Posted by Admin on October 9th, 2007 — Posted in SEO
By Vickie Scanlon
When I first put my website up I anxiously waited with high anticipation for the traffic to arrive. And let me say, I waited, and waited — and got excited when I saw some clicks, before realizing they were my own. Then my patience turned to frustration. I had to find a way to get traffic to my site–for my own clicks were definitely counterproductive.
As with most newbies, I did not have a lot of money to work with, so I was looking for a free option to get my website moving. That’s when I came across this thing called Search Engine Optimization. It was free, required a lot of work, but the rewards would be long term. At least that was what I read.
So, what am I doing wrong with SEO?
First, most people tend to want to shy away from Search Engine Optimization. Why? It’s seems complicated, they’re not quite sure where to begin or they feel the results are too long-term and not immediate (usually). Well, all I can say is, take a deep breath, step through your fear and tackle the monster of SEO, or your online business will suffer.
The first mistake many webmasters make, I included, is to assume that you only need to optimize your home page. Not true, you should optimize for traffic on all your web pages. If you have in the beginning, say, 20+ pages, do you want people to just hit your home page or all 20+ pages? I bet you’re saying all 20+ pages. If not, you should be. You must make your website accessible to your target market, thus, open the entry points where you want them to enter.
Second mistake, many webmasters do not fully understand the importance of keywords in their meta tags. Thus, SEO begins first with optimizing your meta tags with your keywords or keyword phases.
Meta Tag Title – your keywords should be in the meta tag title. Well, let’s see, what did I have — my index web page had the welcome title that I used on the web page. Well, this could be a good thing if it has your keywords in it — but if it doesn’t you’re losing the search engines and traffic. Translated, what title you have on your web page for visitors to view, doesn’t necessarily have to be the title in your Meta Tag Title.
Meta Tag Description – your keywords should be included in the description as well. It’s almost like writing a concise ad to draw the search engines and traffic. If you go to Google and type in one of your keywords, you may very well see the meta description drawing people to your site. It depends on what the search engines find to be relevant.
Meta Tag Keywords — some say that the search engines ignore the keywords, while others believe they are giving the competition an unfair advantage. I personally use the meta tag keywords, both as a personal reference and for any of the search engines that may still use the keyword meta tags.
Alt tags — not all search engines utilize the alt tags, but some still do. So, don’t ignore the images, where you can put a keyword in an alt tag. It’s rather simple, just put alt=”keyword here” within the image.
Content — you should have keywords within your content. For me, emphasis should be audience first, then keywords. So write your content first, then try to incorporate your keywords.
Things To Avoid
To keep you in good standing with the search engines you should avoid some of the following:
1. Blackhat tactics — No hidden keywords. Which means, having keywords that are the same color as your background and are not visible to the human eye.
2. Keyword stuffing — Stuffing your keywords into your copy. You can tell rather easily by the fact that the content does not flow smoothly and may have little or no learning value to the reader.
This is a good starting point, and if you’re new to SEO it will keep you busy for a while. So, create the mindset of “getting it done” with long-term goals and you should begin to see traffic coming your way for years to come.
To Your Success.
Vickie J Scanlon She has been working on the Internet as an affiliate marketer and an avid researcher — learning and sharing information on all the facets of Internet Marketing. ��Visit her site at:
http://www.myaffiliateplace.biz (My Affiliate Place) for free and have to purchase tools related to all phases of an online business, articles related to affiliate/internet marketing, ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities, computers and software utilities and more.Article Source:
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Posted by Admin on April 18th, 2007 — Posted in SEO
For newbies to gurus, these are free SEO Tools that everyone is using!
If you have more to add, please send me a comment.
Page Rank
Rank Checker – Get a overview of your website’s ranking
PageRank Lookup – check the PageRank for a website
Google PageRank Prediction – check predicted PR of a site
Multi-Rank Checker – View your Google PageRank and Alexa Ranking in bulk
PageRank Checker – View your Google PageRank on differnet Google servers
Links related
Bookmark & Blog Search Check – Find your backlinks in the major bookmarking sites and blog search engines
Reciprocal Link Check – check whether your link partners are linking back to your website
Link Popularity Checker – a popularity score given to a website based on inbound links
LinkPrice Lookup – check the price of your link
Link Price Calculator – another tool for checking the price of links
Link Checker – check your links to see if it’s still valid or not
Link Popularity – checks the total number of web pages which link to a website
Link Price Calculator – help to determine the approximate amount you should be paying (or charging) per month for a text link (ad) from each and every page of the specified website
Site Link Analyzer – analyze a given web page and return a table of data containing columns of outbound links and their associated anchor text
URL Rewriting – convert dynamic URLs into static looking HTML URLs
Link Extractor – Extract links from a specific web page
Link Shortener – shorten a web address
Back Links Finder – Build relevant website back links
Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer – check link text used by your backlinks to Link to your wesbite
Keyword related
Keyword Verification – checks to see if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword
Keyword Density Analyser – another SEO tools for keywords
Keyword Cloud – a visual representation of keywords used on a website
Keyword Density – another SEO tool for checking keyword density
Keyword Difficulty Check – see how difficult it would be to rank for specific keywords or phrases
Keyword Optimizer – optimizer your keywords with this tool
Keyword Typo Generator – generate a list of suggestions for likely human misspellings and typos
Keyword Suggestion – Find related keywords matching your search
Free Keyword Research Tool – analyze the meta keywords of your competition
Sitemap
XML-Sitemaps – Build your Site Map online (XML, ROR, Text, HTML)
Gsitecrawler – Google (and Yahoo!) Sitemap Generator for Windows
Validate XML Sitemap – Search Engine Optimizion Tool for validating your xml sitemaps
Search Engines
Google Analytics – tells you everything about your visitors
Google Backlinks Check – Check Google and 9 data centers for backward link updates
Google Banned Checker – check whether a site is banned by Google or not
Search Engine Bot Simulator – SEO Tool to simulate search engine parsing of webpages and display discovered links.
Indexed pages – check the no. of indexed pages for your blog
Spider Simulator – simulates a search engine by displaying the contents of a web page
Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker – checks the exact HTTP headers that a web server is sending with an HTTP response.
Search Engine Position – Locate your search listings on Google and Yahoo!
Search Listings Preview – Preview your website on Google, MSN and Yahoo! Search
HTML related
HTML Encrypt – Hide your HTML source code
HTML Optimizer – Optimize and clean your HTML source code
HTTP Headers – Extract the HTTP Headers of a web page
HTTP Headers Viewer – check HTTP headers for any specific URL
Meta-tags Extractor – Extract meta-tags information from a web page
Meta-tags Generator – Generate and configure your meta-tags
META Analyzer – analyze a website’s meta tags
Meta Tag Generator – help you to generate meta tags
Meta Tag Optimization – Check your Title and Meta Tags for keyword optimization
Source Code Viewer – View the source code of a page
Domain related
Alexa Traffic Rank – View and compare Alexa Ranking graphs
Domain Age Tool – find out the age of your competitor’s domains
Domain Stats Tool – get all kind of statistics of your competitor’s domains
Domain Availability – Check the availability of domains
Domain Look-up – Retrieve a range of information about a domain
Domain Whois – Retrieve domain whois information
Instant Domain Checker – Check the availability of domains instantly
Ping Test – Check the presence of an active connection
Reverse IP/Look-up – Resolve a host to an IP address
Server Status – Check if your website is online or offline
Website Speed Test – Find out how fast your website loads
What Is My IP Address – shows your ip address
Class C Checker – check if some sites are hosted on the same Class C IP Range
IP to City – determine the Country, City, Latitude and Longitude of an IP Address
Website to Country – determine the Country in which the specified website is Hosted
Web stats
Statcounter – famous free web tracker
HiStats – Free, real time updated web stats service
Addfreestats – provide free website statistics
Miscellaneous
FEED Validator – for Atom and RSS
W3C Markup Validation Service – check for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards
Kontera Ads Preview – preview Kontera Ads on your website
Online spell checker – simple online spell checking tools
Browser Screen Resolution Checker – shows what your site looks like with different screen resolutions
Your Browser Details – View your IP address and your browser details
Anonymous Emailer – Send e-mails to users anonymously
md5 Encrypt – Encrypt text to MD5
Online Calculator – A simple online calculator
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