Just like the natural world SEO traffic adheres to a Power Law, more commonly known as the long-tail or the 80-20 rule for you MBAs. Applying this to search, it means approximately 80% of your organic traffic is attributed to the top 20% of your keywords. When you visualize this type of data though an inherent problem occurs… …the number of visits for the head terms far exceed that of the torso and tail keywords, thus rendering the graph useless. And if you wanted a YoY comparison of your SEO performance? ...

One of my top blog posts this year is the bulk URL checker and has become my staple tool for HTTP checks en masse when I don’t want to fire up third party software. This accomplishment got me hooked (on coding) and to keep my momentum going I decided to write a Ruby script which interfaced with the aHrefs API and emulate their batch analysis tool. If you’re only interested in the bulk link analysis script then you can find it here. It may look simple but it took me a couple hours to complete and needs some cleaning up on my part. This file is a good start for anyone who needs a quick analysis about a list (big or small) of URLs and their links. Regardless, I’ll continue to build upon it so it resembles that of the aHrefs tool. ...

2012 was such an amazing year for me I can’t even begin to describe how grateful I am for everything that has happened. Anyways, check out the “Year in Review” video by Google below…they always get me all teary-eyed. Let’s hope for an even better 2013. =] YouTube: Year in Search 2012 If you liked this video you may also want to check out the one from last year.

When I first started doing keyword research I found myself easily downloading 10+ CSV files from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This became a (painful) problem because I had to manually copy and paste all the data into a single Excel file. Fast forward a few months when I finally found the perfect solution: using the CAT function (short for CONCATENATE) within the command line. Mac users can get started immediately with their Terminal (located in the Utilities folder); Windows users will have to download Cygwin. ...

I occasionally browse my Twitter feed to stay in touch with SEO news and random internet shindigs. One thing I’ve noticed is some SEO’s only interact with a certain group whereas others are more open to “outsiders.” This social phenomenon shouldn’t be too surprising since it’s easily observable in high school where you have the popular kids, jocks, math geeks, environmentalists, goths and so forth hanging out with their own clique. In fact, we can sum it up with one timeless quote… ...

I’ve been preoccupied this month with my recent job change so I don’t have anything insightful to share. However, that doesn’t mean cool things aren’t happening on other websites! Below are my top five favorite blog posts for the month. Web Analytics Consulting: A Simple Framework For Smarter Decisions Avinash does an incredible job detailing the different components of consulting as a web analyst. I’ve always clumped the three aspects together but his framework has helped identify my strengths/weaknesses and what clients I should take on in the future. That being said, I believe every SEO should be competent in data analysis (DA). ...

There are many pivotal moments in a life time and one of mine occurred earlier this month when I made the difficult decision to resign from CafePress as the in-house SEO Analyst. After nearly two years of dedicated service I felt my time was up as my professional long-term vision no longer aligned with company goals. This is not to say CafePress wasn’t a great place to work. In fact, that could be further from the truth because I absolutely LOVED my time there. I worked with some of the brightest minds in the online marketing industry and learned a lot from everyone. ...

I love optimizing websites for search engines so much I regularly do consulting work on the side. But what I love more than THAT is showing clients the amazing year-over-year results of a successful SEO campaign. The data from the images below come from an eCommerce website in an extremely competitive niche. When I first started in April 2011, they received an average of 80 visits per day; that number jumped to ~200 visits per day - a 150% increase! ...