Free Keyword Research Tools
Google Suggest - This is a really cool free widget that works kind of like auto complete, but gives a list of common searches and the number of search results (I.E. how much competition) for the query. All in real time. This is great for quick and dirty brainstorming during early keyword discovery.
Wordtracker Keyword Research Tool free trial - The free trial only returns data from MSN, but is still very useful, and as of now you can use it over and over. Web-based tool suggests related keywords, and rates them to indicate usefulness and difficulty.
The Free Digital Point keyword suggestion tool is one of the most popular keyword reasearch tools available. Here's the gizmo:
Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool - Free online tool suggests variations of your keyword with indication of search traffic and competition.
Overture Keyword Selector Tool - Free tool suggests related terms and the number of searches in the last month.
Google Adwords traffic estimator - This free tool will help you to get some idea of the potential cost / monetization for your keywords. Some Adsense clicks are worth a dime and some are worth a dollar, this will help you discover which is which.
SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool - Suggests variations of your keyword, and gives monthly search numbers for top engines, and links to Google suggest numbers for number of results indicating degree of competition. Outstanding free tool.
SEO Digger - Free tool that parses their database of keywords and SERPs for your domain or WebPages, and tells you all of the searches (and your rank) that you rank for on Google and MSN, and tells you the search traffic for those keywords according to Wordtracker and Overture.
What to do with the Keyword research tools:
1) Use any or all of
Google Suggest, Wordtracker, SEO Book, or
Google Adwords keywords suggestion tools to find keywords that get a reasonably large amount of traffic and a reasonably small amount of competition. Wordtracker assigns a value to each keyword that ranks them in just this way.
2) Use the
Google Adwords Traffic estimator to evaluate your keywords for monetization potential if you plan to use Adsense or their Cost if you are going to use Adwords.
3) Use
SEO Digger to track your SEO progress and to discover long tail searches that you already rank for and that might be worth more specific targeting to move you up in the SERPs. It's usually pretty easy to move up for a search that you already rank for but haven't specifically targeted.
4) Use your chosen keywords in the targeted page's META TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags, in the content in an H1 heading, in the content text, and in the anchor text of links to your targeted page from other relevant parts of your website. Don't get carried away, a little goes a long way.
Other Free Tools and Resources
SEO Jargon - If you can't sling the slang you won't know what the hells going on.
Google Webmaster Central - Lots of free tools and information here. If you want to improve your traffic you need a (free) account here, and you need to use it.
Google Analytics - Free analytics tool with lots of features.
Clicktracks Appetizer is a free version of the full featured commercial analytics program which features a simplified (yet essential) group of tools. This is a good way to wet your feet if you have no experience with analytics.
Free Online Sitemap Generator - Crawls your site while you wait, and generates not only a Google Site Map but also an html version for your users, and also points our crawl errors like broken links and duplicate pages.
Free XML Sitemap Generator - Another free xml sitemap generator.
W3C Markup Validation Tool - This free online tool checks your page for coding errors, and points out their approximate location, but just for fun it doesn't really tell you what the problem is. I usually find lots and lots on mine. Figuring out exactly what the errors are is often a real challenge. There is also a page abstract tool that is pretty helpful.
W3C Broken Link Tool - Another free tool from the World Wide Web Consortium - this one checks for broken links.
US Government Website on Usability - Your tax dollars in action - Research based information on website usability. Information you need to keep users on your site once you attract them in the first place.
html gate - html editor that includes powerful auto correction features, and doctype conversion that is very helpful in finding and avoiding those pesky coding errors that the W3C site helps you to validate. There is a fully functional free trial version.
Firefox Extension that adds Google Suggest - along with other handy search features to firefox.
SEOBook Free SEO tools - too numerous to list. Check it out.
Spider Viewer - shows you what the spiders see.
Search Status add on for FireFox - Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools.
SEO for Firefox - Pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results.
SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO - This free e-book is a much more detailed (and authoritative) treatment of what I am covering with this page.
Online Favicon editor - favicons are the tiny pictures that represent your site in bookmarks, and no it isn't SEO, but it is branding.
SiteMost's Google supplemental results tool
My Favorite SEO and Usability blogs
Search Engine Watch
Bruce Clay internet marketing
Sphinn SEO social networking site - This is a new site, and probably THE trendy place to participate in the SEO community at this time.
DoshDosh.com is all about
Making Money Online and has real, usable information day in and day out. SEO, Monetization, Marketing, Blogging, it's all here. No time wasting BS here, just the good stuff.
SEOmoz Blog - caters to professional SEOs, but has lots of high quality information for anyone interested. If I was going to SEO for clients (in an alternative universe perhaps) this would be high on my list. As it is, I read it every day anyway.
SitePro News Blog - Another reliable free source of pro quality SEO, usability, and marketing information, and tools.
FeedTheBot.com is a great resource to help you
Understand the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Do It Yourself SEO - Notes to Self
First of all, this article is really more about making your website Search Engine Friendly than actual Optimization. Do it yourself Search Engine Optimization is about like a shade tree mechanic trying to build a competitive NASCAR in his garage. In either case, a lone amateur is unlikely to be able to compete head to head with a well-financed team of trained professionals. However, only a few people have a real need for a world class race car, and the determined do it yourselfer can do a good quality tune up with a few basic tools and skills. Just try to have realistic expectations. Even if you were to hire a professional to perform search engine optimization on your site, you would still benefit from an understanding of SEO fundamentals.
The truth is, this article is more for my own benefit than anything else is. I realize that Search Engine Optimization is a highly competitive subject on the Internet with numerous blogs devoted to it, and this page will probably draw few hits. However, a web page like this is one of the easiest ways for me to keep information easily available and organized so that I can quickly access it from any of the several computers that I regularly work from. However, if anyone else happens to stumble upon it and find it useful then so much the better.
I believe this list to be from highest to lowest in terms of Benefit/Effort, so if you can't do it all at first then start your work at the top of the list, and go as far as you can.
What is Your Goal?
You are more likely to achieve your goal if you know what it is and have a plan on how to get there. If your goal is to make money then you need to be in a business sector where there is money to be made by your type/size of business. Of course if you are clever enough then you might be able to profit in almost any sector, but to paraphrase Warren Buffet "Even an average manager can profit in a highly profitable business sector, while even an excellent manager will struggle in a highly competitive one." Why make life harder than it has to be? On the other hand if your goal is to enjoy yourself and maybe make a few dollars to pay for hosting, then don't sweat it. Sign up for Adsense and Blog away.
On Page Optimization
On every Page...
Do No Evil - Don't try to be tricky, it will usually backfire.
Don't change page addresses! Once you have posted a page for any length of time, don't mess with the page or directory names. If you absolutely must (and you probably don't) then at least use a 301 redirect to the new location.
Present High Quality, Original content - If your content is better than anyone else's is then Google WANTS it to be the #1 result.
Unique Descriptive META title and description tags which features a valuable keyword, and that actually describes the page content. Every page must have a unique title and description META tag.
h1, h2... Header tags within the content which feature targeted keywords and serve to define an abstract/outline of the page.
Descriptive alt tags for images which reinforce the keywords and description used everywhere else and make image content accessible to the blind
Initial page content which reinforces the relevance of the META title, META description, keywords, and header tags. I say initial, because word on the street and my limited experience indicate that the spiders don't always read the whole page. Don't "stuff" your content with keywords though. Make it sound natural.
Basically, all of the page elements should be relevant to each other to make it clear exactly what the page is about to both the customer and the search engines. However, some SEOs seem to believe that "over optimization" could be counter productive. These kinds of things are where the art of SEO comes in.
W3W validated code - I don't know how important this really is, but it will help to insure that your pages work correctly for your customers no matter what browser they use. It is certainly important to have the cleanest possible code so that your pages will load correctly and as quickly as possible. At least navigate through your site with some alternative browsers. Internet Explorer is the prominent one followed by Firefox.
Search engine spiders can only "see" text, and can only follow text links. Be careful about how you use graphics, flash animation or java script. You want a crawlable site/page that does not impede search engine robots.
Overall Site Optimization
Get your own domain! You probably won't go very far with a free domain. Domains start at around $2 - $10 per year.
You need a site map which is no more than 1 click from any page and which points to every user accessible page.
You probably also want to have an XML site map just for the search engines. See the free tools below.
No duplicate content either on site or off site. Don't plagiarize, even from yourself.
In line links with relevant anchor text between related content pages - instead of your anchor text just saying "click here" you might consider something like "click here for white widgets" A Google search for "click here" returns over one and a half Billion results.
No unfinished or "Under Construction" pages
Whenever possible use targeted keywords in your domain, directory, and document names. Instead of "www.buystuff.com/products/product1.htm" you want something like "www.golf-gear.com/golf-balls/titlist.htm" if possible. This makes good sense to me, but I have seen the opinion that this is hogwash. Still, I don't see how it could hurt.
If you have a retail website that generates long obfuscated URLs with lots of question marks, session IDs and other squigglys then you should do something about that. Any pages that you want to rank high in the SERPs should have search engine friendly URLs. If changing them all is not feasible then at least have SE friendly URLs on your main category pages. This one thing made a big and immediate difference on one of my websites.
Avoid links out to non-relevant or low quality sites or content; or at least consider using the nofollow / noindex tags on questionable outlinks especially in user generated content such as blog comments.
Don't try to use any tactic which tries to in any way trick either your customers or the search engines about the true nature of your website. You don't even need to know all of the particular schemes - if it seems shady, then don't do it. Admittedly there are some "Black Hat" SEO experts that might be able to generate very large very quick surges of website traffic by applying shady tactics, that sort of thing is not a good choice for the do it yourselfer. Misapplied black hat tactics might get you banned from the search engines indexes. This site will help you to
Understand the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Link exchanges are of questionable value and may actually hurt you. As a general rule you don't want to link out to completely unrelated sites/page, and you certainly don't want to link out to the link exchange sites AKA - link farms. BTW, they all swear that they are not link farms, but they pretty much all are. Here's a litmus test for link farms - if they require you to link to them before they will link to you they are probably a link farm. Some of them will even cheat you by generating their pages with java script so that the link to your page is invisible to the search engines. Not cool.
Use an analytics tool to track the results of your changes.
Google Analytics is a free analytics tool with lots of features.
Breaking news from SMX Seattle - According to Matt Cutts (Google Engineer of Rockstar status in the SEO Community) bought links will probably be of limited (pagerank) value because 1) Google doesn't like them 2) Even if you think they are undetectable all it takes is for one involved website to get caught or ratted out for all outlinks from the seller to become useless. Who knows how this applies to paid inclusion or "Express review" on mainstream directory / search engines.
Off Site Optimization
Register with search engines and indexes when you are ready, but don't use any kind of submittal service or software. You don't NEED to register with 22,000 search engines. If you register with the main ones, the rest will find you. By the way if you have an XML (Google) sitemap (which you should) you can submit to Ask.com by pasting the following in your browser address bar and hitting enter:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml You can also put the following dirrective into your robots.txt file:
SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml
Register with good quality indexes. Be aware that you are mostly going after the traffic from the actual index and not additional pagerank from the links. If an index will link to any site, then you probably don't want to be on it. Stick with selective, human edited indexes which are like Yahoo or DMOZ (if it is still working).
Obtain high quality inbound links from high traffic pages on trusted sites which are related to your site/page content. - This is the hardest part, and there are several ways to accomplish this -
1) Make your page/site one of the very highest quality and useful resources in your subject matter and then wait months or years for people to notice this fact.
2) Market - buy advertising, issue press releases, send out mass emails, create buzz within social networks, linkbait, hire celebrities to promote your thing, appear on the tonight show, stage publicity stunts - basically all of the things that the movie studios do to promote a movie.
3) Ask for them - Don't just beg for a link, offer something of value for the webmaster to link to, and get involved in the online community that you want/need to network with. It's give and take, you have to give before you can take.
4) Get involved in related blogs and forums, and post in them. Even though lots of these venues will be using nofollows or some other form of link condom you can get traffic, and if you offer a quality resource traffic will eventually equal incoming links.
Don't see What you were looking for? Search This Site...
Site Map
- Fixit Blog
Cost of the War in Iraq
(JavaScript Error)
