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
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 ool.search-engine-viewer.htm -
enter your URL and it gives you a summary of the things you
could improve. - http://www.gritechnologies.com ools/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:/ oolbar.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
ools/website-promotion-tools.html Various Web Promotion Tools
Enjoy!
About the author:
<p>* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and heads
copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney
+612 4334 6222 or at <a
href="mailto:glenn@divinewrite.com">glenn@divinewrite.com</a>.
Visit <a href="http://www.divinewrite.com"
target="_blank">http://www.divinewrite.com</a> for further
details or more FREE articles. </p>
