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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 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 GoRank's Keyword
Density Analyzer 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.
- Search
Engine Optimiser - enter your URL and a keyword
phrase and it gives you a great summary of the
things you could improve.
- 1-Hit.com
Search Engine Simulator - enter your URL
and it gives you a summary of the things you could
improve.
- Poodle
Predictor Search Engine Spider Simulator -
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 CleverStat.com's
Google
Monitor 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.
Visit the Google
Toolbar Download page to download. 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 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 (FREE)
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 WebMaster
World, but Search
Engine Forums 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, but these will
certainly get you started.
Some additional resources:
Enjoy!
* Glenn Murray is an advertising
copywriter and heads copywriting
studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on
Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com.
Visit http://www.divinewrite.com
for further details or more FREE articles.
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