Gadgets! Who does not love gadgets? We have gadgets for almosteverything. Tools to make life simpler and more efficient. to get thejob done in less time with the least amount of energy expired. Toolsthat do a better job. From power tools to vacuum cleaners to cordlesselectric screw drivers to GPS devices and metal detectors. All thesestools help us in our daily lives. They make us more efficient, make usappear more professional, give us more time and less stress and perhapseven enable us to do that which we couldn’t do otherwise. Yes, toolsand gadgets are mans best friend. Oops second best friend.
Whyshould SEO be any different. Many say that it should be left up to theprofessionals. Yes I agree in part. If you can do a reasonable jobyourself, or you can’t afford the professionals or you are plain juststubborn, or what ever the reason, one should be able to at leastattempt the job yourself. If you so feel inclined or forced to do it.Who doesn’t have some tools at home, power tools. Things to fixelectrical appliances, or do the odd carpentry job, or even attempt todo some minor construction or building. Many have done some kind ofDIY. Some have succeeded some have not. But then you will never know ifyou don’t try. Also, some just know themselves that if they attempt tofix the broken electrical plug they will die a horrible death. So theyare very comfortable in hiring a professional.
SEO is nodifferent. You can try and do the job manually, or you can make use ofthe vast number of tools that are available to you, or you can hire aprofessional. Seeing that this blog is for absolute beginners, weassume that you are not a professional and that you want to try thisyourself. Believe me you CAN do just as good a job as any professional.It is not impossible. Hey, I am not a carpenter by any stretch of theimagination, but I have created some nifty looking woodwork pieces thathave had my friend go GA GA.
So what I would like to do here istake a look at some tools that are available to us that can help us outwith this SEO thing. Some are free, some require some form of paymentand some are limited. But they all help. Before we delve into the nittygritty of SEO and the strategy of SEO and all the cool stuff Idescribed on my previous blog, lets look at some really cool and niftytools.
I am gong to divide the tools into two categories, onlineand offline or desktop applications. Online typically speaks of websites that enable you to do things, while offline typically requiresyou to download a program and run it to achieve your or the software'srequired goal. While some tools are not pure SEO tools but alsoincorporate SEM (Search Engine Marketing), which we will cover inanother blog, they are all helpful in getting your site out there.
Online tools.
Seeingthat most people find your site through some form of search engine, andthat the most popular are Google, Yahoo and MSN. It stands to reason tosee what they can offer when it comes to SEO. After all it is theirdomain isn’t it.
Google offer a wealth of tools and services for the armature and professional. Most you have to create a Google account for. But its free and well worth it.
Improveyour site's visibility in Google search results. Google Webmaster Toolsprovides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility onGoogle. All you have to do is add and verify your site.
Links are so important to a web site. Discover your link and query traffic View,classify, and download comprehensive data about internal and externallinks to your site. Find out which Google search queries drive trafficto your site, and see exactly how users arrive there.
Shareinformation about your site. Tell Google about your pages withSitemaps: which ones are the most important to you and how often theychange. You can also let Google know how you would like the URLs thatthey index to appear.
View more information about your crawl errors with the new content analysis tool.
Thisis a fantastic tool. And its Free. Analyse your visitors. GoogleAnalytics shows you which sites, search engines, and keywords referyour traffic and how visitors interact with your site. They have allsorts of graphs and trends. Statistics that you can drill down too. Itis really cool and worth checking out.
WithGoogle Trends, you can compare what interest there is in your favouritetopic or keyword. Enter up to five topics or keywords and see how oftenthey’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows howfrequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and inwhich geographic regions people have searched for them most. You cansee a snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind by viewing thefastest-rising searches for different points of time. You can see alist of today’s top 100 fastest-rising search queries. This is greatfor optimising your keyword search phrases and terms.
Thistool allows you to test different web site designs and content to seewhich ones attract and keep visitors, which ones bring them back formore and ultimately which ones are converted into sales. What you do isyou create a particular page design with particular content. Let theweb site optimizer monitor it. Then create another similar butdifferent page, and test that, so on and so on. Then compare the datato see what users and customers like.
Aspin off of Google search, but with a twist. As you type, Google willoffer suggestions and the approximate number of expected results. Not afantastic tool. But sure does help to find out what keywords arepopular and what similar searches others are doing.
Although Adwords is a pay service.They do have a section where you can do some sort of keyword analysis.You can search specific keywords. Then you get results back of relatedterms. Their relevance, and what their search volume is. I.E you don’twant to have a keyword term that people never use to search with.
7.iGoogle
Thisis essentially a Google homepage. Where you can put Google gadgets on.I especially like it, because you can put webmaster tool gadgets,Google Analytic gadgets. These give you a quick overview of how yoursite is performing, and it also gives you summary reports from thesesvarious services. A one stop, quick glance overall reporting andnotification strategy.
Thisallows you to put in some specific keyword search terms, and then seethe search volume. It also allows you to see how much the InternetAdvertising community will pay for a particular keyword of phrase. Thisgives you an idea as to how important those keywords are.
Theseare just a few services from Google. We still have to look at whatMicrosoft can offer. They have some cool stuff too. There are alsoother online sites that can help. Like Alexa, Wordtracker, SEOBook,WebCEO and many others that hopefully I will have time to cover next.But the conclusion is, that there are ample tools out there to help youwith your search engine optimisation efforts. It just takes time andeffort to see results.
What are you're experiences? Have you played with theses tools yet? Which are your favourite? Drop me a comment and let me know.
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