We’re excited to announce a pretty big new feature which will be live next week. We’ve been working with a few different API’s to bring in backlink data about any website. There aren’t that many sources for this information, and numbers from these sources can vary widely, which is why we decided to give you all of them, and let you choose which metric to look at. We’ve successfully incorporated data from Yahoo!, SEOmoz and MajesticSEO. We’re also pulling, in real-time, the latest blogs linking to any site. Here’s a preview of what you’ll see very soon.

We’ve used the Top Rank Blog as an example, and you’ll see from these numbers, they’ve done an impressive job of developing link worthy content. How does your blog compare? Next week you’ll be able to find out.

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A friend of mine, Travis Campbell, did a great review of AuthorityLabs on his marketing strategy blog. This is an example of how someone used AuthorityLabs to make sure their site is positioned where it should be during drastic changes. Travis had to merge two sites into one, and needed to easily ensure he retained his rankings. AuthorityLabs allowed him to get daily feedback on how changes he made to his site affected search engine visibility. He invested heavily in SEO and AuthorityLabs helped him protect that investment.

Figuring out what terms your competition is trying to rank for can be a great way to find keywords to target. If you know what to look for, it’s pretty easy figure out. When analyzing the competition, though, make sure THEY know which terms to target. If they do, the quickest thing to look at is the title tag.

Many times important terms will be included within the title tag. I took a look at the top 5 brands that came to mind within the consumer wireless industry. Here are their title tags…

Sprint: Cell Phones, Mobile Phones, and Wireless Calling Plans from Sprint
T-Mobile: Cell Phones,Cellular Phone Plans,Prepaid Cell Phones,Free Cell Phones & Deals – Stick Together with T-Mobile
Verizon: Cell Phones,Prepaid Cell Phones,Cell Phone Plans – Verizon Wireless
AT&T: Cell Phones and cell phone plans – | Wireless from AT&T

From these we know the major players in the wireless industry are going after…

I entered those into the AuthorityLabs demo account, and now we can see how each brand is doing for the terms they’re most likely targeting.

There are a lots of ways to pull out insights from the AuthorityLabs interface. The Summary section can help people understand pure visibility of a site within search engines. Here are a couple examples…

This Summary section was pulled from a site tracking 1000 keywords. In the middle of August they pushed a big SEO update. The plan was for that update to fix a lot of on-page issues and it looks like it worked. When we started tracking these keywords they were doing really well on Google, relatively well on Yahoo! but they weren’t anywhere on Bing. You can see that by comparing average ranking data. Over the past month they’ve managed to improve their visibility on Bing quite a bit. They started with an average rank on Bing of around 100, and now they have an average rank of 56 which speaks a lot for some of the techniques they’ve used.

What’s important about this, though, is they may not be seeing a whole lot more traffic from Bing. Their really long tail keywords are ranking in the top 5, but their head terms still have a ways to go and are what’s weighing down this average. With this summary data, though, they know they’re moving in the right direction and the changes made in August have had an overall positive affect on ranking performance.

Here is data for another site, not quite tracking as many keywords. The important thing to notice here is the KWs Ranking graph. They’ve deemed 224 keywords as terms they should be ranking for, and out of those 224 keywords only 24 are ranking in the top 100 positions. This is the initial performance indicator you want to look at when starting an SEO campaign, or brand new site. The first goal should be to get all those 224 keywords ranking. Then go from there.

We’ve been tracking quite a few domains and keywords on Live for sometime now. I was curious to see if Microsoft made an effort to improve the actual results within their new search engine Bing, and not just dress up Live.com results. It looks like they definitely made a few changes to how they rank sites. This isn’t the case for every keyword across the board, but a good amount of the keywords we’re tracking significantly changed positions on the 13th of last month.  Here are some examples …