Google’s Matt Cutts explains the Caffeine Update (which has FINALLY and COMPLETELY live) in this interview with Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced. A synopsis of how Google indexes documents via Caffeine is also posted on Google’s official blog.

Google Explains the Caffeine Update is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

I have a confession. Early this month I blogged about how I had cleaned up my Firefox  toolbar, insinuating that I only needed three primary browser extensions in my SEO tool kit. At the time I wrote this, this was true. I swear.

Less than a week after publishing “Is your SEO tool kit getting a little heavy?”, however, I discovered a forth power tool that I simply cannot live work without: SEO Site Tools. Developed by Carter Cole, this is a killer SEO extension for Chrome, not Firefox. That’s right – I have completely broken my personal rule of keeping all of my SEO, dev, and design tool extensions exclusively in Firefox. Up until this point, this has worked exceptionally well. When working, I do my heavy lifting over in Firefox and then pop over to Chrome when I need a huge browser window not impeded by a tricked-out tool bar. Keeping SEO plugins out of my Chrome installations has also kept this super-fast browser running well, super-fast.

When I stumbled across SEO Site Tools, however, I knew things had to change. Take a look at what it does (in a single extension) and you’ll see why I caved:

First of all, you do not have to sacrifice one pixel of space in my browser window in order to install this extension. As you can see from the screen shot, you can select SEO Site Tools from a drop-down list. The icon in the drop-down list also displays either PageRank, mozRank or mozAuthority of the current page you are viewing, depending on how you configure this extension to suit your preferences.

Here is a sample of the at-a-glance metrics SEO Site Tools provides  for Google, Bing, and Yahoo:

• PageRank
• Date page last cached
• Number of indexed pages
• Number of unique visitors
• Average number of visits per user
• Number of page views
• Average time on site

This tool also provides external data from:

• Alexa (including a traffic graph!)
• Yahoo Site Explorer and SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool (provides the most important link metrics from both)
• Dmoz
• Majestic SEO
• Quantcast
• SEMRush

You also get all the standard on-page information, too (meta tags, etc.). To be honest, there is nothing really outstanding in this section of the tool. However, I really like the fact that the number of external and external do-follow links is easy to find and add up in the interface of SEO Site Tools. Very handy. This information is in most other SEO extensions for browsers that I’ve used, but is always buried deeper into the tool’s interface. AND it also provides a cute little pie chart that shows the proportion of external to internal links on the page. I also like that this tool include important header information.

My favorite aspect of SEO Site Tools, however, is the social media data it collects. It not only shows how many times a particular URL was featured in a tweet, but it shows the tweets themselves along with their shortened URLs and the number of TweetMeMe comments related to the URL. 

It also shows reaction 0n Facebook (including shares and comments), Digg, del.icio.us, Google Buzz, and reddit.com.

Other tricks SEO Tools performs includes:

• Extracting targeted keyword terms and alt-tags with the touch of a button
• Running a page load speed test
• Examining anchor text
• Breaking down visitor screen sizes by percentage
• Showing basic server and domain information
• Providing links to the keyword research tools such as Google SKTools and Google Search Insights
• Numbering the first 100 results in the SERPs for a search query, and showing the PageRank of each results

If you try this extension out for yourself (or have already done so), I’d love to hear your own take on it. I am also very interested in hearing what other SEO extensions for Chrome ya’ll have used.

Why I Couldn’t Resist Adding SEO Site Tools to Chrome is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

These days, we are fortunate to have a huge variety of SEO tools to make our work easier & more efficient. Since so many of these tools are free, however, it is easy to clutter up your browser with many more tools than you actually need. I recently decided to clean up Firefox on my machines, which was overloaded with so many tools I often found myself opening and closing the toolbars all day long. They had become so cluttered with SEO tools that I was not able to get a decent view of a web page when they were opened, especially on my laptops. I feel a little less crazy and a bit more efficient now that I have lightened up Firefox’s SEO tool belt. And Firefox is even running a bit faster, which is an added bonus.

Here’s what I kept in my SEO tool belt for the Firefox browser:

SEO for Firefox

When you turn this baby on and do a search query, you can instantly pull up a ton of metrics on each site listed in the SERPS — right there in the SERPS. The data you can view for each listing simultaneously includes Google PageRank, site age, total number of backlinks according to Yahoo, total number of .edu and .gov links, number of Del.icio.us bookmarks, Alexa ranking, number of Bloglines subscriptions, how many pages are indexed in Google, whether or not a site is listed in the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ, and a link to WhoIs data. You can also view number of Diggs, stumbles, tweets, Technorati mentions, a link to Google Trends data as well as Majestic SEO, Wikipedia mentions, Best of the Web inclusion, and rankings in Yahoo and Google.

Another great feature of SEO for Firefox is its X-ray tool, which allows you to see if a page has basic on-page SEO components in place such as titles, h1 tags, meta descriptions, and alt-image text. It also has a useful option to highlight nofollow links (see below).

The only thing that I don’t like about SEO for Firefox is that you now have to register with SEOBook in order to download it. And each time you download it onto a new machine, you must go to SEOBook and ask them to email you a link to the download. Still, with all the features you get get (for free, at that), it’s worth the bit of extra trouble.

Firebug, Yahoo! YSlow & Google Page Speed

I use Firebug to inspect source code without having to open a new window and diagnose scripting errors. It also has several great add-ons. The ones I have decided to keep are Yahoo! YSlow and Google Page Speed, which, as their names imply, measure page load speed. But what’s really awesome about these tools is that they not only tell you how fast your page loads, but they grade it based on how well it is optimized for loading and give you suggestions for improving your page load time (e.g., enabling compression).

You might be wondering why I decided to keep two different tools for measuring page speed in my SEO tool kit. The answer is, frankly, I couldn’t choose which one to give the boot. They basically do the same thing, but each one gives slightly different results and has a few unique features. It also is interesting when the results are pretty far apart, such as the tests I recently ran for The Huffington Post’s home page (see below).

YSlow gave The Huff Post a grade of “E” due to too many http requests, lack of a content delivery network, missing expires headers, non-compressed pages, too many DNS lookups, and multiple javascript and CSS files. YSlow did give The Huff high points for calling CSS from the top of the page and javascript from the bottom, avoiding URL redirects, making ajax cacheable, avoiding 404s, using cookie-free domains, and using GET for ajax requests.

YSlow gave The Huff a much higher score, 79 out of 100. Note that YSlow gave The Huff points for some of the same data points that Google Pagespeed docked points for. This is why I need both tools!

Aside from SEO, I also use Firebug frequently for design-related purposes such as previewing CSS changes in Firefox. I also do this for Chrome. Firebug for Chrome isn’t quite as robust as the Firefox version, but is still an amazing tool.

mozBar

I use the paid version of SEOmoz’s mozBar. If you want to try it out, however, the free version is pretty darn useful as well. Here’s what the mozBar toolbar looks like on my Firefox for Mac:

Here’s closeup shot of the most helpful features on the toolbar:

The mozBar gives me quick access to a URL’s Page Authority, Domain Authority, mozRank for the page, mozTrust for the domain, and the number of URLs and domains linking to the URL. And if I want in-depth information, there is a handy link on the toolbar that will pull up more Linkscape metrics for me. There are also shortcuts to the other tools I often access at SEOmoz, including Trifecta, Open Site Explorer,  and the Keyword Difficulty Tool, as well as the Pro Q&A forum where I go when I cannot find a solution to my SEO debacle anywhere else. There are also a lot of other shortcuts that I don’t use, such as one to SEOmoz videos. If I want to see a video, I just pop on over to the SEOmoz site. For some reason, though, having shortcuts to my favorite SEOmoz tools is quite useful.

Some other groovy things the mozBar does is show me on-page SEO factors without having to dig into the source code, and evaluate the link profiles of all the URLs in a SERP. There is also a three-part page overlay feature (see below).

That’s it, folks. These are the SEO tools I have at my fingertips at all times. Streamlining my Firefox plugins has made them even more accessible than they were before when the browser was cluttered by a lot of tools I rarely used.

What about you, is your SEO tool belt sagging a bit? Or have you recently given it a makeover? I’d love to hear what SEO tools are most essential to your daily work.

Is Your SEO Tool Belt Getting a Little Heavy? is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

Do it for love, or do it for the chance to win a shiny new toy — just do it!

I just took SeoMoz’s biennial search marketing industry survey and think you should, too. As Rand promised, it only took about 10 minutes. That said, it was surprisingly comprehensive given the lack of pain involved in taking it. I was given the opportunity to answer questions such as if I use the nofollow and canonical tags or not, what specific tools I use for SEO and social media, and what activities I concentrate my efforts on. The survey also covers all the usual budget, job role, and compensation questions as well. To be honest, though, I would have gladly spent up to an hour taking a survey if it would give us a better idea of what it means to be a part of this industry and give us insight into making search better for everyone involved.

If you haven’t yet taken this survey and you working in the search marketing industry, I encourage you to do so. The more of us that participate, the more information we will have about who we are as a community and where we are headed. (The results, of course, will be released publicly as the 2008 results were.)

It will also be interesting to look back in a couple of years when we take the 2010 survey and see if our predictions as a whole were on-target or now. Looking back on the 2008 survey results sure was interesting! *shakes head, laughing * In 2008, the majority of us thought that Yahoo! was more likely to challenge Google than Microsoft — followed by Ask, Baidu, and Wikia. What the heck is Wikia? I don’t even remember Wikia? LOL. Do you? And is Baidu still around? (Frankly, I am surprised that Ask is still around.)

So, take the survey because you love what you do and want to give back to the search community. Participation is anonymous, of course.

And if you could care less about the greater good, well, they are offering all survey participants the option of going into a a drawing for a nice list of prizes that includes a 32G iPad, Flip HD cameras, and, of course, SEO swag.

Have You Taken seoMoz’s Industry Survey Yet? is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.

In just a few minutes, you can gain two high-quality links from one of the web’s most popular social networking sites, LinkedIn. Not only do they offer great page authority, but they also pass link juice from your public profile. Here’s what to do:

1. Login to your LinkedIn account and select “Edit My Profile” from the drop-down menu.

2. Scroll down your profile page until you see where your links to the websites of your choice  are listed. Note that you are allowed to list three different links here. LinkedIn offers the choice of using custom anchor text for each link or selecting one of several choices from a drop-down menu. Go ahead and select “Other” for your first link and then type in the anchor text of your choice (optimized, of course, for relevant keywords) and then paste in the URL. This link will be no-followed, but it will have perfect anchor text and still give you a link from an authoritative site. Relevant anchor text and site authority are two important measures in determining link value, as is the PageRank or amount of link juice a link passes (usually determined by PageRank when doing a quick-and-dirty analysis of a link’s value).

3. Next, select “My Blog” and “My Website” for your second and third links. Paste in the appropriate URLs for each one. The bummer is that you cannot choose custom anchor site for these two links. But the awesome news is that not only will these links will not only come from an authoritative, high-ranking site,  they will also pass link juice to the blog and website they lead to.

4. Click “Save Changes” and you are done.

5. To verify that I am not pulling the wool over your eyes (or just for fun), you might wish to look at your source code of your public profile to make sure that the links are neither redirected nor no-followed for “My Blog” and “My Website.” Remember, your public profile is the one with your custom URL. For instance, mine can be viewed at http://linkedin.com/in/christycorrell/. The one with the messy URL is the one you can only see when you are logged in. All links in the “Websites” section of your profile with the messy URL will be redirected.

How to Get Two “Do-Follow” Links from LinkedIn in Under Five Minutes is a post from: Online Marketing Jill of All Trades, the blog of Denver-based SEO/Writer Christy Correll.