Trade Secrets - 8 Great Tools for Search Engine Optimization
By Glenn
Murray
About
80% of website traffic comes through search engines. And research
shows, if you’re not on the first 2 pages, most people won’t find
you.
This
article isn’t about how to achieve a high ranking. That topic
has been done to death over the past few months. We all know the
basics now… Submit your site to the major search engines, scatter
a generous helping of the right keyword phrases throughout your
site in real sentences, then get a lot of other relevant sites
link to your site. That’s it.
This
article is about what tools to use to make your job easier.
1)
Choosing Keyword Phrases (costs approx USD$7.50 per day)
To
decide what keyword phrases to use, subscribe to http://www.wordtracker.com
for a day and do some analysis. Simply enter a keyword and WordTracker
tells you how often people have searched for that keyword in the
last month or two, how many competitor sites are using that keyword,
and how many searches it expects in the next 24hrs.
2)
Measuring Keyword Density (FREE)
To
measure the density of the keyword phrases on your page, go to
http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php and type in the domain and keyword
phrase you want to analyse. It’ll give you a percentage for all
the important parts of your page, including copy, title, meta
keywords, meta description, etc. The higher the density the better.
3)
Check How Search-Engine-Friendly Your Site Is (FREE)
Search
engines send out spiders (or robots) to investigate your site.
These tools allow you to see your site from the spider’s point
of view. - http://optimiser.123promotion.co.uk - enter your URL
and a keyword phrase and it gives you a great summary of the things
you could improve. - http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.search-engine-viewer.htm
- enter your URL and it gives you a summary of the things you
could improve. - http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go?
- Poodle tells you how many links the spider will see and investigate.
4)
Check How Many of Your Pages are Indexed (FREE)
Go
to just about any search engine and type “site:www.yourdomain.com”.
The search engine will then tell you how many of your pages it
has indexed.
5)
Monitor Your Position in Google (FREE)
No
need to waste time clicking through hundreds of Google search
results looking for your site. This tool allows you to enter a
keyword and a domain name, and it searches Google to see where
your domain is positioned. Go to http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor-query.htm
to download the setup file. Then just install.
6)
See How Important Sites Are (FREE)
The
Google Toolbar is an indispensable tool. One of the things it
can tell you is the “importance” of every site you visit (in Google’s
eyes at least). You’ve probably heard a bit about PageRank or
PR. PR is Google’s measure of the importance of a site. Basically,
the higher your PR, the higher your ranking. This tool gives you
a snapshot of the PR of every site you visit. Go to http://toolbar.google.com.
TIP: It’s good to get links from other sites with high PR – especially
if they contain the same keywords as your site. WARNING: Apparently
the Google Toolbar monitors your internet usage. As yet, it’s
unclear what it uses this information for.
7)
Monitor What Sites are Linking to Yours (FREE)
Google
News Alerts (http://www.google.com/newsalerts?hl=en) and Google
Web Alerts (http://www.google.com/webalerts) will tell you who’s
linking to your site. Simply set up an alert to be notified when
Google finds www.yourdomain.com.
8)
Getting Help (FREE)
If
you’re new to SEO, the first thing you should do is check out
Google’s guide to SEO at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.
If you already know the basics, there are a number of forums you
can subscribe to to post questions. These forums are free, and
they’re frequented by countless SEO experts. And when I say “experts”,
I mean EXPERTS! Some of these people do SEO all day, every day.
And like many technical experts, they’re only too happy to help
– for free. The best forum seems to be http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3,
but http://searchengineforums.com/Forum28 is ok too. If all else
fails, you can try sending Google an email. Go to http://www.google.com.au/contact/index.html,
but don’t hold out much hope of help here. They’ll eventually
answer, but there’s no guarantee on the quality of their response…
This
is just a snapshot of the tools available out there, but these
will certainly get you started.
Some
additional resources: • http://www.123promotion.co.uk/promotion/tools/website-promotion-tools.html
- Various Web Promotion Tools
Enjoy!
About
The Author
*
Glenn Murray is an SEO
copywriter and Article
Submission Specialist. He is a director of PublishHub
and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted
on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com.
Visit http://www.divinewrite.com or http://www.publishhub.com
for further details, more FREE articles, or to purchase his e-book,
‘SEO Secrets’.
Article
Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
