About Plug in SEO

What is Plug in SEO?

Plug in SEO is an online tool that helps you monitor and optimize how well your website ranks in search engines.

By improving your search engine rankings, more people will find and visit your site – and that improves your business.

What if the search engines change their algorithms?

Search engines are continually changing their algorithms. We don’t believe long term search engine success comes from understanding these algorithms, as they can and do change frequently. If you’re optimizing your web site by “gaming” the search algorithms, it may work today but may damage your search rankings over the long term.

Instead, we believe in helping you understand what search terms your users (and potential users) are looking for, and build relevant content for those search terms. If you’re building great content for relevant search terms, then a good search engine algorithm will identify your content.

We do also believe that inbound links from other, relevant sites will always be a crucial part of search engine algorithms, as well as driving direct traffic to your site. It’s just like the real world – you are more likely to visit a site if it is recommended by another site you trust. So as well as building great content, we will help you nurture relevant inbound links.

How does it work?

To get started, you simply input your site’s URL, some keywords and some competitor URLs. Within minutes Plug in SEO will start giving you useful information.

To get the most benefit from Plug in SEO, we also need access to analytics data, which tracks the visits that your site receives. We integrate fully with Google Analytics, but if you don’t already have that installed we have a real time analytics package included with Plug in SEO. All you need to do is add a very small piece of JavaScript code to each page on your web site. If you’re not a developer, don’t worry – this is a very, very simple task that your development team can do for you within minutes.

Do I have to install software?

No – Plug in SEO is a web service that you can log in to from any browser, anywhere in the world.

To get the most benefit from Plug in SEO, we’ll need access to analytics data. If you’re already using Google Analytics, we can integrate with this directly.

If you prefer to use our analytics package, this involves adding a very small piece of JavaScript code to each page on your web site. For most websites this is a very simple task that your development team can do within minutes.

Which search engines do you support?

Currently we monitor your rankings in Google.com and Google.co.uk. We’re planning to add more search engines, and if there is a particular one you’d like us to include please let us know.

Does Plug in SEO work in languages other than English?

The interfaces in Plug in SEO are all in English at present, but the keywords you monitor can be in any language, and they will work just as well.

At the moment we only track rankings on Google.com and Google.co.uk – if your visitors use another local version of Google (or, indeed, another search engine altogether) please do let us know to help us prioritise adding additional search engines.

Payment

What does Plug in SEO cost?

Plug in SEO is completely free for web sites that have a small amount of traffic, and we will not charge any web site, whatever its size, for any month where traffic doesn’t increase.

We also give you 30 days free usage so that you can try out the service – during this free period you don’t even have to give us your payment details.

Please see our pricing page for further information.

What payment methods do you accept?

We support payment through PayPal, which accepts a variety of credit and debit cards.

Integration and analytics

I already use an analytics package, do I need to install more analytics tracking code?

Plug in SEO is fully integrated with Google Analytics, so if you’re already using that, there’s no need to add any more tracking code to your site.

If you’re using another third-party analytics package and would like us to consider adding integration support, please let us know.

Where is the JavaScript code for analytics tracking?

Plug in SEO users can find their JavaScript tracking code under the Analytics tab.

If you haven’t already installed Analytics, simply press the ‘Enable’ button.

If you have already enabled Analytics, click on ‘Site preferences’ then ‘Tracking Code’.

I’m using the built-in analytics – how do I change to Google Analytics?

Simply change the analytics source and enter your Google analytics details.

If you haven’t already set up Google Analytics on your site you will need to add their JavaScript tracking code to each page.

I’m using Google Analytics – how do I change to Plug in SEO’s real-time analytics?

Simply change the analytics source and make sure you have added the JavaScript tracking code to your site.

Building content

How do I build search-engine-friendly content?

Here are a few brief pointers:

• My keywords gives you data about the keywords that are achieving the best search rankings. If you include relevant keywords when you’re writing about a topic, that should improve the search engines’ ranking of that content for those keywords.
• Write naturally – don’t stuff your content with nothing but keywords, or the search engines will penalize you.
• The Most relevant content box on My keywords shows you what other content is ranking best for particular keywords. You can use this to inspire you about what content to write in order to improve your own ranking on those keywords (but we don’t recommend you copy other sites literally!)

How do I get more inbound links?

The Link suggestions area of Plug in SEO suggests potentially relevant sites that you might like to approach for inbound links.

• You (or your PR staff) can use the suggestions to identify the most promising sites to approach. Get in touch with the site owner or writers to suggest that your site might be of interest to their readers.
• Be wary of very generic “directories” where you can automatically create a link to your site. If you can do this, so can everyone else – and the search engines know this and rank the link accordingly.
• Be aware that many online forums forbid direct advertising of your site – but if your site provides a genuine answer to a problem that someone else on the forum wants to solve, then it may be considered acceptable to post a response linking to your site. We recommend you check the forum’s policy to see what’s considered acceptable.

Terminology

What is a keyword hierarchy and why would I want one?

Keywords are the terms that you believe users will search for, and that you want to rank well on. With My keywords you can track what search rankings you have for each of your keywords, and see how this changes over time.

There may be alternative spellings or word orders that you want to track, but that are essentially the same term. You may choose to group these together.

Plug in SEO lets you group individual keywords, and groups of keywords, into as many different levels as you like, so that it’s easier to see at a glance how your keywords are performing. You can then drill down into the details of different individual keywords if you want to.

For example, a website selling haggis will obviously aim to rank well on the search term “haggis” if possible. There may be lots of common mis-spellings of this (“haggis”, “haggiss”) that in practice, lots of users enter into search engines.

Another reason to group keywords is if you have several related keywords that vary by one word. For example, suppose our haggis retailer has stores all over Scotland. They might want to rank well for “haggis shop Edinburgh”, “haggis shop Glasgow” and “haggis shop Aberdeen”. These could be grouped together under the term “haggis shop” so that it’s easy to see how the group of terms is performing. You could drill down into the individual terms to see how well each individual shop ranks.

What are inbound links?

Inbound links are links from other websites to your site.
Search engines use inbound links a bit like a recommendation. If you have an inbound link to your site from a very popular, relevant site, this will tend to make the search engines consider your site to be more relevant.

The text used in the inbound link is also important, and it’s best if it includes relevant keywords. For example, if your business sells haggis online, an inbound link with the text “buy haggis” linking to your site would be more powerful than an inbound link with the text “Dan’s online shop”.

What are analytics?

Analytics packages keep track of data about each time anyone downloads a page from your web site. You can then access this analytics data to answer questions about who is using your web site, and what their behaviour is on the site.

For example, a few common questions that you can answer with analytics packages include:

• How popular is my site, and is it getting more or less popular over time?
• How do people find my site?
• Which pages do people look at most often on my site?
• What percentage of my visitors convert into paying users?

There are many, many more questions you can discover the answers to from a good analytics package.

Plug in SEO includes a real time analytics package, which gives you comprehensive data almost instantaneously.

Another free, and very popular, analytics package is provided by Google, and Plug in SEO integrates with Google Analytics seamlessly. The only disadvantage is that data is not made available to you in real time, so you can’t see accurate information about the most recent visits until roughly a day has passed.

What is JavaScript tracking code?

In order to track the visits to your site, any analytics package will need a small piece of code inserted into each page. This code sends information about the page visit to the analytics package.