|
About 80% of website traffïc 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 24hrs.
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 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) 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 chëck out
Google's guide to
SEO. If you already know the basics, there are a number of forums you
can subscribe to to post questïons. These forums are frëe, 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 frëe. 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 guarantëe 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.
Enjoy!
About The Author
Glenn Murray heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on
Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at
glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit
www.divinewrite.com for further details.
|
|
