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I was just reading an article about a nifty little tool in MS Excel that allows you to populate data on a worksheet by pulling data directly from a website.  I have seen this feature before but never really saw a use for it.

Then I started thinking about SEO research and how it can be a pain to insert and format data into an excel sheet from a website.  This is tradionally a fairly manual task as it is usually not just a matter of cutting and pasting. 

As an example of one use, I played around with importing keyword data from Digitalpoint.  Sometimes we use this data to send reports to clients and to create proposals/strategies.  There are some other tools out there like wordtracker that will send you formatted keyword lists, but the method of pulling the data for yourself into an excel sheet is very convenient and can save you time and money.

So here are the basics of it.

If you open up excel and go to DATA > IMPORT EXTERNAL DATA > NEW WEB QUERY

The Web Query window will pop up.  You then need to browse to the page that you want to pull the data from.  In this case I am going to DigitalPoints Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Once you are see the data you want to import you simply checkmark which sections you want to include.  Excel makes it pretty easy since it puts most of the sections into blocks.  One problem though is that on some tools it cannot determine which sections to pull.  I tried a few different tools and Excel had problems with about half of them.

Once you select the sections you want to import and hit execute, excel will pull the data into nice clean text, right into your excel sheet.  You can then clean it up however you need to.

A couple important things.  You can select how you want excel to pull the data in. You can have it as straight text, rich text, or with full html.

There is also one other important setting.  Excel automatically assumes that you want to refresh the data every so often and will do so.  Since you only want to pull the data once, you will want to disable that feature, so that your data doesnt change.  Of course, there may be times that you might want the data to refresh.  One example might be if you are using it to pull current rankings in google.  You could set excel up to pull the data for the top 10 sites for a specific keyword.

Here are some other uses right off the top of my head.

- Collecting backlinks data from backlinks tools.
- Collecting lists of potential link partners.
etc.. etc.. etc..

What uses can you think of?

We recently received a question from a reader of our articles who wanted to know if there is a benefit to using subdomains as part of his URL structure.

He would then use 301 redirects found in his .htaccess file to point visitors at the subfolder on the same site.  The idea he had was that the subdomains are worth more to search engines and therefore the subdomain’s influence over the link popularity of the rest of the site would be positive. 

In this article I address this common question:

Are subdomains better than subfolders?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is becoming even more ingrained into our lifestyles.

While it’s true that most web users still haven’t caught on to RSS, some online retailers have found an innovative use for it.  One that doesn’t involve syndicating news or blogs but still gets their message across.

In this article I look at some of the alternative uses of RSS and how almost any website can take advantage of them even if they don’t regularly publish fresh web content.

Many people think that the only way they can take advantage of social networking is through the use of a blog.

But the truth is, you don’t need a blog to use these services. 

In fact, in this article I’m going to explain how you can use sites like Technorati and Del.icio.us to build buzz for your site without the use of a blog.

One of the best ways to promote your site is to generate buzz that gets carried offline.

One way to do that is to ensure others know what you are doing but sometimes this can be difficult especially in today’s fiercely competitive online market.

There are areas of the web which are geared towards helping some of those sites and if your site is a technology or tech related site then this article is for you.

New research released indicates that users take much less time than expected to critique a website.

In light of this research it is important for website owners to realize how big an impact that initial response is.

Therefore in this article we dig a little deeper into the research and provide some thoughts on what the findings could mean for you.

There is a theory called “The Long Tail” that noted that a relative handful of blogs have many links going into them but “the long tail” of millions of blogs have only a handful of links going into them.  It is very similar to the bowtie theory. 

This same Long Tail theory has been applied to search in that a handful of queries drive a lot of clicks to a site but in reality there are sometimes tens of thousands of other terms which actually convert at a higher rate.

In this article I explore the Long Tail of search and how analytics impact it.

As web users become more savvy e-tailers are going to have to learn how to adapt their sites to suite many different users.

In this article I look at why segmentation is going to be so important in the new year.

There are many ways to increase content on your site, from manually creating it to purchasing software which will auto generate it for you.

While I highly recommend you stay away from anything which is automatically generated I also understand that many people don’t feel comfortable writing.

Therefore, in this article I look at another way to make your site appear as if its changing.  That is, incorporating feeds into your site to improve return visits and build your brand.

I thought a post on searchenginewatch’s forums was very interesting.  While I haven’t yet tried it it does seem to have merit.  It talks about using subdomains from an existing site to help kick a new domain into the index and out of the “sandbox.”

In this article I explain what this technique is and how to use it.

I’ve been actively researching ways to quickly and effectively build content to websites.  And while blogs tend to be near the top of the list, there are other opportunities out there.

One such opportunity is a Wiki.  And while a Wiki won’t suit all sites, there are those which can use a Wiki effectively.  If you think you are one of those sites, take a look at this article.

In looking forward into next year there are certain things we can be sure of.  That the engines will continue to improve their algorithms and that new tools will be added to the SEO/SEM toolkit.

In this article I look at one of those tools as well as some of the potential drawbacks to the new medium.

Sometimes your competitors will do almost anything to compete with you including stealing your content.

To do this they sometimes employ automated software much like a search engine crawler to make the process quicker and easier than manually copying your site.  This can cause many problems for you.

In this article we look at ways to stop this from happening.

301 redirects are used to tell browsers including search engine spiders that pages have been moved, and to notify them of the new location.

However there is much confusion on what the best type of redirect is, as well as confusion on the proper way to implement it.

In this article we cover the bases looking at the most common types of redirects as well as how to implement them.

Analytics are very important to your web marketing campaign.  If you do not use analytics properly you may not understand how effective your search engine marketing is.

In this article I look at some practical examples of when to use analytics and some things you need to identify in order to get the most out of your analytics.