Fetch as Googlebot and Malware details — now in Webmaster Tools Labs!

The Webmaster Tools team is lucky to have passionate users who provide us with a great set of feature ideas. Going forward, we’ll be launching some features under the “Labs” label so we can quickly transition from concept to production, and hear your feedback ASAP .

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Fetch as Googlebot and Malware details — now in Webmaster Tools Labs!

Producing effective menus

When designing a website it is important to try to provide as much visual support and context as possible to help orient users and to minimize the disruptive effects of jumping from one place to another whilst trying to find something.

There are 3 key navigational bits of information things people need to know when they are on an internet page; Where they are, Where they have been and Where they can go.

The following principals should be considered when designing an effective web site navigation.

1. Make the current menu selection clear. Your current selection should act as a "You are here" sign, reminding users of their place in the system.
2. Make the user’s current navigational selection visually ‘non-clickable’.
3. Place the most commonly used, or important items at the top or left of the list.
4. When secondary navigation is required, make it visually associated with and visually subordinate to the relevant parent section.
5. Always display the navigation and always display it consistently.
6. Always display links to a page’s children, siblings, parent and grandparents.
7. Provide redundant links on important sub-homepages.
8. Provide a clear link to the homepage from all pages.
9. Use intuitive labels for your navigational elements.
10. Where possible, stick to 5-9 navigational elements per hierarchy

Market Samurai Review - Keyword Wizard

I have recently purchased Market Samurai and have now been testing it out for a few weeks. As an SEO consultant I make it my business to understand how new keyword research tools work and the benefits and features of each.

Although I already have a WordTracker account, I decided to get the trial version of Market Samurai to see what data it produced, and I was so blown away by its features that I did not even wait for the trial to expire – I just pulled out my wallet and paid to ensure I got it before the price goes up.

Now previously my method for researching keywords in new markets and niches was to use a combination of Wordtracker and Google’s Keyword suggestion Tool, and compare results. I would then go and double check the actual results on the search pages, and click on the top 5 or 6 results to see how well they were optimised on-site as well as their PageRank.

This as you know gives you an idea of how easy it will be to rank your page on the top of Google for that search term.

Market Samurai does all this for you!

Here is a short video showing you how I use Market Samurai to research keywords for niche markets….

Basically you type in your keyword, you click one button and MarketSamurai pulls back a list of related words, just like Google’s keyword tool. You then remove any words you are not interested in and click "Analyze results". You can easily add positive or negative keyword filters to quickly manipulate the keyword list.

The Noble Samurai then pulls back information on the following metrics….

1. the estimated daily number of searches (from Google)
2. the daily search traffic – which is the amount of traffic you would expect to get if you were in #1 position,
3. the percentage of phrase searches to broad searches
4. the Google trend (in a mini-graph next to the keyword)
5. the number of competing Ads on Google Adwords
6. the number of clicks the #1 ranked Advertiser can expect per day
7. the average cost per click of this word in #1 position
8. the expected CTR if you were ranked for #1 on Adwords

… and a few more metrics calculated on the above such as daily spend on adwords if you were bidding for #1 and the SEO value of the keyword. It also gives an index of how commercial each term is. Search terms like "Buy product X" or "Purchase Product Y" have a higher commercial intent and so would likely convert better.

This alone is worth buying the software for!

However what made me decide to buy was the fact you can get the SEO competition data in one screenshot alongside all the other search data so you can easily compare how many clicks each word gets together with how much competition there is for that word.

The only feature I see missing from Market Samurai is that it pulls most of its data from Google’s database, and does not for example show you competition on Microsoft or Yahoo – however for me this is not a problem because I always optimise a new site first and formost for Google since Google has by far the major market share of the search market.

You can get Market Samurai at http://www.marketsamurai.com/