on 3 key areas that give them a good overview of the strength of their competitors.

Here’s their step-by-step strategy (using the example above):

1. The first thing to look for is whether more than one competitor has a ‘Y’ (a Yes) in ALL the YAH, Title, URL, Desc & Head columns. If there is more than one site, we should pass on this keyword and move into the next one.
2. If no (and for this keyword it’s a ‘no’), we then need to look at the Pagerank of the each of the websites (PR column) and make sure that there are at least two sites with a Pagerank of 3 or below in the top 10. In this case, there are. In fact, 8 of them fall into this category.
3. We then need to look at the number of backlinks that each of these pages have pointing to them (BLP) and check that there are two sites with less than 50.

It’s a nice, simple, repeatable strategy.

I took the extract above from Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton’s “Generating Affiliate Profits From Free Google Traffic” ebook, which I read this weekend.

It’s their a step by step technique for promoting affiliate products with SEO, taking actual examples from their business (which turns over around $7million per year).

This ebook is available free right now – however, the reason it’s free is because Tim and Steve are giving it away as part of their Commission Blueprint 2.0 launch (so you’ll be asked for your email address in exchange for the book).

If you want to get the “Generating Affiliate Profits From Free Google Traffic” ebook and you’re feeling generous you can use our private referrer link (and help fund the development of more Market Samurai goodies if you choose to buy later on from their launch).

Or you can use this direct link you can use if you prefer – and we won’t see a cent.

But either way, get a copy of the ebook.

The ebook is genuinely high quality content – the strategies for SEO Competition matrix analysis and choosing a domain name are methodical and easy to follow, the information is detailed enough for you to put everything into practice immediately (with no “missing pieces”), and I particularly like their quick and cheap test to validate traffic levels before they begin – so it’s well worth getting a copy.

Brent

P.S. – If you don’t have access to the SEO Competition module, you can upgrade to the full version of Market Samurai here.

43 Comments »

Hi Team

This is something I’ve never told you about.

Some people have already worked this out for themselves…

And it’s the reason Market Samurai works the way it does today.

In Fact, Market Samurai was Built Around This…

Before Market Samurai was released to the public, we were using the same tools ourselves to do semantic site structure analysis for sites that we were building.

The reason was simple – with the right site structuring, linking and keyword use (all using semantically relevant keywords) we could achieve rankings with fewer links, less PageRank and less site-age.

And that meant a better return on investment from any SEO work we did.

“Better Results? Less Effort? How do I get this!?” I hear you say.

Well, let me show you what we were doing – and how you can do it yourself.

How to “Sharpen” Your Site – Samurai Style!

First, thing’s first…

You need to find a core site keyword – something that has high levels of traffic, high levels of value, and relatively low levels of competition.

Everything will revolve around this one core keyword.

Finding a Core Keyword

You’re looking for high-traffic, low-competition, high-value keywords here.

I like to set my Market Samurai filters to these levels: Above 80 hits per day in SEOT, below 100,000 competing pages in SEOC (although below 30,000 is best), above 15% phrase usage in PBR and over $1 in SEOV.

However, I personally like to see something that is better than the bare minimum levels.

SEO Analysis on your Main Site Keyword

Next, you’ll also want to do SEO Competition analysis to make sure you’re competing in a market where young, low PageRank, poorly optimized sites with few links are already ranking.

What I like about this example is the low PageRanks of pages appearing in the top 10, the lack of on-page optimization on most sites, and the low levels of Page Backlinks to the pages.

The ages of some of the domains, the fact that most sites have DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory backlinks, and the high number of domain backlinks make me think twice about this keyword.

I might still try it out – but with these factors working against me, my chances of getting that illusive top spot easily might be more difficult – and that means it may take a lot more work to get there.

Refocus your Keyword Research

Once you have this core site keyword, create a New Project in Market Samurai for your main site keyword this keyword – because we’re going to refocus our analysis onto this one keyword.

Start by generating keywords around this keyword using the Google Synonym Tool option with “Include Additional” selected.

Find Category Keywords

By tapping into Google’s Synonym Tool to generate keywords, Market Samurai is able to show you up to 200 related “branches” around your core keyword.

You’ll want to (again) filter out high competition, low traffic, low value keywords. The keywords we’re left with will be good for our web-site categories.

In this example, I performed almost identical analysis to before, when I was finding a core site keyword – however, I dropped my minimum traffic filter to an SEOT of 10 or above.

And then, there’s a little manual labor…

Remove any keywords that you see as being irrelevant to your core theme by clicking the “X” on the far right hand side of the keyword. And you’ll be left with a nice list of relevant, valuable, high traffic, low competition keywords – like I have above.

Article Keyword Research

Click on the key icon beside any of your category keywords it to open it up in a new tab – and do some more keyword research to find content topic areas within each category.

For this step, it’s handy to use the Google Search Keywords option, as well as the Google Synonym Tool with the “Ignore Additional” option selected. This will give you a nice “long tail” list of topics.

The next step is researching and creating web-site content in each one of these topic areas.

But how do you research these topic areas?

Find Content: Research or Republish

Market Samurai’s “Find Content” module is purpose-designed for this!

It was built to research the content that is already published on the web to help you to write your own articles, or to find articles that you can legally republish (although check the site terms and conditions before doing this.)

Click on the key icon beside the keyword, go to the Find Content tab, and begin research.

We can analyze the content based on authority factors here.

Content that has high PageRanks, Backlinks and Age might be a sign of good quality information – and a good article to research before writing your own article on the same topic.

Content that has low PageRank, Backlinks and Age might be content that you can republish on your site for testing the niche (because writing content is one of the most time-consuming parts of setting up a niche web-site) – and see if you can get rankings using someone else’s article on your site (a very promising sign if you do!)

(This is something unique to Market Samurai. I’m yet to come across any other software that analyzes the authority of a piece of content in this way.)

Next, we need links…

Get High-Quality Backlinks

Finding backlinks is easy. Focusing on the high-quality backlinks, the ones that will give you the best result for your time and effort, is difficult.

The Promotion module helps here, by showing the PageRanks, Backlinks, and the use of Follow/Nofollow on pages where you can receive backlinks.

You’re starting to see how all of this ties-in, and how each step impacts on all of the others.

And by putting it all together, we can get faster rankings in search engines, more traffic sooner, a better return on our time and effort on SEO, and better results in the long term – with less time and effort required.

But we didn’t do it for you.

We created “Market Samurai” originally (well before we released it) because we were doing these things ourselves – and we wanted to achieve the best results, faster, with less time and effort.

The Next Step

The next step is to just do it!

Market Samurai will give you the semantic keyword relationships you need for site structuring, for internal linking, for link-building, for tagging and more if you use the keyword research procedure I’ve described above.

If you don’t have Market Samurai yet – get it. You can download a free 12-day trial here.

If your trial has expired, you’ll be able to use the Keyword Research features still – but you will need to get the full version of Market Samurai to use the other features. You can purchase Market Samurai for lifetime access to all Market Samurai features here.

As I say, these semantic site structures can help you to get better results in search engines, with far less effort, and fewer links. So I challenge you to try using them for yourself using Market Samurai, and see the results you get.

Brent

53 Comments »

Hi Samurai,

Over the past 48 hours, Google has been updating their Toolbar PageRank data.

So whip out your copy of Market Samurai, open up the SEO Competition module – because it’s time to get analyzing.

Do it now! – There won’t be a better time to do SEO analysis for another 3-4 months!

If You’re Wondering “Why?” – Let me bring you up to speed…

Most of you know already that PageRank is a measure of the value of links pointing into a web-site.

The more and higher value links that you have pointing to your site, the higher your PageRank is.

Even though Google is calculating and re-calculating PageRank constantly throughout the year (I mean every day) – and altering peoples search engine rankings based on their new scores, we “mere mortals” only get to see a PageRank update once every few months.

When it happens, Google takes a “snapshot” of their PageRank data, and makes it accessible to the public.

And this means, in a few days time (as the PageRank changes filter through), we’ll have the most accurate indication of PageRank possible.

So NOW is the Best Time to Check PageRank!

• If you’re trying to break into a new market, open up the SEO Competition analysis module inside Market Samurai to get the most accurate snapshot of your competitors’ PageRanks that you’re likely to see for the next 3-4 months.

• It’s also a fantastic time to check the PageRanks of your competitors’ backlinks. The SEO Competition module’s “PR Analysis” feature will help you with this.

• Finally, if you’ve been working hard building links over the past few months, you get to see the effect of your work in any PageRank changes that happen over the next few days.

(The new “Add URL” feature inside Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module couldn’t have come at a better time for this job!)

What Changes are YOU Seeing?

Has your PageRank risen? Has it fallen? Has it stayed the same?

With the PageRank data update still happening, you should be seeing some changes over the next few days (in fact, many sites will have seen a change already!)

What changes are you seeing?

Brent

P.S. – If you don’t own Market Samurai yet, and your Market Samurai trial has expired, you will have lost access to the SEO Competition analysis tools, and will need to do the analysis manually and by-hand until you upgrade to the full version of Market Samurai.

26 Comments »

Hi!

My name is Michael – I’m one of the developers behind Market Samurai – and Brent’s asked me to introduce some new features that we’ve released today!

Have you ever wanted to compare your the SEO stats of your website against those of your competitor?

In version 0.80.18, we added a feature to the SEO Competition module to allow you to do just that: check out the video for a walkthrough of the new feature.

You can put your domain into the list – (e.g. “vintageelectricguitars.com”) – or you can analyse a specific page on your website – (e.g. “http://www.vintageelectricguitarblog.com/vintage-electric-guitar/gabriel-v18-amplifier-fantastic-amp”).

Here are some uses of the new feature:

• Analyze multiple pages on your website to see what it would take to get a double-listing in Google for your chosen keyword;
• Check stats for any website, webpage or Web 2.0 site (Squidoo, Hubpages) that you create;
• Analyze competitors that don’t appear in the top 10 spots in Google.

You’ll find the new button at the bottom right of the SEO Competition module:

You can use this feature to look at the stats for your website against those of your competition – perhaps you need to increase your backlinks, or maybe you forgot to add your site to the Yahoo Directory – now you can find out using Market Samurai.

(Note: You’ll need to create a new project if you want to use this new SEO Competition feature – it won’t work with old, saved projects… And really, you want to look at the latest SEO stats for your site and your competitors anyway.)

Tooltips

By the way – you might have noticed another new feature that we released quietly a few weeks ago – tooltips!

Did you notice them?

You can now hover your mouse over some of the more confusing acronyms – eg, SEOTC in keyword research – to get an explanation of what they mean.

The tooltips, and the “Add Custom URLs” feature inside the SEO Competition module were both feature requests made by Market Samurai users – just like you.

If you want to make a suggestion, send us a note here. Not all suggestions will become part of Market Samurai, but we work hard to make sure the most commonly requested features are adopted.

Mike

P.S. – Andrew, Arlen and I have been working hard on some other new features that are all coming together at once – and will be released very soon.

P.P.S. – Pretty soon we’ll be announcing new stuff so frequently that we won’t be able to send out email announcements to everyone. Instead, we’ll just upload details to our blog.

So if you want to stay up to date, make sure you subscribe to the blog (via RSS, or by entering your email address into the box on the right for email alerts).

36 Comments »

Ohayo Samurai!

Several people have asked about SEO Competition analysis on specific sites inside Market Samurai.

How do you analyze the Search Engine Optimization factors for a site that doesn’t appear in the first page of Google?

If you’re working with a site that’s on Page 2 of Google’s search results (or beyond!), it’s handy to know how it compares with sites that are already ranking in the top 10 positions in Google… and what SEO weaknesses you need to overcome!

That’s where this handy SEO Competition Analysis trick comes in handy:

SEO Competition Analysis (off-page SEO factors only)
on a specific site using the Market Samurai Software

Note: This is a work-around that will allow you to analyse off-page SEO factors only – you won’t be able to use it to analyze on-page SEO factors.

BUT there will be an easy, better and more permanent solution added to Market Samurai in the future. Stay tuned for this.

Sayonara for now!

Brent

9 Comments »