SEO Trade Secrets - 8 Great
Tools for Search Engine Optimization
By Glenn Murray
©2004 All rights reserved
About 80% of web site 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 to 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
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 24 hrs.
2. Measuring keyword density
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 analyze. 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. Test to see how search engine friendly your site is
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://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. Find out how many of your pages are indexed
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
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
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
Google News Alerts and
Google Web Alerts 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
If you're new to SEO, the first thing you should do is check out Google's guide to SEO. 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 Forum 3 - Webmaster World,
but Forum 28 at SearchEngineForums is
ok too. If all else fails, you can try sending Google
an email, 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. Doubtless there are better tools available,
but these will certainly get you started.
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