by Nathan Lewis
Having the right tool can make any job easier. The same can be said for search engine optimization. There are tools, many of them free, that will assist you in optimizing your site for the best possible ranking.
Page Optimization Software
Optimizing pages is one of the most important factors in achieving top rankings. Simply writing the content to make it visually attractive to your visitors is not enough to get you the high rankings you desire.
Optimizing pages is done one page at a time for best results. Yes, there are broad optimization techniques that are used on the entire site, but getting down to optimizing each of the top pages of your site is something you need to keep as a goal.
Creating the page in a manner that is easily read by search engines is more important than the vast majority of do-it-yourselfers know or understand. Fortunately, there are software packages available that can help make short work of a potentially long job.
The best I have seen is what I have been using for 4 years. Web CEO, found easily by performing a search your favorite search engine. Web CEO can be found at www.webceo.com The basic package comes with all of these features:
• Page/SEO Optimization
• Site Submission
• File Transferring (FTP)
• Site Ranking Check
• Keyword ranking and analysis
• Site quality checker
This package in its basic format has a tremendous amount of very usable features that will quickly become one of your primary tools for SEO and site submission.
Site Traffic Reporting
Having tried several different traffic reporting programs, the best I have found for the money is Google Analytics. By opening up a Google account you are able to take advantage of this extremely powerful reporting tool for free.
After setting up your website parameters, you are then able to copy a small amount of Java Script that is placed at the bottom of the page, just above the Body Tag. On HTML pages you must load this code onto every page you wish to track. Unless your page has a footer include file that will allow you to load the Java Script into this footer file instead. Our sites use a PHP based program that allows us to load the Java Script into such a footer file.
Once the Java Script is loaded, you can test the connection to confirm that the code is loaded properly. If so, wait 24 hours and you will see traffic data.
While I have not seen anything confirming this next statement, I can attest that shortly after installing Google Analytics on each of sites Google amazingly found our pages and began ranking them within weeks of us launching the sites. While this might not sound like a big deal to those new to SEO, those of us with any length of time in the Internet business know that it used to take up to a year to get any quality rankings with Google.
And, oh yes. You do get some very informative reports from Google Analytics.
Google Webmaster Tools
Once you have a Google account you can begin using their Webmaster Tools.
Go to www.google.com/webmasters/ to find an entire section of Google dedicated to the do-it-yourselfer who wants to obtain the highest possible rankings.
Add your site(s) to the dashboard and begin tracking some very key points of SEO. Not the least of which is the ability to submit a sitemap of your site to Google to make finding all of your pages easier for the Googlebot.
While Google does have some good information on how to create a sitemap, I found that there are 3rd party programs that are easier to manage and create the sitemap. Once the sitemap is created, I use Google Webmaster Tools to upload the new sitemap.
After as little as a week, you can start seeing information populating the pages of the Webmaster area. Site rankings, inbound and outbound links as well as any errors that occurred during the last crawl of your site are shown in the tool.
Google Base
If you are an e-Commerce site this could be the absolute, most important single tool that you will find for your site at any price.
Google Base allows e-Commerce sites to upload their entire database of items to Google for display at the top of search results. Interested?
If you have done Google searches, have you ever noticed that sometimes there are up to 3 items at the top of the search results with prices shown out to the right and links to sites below? These are items uploaded into Google Base by sites just like you.
How would you like your items to be ranked higher than you competitor and not cost you a dime? Upload your items to Google Base and watch the magic.
For our e-Commerce sites we use a shopping cart that has a Google Base export built into it. There are any number of shopping carts with this feature already included. Yours may be one of them. If not, Google will provide you with the format to create your own upload.
A bit of caution for dropshippers. Google does not like dropshippers and will not accept uploads from your site if they suspect that you dropship product.
The key here is to keep your items and upload current for the best possible results.
Google Toolbar
This is an add-on to your browser that shows the ranking Google assigns to all sites.
Page Rank is a somewhat mysterious number between 0 - 10. The higher the number, the better.
Using some algorithm, Google analyses a variety of factors to rank the significance of each site as it relates to the entire Internet. Confused? How about some examples:
• The New York Times has a PR of 9
• The Wall Street Journal has a PR of 7
• IBM has a PR of 9
• Selling Power Magazine has a PR of 5
• The Entertainment Section of my local paper has a PR of 0
• Google, of course has a PR of 10
While Page Rank will not by itself raise your rankings, it is a useful tool when linking to other sites. Google will give your site greater weight if it has inbound links from sites with a higher Page Rank. Think of the inbound link as a vote of confidence for your site. Having this vote of confidence from someone that Google thinks highly of certainly carries greater weight.
Do these tools work? Is the effort worth it?
Using just the tools outlined here we were able to increase our search engine website traffic by 3,900% in a year's time on one of our mature sites. We consistently have in excess of 80% of our traffic from referrals, including website traffic from all the major search engines.
We did this without spending a single dime on SEO and using the tools mentioned above.
Having the right tool can make any job easier. The same can be said for search engine optimization. There are tools, many of them free, that will assist you in optimizing your site for the best possible ranking.
Page Optimization Software
Optimizing pages is one of the most important factors in achieving top rankings. Simply writing the content to make it visually attractive to your visitors is not enough to get you the high rankings you desire.
Optimizing pages is done one page at a time for best results. Yes, there are broad optimization techniques that are used on the entire site, but getting down to optimizing each of the top pages of your site is something you need to keep as a goal.
Creating the page in a manner that is easily read by search engines is more important than the vast majority of do-it-yourselfers know or understand. Fortunately, there are software packages available that can help make short work of a potentially long job.
The best I have seen is what I have been using for 4 years. Web CEO, found easily by performing a search your favorite search engine. Web CEO can be found at www.webceo.com The basic package comes with all of these features:
• Page/SEO Optimization
• Site Submission
• File Transferring (FTP)
• Site Ranking Check
• Keyword ranking and analysis
• Site quality checker
This package in its basic format has a tremendous amount of very usable features that will quickly become one of your primary tools for SEO and site submission.
Site Traffic Reporting
Having tried several different traffic reporting programs, the best I have found for the money is Google Analytics. By opening up a Google account you are able to take advantage of this extremely powerful reporting tool for free.
After setting up your website parameters, you are then able to copy a small amount of Java Script that is placed at the bottom of the page, just above the Body Tag. On HTML pages you must load this code onto every page you wish to track. Unless your page has a footer include file that will allow you to load the Java Script into this footer file instead. Our sites use a PHP based program that allows us to load the Java Script into such a footer file.
Once the Java Script is loaded, you can test the connection to confirm that the code is loaded properly. If so, wait 24 hours and you will see traffic data.
While I have not seen anything confirming this next statement, I can attest that shortly after installing Google Analytics on each of sites Google amazingly found our pages and began ranking them within weeks of us launching the sites. While this might not sound like a big deal to those new to SEO, those of us with any length of time in the Internet business know that it used to take up to a year to get any quality rankings with Google.
And, oh yes. You do get some very informative reports from Google Analytics.
Google Webmaster Tools
Once you have a Google account you can begin using their Webmaster Tools.
Go to www.google.com/webmasters/ to find an entire section of Google dedicated to the do-it-yourselfer who wants to obtain the highest possible rankings.
Add your site(s) to the dashboard and begin tracking some very key points of SEO. Not the least of which is the ability to submit a sitemap of your site to Google to make finding all of your pages easier for the Googlebot.
While Google does have some good information on how to create a sitemap, I found that there are 3rd party programs that are easier to manage and create the sitemap. Once the sitemap is created, I use Google Webmaster Tools to upload the new sitemap.
After as little as a week, you can start seeing information populating the pages of the Webmaster area. Site rankings, inbound and outbound links as well as any errors that occurred during the last crawl of your site are shown in the tool.
Google Base
If you are an e-Commerce site this could be the absolute, most important single tool that you will find for your site at any price.
Google Base allows e-Commerce sites to upload their entire database of items to Google for display at the top of search results. Interested?
If you have done Google searches, have you ever noticed that sometimes there are up to 3 items at the top of the search results with prices shown out to the right and links to sites below? These are items uploaded into Google Base by sites just like you.
How would you like your items to be ranked higher than you competitor and not cost you a dime? Upload your items to Google Base and watch the magic.
For our e-Commerce sites we use a shopping cart that has a Google Base export built into it. There are any number of shopping carts with this feature already included. Yours may be one of them. If not, Google will provide you with the format to create your own upload.
A bit of caution for dropshippers. Google does not like dropshippers and will not accept uploads from your site if they suspect that you dropship product.
The key here is to keep your items and upload current for the best possible results.
Google Toolbar
This is an add-on to your browser that shows the ranking Google assigns to all sites.
Page Rank is a somewhat mysterious number between 0 - 10. The higher the number, the better.
Using some algorithm, Google analyses a variety of factors to rank the significance of each site as it relates to the entire Internet. Confused? How about some examples:
• The New York Times has a PR of 9
• The Wall Street Journal has a PR of 7
• IBM has a PR of 9
• Selling Power Magazine has a PR of 5
• The Entertainment Section of my local paper has a PR of 0
• Google, of course has a PR of 10
While Page Rank will not by itself raise your rankings, it is a useful tool when linking to other sites. Google will give your site greater weight if it has inbound links from sites with a higher Page Rank. Think of the inbound link as a vote of confidence for your site. Having this vote of confidence from someone that Google thinks highly of certainly carries greater weight.
Do these tools work? Is the effort worth it?
Using just the tools outlined here we were able to increase our search engine website traffic by 3,900% in a year's time on one of our mature sites. We consistently have in excess of 80% of our traffic from referrals, including website traffic from all the major search engines.
We did this without spending a single dime on SEO and using the tools mentioned above.
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