Posts Tagged ‘seo tools’

Basic SEO Tools For The Beginner

October 5th, 2010 by Patrick Hare

 

At Web.com Search Agency, we offer a variety of professional SEO solutions for small businesses and enterprise level companies, but in many cases companies want to test the SEO waters by starting out on their own. In fact, some of our best customers began the process by building basic optimization into their own sites, getting some rankings, and then reaching a plateau that required more professional consulting to overcome.

If you’re trying your own search engine optimization process, there are a couple of tools we would recommend acquiring in order to see how your project progresses.

  • Analytics – Understanding how much traffic you’re getting, and where it is coming from, will guide you through many different decisions about your website. There are a lot of web analytics tools out there, but Google Analytics is free, used by the majority of people in the SEO industry, and easy to install. If you have a bigger budget for your site, Omniture is an analytics software that requires more work for installation but can produce some detailed and granular reporting.

 

  • Ranking Report Software – There are some free tools online (like mikesmarketingtools.com) that can help you track your rankings, but a small investment in ranking report software will let you see how you rate for your keywords. Although search engine results can change on a minute-by-minute basis, most basic searches produce results that will show your site rising steadily if you’re doing the right things, and dropping more quickly if something goes wrong. Almost any SEO agency will include free ranking reports, but if you’re doing it on your own you will want an automated way to track your search engine progress Advanced Web Ranking and WebPosition are two of the most popular.

 

  • Link Analysis – Backlinks are a very big factor in search engine rankings, and you will want to understand how your link building efforts are paying off, and how many links your top competitors have. We have an SEO competition report that can help you understand the quantity of backlinks going to sites in the Google Top 10, but quality plays an even bigger role. One good link can be worth the same as hundreds of bad ones, so you shouldn’t panic if your competitor has 10,000 links more than you do.

Naturally, there are many more steps to the optimization process, including title and content creation, specialized link building, and code tweaking, but for a beginner, it is important to be able to measure success on the site, in search engines, and among other websites. With a few basic tools, you can get a much better understanding of the factors that drive traffic and influence search engine results, so you can be better informed about what you need to take your site to the next level. As always, SEO agencies like Web.com Search Agency can have a lot of other tools at their disposal to drive your rankings success, but the use of analytics, ranking reports, and link analysis on your own side are still useful for tracking search engine progress, whether you’re managing your own SEO of trusting the process to an outside company.

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SEO Tools – Free Search Engine Optimization Tool Kit

June 11th, 2009 by Patrick Hare

One of the most popular sections of our site is the free SEO tools page . In fact, the tools page is so popular that many of our competitors use these tools to get quick search engine metrics for their own potential customers. Here’s A Quick Breakdown about what each tool does:

Domain Trust Find out your site’s age, PageRank, Number of Backlinks, How many of your pages are indexed, and positions for 3 of your keywords. This tool has been updated to compare your site to two of your competitors for the same phrases.

Site Submission – Submit your website to search engines. This may seem old fashioned, but our company was founded on the principle of getting people into search engines by submitting them, and new sites should be submitted so search engines know to crawl them and start the clock on your “sandbox.”

PageRank Checker Not everyone likes using the Google Toolbar, since it basically tells Google about every page that you’re visiting. You might also work for a company that won’t let you download and install toolbars. The PageRank checker is a perfect shortcut for people who want to know PageRank without downloading a toolbar.

Ranking Report Get Google, MSN, and Yahoo rankings for up to 3 keywords. Our regular customers get larger reports with comparisons to previous months, trends, etc, plus an explanation of how their SEO program is growing.

Link Popularity Checker See your link popularity vs. that of 3 competitors. Note that there are ways to beat people with quality links vs. link quantity.

SEO Competition Report One of our favorites, this tool lets you Compare site age, PR, Backlinks, and Pagerank against the top 10 Google results. It is also very educational for new clients, because it shows them how much (or how little) work is necessary to get a site ranked for a particular phrase.

Meta Generator Got some basic HTML Skills? You can type up a title, meta description, and keywords and our generator will create the code to put on your pages for you. Just make sure you replace the metatags that might have been there previously, so the search engines don’t get confused.

Shortcut Widget – Put our tools on your own website! This tool has dropdown boxes so you can check one metric at a time, and if you work in the field of SEO and want a tool to give your own customers, this one helps you illustrate a variety of optimization factors without all the hassle of paying a developer for complex code and maintenance.

As any good Search Engine Optimization agency can tell you, free tools are a great place to start but a poor place to finish. We like to use them to help our clients understand the many factors involved in getting great search engine positions. On the “paid” side of the equation, our customers get experienced SEO consultation, and customized optimization designed to match up real-world search demand with your products and services. We have also built quite a few proprietary processes which help you save the time and money compared to DIY optimization. Even though there aren’t too many secrets in search engine optimization, proper use of SEO tools is often the difference between success and mediocrity in the search engine world.

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