Search engine optimization requires many hours of research before the process actually begins. SEO tools are a great time saver, often offering information and data in seconds as opposed to hours of manually checking for specific SEO related information.

Though an SEO tool offers an opportunity to save time in gaining needed data quickly, tools do not replace the need to become familiar and experienced with SEO guidelines. Before an SEO tool can prove to be useful, one must first become accustomed to each of the major search engines and their algorithms to best understand and implement the data that you are researching into your own SEO project.

Example tools that help a webmaster safe time are the sandbox detection tool, ranking tool, back link tool, keyword popularity tool. Search engine seo tools are tools that can make a web master successful in achieving information in a short period of time.

There are many seo tools that can be found on the internet. I would suggest that you research each tool web site and make sure that there are no restrictions to that particular tool. Check for any copy rights before downloading a tool.

More SEO tools can be found by search on Google for SEO Tools.

The following article is copyrighted by SEO Company 2003-2005 and can be viewed at this SEO Tools Page.

Another aspect of selecting keyphrases is keyphrase research. We know what we are offering, but we aren’t sure what search terms people might use to find it, or else we have so many possible search terms that it would be prohibitively expensive to optimize a site for each one of them.

The first part of keyphrase research would be brainstorming which is nothing more than making an educated guess. You know your business better than anybody so the best place to start is with you! We come up with maybe ten or fifteen different keyphrases, or however few or many as may be appropriate to our particular endeavor, which we believe are applicable to our enterprise.

We can also just ask people for suggestions. Friends, family, and especially your existing customer base, if you have one. "What search term would you use to find my product or service on Google?" That’s simple enough. And it provides valuable information.

If you have existing advertising or marketing material, such as print ads, radio or television spots, attempt to extract common themes or elements from them in the selection of keyphrases. Keep in mind that most business web sites are nothing more than souped-up, 21st-century, nice-looking, interactive newspaper classifieds. The content of any existing marketing materials should therefore be a good source of ideas. Also, the marketing materials of your competition should provide a wealth of information for you - especially their web site content. Examine the body text of the web site, and the META information for ideas. Perform a search on Google, Yahoo! or another search engine for the keyphrases you think are correct - and see if what comes up would qualify as competition. If so, see what they are doing - and then do it better! Examination of your competition is both ethical and fruitful. Know your enemy! No use reinventing the wheel if someone else has already invented it for you - just make it better, using steel-belted radials instead of stone. Knowing your competition also enables you to effectively focus on what they are not doing - crucial to your niche marketing.

Later we will discuss something called focus pages. For now, just know that every page of your web site will be optimized according to the contents of that particular page. So if you sell both alligator wallets and snakeskin boots, it is okay to have the multiple, unrelated keyphrases alligator wallets and "snakeskin boots". You do not have to settle for only one, nor do you have to figure out a way to use the term "alligator wallets" on the snakeskin boots page, and vice versa.

Tools useful in keyphrase research

By now we have a list of brainstormed ideas. We know what the competition is doing as well. So let’s drop in our keyphrases and start selling!

Not yet. What if you are missing something. What if everyone (your competition) is missing something? What if one hundred thousand people are searching for the term you think is right, but one hundred million are searching using a different, mystery, search term? How do you find out? There are some great tools available to help you in this regard.

The primary purpose of a keyword research tool is to take your raw brainstorming ideas and convert them into actual search terms. It is one thing for a marketing professional or business owner to speculate as to appropriate keyphrases - it is another thing entirely to be empowered with the knowledge of what search terms your customers are actually using. One useful tool is the Overture Keyword Selector, found at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ . Here, you input a suggested keyphrase, and it delivers a list of related keyphrases that have actually been utilized by individuals searching throughout the Overture (now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing) network in the last month. It also lets you know how many times each keyphrase has actually been utilized. Once you get the results, you may find other, related keyphrases that are extremely popular which you may wish to consider. Nobody wants to optimize their web site for keyphrases for which nobody is searching!

Another useful tool is WordTracker, www.wordtracker.com. This tool utilizes a database of actual Internet searches occurring over the last four months to deliver keyphrases related to your brainstorming ideas. You input your brainstorming ideas, WordTracker outputs suggestions. Then, we take a look at the suggestions, attempting to find popular search terms that we, or most importantly our competition, has failed to recognize. Optimizing for these terms then leaves us with little to no competition for this vast market!

WordTracker does charge a small fee, however you can buy a license good for one day, one week, or one month, depending on your needs.

A powerful tool is KeywordDiscovery, www.keyworddiscovery.com. For a nominal monthly subscription fee, you gain access to a number of features. KeywordDiscovery offers an impressive keyword research tool. You can also search for keywords by industry without having done any brainstorming, which can be very useful if you are just coming up blank. It also offers spelling mistake research, which is a good way to attract customers who make common typographical errors when entering their search query. KeywordDiscovery also provides a related keyword engine, seasonal keyword trends and keyword density analysis. This tool is the tool of choice among many professional SEO firms and consultants.

If you have access to a traffic counter which tracks keywords or your server logs, there is another way to come up with keyphrases. You can examine this data and find out what terms are actually being used by customers at this time to land on your site. The problem with this method is that it doesn’t tell you much - in other words, you have no information about the traffic you are missing. What it can tell you, however, is whether or not your site is attracting quality traffic.

For instance, if your business sells dog sweaters that are specially designed for a three-legged dog and are marketed under the brand name Tripod Pups, with the fourth hole sewn closed so that heat does not escape, and you are able to ascertain that most of your traffic is coming from people searching for "photography accessories", you know that you are not reaching your niche market. One useful and free tool for adding tracking software to your web site can be found at www.statcounter.com.

How many keyphrases?

Ideally, each page of your web site should be optimized for only one keyphrase, so as not to dilute your keyphrase density. Of course, most web sites offer a number of products and services, all of which they want to be highly visible on the search engines. The short answer to this conundrum is to optimize each page individually according to the main content of that page. The long answer gets us into the topic of focus pages.

If you have more than one product or service, for example not only do you market a product line called Tripod Pups, but also a product line called Bipod Pups for two-legged dogs and Monopod Pups for one-legged dogs, it becomes difficult to effectively optimize your web site using common keyphrases throughout the site. This highlights the need for individual page optimization.

What we want to do is to create separate pages which feature each product line and are optimized for only the search query which relates to that product line. So we now need to make our one page web site a three page web site. Each page focuses on the individual product line for which you are desirous of attracting traffic.

To avoid the use of mirror pages, which we will discuss more in depth later, we will need to rewrite the content so that there is a noticeable difference from page to page. It is probably not sufficient to merely do a "find and replace" type edit of the content, the only difference from one page to the next being the substitution of one search term for another.

We have now concluded our selection of keyphrases. We know what our competition is doing, we know what our customers are searching for, we have identified both our niche market and common misspellings.

About the Author: Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks Business Class and is an expert in search engine optimization. Mr. Foster has been active in the industry since 1995. For further information, please visit http://www.arteworks.biz or http://www.search-bully.com.

Where is the need to worry? Who needs a PR Tool Bar Anyway!

Everywhere its the same topic. Its getting stale and beginning to stink already. When it first disappeared all of us thought we were penalized for something we had not done. Some of us were informed by stranger webmasters that we were black listed and soon all of us realized, it had little to do with us and more to do with Google and their software and engineers. And the forums overflowed with information and assumptions!(they still are!).

Google PR Tool Bar is down. Accepted. Why? Nobody knows! Some of us feel they have done away with it, for good, while others feel Google is into some major overhauling. For all you know there might be a third interesting angle to it! We will have to watch out for it. I am sure its going to beat all the logics and assumptions people are coming up with. But the phase is interesting nevertheless.

All of us who have been working on the net for several months or more already know, PR is a mindset. We have become habitual to checking out the green line, that’s all. It hardly serves our purpose. We all know sites with PR3 and even PR2 show on the first page of SE for certain Keywords we are breaking our heads on while we are nowhere with PR4 and sometimes PR5!! Link popularity is the most important aspect of a website. How many link backs do we have is an important consideration.

Coming to dealing with it - PR Tool Bar comes in most handy while exchanging or accepting links exchanges. Now since we do not have PR Tool bar let us check the link backs. The more teh back links better the site. simple! Some webmasters are already taking advantage of it. They simply send us requests saying "we are PR5 (not even PR4! straight PR5!!) trying to attain PR6 request to exchange links with you" And when we go and check the back links they barely have 15 links-backs! Such is life! We don’t know whether it takes all kinds to make this world, but we do have them!

Lets not worry bout Pr tol bar not being there. Lets simply, ignore it. This is a better way to deal with a link exchange offer anyway. MOre sensible, mor advanced and more mature. Don’t we want to get serious abotu our work at hoem based business and join the ranks of net-enterprnuers who are doing very well for themselves that’s because they realised things faster than us. for them Tool Bar or no tool bar - its all thes same!

The author is Purva Mewar webmaster of two Work at Home Business websites http://www.yesearnfromhome.com and http://www.work-at-home-earn-extra-income.com

In order to get a top 10 google ranking it is imperative to not only know how to use the resources that are available to us, but to also know what to do with them. The key is always to find out what tools are the ones to use. In my experience, there are two tools I use almost daily to help my sites achieve top 10 rankings.

1. GoogleRankings.com is an incredible tool that every webmaster should consult. Now, because Google rankings fluctuate multiple times a day, the site is sometimes a couple hours delayed, however it provides a great resource in quickly finding how your competitors stack up against your website. Not only that but you can use different key words in conjunction with a website to see how they rank. Incredibly useful in determining which key words should be used in your content and advertising. As an example, if you were to decide on using a specific keyword phrase. Type in that key word into GoogleRankings.com, along with your competitor’s website, and you will see how they rank in regards to that specific phrase and/or word in Google. This will allow you to specifically pinpoint which phrases and/or keywords your competitors rank low in, which you will in turn begin to focus your attention on.

2. Google Suggest is used to determine the frequency of various key word searches. http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en As discussed before, not only is it important to find out how your competitors rank for a certain term in Google, but it is also perhaps even more important to find out how many times that specific phrase has been searched for. Google Suggest Beta is the perfect answer for this problem. Just type in a few words and it will immediately display multiple results for that specific term, and variations of it.

***Hint*** Remember, it is not always necessary to have a top 10 listing for the most popular searched phrase. Just imagine the potential of having 5 top listings for keywords that are not quite as popular. Not only will it be easier to achieve a top 10 listing, but while all your competitors fight over 1-3 key words, you are capitalizing on all the others. In the end this will mean a literal financial windfall depending on your product, etc.

Darren H. currently owns and is involved with various online marketing and management companies. He is the author of “How to Get Listed in Google within 72 Hours.” and prides himself on helping many individuals and business customers achieve top 10 rankings within Google in an extremely short time frame. To learn more and get started today please visit: http://www.top10googlerankings.com

You probably get some web site statistics on visitors from your web host — maybe in the form of an incomprehensible log file. If you’re lucky you might get a rough analysis showing how often individual pages have been viewed.

Or maybe you just have some sort of counter on your home page. You know those cool, free stat counters that you find on every second web site. Truth been told, not a very satisfactory measure of site traffic, and definitely completely useless in a business perspective

Defining What to Measure and What to Analyze: KPI

If this is as much as you do with the data, you’re definitely missing out on a lot of vital information which can really help you to fine-tune your site, steering visitors to those areas which you want them to visit — like your order page? Every web site has Key Performance Indicators, or KPI’s. A KPI is a measurement of what you want people to do on your web site — after all, your web site have a goal, a purpose — Right?

Say your site is selling a piece of software. Your main KPI would be how many visitors buy the software or download a free trial of the software. Maybe you have a news letter that you send every month with offers and information about your products or services. One KPI would be how many sign up for the newsletter — another how many that click the links in your email and visits your Special Offer page.

Or it can simply be one of the most obvious KPIs: How many users, how many page loads and for how long do they stay on your site. The longer they stay on your site, the more interesting your visitors find your site.

Defining the KPI for a web page can be hard, but is extremely important for measuring how efficient your web site really is. One of the most important KPI’s for SEO Bomb is how many visitors get in touch with me and ask about SEO services for their web site.

Some sites are simply about branding and promoting a certain product. Take Coca Cola for example. They sell all their products in stores, yet they have spent quite a few dollars on their website, and must have an incredibly advanced tracking system for their sites success.

The Web Stats Program

After having defined your KPIs, how do you measure it? You need a Web Site Stat program, and these come in many, many flavours — from the simplest and most dreadful web based ones, like Webalizer, to simple, yet useful and free web stats like AWStats. If your budget allows it, you can go for the more advanced solutions, like ClickTracks, Omniture SiteCatalyst or Deepmetrix Live stats.

These are all awesome, yet fairly pricy solutions that will certainly give you control over your visitors. There are also programs that include a number of other powerful tools for SEO and Keyword Analysis (http://www.seobomb.com/seo-links-and-resource-page/#free-seo-tools), such as WebCEO. WebCEO is the program I use on my site, so I highly recommend it. The program itself is free, but the price for the web stats module really isn’t bad either.

Whatever web stat solution you choose, they must be able to show you the following information:

• Number of visitors

Simply the number of visitors you get. One visitor may visit your site more than once, so you need:

The number of unique visitors.

This number tells you how many times each visitor visits your web site

Also referred to as "stickiness". What this number basically mean is how long the visitors stay on your site.

Which pages does your visitors like? Which pages does not get a lot of traffic? Extremely useful information, and you can use these numbers to determine many things such as what kind of content does your visitors like? Which pages rank well in search engines? Which pages does not rank well in search engines? Most popular pages, Search Engines and Keywords & Key Phrases gives you the most important information about how well you perform in the Search Engines and how you can drive traffic to your site via SE’s

From which country or state does your visitors come from?

This tells you on which day of the week you get the most visits. These and Time of day are very important numbers. If you’re a B2B company, and you get most of your visits in the weekends and after 5 in the afternoon, your web site is probably targeting the wrong visitors, because they are browsing from home.

Referring sites can be very useful. Is there a particular site that send you a lot of traffic? Maybe you should consider buying advertisement on that site.

Simply an overview of which search engines are sending you the most traffic and how much. This is usually Google.

An overview of which keywords drive traffic to your website via search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t listed the ever-so-popular "hits" in the list, and the reason is very simple — there’s no point, and it’s a completely useless number when analyzing from a business perspective. Or any perspective for that matter.

One hit means every time the server gets a request for a file. That means that if I have one page on my site, but I have packed it with a million tiny 1 by 1 pixel pictures, I get one million and one hits (remember, one for the html file itself) every time a visitor loads that page. Doesn’t sound too impressive anymore, does it?

With a simple and free web stat tool (http://www.seobomb.com/seo-links-and-resource-page/#web-site-statistics) such as AWStats, you have all this information presented in an easily understandable format. By now you should have a general idea about site statistics, but how can you use it to make your web site more profitable?

One way is to drive more traffic to your site via SEO, SEM or banner/text ads. The sheer bulk of traffic will increase your "sales". Let’s just call it sales, but a sale can be everything from some one signing up to your news letter, sending you an email with a request or a download of your awesome software.

Traffic vs. Sales Performance

Sheer bulk of traffic is always good, as long as it’s targeted, but how can you convert your visitors into customers? How do you optimize your content to make it more selling? With more advanced site statistics tools you can analyze user paths, track the movement of your visitors throughout the site, and by doing so, get a better picture how they behave — and better yet, control how they behave and make them do what you want them to do.

Let’s use the software company again. You have a download page, and it’s linked in your main menu. You also have another page that receive a considerable amount of traffic via search engines. The only thing that connects these two pages are the link in the main menu to the download page. Some times, if the content on the popular page is really interesting, your visitors are so focused on reading that they do not look at the rest of the page.

The more interruptive banner ads you have on your page, the more this rule will apply. What do you do if some one yells directly into your ear? Of course you cover them. Internet users nowadays, and experienced users in particular, have developed what I like to refer to as tunnel vision — they simply block everything but the content they’re reading. Sounds familiar? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were one of them. After all you’re reading a rather nerdy case study about web site stats.

Both SiteCatalyst and ClickTracks have a really nice feature that lets you open your site in your browser, and it will highlight the links that are most popular — with number of clicks, percentage and all. Very nice and incredibly useful feature.

So how do you solve this problem? By adding links to the download page in the content of the popular page. Whoever’s reading that page cannot avoid to notice it, and it will drive traffic to the download page. One of my goals with my site SEOBomb.com is to share my page about SEO Links and Resources.

Just for fun, scroll up and count how many links I have to that section of the site. Did you already click on any of them? If so, I guess that proves my point.(And I hope you find it useful, because I spend a lot of time on it.)

Web Site Trend Analysis

Here comes the fun part. By following the trends over time, you get a better overview of what’s going on. On your site, and on the internet. I can tell you that most of the web sites I’ve been involved in to date gets the most traffic on a Thursday. It doesn’t matter what month or what year. Thursday is traffic day. Of course it depends on what business you are in, but I am confident this applies for most business sites.

Obviously, leisure sites will have a different traffic pattern. Take a online casino site for example. Chances are they receive the most traffic in the weekends and in the afternoon on weekdays. Chances are also that they are most profitable in the beginning of each month and in the middle of each month. Why, you ask? It’s pretty simple. Payday the 15th and the 30th.

Wild guess — on which days of the month does it make most sense for the online casino site to launch a new campaign? In the beginning and in the middle of the month, of course. That’s when their potential customers have money available.

By looking at your web site statistics and by analyzing your target audience, you can tweak the performance of your web site. It doesn’t matter if you are a one man company, a mid size corporation or a Fortune 500 Company — Everybody can increase web site performance and revenue by analyzing your web site stats and applying the proper strategy accordingly.

Sverre Sjothun
SEO Specialist and Owner of the SEO Bomb.com Blog

To learn more about his take on SEO, visit his blog SEO Bomb.com - Explosive Search Engine Optimization

Sverre is a Search Engine Optimization Specialist with a specialization in technical SEO, web site performance and conversions and is working for one of the top 10 online gambling sites on the net.

Many companies after spending a substantial amount of money on the development of their websites assume that once the website is published on the Internet, people will flock onto it and, therefore, do not take website promotion as seriously as the development part of it. Today, with millions of websites around, no matter how great your website is, if you don’t promote it effectively, you will not get the visibility that your site deserves.

Effective promotion of a website starts with submission of the site to various search tools available on the Internet. There are two different types of search tools: search engines and directories. Search engines index their listings based on the information retrieved by their spiders that crawl through the Internet following links constantly looking for new websites. The directory listings are compiled by human editors from the URLs submitted to the directory. If your website is listed in the directories you can be sure that the spiders of different search engines sooner or later will index your site. That’s why you should start submitting your website first from search directories.

Search Directories

Among all the search directories available on the Internet, Yahoo! and DMOZ are the most important ones.

Open Directory Project or DMOZ

DMOZ is the second largest human compiled search directory on the Internet after Yahoo! Open Directory Project is a huge web directory of Internet resources. All submission to the directory is evaluated by volunteer editors. There is no fee to be paid to get an inclusion in the directory. As a human edited directory it might take more than a month to get your site evaluated. Once you are listed in the DMOZ, within two weeks to two months your website will start appearing on search engines like AOL Search, Teoma, HotBot, Google, Lycos, AllTheWeb, Excite, Go2Net and a number of regional search engines. At present around 354 different search engines and portals use data from Open Directory Project. This is one of the main reasons why you must consider submitting your website to DMOZ.

Submitting your site to directories is a bit trickier then submitting to search engines.

Following rules are common for almost all directories:

- Check to see if your website is already in the directory

- Write an objective description of your website

- Search out the specific subcategory from the directory hierarchy

- Follow the rules of submission as specified

Make sure you follow these rules while adding your website in DMOZ. This will improve your chance to get your website accepted and reduce the processing time.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! is by far the number one destination for Internet surfers. Although the search results for Yahoo! is provided by Google, many people still prefer to browse through Yahoo! directory to find whatever they are looking for. This makes an inclusion to Yahoo! directory quite valuable for ecommerce sites. Yahoo! presently charges yearly fee of US $299 for each web site submitted. The fee is nonrefundable, which means if for some reasons Yahoo! declines to add your website in its directory you will not get your money back! The only thing Yahoo! guarantees is that the editors will look at your submission within seven days and send you an answer.

Should you consider submitting your site to Yahoo!? It all depends on the kind of business you are in. Some sites receive an overwhelming number of traffic from Yahoo!, others hardly receive anybody. My suggestion: list your website in Yahoo! directory for a year and see the outcome. If you feel comfortable with the result you are receiving – continue. If the result is not satisfactory you can always cancel their service after one year.

LookSmart

Although it is the third largest directory on the Internet as a search portal LookSmart is not that popular. However, it provides directory listings to MSN search, About.com, Infospace, Inktomi and others. It is probably still the best way to get high ranking in MSN search. LookSmart is a fee based service. You pay US $49 submission fee for the site review by their editors and 15 Cents for each click through. Pay per click minimum monthly payment is US $15.

For noncommercial sites LookSmart has a partner directory named “Zeal”. Zeal is a community directory for Internet surfers. To submit a site to Zeal you first have to become a member by passing a quiz test. The reason I am mentioning Zeal here is – you can actually submit noncommercial portion of your site to Zeal and receive an appearance in all of the places that LookSmart listings show up, without paying a pay-per-click fee.

Other Directories

Other small but notable directories that you should consider are joeAnt, GoGuides and Gimpsy. Don’t expect large traffics from these directories; however, they will help enhance your link popularity. Link popularity is a concept which means- how many sites have links pointed towards your website. Link popularity is important because your website’s rank in the search results depends on it in a big way.

Search Engines

Search engines use special programs to crawl the Internet and index web pages. These robot programs are called “Bot” or “Spider”. Spiders crawl up the Internet using links. That’s why it is so important to have back links to your website. When you make a search, the search engines show you the results that are retrieved from the servers, where all the indexed web pages are cached. Only when you click on a link from the search result you see the real web page.

The most important search engines are Google, Altavista, AllTheWeb, Teoma, Lycos and MSN, HotBot, AOL Search, etc. Google

No doubt that Google is the best search engine available on the Internet today. According to Google, they have indexed over 3.5 billion pages up to now! More Internet surfers are prone to use Google because it has great search enhancing functions, and you can always expect relevant and quality search results.

You can submit your link using Googles Add URL page located at http://www.google.com/addURL.html. However, if you have links pointing towards your site on other websites, you can be sure that Google’s spider, Googlebot will eventually come and index you site. Contrary to popular believe once your site is indexed, there is not need to resubmit your pages to Google, even if you updated the pages. If, although it is not necessary, you submit your website to Google, submit only the index page, it will find the rest of the pages using the links anyway. Altavista

Once powerful, Altavista started to loose grounds to other search engines in a big way. Submitting to Altavista is fairly simple! From the home page click on the “Submit a Site” located at the bottom of the page. There are two choices for you: either you can choose the “Basic Submit” service, which is free or for an immediate inclusion, you can choose the “Express Inclusion” service.

To prevent automatic submission of URLs, on the submission page Altavista added submission code that has to be inserted manually along with the URL. The Express Inclusion service costs US $39 for the first URL for six months.

AllTheWeb

This search engine is becoming quite popular lately. It has a very large database. AllTheWeb has very sophisticated search functions like searches for pages linked to a given page, searches within URLs or page titles, and searches limited by page size. It provides search results and technology to Lycos and Ebay. Submission to AllTheWeb is quite easy. Use the following link page to submit your URL: http://www.alltheweb.com/add_URL.php If you need an express inclusion, you have to use “Lycos InSite“ service of Terra-Lycos. The rate is US $35 for a full year inclusion.

Teoma

If you care about Teoma, a much hyped search engine, which is actually an additional search engine of Ask Jeeves, you can use its paid inclusion program located at http://ask.ineedhits.com/sitesubmit.asp?id=30270. It charges US $30 per year for first URL and US $18 for additional each.

Inktomi

You may not heard about Inktomi, but many popular search engines use the results from Inktomi such as AOL, Excite, Go.com, HotBot, IWon, Overture to name a few. For secondary search result even MSN uses it! Yahoo! recently bought Inktomi. Which means that very soon even Yahoo! might give priority to the search results coming from it. Inktomi provides a paid inclusion service. Inktomi sells its inclusion service exclusively through its reseller partners. You can find them over here: http://www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/submit.html The fee is US $39 per URL for a year and US$25 for subsequent URLs.

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com – a Global B2B Exchange with solutions to create e-catalog, Web store, business process management and other features to run a business online. You can read various articles written by Nowshade Kabir at http://ezine.rusbiz.com.

Search Engine traffic accounts for nearly 80% of the Internet traffic. It is no wonder all website owners want their pages appear in the first 3 pages of the Search engine Results Pages ( SERPS). Getting there by itself is one tough job, and sustaining your place there is another day to day tussle. Unless most of the mundane tasks are automated the life of an SEO is going to be miserable. We constantly see new webmasters are clueless about the tools of the trade. Let’s see a few main one’s in this article.

Keywords describe the content to the search bots, they guide the search engine to decipher the theme of a webpage. These keywords should be employed in specific ways to acheive optimal results. The first thing to note is the keyword density, SE’s still use the density to validate whether they are being guided towards relevant content as suggested by keywords. Keyword Density Analyzer is one important tool that should be employed to check the usage of keywords and phrases in each of your webpage.

Keyword Research tools are really godsend. In this competitive space, if everyone starts targeting the same phrase then you are going into a virtual stalemate. That is why we should find relevant phrases and target them rather than highly competitive keywords. It is better to be listed in page one of a relevant keyword than on page 6 of the main keyword. There are many tools out there that can provide you a list of keywords based on the popular searches, with cue from the SE’s themselves. These are typically based on the current search terms employed the netizens.

Keywords are just one part of the SEO puzzle, there is a good tool to prepare your website for SE’s. Checkout the resource box for the website with all the tools described in here, they are free to use. The search engine preparation tool helps analyze your website against many criterion. Another popular tool that is a must have is the position checker. The search engine index is really dynamic and hence keeping up with your position manually and that too twice a day is a redundant task that is best left to a script.

The pro tool that is employed by SEO’s is the saturation tool that finds how many pages have been indexed and figures out your presence in the top search engines. This is really helpul because as you know each page in the website is indexed separately and seen as one individual entity in the web. This tool figures out which one’s got indexed and which did not and you can further analyze the reasons and try to enhance the optimization. The free SEO tools can found in http://www.web-inspect.com.

Author freelances for many great web companies and can be found in Aplora Web Solutions and No Fee Free Freelance.

I recently invested quite some time into generating search engine friendly URLs for several of my websites to increase my ranking and to have more pages indexed. I can highly recommend to look into this if your own website does not have se-friendly URLs. Especially Google (the most important search engine nowadays) can be very picky in regards to URLs that are not se-friendly.

Example (the 2 URLs below bring you to exactly the same page):

http://www.beefkabobs.com/ShowCategory.php?CategoryID=13 -> this URL is not se-friendly and search engines will eventually ignore any page behind it or rank it much lower in search results. Visitors will have difficulties to remember this URL. These kind of URLs often come from dynamic database driven websites. Each page is dynamically created when requested. Look at the forums URL this moment, too. It is dynamically created and not very friendly to search engines or the visitor. You get the idea.

http://www.beefkabobs.com/kabob-recipe-category-13.html -> this URL is se-friendly and search engines will spider the page behind it easily. It is keyword enriched to increase search engine ranking. Overall - this URL is easy to be spidered and easy to remember by a visitor.

For one of my own sites I was able to increase the number of pages indexed from 36 to over 150 pages - just by making the URLs search engine friendly. The additional pages were ignored by the search engines because they could not read the URLs properly. The domain used in my example went from 20 pages to 80 within 2 weeks and should go to over 120 pages indexed (by Google) with the next Google update.

How do you make your URLs search engine friendly?

Your web host/web server needs to support the Apache Web Server module "mod_rewrite". This module allows to rewrite URLs a certain way. By using a ".htaccess" file you can give the web server the necessary commands to work with se-friendly URLs.

How does this now really works?

In general - you are faking the nice clean looking URLs and fool search engines and visitors to believe that the URLs of your website are se-friendly.

SE-friendly URLs work in 2 steps. 1) Your site needs to display the se-friendly URLs. 2) mod_rewrite and htaccess ‘translate’ the se-friendly URL and redirect the traffic to the ugly looking se-unfriendly URL in the background (invisible to anyone). You will need to setup the htaccess file with the command how you would like the URL to look like and what does it translate to (a certain ugly looking dynamic URL).

The code that generates the URLs dynamically needs to be adjusted to match the rules from your .htaccess file. You upload the code changes and the htaccess and off you go.

Can every website be modified?

Most websites with dynamic URLs can be modified if the server environment meets the requirements. Each website needs to be looked at separately to get the best results.

The learning curve on creating se-friendly URLs can be quite challenging. Spend the time and resources on creating se-friendly URLs. The results can be overwhelming.

About The Author

Christoph Puetz is a successful small business owner (Net Services USA LLC) and international author.

The website used as an example can be found at http://www.beefkabobs.com. A second example can be found at http://www.vitaminsinstock.com

This article can be reprinted as long as the author information and resource box stays intact. All URLs/Links must be clickable and active.

Search Engines have become the soul of the Internet. They provide a means of aggregating, correlating, indexing and categorizing the vast amounts of content in the wild world of Internet. They have gotten complex over the years with better algorithms to serve the folks who want to find something, really find something. They have become extremely adept at finding out duplicates and hidden texts, detecting and punishing the search engine spammers. Every webmaster should take utmost care on what gets to be listed in the search engine. Things that were employed earlier to spam the search engine to get high ranking will come back to haunt you if you don’t do the garbage disposal. In this article we will employ one tool that makes the SEO or webmaster’s task much simpler. this article provides you with some SEO tips on how to use the saturation tool.

Search engine saturation tools provide a snapshot of what is currently indexed or known to the popular search engines. They provide you a way to understand what areas of your website are indexed and what is not. Alternately it provides information on, did the thing you don’t want to be indexed, got indexed or safe from the eyes of the dragon. This tool shows exactly the weakest portions of your website. Here is the next step you need to understand it is saturation density. This is calculated as the percentage of your website pages that shows up in the saturation tool results. The percentage should exclude the pages that you wanted to be excluded. Additionally you should exclude the image files and object files. Once you take inventory of the file list you want to target and the number of files you got indexed, you can get your personal saturation indicator. This personal target should obviously be close to 100%.

The next factor you need to consider is the saturation density of your competitors. Just look at the saturation index of your competition. And compare against yours. This will give you a pretty good idea on the probability of some one finding your web pages over theirs. If your competition has 1000 pages indexed each for a unique keyword on top of the common keywords. They are going to get the Lion’s share of the traffic. Ultimately this means PageRank. There is a lot you can learn about your competitor than you would by visiting their website. For example your site might be very rich in content and the competitor may seem to be low in content but they still rank higher. But if you look closer they may have a flat file based vibrant forum that gets indexed in the search engines giving them higher relevancy than yours. This is just one example I can reveal. There is tons of other such goldmine data that can be collected by simply using the saturation tool.

There are many search engine optimization websites and companies who offer this tool for free over the web. The resource box contains one such website. The saturation tool is typically a taken for granted tool. The average webmaster just discounts what is indexed and what the competition is index on. Looking at just the top 10 results and analysis of the same won’t suffice. Dig down deeper, you will be amazed at what you can find out about the competition using these tools. Also remember what I said in the first paragraph. There is stuff that you don’t want your competition to know about like a simple customer list that gets stored somewhere because you used an unprotected flat file system. Everybody is learning your competitor is also reading this article and they would have started using the saturation tool to spy on you. This tool is great as it enables you to be a good responsible business. Happy optimization!

To get more SEO Tips like this please visit web-inspect.com. Author does freelancing for many search engine websites and can be reached through the no fee free Freelance website - freelancefree.com. Author recommends the following Photoshop Tutorials Website for your further development - tutorialized.com.

How to build the ideal website for software archives. View from developer.

Advantages for developers

Why developers come to your archive? What do they want to find?

They wish to make their software popular!

1. Be open! Easy and quick submitting is the best way to attract the developers.
2. Do not ask for money from the developers for submitting. Sell software, sell advertising, and sell deep reviews - that’s your source of income. And never demand for the back link!
3. Use Portable Application Description (PAD)! PAD is an unlimited resource of the up-to-date information about software titles. Read and display to visitors as much information as possible taking it from the developer’s PAD: the version history (recent changes), brief and full description in several languages, keywords, the application logo, etc.
4. Use the categories structure from PAD. Do not create a self-made tree of categories at first levels - the program branch should be readable from PAD automatically.
5. But! Expand the PAD categories to the deep. The term File Management is extremely wide, it encompasses thousands of titles. Refine it and offer this option to the submitter.
6. Sell the advertising as an option - and remove the "Google adsense" and "Sponsored link" from paid pages. If I pay for advertising, I do not want to see the competitor’s URLs on my page!

Advantages for visitors

Why people come to your archive? What do they want to find?

They wish to find, learn, and discuss the software covering their needs!

1. Let your first page be easy: easy to open, to read and to understand. I want more white space. I want scalable fonts. I want a big search field, evident categories tree, last updates, news and postings.
2. Let your archive be searchable. Search - that’s the way to find what you need. Browsing by categories is hard and slow - each branch of categories tree includes dozens of pages. Only first rows are accessible, others are "dead weight". Few popular titles have an amazing downloads count - others have nothing. It’s no good! Submitted software - this is a pure capital. It should not waste. Turn it ON - let this wealth do its work! Use the standard categories with detailed sub-branches. Use search queries. Build complex search functions, with pictorial rendition of results. Visitors are shocked when they type the "dvd player" in the search field and get 183 titles. It’s a wrong way! I want to see the advanced search with checkable categories, including and excluding keywords, with filters by file size, price, and date. I want to see the visible result statistics for huge results instead of a full results list. Use the experience of data visualization techniques - like business statisticians or strategy game developers do!
3. Visitors want to see reviews, opinions, ratings, and discussions. And they also want to write it. Each software title should be something like a forum topic: a field for discussion, a place for communication. Use the forum moderator’s experience - visitors love the avatars, posting statistics, cross-postings and quoting. We want to participate in a show - not just viewing rough facts!
4. Visitors want to be up-to-date! Provide the RSS or e-mail notifications for each software, category or discussion.

This is a feedback to software archive owners from the developer who is visiting the 5-10 software sites per day, and really has something to say. Use these tips and grow your site to the most powerful shooter on the Internet market. Good luck!

About the author

Software developer and vendor with 10 years experience. Visit http://www.qunom.com for contact information.