Designing and building a website is one thing, getting that number one position on search engines is all together another. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO is an ongoing process for any website with the goal of making your site appear as high as possible in search engine rankings - and also making sure your site appears in the correct searches for your target market. There's no point in your food transport services business appearing where people are searching for restaurants.
Below is a list of online tools which I have made use of in the past to good effect. Each one can help send your SEO strategy pointing in the right direction to achieve a higher position in searches.
There are many plugins available for Firefox, one of the best I have found for analyzing the seo quality of a webpage is SEO Doctor. It gives any page a percentage score based on various factors that affect a pages SEO including the position of the highest <h1> tag, title tag and the number of links. The feature that makes this plugin shine however is that it will tell you what you need to fix on a page to make sure it has the best possible SEO score when there are marks against your page.
A simple but useful tool wich sits in your firefox browsers toolbar and tells you the Google page rank for the current web page you have open. Great for checking your own sites but also great for comparing with your competitor sites too.
Keyword Position Monitoring Report Service is a search engine keyword position tracking tool. You can track various keywords and the position where your website appears when that keyword is searched. It covers all major search engines and also gives you location specific results (search engine results are often displayed relevant to your current location). There is a free limited service which comes with a small number of keywords/websites you can track, and for a reasonable price you can upgrade your service by purchasing extra keywords or adding more websites.
Google offers their own tool for tracking your websites indexing and positioning on the Google search engine. Some features include a daily updated search query tool with impression and click data, sitemap, keyword management and crawl error reports.
At time of writing bing controls a bit almost 30% of the internet search market share, and is growing. Which makes closely tracking your bing positioning critical as it can count for a huge amount of your traffic. The Bing webmaster tools, although not quite as extensive as the Google webmaster tools still has a list of useful tools for sitemap, indexing management and crawl reports.
Yahoo Site Explorer provides a way to track your websites performance on the Yahoo search engine, including sitemap submission and indexing data.
Google analytics is a free website analytical tool which helps you monitor your traffic and analyze your visitors. When used to good effect this tool will guide you in targeting your website to the correct market and getting the most out of each visit to your site. I would consider this a must-have for any website owner wanting to get ahead in their market.
This tools achieves the same goal as Google analytics, however has a distinct advantage over it's Google counterpart, it doesn't rely on JavaScript code to collect it's data but instead runs on the same server that your website is hosted on - this means Webalizer will have almost perfect accuracy when collecting data. The downside is that it's design is not very user friendly so will have to spend a bit of extra time getting to know the program the make the most out of it. Webalizer is easy to install, in fact it comes with just about every hosting package currently available.
This website sells a product that can build a complete search engine friendly sitemap for any website at the click of a button. The program is affordable and installs onto your server as a sub-folder within your website. There is also a free alternative which requires no installation and runs off the XML-sitemaps.com website, however there a limit to the amount of pages you can add. Definitely worth checking out if you are in need of a sitemap.
This free plugin is the best solution I have found for building sitemaps for any self-hosted wordpress site. The plugin will automatically build the sitemaps for you as often as you like and notify major search engines of the changes. Sitemaps can also be customized with Wordpress specific options such as selecting which post categories to include/exclude.
Ping-O-Matic is a free service that can notify various search engines of updates to your blog. Apart from the major search engines Ping-O-Matic also notifies others such as IceRocket, Weblogs.com and NewGator.
If you run an online store then this can serve as an extra pathway to which you can present your products to your customers online. Submit the products from your store and people can find those products directly through Google Shopping search.
Mass Search Engine Submission
This is a device often offered by hosting companies and also often quite costly, however can also bear unseen fruits. There are over 400 different search engines around the world, and these services offer to submit your URL to all of these search search engines for you. Now it's true that the vast majority of your traffic will come from google bing and yahoo, but if your website is new and you need to build visitors then it can pay off to get your name out to as many search engines as possible, you never know which one will start ranking your site high in results. One example of such services is
Search Engine Booster.
