Oftentimes, the most important facets of SEO are overlooked, even by webmasters and seasoned SEO experts. Why? Because somehow all the emphasis gets put on the importance of keywords, leaving all other SEO elements in the dust.

Equally important aspects of SEO include:

1. Reciprocal Link Exchange (Linking Strategy)

2. Page Rank

3. Avoiding getting penalized by the Search Engines, and more importantly, avoiding getting banned.

I am an online business owner and SEO specialist. I have seen people put emphasis on the wrong things, to the detriment of equally important elements.

So, how can you build a website that is completely optimized and that attracts thousands of visitors each month? One way is to simply analyze the websites of your competitors. Sound confusing? It’s not, once you really understand the concept of not "reinventing the wheel". If you follow this philosophy, you can parlay the success (read: copy) of websites that are already successful into your own online success.

Your first step is to completely automate the SEO process. This means choosing an SEO software tool that will let you analyze all of the important SEO information of your competitor’s sites - Reciprocal Link Exchanges, PageRank, Search Engine Ranking and Reciprocal Links. This way, you can quickly and easily see exactly what your competitors are doing to be ranked as well as they are. A good automated SEO tool will give you a step-by- step process, that you can follow for any website you set up, to ensure your success. Best of all, that formula will have been proven to work because your successful competitors are already using it!

In addition to all of this, a good SEO tool will help you to avoid being penalized and even banned by the Search Engines.

Consider the following:

1. You can be penalized by linking to websites that have been penalized and even banned by the search engines.

2. You have to keep track of all the websites that you are linking to manually to avoid having this happen to you.

3. You need to know who your link partners are linking to; they may be linked with a site that has been penalized or even banned by the Search Engines, which could lead to your getting penalized or banned as well.

Automating your SEO process will make all of the above not only easier, but quicker as well, since you will no longer have to search through and keep track of thousands of websites manually.

Joe Borges makes it easy to get your website optimized and listed in all the major search engines. Learn how to automate your SEO Process for online business success by visiting: http://www.tekretail.com/bestseo.html

Joe Borges is an experienced Internet Marketer and Software Consultant with experience in website development and implementation. He is also a professional SEO Consultant, helping internet businesses increase their web presence, website traffic and Search Engine Ranking. Get essential tips, tools and strategies that you can use right now to make your online business thrive by visiting our Internet Marketing Services website.

When you analyze a competitors website, you need to make sure you’re prepared to do the job correctly. Competitors’ websites, if analyzed properly, can give you all sorts of information that you can use to increase the traffic and the popularity of your site. You can use these sites to analyze your own market. If a site gets a lot of hits it has to be doing something right. Check out where it is ranked, what key words it uses, how it is formatted, and what you can do to exemplify the good and filter out the bad. Also be sure to keep copyright laws in mind as a copyright infringement suit is never good for you, your site, or your blood pressure.

Identifying the Leaders.

You need to start off by identifying the major players – a good place to do this is Yahoo’s directory. It’s not as comprehensive as it once was, but it’s good if you’re looking for the major players. You may want to print out the directory to take a closer look. Look for large companies, as well as innovative approaches and new products. Also use this examination as an attempt to identify the niche markets that the major players have not identified and exploited. If you can find new niches you’re basically set as far as traffic goes.

Also consider that since Yahoo!’s directory is the place that you look to find the big players, it may be a good place to get listed in order to become a big player. These little associations are important if you want to start to attain more and more traffic and conquer a niche or category. Try to identify all places that the big dogs hang out and start hanging out there. It’s all about who you know in this business so bigger is better. You might not be ready to play with the big dogs, but the only way to get there is to sit down and give it a shot.

Sites like Media Metrix 500 can tell you which companies get the most traffic, and you can learn about the relative traffic by using Alexa. Alexa is a free add-on to your browser that ranks the traffic to each sire you visit, telling you whether it’s in the top 100, the top 1000, the top 10,000, and so on. This gives you a rough idea of where your competitors are in the pecking order.

Scrutinize the Leaders.

The next step is to study the top 5 or 10 competitors very closely. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at competitors website and analyzing them. These are the things that you should look for.

1. Make sure you check to see what products or services they offer, and note anything that’s different from your own offerings. Look for gaps that you could fill.

2. Think about the look, feel and functionality of their website.

3. See what advertising campaigns and offers they’re running.

4. Look at their strengths and weaknesses, from the customer’s point of view.

5. See if you can figure out their strategy.

When you’re dealing with publicly traded companies, you can often get detailed information from their SEC filings. Write down the names of their key players and then look for any interviews and speeches they might have made about their website.

Look for Strengths, Vulnerabilities, and Gaps.

Now, summarize the information you’ve found into a few sentences for each competitor, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Note strategies that are going to be necessary to counter their offering – these will depend on your own website’s strengths. If you’re small, then you’ll need to be resourceful to exploit their weaknesses.

With this research, you can create a marketing plan. Be sure to include how you intend to deal with competition, and what steps you think you’ll need to take for you site to come out on top. Once you’ve finished analyzing your competitors, you need to consider whether it would be better not to compete at all, and find a less-saturated market.

Don’t get frightened away prematurely, though – make sure you know what you’re getting into before you start, and don’t let big companies intimidate you. Remember that you can move faster than they can! All you have to do is offer your customers things they can’t find anywhere else.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

I’ve collected some really cool free products for you that will help with your website marketing efforts. What do I want in return? Nothing!

Free Tool No. 1 - How To Keep Track Of Your Google Rank Without Wasting Hours

This is a very nifty tool that let’s you keep track of where your website is listed in Google.com for your key phrases. You can also input other websites and keep track of them as well (you didn’t hear me say ‘competitors’ did you?).

Download it, install it, run it. Simple.

http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor-query.htm

Free Tool No. 2 - How To Check For Broken Links

One of the things that can really annoy visitors to your website is if you have links that simply do not work. Well worry no longer! You can now insert the web address of the page you want to check and this brilliant little tool will run off and check every link on your page to make sure that it works okay – how cool is that?!

http://www.siteowner.com/badlinks.cfm

Free Tool No. 3 - How To Check The Speed Of Your Homepage

It’s essential that your homepage is optimised so that it loads up on people’s screens as quickly as possible. You can use this handy tool to simulate how long it takes your homepage to load up at different connection speeds. The tool will also provide you with some handy tips on how you to speed up your homepage.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze

Free Tool No. 4 - Free Web Tutorials, Reference Materials and Resources For Your Website

Whether you have created your own website or someone else has built it for you the following resource is a great place to learn more about web development. Even if you don’t develop your own website you can access the free, simple tutorials to grasp the basics of web design.

The site has lots of free tools you can just copy and use straight on your website, tutorials on different aspects of web design and bulletin boards where you can discuss problems with other website owners.

http://www.bignosebird.com

Free Tool No. 5 - Seven Part Internet Marketing Course

Get a free training course on website marketing that includes a one hour audio seminar, special reports and more here: http://www.websitemarketingbible.com/marketing/

Enjoy the freebies!

Michael Cheney is the Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM: "Your bible is superb! The world needs to read it and learn from it." - Jay Conrad Levinson, Author of "Guerrilla Marketing" http://www.websitemarketingbible.com

Yahoo has a great, free tool that can help smart marketers find new market niches. It’s called the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool.

To use this tool, to go http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.

All you’ll find on the page is the title Keyword SelectorTool, a couple of short paragraphs of text, and a search box labeled Get Suggestions for.

Now, comes the neat part. Just type in a word or phrase, for example, “pet supplies,” and click on the arrow to the right of the box. After a few seconds (or minutes), you will see a list of keywords related to “pet supplies.” The number to the left of the term is the number of times people searched on that phrase in the past month. In the case of “pet supplies,” you will see that the phrase most often search on is “pet supply,” with 322,491 searches. Below this, you will most likely see something like the following:

Bird pet supply represents a potential market niche because it’s fairly specialized and yet people are clearly searching for products in this area. But you could segment even more.

Change the phrase in the search box from “pet supplies” to ”bird pet supply,” and click the arrow. The search tool generates a second list with “bird pet supply” at the top with its 1376 searches. But second on the list is 81 searches for “bird discount pet supply.” Here is a niche within a niche – people looking for discount bird supplies. You might not attract a lot of visitors to a site dedicated to discount bird supplies, but you can bet those that arrive at your site will be ready, willing and able buyers.

For that matter, look down the list a bit further and you will see 27 searches for pet supply bird cages. Couple this with the searches for bird discount pet supply, and you end up with 108 potential customers. You say this doesn’t seem like many? Maybe not but if you could sell $20 worth of supplies to these people a month, you’d be grossing $2160 a month. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Since the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool is free, you can run searches to your heart’s content – on anything from pet supplies to the Korean War (22,655 searches last month).

It’s a great way to find market niches and the price is right!

Here’s anothr thing that’s great and the price is right. Plan to vacation this year in Denver. A Denver vacation offers the best of both worlds. You get all the fun things to see and do that are found only in a big, bustling city and there is the spectacular scenary and breathtaking vistas offered by our nearby Rocky Mountains. For more information on a great Denver vacation, just go to http://www.best-denver-vacation.com

Douglas Hanna has lived in the Denver metro area for more than 30 years and is an expert on both Denver and Colorado. He is also the author of more than 100 ezine articles on a variety of subjects.

Promotion… also known as selling. Not an easy task in today’s market, but with the right tools you can succeed. What I know is what I have learned in promoting a.k.a. selling my web site, spiritwhole.com, and trust me, I could write volumes by now. But, to make it short and sweet, here are some tips that you can use to get your business purring like a kitten that actually work:

About The Author

UW Graduate, 1989, BA Bus. Admin.

Owner, www.spiritwhole.com

Animal Lover

Published Poet

info@thespiritwhole.com

Websites that are dependent on search engine traffic rely heavily on detailed keyword research to reach their target audience. Whether the resulting information is used for PPC, SEO or featured ads is beside the point. Simply put, if you want to exploit search traffic, you need accurate data on the number of searches carried out for each particular keyword.

Some companies will sub contract the keyword research to a specialist company and others will tackle it in-house. Regardless of who performs the research, a large number of people will primarily use the information provided by the Overture Keyword Assistant as the foundation of the project. I’ve been of the view for some time that the data Overture provides is often inflated, especially primary keywords. Recently I have been conducting tests to ascertain the accuracy of Overtures data in an effort to prove my suspicions and to see how big the problem is. The results so far are way beyond what I expected.

The SEO Research

Approximately one year ago I set up a new website focused on VoIP phone systems (www.ip-phone-system.co.uk). The website was built to rank highly on Yahoo for the search phrase “Phone System” and a number of other keyword phrases. According to Overture the phrase “phone system” has 350,066 searches performed each month in the UK alone. The website is currently on the first page of results in Yahoo.com and in the top three positions for Yahoo’s UK only search.

With the keyword tool reporting this amount of searches and the websites position, you would expect the site to be receiving a large volume of traffic. But to put it simply, it does not. For example, over the last two months the site has only received three visits from people searching for “phone system”.

This test is not concrete because the majority of searches for phone system could be performed on another engine that Overture pulls its results from like MSN. But you would have to agree that it’s not very likely. Especially when you consider the site ranks in the top three positions for the search phrase “phone system” on MSN.

Overture’s keyword tool pulls its results from a number of sources, Yahoo and MSN being the largest in terms of traffic. The site has a large number of top three listings on apparently high traffic yielding phrases e.g. IP Phone, Business Phone System, Office Phone System etc. yet only receives a very small number of visitors.

Phantom Traffic

So what’s causing the highly inflated number of impressions the tool returns? I can’t say for sure but can certainly name a few things that could be significantly contributing to the effect. I’m also going to try and coin a phrase here and call the phenomena “Phantom Traffic”, which simply means non-genuine traffic or searches conducted for other reasons than an actual genuine interest of finding a site relating to a keywords particular theme. I strongly believe both of the examples below are affecting Overtures data and are contributors of phantom traffic.

1. Manual SEO Position checking

People manually checking the search results to ascertain a websites position. Search phrases that are perceived to be high traffic yielding in theory will have more people conducting optimisation and therefore more people manually checking their positions. More people manually checking their positions causes the number of impressions to be inflated (phantom traffic). This is self perpetuating; the more people checking results inflate the number of impressions, causing even more people to target the phrase and manually check their positions etc. etc. etc.

I’m certain this is impacting the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool significantly enough to cause many sites to chase phantom traffic. I also believe this to be the biggest contributing source of phantom traffic. Many webmasters manually check their rankings every day and some even more.

Auto Generated Pages Compiled from SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages)

Spam sites gathering keyword rich content from the SERP’s. These sites will automatically query search engines for their most sort after keywords (probably researched via the Overture keyword suggestion tool). The sites automatically copy the results pages of the search engines which are highly keyword focused. Quite often these sites will auto generate tens of thousands of pages, all focused on a select number of keyword variations. These keyword rich pages are normally buried quite deep in the site because they have no value to human visitors. Each page will be linked using rich anchor text and then pass the relevance back to one of the main pages via an anchor text link.

The idea behind this SEO trick is simply to produce large amounts of optimised content that’s linked together in a favourable fashion. Some of the programming that goes into these kinds of practices can be very clever, while others are very basic indeed. The problem is virtually every page being generated or regenerated for that matter is influencing Overtures data, unless the programmer is using an API key (which is unlikely).

Conclusion

This is very worrying to me as there must be a large number of people who base their entire keyword research campaigns on the data from Overture. This may cause their entire marketing campaign to focus on nothing more than Phantom Traffic. So what can one do to avoid targeting phrases that mainly consist of phantom traffic?

Well first of all it’s wise to use a combination of data sources. Wordtracker provides similar data to Overture but it’s gathered from different sources. Comparing the two data sources can sometimes highlight phantom traffic. If you notice keywords with an extremely high number of impressions, just ask yourself if it’s believable. Common sense can go a long way in this game.

Personally I’ve always advised clients to target sub-primary keyword phrases first and once rankings are achieved to focus on the next sub-primary phrase. If you intelligently select sub-primary keyword phrases that include the primary keywords, you are optimising the primary keyword at the same time.

Example

A good example of this is the sub primary keyword phrases, “web design Manchester”. The company I work for is currently listed on the first page of the major search engines for this phrase. The primary phrase is “web design” and is also being optimised at the same time because the words are contained in “web design Manchester” (we’re currently holding position 11 on Yahoo UK for search phrase “web design”). The search phrase “web design Manchester” is also one of our best performing keywords because it is so targeted. Anyone searching on that term is specifically interested in web design in the Manchester area.

Optimising in this fashion has several benefits. First of all sub-primary phrases should be less effected by Phantom Traffic and the number of impressions you see should be similar to the number of genuine searches carried out. Sub-primary phrases tend to also be less competitive with fewer people specifically optimising for them (however, this is not always the case). So reaching a traffic generating position is easier and faster resulting in faster ROI.

Once enough sub-primary phrases are optimised to rank well for primary keywords. The campaign will already be bringing in targeted traffic and therefore cause much less pain and wasted effort if the primary keyword is heavily affected by Phantom Traffic.

The other advantage is much of the time sub-primary phrases are more targeted and the traffic they bring tend to convert much better. I have personally seen this time and time again. Sites that have little traffic but enjoy a conversion ratio of 1/3 because the traffic they do receive is extremely targeted sub-primary keyword phrases. These websites often out perform sites receiving ten times the amount of traffic from primary keywords. It’s all down to specifics though and what works for some may not work for you. As mentioned before, common sense goes a very long way in this game. Just don’t get caught up chasing phantom traffic.

James Anderson is the author of SEO Forum Watch and is currently working for Podium Solutions a Manchester Web Design and Internet Marketing Company as a Search Engine Optimisation Consultant. James has helped many companies conduct keyword research for SEM campaigns.

Traffic. Everyone wants free traffic, and what better way to get it than optimizing your site?

There are some very simple things that you can do to optimize your site. If you want to get more from your website, then implement these strategies, use these tools, and make your website spider food for the search engines.

Below are some of the best sites I have found for optimizing my sites.

1. Check your site.

Before you start tweaking your site, you need to make sure that it’s either in Google or not banned by Google.

The truth is, you want to optimize your site for Google, which is now the number one search engine in the world.

It won’t do you any good to optimize your site if Google won’t accept it.

Use this tool to check your site.

Google Banned - http://www.googlebanned.com

2. Toolkits

If you can find the tools you need in a collection, this will save you a lot of time, as well as frustration because you will know exactly what you need to do to properly optimize your site.

You’ll want to check different aspects of your site like page rank, metatag information, and links. Nothing will drive your potential customers away faster than broken links.

This site, in addition to offering a forum on search engine optimization, also offers a nice collection of tools for helping you optimize your site.

SEO Chat - http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools

These two sites also offer search engine optimization tools. It’s really a matter of preference, as well as what tools you need to optimize your site.

Add Me - http://www.addme.com

Evrsoft - http://www.evrsoft.com

3. SEO Software

You can also use software to help you optimize your site. Where software will help you the most is to actually help you optimize your site for the keywords you are trying to target. It’s a waste of time to optimize your site if you haven’t optimized for the right keywords.

This is the software I use, and it’s free. It works for both MAC and PC, and it has some of the best documentation I’ve ever seen on search engine optimization because it’s written for the average person. It also includes a basic search engine optimization training course, a 50 page manual, and excellent, step by step directions for preparing your website for the search engines.

Web CEO - http://www.webceo.com

4. ROR Generator/Robots Text Generator A what?

ROR is similar to a robots.txt file in that it gives information about your site. The difference is that an ROR file is in XML format.

You can use this generator to create an ROR file for your site, and then paste a button to the main page of your website. When the search engines spider your site, they’ll spider this file and have a better description of what your site is about.

I would also recommend that you create a robots.txt file because this will tell the search engines what not to spider on your site. If you own a members’ area, or you sell anything, you don’t want the search engines spidering your download pages.

ROR Generator - http://www.rorweb.com/rorgenerator.php

Robots Text Generator - http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-creator/simple-robots-creator.php

5. Site Map

A site map is not only a great tool for letting your customers know where everything is located on your site, it can also help you with the search engines.

By creating a site map, you will have an index of all the pages on your website. When the search engines spider your site, they’ll find all of the pages. This will help you with your rankings.

Creating a site map, especially if you have hundreds, or even thousands of pages on your site, can be very time consuming. This generator will speed up the process.

Spider Map Creator - http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/spider-map/creator.php

6. XML Site Generator

Google is now offering webmasters a chance to submit an XML site map.

An XML sitemap is a search engine friendly sitemap of your site. This isn’t written for your visitors though. It’s written for the search engines so that they can find all of the pages on your website.

Even if you include a sitemap on your site for your visitors, I would still recommend that you use an XML sitemap. This can speed the process of getting your site indexed by Google. This is an easy way to make sure that all of your pages get indexed.

Creating a sitemap is easy. You can use the generator listed below. Once you’ve created your sitemap, submit it to Google.

XML Site Maps - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php

Submit your sitemap to Google - https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

7. Linking

There’s been a lot of talk about linking because linking is one of the most important strategies for getting high ranking in the search engines.

The more links you have pointing back to your site, the higher the page rank you will get, as well as creating a way for others to find you. You can use this strategy to get referrals from other sites, which is free traffic. It’s targeted, and you are being recommended by another site.

Before building your linking strategy though, you should check your popularity. See who you are linked to first.

Link Popularity Checker - http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm

Once you have checked your link popularity, begin by building links back to your site. Below are two sites that offer directories you can submit your site to.

Directory Manager - http://www.123promotion.co.uk/directorymanager/

Free directories that don’t require a link back - http://www.directoriezsubmission.com/free-web-directories.htm

Linking can drive a lot of traffic to your site. The more backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the more popular it will be. You’ll also get a lot more traffic.

Before you start to market, complete your site. Optimize it for the search engines, and use these tools to help you get higher rankings.

Jinger Jarrett will show you how to use the most effective "White Hat" search engine optimization strategies to build traffic and sales to your site. You can get her free ebook, "Search Engine Secrets", when you visit http://www.jingerjarrett.com/

I came across a new website the other day and was quite pleasantly surprised.

Basically this is another really great way to get targeted keywords for your website. And the best part is it is free to use. You can check it out by going to http://www.nichebot.com

You simply enter in your keyword (I noticed you can’t use more than 2 words) and it will give you a list similar to what you would see in Wordtracker. You can choose to have your keywords shown through a Wordtracker database, Overture database, thesauras, lateral or with a keyword analysis.

It is pretty extensive and I highly recommend that you check it out. It gives you five statistics for the keyword you type in.

1.) Phrase - Exact keyword phrase people are using to search the search engines.

2.) Count - Number of times search phrase was used in the past 60-days.

3.) Pages - Number of pages listed in Google with any or all of the keyword phrase.

4.) Competition - Number of pages listed in Google with the exact keyword phrase.

5.) Ratio - Number of sites for every 1 search; the closer to zero, the less competition.

Wanna know your Google ranking without having to buy expensive software? Nichebot also has a way that you can check you ranking.

At the bottom of their homepage you will see a link that says ‘Google Ranking’ click on the link and you will be able to enter your keywords and website url to check your ranking.

I think this website is going to get big really quick. Hopefully it will continue to stay free to use.

Go check it out and see for yourself: www.nichebot.com

Leah West
http://www.westmarketing-design.com

Get a search engine friendly website…
Sign up for my free monthly ezine and get lots of great info on how your small business can make BIG money on the internet. http://www.westmarketing-design.com/ezinesubscribe.htm

The first months my website was online, I was constantly checking the search engines to see if my site was listed under the keywords that I was targeting. And always with the same negative results.

The truth is that the keywords that you are targeting are often not showing your site the first months at all on the first 200 search listings. OK,if you try to get your site listed for hoooohjgaagga or something like that, it could get you a first place in no time. But who wants to target that keyword?

In fact, I get a lot more traffic from keywords that I haven’t thought of using as a keyword in the first place. One tool that I have found online can easily show you the keywords that your site is ranking well for.

You can find it at: http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php Here you simply enter your domain name and hit the "Analyze Keyword" button.

If you want to,you can change the different settings on this page before you hit the button. But I usually leave this at default.

Then on the next page you can see a detailed report on keywords that are found on your site. You can see their numbers and density. It shows the number of 2 Word Phrases and 3 Word Phrases.

Step 2 Create Position Report

Now to the cool part of this tool. When you hit this button, the tool will search Google for the keywords and keyword phrases that it have gathered from your site. After a few seconds it shows your position for each of them. So now you don’t have to wonder if your site is listed in Google.

But as I said, the first months you shouldn’t be worried if you don’t find your site under any keyword at all. Google use a lot of time to index new websites. I have found that MSN are a lot faster to show my pages under the keyword that I want.

I hope you’ll find this tool as useful as I have.

Torgeir Sunnarvik is the owner and webmaster of: http://www.everypleasures.com/. His site offers free ebooks, ebooks with reprint rights and review of business ebooks. Visit my ebook and Internet marketing forum at: http://everypleasures.com/phpBB2/index.php

In this three part article, you’ll find many tools that any webmaster can use to monitor your site’s search engine position, and use to increase the visibility of your site in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

URL Trends
http://www.urltrends.com/

Most of the coverage I’ve seen focuses on the ability of UrlTrends to allow you to "View Any URLs Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Popular Search Terms and Incoming Links".

And that’s a great thing, to be able to see all of that from one place. But one great thing missed about this tool are that you can subscribe to changes to the results via RSS -hands off monitoring of your site.

Fagan Finder’s URL Info
http://www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/

This online gadget is like the Swiss Army knife of site information, giving you one-page access to dozens of pertinent check-ups. But monitoring relevant search engine information like your backlinks, or the cached pages in a search engine are just the tip of the iceberg.

You can use URL Info to check that your HTML code is validated, translate your page, and if you’re a blogger, discover where your site is mentioned in the blogosphere.

Spannerwork’s Spider Simulator
http://www.spannerworks.com/spidersimulator.0.html

Ever wondered what your site looks like to the search engine spiders that crawl the web, looking for information to include in their databases? Go to this page to see what information is seen by the spider and what it skips over.

Spannerworks.com can also help you figure out how to troubleshoot content that seems like it should show up to a spider but doesn’t, with its HTTP viewer. They also have a tool that will analyze your keyword density.

GoRank.com’s Top Ten Comparison
http://www.gorank.com/seotools/

If you’ve been banging your head against the wall in an attempt to figure out why you haven’t hit the top ten results in Google, GoRank.com has a page that can give you important clues to help you figure it out. One of my favorites, the Top Ten comparison report, will scrub the raw data of the top ranking results for a given keyword.

In studying the results, you may find it easier to understand where your own optimization efforts are going wrong. Don’t forget to stop by Google for your API key at http://www.google.com/api as you’ll need it to create your free account.

Search Guild’s Keyword Difficulty Checker
http://searchguild.com/difficulty/

This one’s an old favorite of mine. When you find what you may think is an ideal keyword, before you start tweaking your pages, it’s a good idea to run it through this tester. Using the Google API, it analyzes whether or not a given phrase will be worth your efforts.

You’ll already have to be well-versed in how to find good keywords to plug into the tool, but once you have that nailed, it’s pretty reliable in telling you whether it’s worth your time to target that phrase. If you use flash on your site, check out the flash viewer on their utilities page as well.

In the next article in this series, you can read more about tools specific to Yahoo and Google that will help you track your rankings and study your site.

Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

You can find hundreds of pages of tips and news on traffic generation, search engines, blogs and RSS every day at http://www.freetraffictip.com.