SEO Trade Secrets - 8 Great Tools for Search Engine Optimization

By Glenn Murray

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/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) 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://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 (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/tools/website-promotion-tools.html Various Web Promotion Tools.
There are a lot of ways to promote your website and, unfortunately, a lot of these methods are mistakes. Here is a list of some of the more common mistakes (often referred to as Black Hat SEO) that you should steer well clear of.

1. Bad Neighbourhoods

These sites are also known as free for all (FFA) pages and link farms. They serve no other purpose other than to list tens of thousands of unrelated websites. Not only will these sites not provide your site with any traffic, certain search engines will ban sites who participate.

2. Over Optimization

Optimizing your web pages for a particular search engine can be a good thing. Over-optimizing can defeat the purpose, however. Search engines are catching on quickly to pages that appear ‘over-optimized’. Stuffing keyphrases into your pages is the most common problem. Never use hidden (invisible) text to add keywords. You will get caught, and your site will get banned.

3. Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are orphaned web pages that are typically optimized for a particular keyphrase and a particular search engine. They are promoted to the search engine in an effort to achieve high rankings. They are not linked back to by any other page on the website and, as such, search engines are able to flush them out quite easily and penalize the entire site.

4. Traffic Generation Scams

Services that purport to drive lots and lots of traffic to your website are typically not very useful. The traffic tends to come from seedy places like domain names that have lapsed in payment or commonly misspelled domain entries. Most of the traffic that hits these pages is accidental and is therefore of no value to you. Other traffic may come from other participants in the program who are required to visit other websites to gain ‘credits’ for their own site. Again, this traffic is not targeted and therefore of no value. Some traffic may even be generated by automated software!

5. Shadow Domains

Shadow domains are small, optimized, supplementary websites designed to drive traffic to a different website. The way this works is that an SEO company will design and optimize a website on your behalf. The danger here is that the you do not own this new website; the SEO company does! This means that if the relationship sours, they may choose to redirect this site’s traffic to whomever they choose (see #4 above), or even sell the site to one of your competitors! Be very, very careful of this technique, as some supposed search engine ‘experts’ even use this method (no naming of names here, however).

One final note: Any company that tells you that it can achieve ‘guaranteed’ rankings is either lying to you or using some of these Black Hat techniques. Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee a number one result within (unpaid) search results. When choosing a search engine optimization company to work with, be sure you feel comfortable with them and trust them (e.g. money back guarantee). And if you decide to promote your website yourself, consider yourself a little better educated against these common mistakes.

About Author:

SEO Trade Secrets - 8 Great Tools for Search Engine Optimization
Source : Glenn Murray heads advertising copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted at glenn@divinewrite.com.

Related Services

Explore the expert services of Page Traffic that puts you in the search engine spotlight.