{"id":13093,"date":"2010-05-22T13:04:31","date_gmt":"2010-05-22T07:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/?p=13093"},"modified":"2020-03-30T14:29:48","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T08:59:48","slug":"google-reader-ultimate-seo-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/2010\/05\/google-reader-ultimate-seo-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Turn Google Reader into the Ultimate SEO Tool"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most people don’t realize that Google Reader can be used as an amazing SEO tool to monitor your industry, competitors, and their backlinks all for FREE.\u00a0 This can be accomplished with a variety of Google Alerts and Yahoo Pipes.\u00a0 The idea is to create insightful RSS feeds and aggregate them into one place, Google Reader.<\/p>\n

Here are the main SEO resources we will be monitoring:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Competitor’s keywords (brand and product keywords)<\/li>\n
  2. New pages on a Competitors site<\/li>\n
  3. Industry keywords<\/li>\n
  4. Forums (find people asking questions about your industries products \/ services)<\/li>\n
  5. Competitors backlinks (mainly new backlinks)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    We\u00a0 will organize all the feeds that we pull into Google Reader and file them under one folder to keep things nice and clean.\u00a0 You may have many clients you would like to perform this exercise for and its a good idea to separate them out to avoid confusion.<\/p>\n

    Before we begin, you will need a Google Account to use Google Reader, so if you don’t have one,\u00a0 sign up. For the sake of this example, lets say I’m in the hot sauce business and Tabasco my number one competitor.<\/p>\n

    1) Competitors Keywords<\/strong><\/h3>\n

    Start by adding an alert to\u00a0 Google Alerts<\/a> for\u00a0tabasco<\/em>. Set the type to\u00a0Everything<\/em> and Deliver to to\u00a0feed<\/em><\/p>\n

    \"Google<\/p>\n

    Click\u00a0Create Alert<\/em>, then view in Google Reader:<\/p>\n

    \"Google<\/p>\n

    This will take you to Google Reader where we will be aggregating our feeds.<\/p>\n

    Note:<\/span> sometimes this is a little buggy and you need to manually add the feed to Google reader by clicking the\u00a0Feed<\/em> link and copying and pasting the feed url to Google Reader<\/p>\n

    First thing to do in Google Reader is to create a new folder to keep things organized. Once you have clicked the new feed and are viewing it, click Feed Settings to create a new folder to place this feed and the others in, I named mine, hotsauce.<\/p>\n

    \"Google<\/p>\n

    Now I’m gonna create an alert for a specific product of Tabasco, the Habanero Sauce.\u00a0 I’m purposely not going to include the word Tabasco in this alert because anything with Tabasco will get picked up in my first alert.\u00a0 Create another Google Alert with\u00a0“Habanero Sauce”<\/em> (in quotes) as the keyword and the same settings as before.\u00a0 Subscribe to this alert just as you did in step 1 and put it in your new folder in Google Reader.<\/p>\n

    2)\u00a0Spying on Your Competitors Site<\/strong><\/h3>\n

    Second, lets create an alert for new pages on a competitors site.\u00a0 It would be nice to know everything they are doing when its happening, or close to it.\u00a0 This is really simple.\u00a0 Just setup another Google alert with the keyword being\u00a0site:competitor.com<\/span><\/em>.\u00a0 In my case I’m going to use Tabasco again, so my keyword for the alert would be\u00a0site:tabasco.com<\/span><\/em>.<\/p>\n

    Save the feed and subscribe to it.\u00a0 Once in your reader mark all items for this feed as read and any new pages will appear at the top of your reader for this feed.<\/p>\n

    3) Industry Keywords<\/strong><\/h3>\n

    The next thing I want to do is monitor industry keywords.\u00a0 I really like\u00a0Soovle<\/span><\/a> to start brainstorming keyword ideas if you don’t have any.<\/p>\n

    \"Soovle<\/p>\n

    As a hot sauce entrepreneur I’m am sure to have lots of recipes and would be interested in other sites with recipes as well (perhaps I can submit my recipes), so I add\u00a0intitle:submit<\/em> to my keyword query. So my keyword query looks like:\u00a0“hot sauce recipes” intext:(submit|add|enter)<\/span><\/em>.<\/p>\n

    This will only return pages with the query \u201chot sauce recipes\u201d as well as pages that say \u201csubmit\u201d or \u201cadd\u201d or \u201center\u201d.\u00a0 It’s not perfect but should return some good results to monitor.<\/p>\n

    4)\u00a0Forums<\/strong><\/h3>\n

    Answering questions people have in forums is a great way to gain a new customer and also get a little SEO boost.\u00a0 I’m in no way recommending that you go spamming forums that have nothing to do with what you are offering. What I am saying setting up the right channels to monitor when people have questions about your product or the industry, answering them will help win customers and in some cases provide a small boost in your websites authority (with a signature link back to your site).<\/p>\n

    I recommend finding an industry specific forum that is very active where you can focus your efforts as well as monitoring Yahoo Answers.\u00a0 You will find that a lot of people will end up at your site from reading your answers to questions and some turn into clients (its not all about ranking #1 in Google)<\/p>\n

    So for Yahoo Answers\u00a0I did a query<\/span><\/a> with\u00a0hot sauce<\/em> as the keyword and selected\u00a0open questions<\/em> as the question status. Then you can select the rss feed for the search right below the search refinements on the left panel of the page:<\/p>\n

    \"Yahoo<\/p>\n

    Second, I want to find an industry forum that I can really add value to.\u00a0 Do a quick Google Discussion search for your topic, I did one on\u00a0hot sauce<\/span><\/em>. Pretty quickly I found Chow.com, a site dedicated to cooking.\u00a0 Setting up a Google Alert specific to this site will allow me to monitor their blog, new recipes, their forum and much more.\u00a0 Even better, it’s very web 2.0, so I will have lots of opportunity to comment throughout the entire site.<\/p>\n

    My Google Alert keyword this time looks like this:\u00a0site:chow.com \u201chot sauce\u201d<\/em><\/span>.<\/em> This will limit my results to just the website\u00a0chow.com (still includes\u00a0chowhound.chow.com, the main forum, or any other sub domain on\u00a0chow.com) and search the site for \u201chot sauce\u201d.\u00a0 Subscribe to this alert just as you did the others.<\/p>\n

    5)\u00a0\u00a0Backlinks<\/strong><\/h3>\n

    One thing Google is really bad at (on purpose) is showing you a websites backlinks.\u00a0 Thankfully Yahoo is great at it.\u00a0 The\u00a0linkdomain:example.com<\/em><\/span> query in Yahoo will return a search for the sites linking to your site.\u00a0 I’m going to use Tabasco.com as an example:\u00a0linkdomain:tabasco.com -site:tabasco.com<\/em><\/span> returns all links to\u00a0tabasco.com but filters out any pages on\u00a0tabasco.com (we only want external links).<\/p>\n

    In order to extract the items to an rss feed, I’m gonna use a custom\u00a0Yahoo Pipe I created<\/span> that simply runs a search on Yahoo. The nice thing about Yahoo Pipes is that you can export it into rss and many other formats (here is my\u00a0rss feed<\/span> for\u00a0linkdomain:tabasco.com -site:tabasco.com<\/em><\/span>). Its really easy to create a feed for your backlinks, just use\u00a0my pipe<\/span> and change the user input to your domain, run the pipe, and select get as rss. \u00a0Subscribe to the rss feed in your Google Reader account and thats it.<\/p>\n

    One thing important about being a good SEO is understanding your industry from top to bottom. Skimming through these feeds and others on a everyday basis will help make you an expert in SEO for your field.\u00a0\u00a0 One thing I find most useful is the loads of new ideas I get each day after digging through my clients feeds.<\/p>\n

    Guest author\u00a0James Charlesworth\u00a0(jamescharlesworth.com)is an SEO specialst for an Atlanta interactive marketing agency.\u00a0<\/em>You can also share SEO tips<\/em> and join over 200 guest bloggers<\/em> here.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Most people don’t realize that Google Reader can be used as an amazing SEO tool to monitor your industry, competitors,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,41],"tags":[44,49],"class_list":["post-13093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google","category-search-engine-optimization","tag-guest-posts","tag-tutorials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quickonlinetips.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}