Search engine optimization is one of the most difficult aspects of managing a website. If you search for “search engine optimization” or “SEO” on Google, you’ll come up with thousands of results. The problem with having such a huge volume of search engine optimization information is that it’s difficult to determine the good from the bad. In fact, you’ll find that a lot of the tips contradict one another.
Search engine optimization is not an exact science. However, there are several resources that are incredibly helpful. Here are a few tools that I use on a regular basis to help with SEO. Unless otherwise noted, these are all free SEO tools and resources.
When you enter a URL into this tool it gives you a text-only view of the site. This is useful because search engines can only read text, so you’re seeing the site just like Google or Bing would see it. This is a good way to scan your site for content that may not be accessible by search engines.
Keyword research is incredibly important. If you market your site towards the wrong keywords, you could see yourself getting a lot of irrelevant traffic or no traffic at all. Type in a keyword, a key phrase or a URL and this tool gives you a list of related keywords, the global and local search volume and the competition for those words. This is a great place to start your SEO efforts.
Typing a URL into this site gives you a list of all the pages on the site and a list of all of the other sites that link to that site. This is a great way to determine who is linking to other sites in your niche. Once you know who’s linking to your competition, you can try to get those same sites to link to you.
Once you verify your website with this tool, you can find out a great deal of information about it. You can check for website crawl errors so you can see if Google is having any issues with your site. It also gives you a list of the most frequently-occurring keywords, which allows you to make sure you’re targeting the words you hope to target. It also gives you a list of websites that link to your site and the top search queries that have returned pages on your site.
Another excellent Google tool. Google Analytics gives you a lot of information about your web traffic. You can find out how many visitors you get, where those visitors are coming from, what web browser they are using, how long they stay on your site, what keywords they are using to reach your site and much, much more.
A good tool for getting information on who is linking to a website. You can find out the page rank of sites that link to you (or someone else), their PageRank and the anchor text the site uses. It runs a little slow, but it’s an incredibly useful tool.
This site has several useful tools as well as a very informative blog. Some of the tools require a page membership, but you can find a lot of information for free as well. Their free SEO toolbox gives you lots of information about your site and their Firefox toolbar goes even one step further. You’ll also find several SEO guides that will keep you informed.
Check out their blog for the latest updates and search engine optimization information.
This is another site filled with several great SEO tools. They have a free Firefox toolbar as well that you can use to get a great deal of information about any site you visit. You’ll also find a great keyword tool and a search engine ranking checker. They also have several other tools and guides on their website that will make your SEO work much more efficient.
Using these SEO tools and resources will make you a better search engine optimization professional. Whether you do SEO for a living or if you just want your own website to rank higher, the links above will certainly help you out.
the most important thing when doing search engine optimization is get a good amount of backlinks first. when you have a sufficient amount of backlinks, then you can start optimizing in page links, keyword density and other factors which affects your ranking.