Category Archives: SEO

Report anything with the new image widget and the new report copying feature

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In our continuous quest for staying the best reporting tool for online marketers we added two great new features today: The image widget and report copying.

Image Widget
The new image widget gives you great opportunities to integrate nearly anything in your reports.

Some possible deployments:

  • A screenshot of a new ad proposal
  • A banner proposal
  • A screenshot of a new call-to-action-button
  • Graphs from other tools
  • A photo of your team

The image widget can be used via the Reporting tab when you add a widget.

image widget swydo

After adding the image widget you can upload any JPG, PNG or GIF file with a max size of 5 MB and we autoscale it to fit in your reports. The widget can be dragged and dropped just like all other widgets. So be creative and use the widget to create super looking and comprehensive reports.

An example

or

Report Copying has arrived

You can now copy reports! Oh, yeah. You could already re-use drafts, but now you can copy reports very easily.

We also tweaked some extra features in the reporting section, such as:

  • Option to change the main author
  • Option to change the client (be sure to change the data sources)
  • And for the cover page we made some improvements: you can now choose which data to display on the cover page.

Example:

We are very thrilled by these new features that make your life as an online marketer easier.

Please check them out in your Swydo. Remember that in the free plan, there’s a watermark logo in the reports that disappears in all paid plans. So upgrade now!

Google WMT ranking data in Swydo

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Swydo now has rankings for keywords and pages derived from Google itself via webmaster tools! Get comprehensive data on where websites rank and use this data in your widgets and reports.

There’s lots of debate recently in the online marketing Industry on the value of ranking overviews. Multiple tools provide ranking overviews that are compiled out of scraped data. These overviews are derived from a computer that simulates a user query in a search engine. In such a query it is ignored that users:

  • query from a certain location
  • from a certain computer
  • have a search history
  • have maybe +1 former queries
  • have maybe blocked other results
  • search differently at certain hours of the day
  • have social actions, like sharing on Facebook/Twitter and Google plus

So an anonymous query from a computer does not mean that much. Google provides alternative, real data via the Webmaster Tools and we have that data now in Swydo. Note that you need some simple additional configuration to be able to pull this data out of WMT, that is explained in detail here.

From now on you can report from within Swydo the top queries/keywords sorted by impressions, clicks, CTR or the average position.

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Google and my father in law

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Every time my father in law takes pictures of our children he say’s: “please stand still, I can’t photograph you” or “do not move so fast, because the pictures will be unsharp”. On every such occasion we point him at the ‘super fast you can take a ferrari picture’ modus on his camera. No use. He thinks people have to stand still to be photographed. The results are boring pictures of my kids giving a fake smile. He should take pictures while they fall out of a tree, play soccer etc. Those are the best pictures. Kids move, they are the best when they are spontaneous

Things evolve, websites evolve. The best experience for the user should be the end goal, without thinking too much about the photographer, eeeuuh Google. That’s also what Google say’s on many occasions: do not worry too much about search engines, but create a unique product, unique, valuable content that gives the visitor a great experience.

When the two Google Founders started in a garage, they had to crawl the web as it was, nobody would change a website for them, so they were innovative in crawling all kinds of content. The photographer took pictures and worked hard and the ‘to be photographed object’ was spontaneous and did not worry much about the photographer.

I understand that Google does not give too much information about their algorithm. It would be like the photographer giving too much instructions. There will always be a fine balance between instruction and spontaneity.

Pagerank is dead: Long Live authority

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I think we can say that Google Pagerank is really dead. A couple of years ago you could hear everybody talk about Pagerank. There were tools, checkers, and rankers. It was in the Google toolbar. But it is hardly mentioned anymore. See this graph of Google Insights:

You can see that PageRank had its peak in 2007. Then the monarch collapsed. The new emperor on the block is Authority. Authority is what you get when you are sharing good content, are active in your field, share on social media, share on your blog and just create great content. Because PageRank is largely based on links from other sites and Authority is largely based on good content. Linkbuilding as a separate manual activity is like the Kings Prompter.  But you know? In 2012 the King needs to stand on his own feet. He needs to speak out what he thinks, be honest, give a good opinion without a prompter. This will give him authority and that will be rewarded with a larger audience.

The job of an SEO will change enormously. Based on a technical sound foundation (you know, in the past, when we would check a site with a Lynx Browser and already had a ton of value?), based on functional flexibility (H1′s and that stuff), you need strategic thought, creativity, social skills to make it in 2012. And manual link Building? Come on.