SEO Tools
Posted by EssexMax on 9 July 2010 under Search Engine, Web Tools | 
2 Comments to Read
Optimising your website to make it search engine friendly can be a challenging and time-consuming venture.
Here’s our collection of handy links and website tools.
Audience Research Tools:
Knowing who visits your site, and what they do on your site is vital when you’re trying to promote your site. Your web hosting service should provide basic stats (often using AWStats), but there are other top tools out there for checking on your site visitors. Here are a few sites worth exploring:
- Google Analytics – Free and powerful. You’ll need to add code to each page. From the people that run the largest search engine
- Clicky – Free, and probably the most comprehensive of the stats services out there (See our Clicky Review)
- StatCounter.com – Free, and user friendly, but capped to 500 records per site
More on Web Stats: Web Stats Basics
Rankings tools:
Benchmarking your stats and site rankings is key to working out how your SEO efforts are working. Here are some handy tools:
- PR Checker – Check your Google Page Rank (use as a guide only)
- Alexa Site Info – Check your Alexa Rank, Reach and traffic stats
- Check Domain Analysis – Check other site metrics including mozRank
- Google Toolbar – Install the free toolbar and select the ‘PageRank’ tool to see the Google importance of each page
Google Toolbar with Page Rank highlighted
Website tools:
Check that your sites are free from errors, and have the required META tags in place:
- W3C Webpage Validation – check your pages for HTML coding errors
- Domain Tools – With a handy SEO score checker
- Google Webmaster tools – Google’s tools to report on what their engine sees
- Meta Tag Analyser – Check your top pages to see if your tags are relevant
SEO Tools:
- Majestic SEO – Backlinks Checker – who links to you?
- SEO Moz – Excellent subscription service, with some free tools. Follow the link to “Tools”
- Duplicate Content Checker
- SEOCentro – Collection of handy tools and checkers
Site Map Tools:
- Sitemap generators: XML Sitemaps (online) Sitemap Generator (free download), Site Map Pro (paid download)
Mark Steadman said,
Now putting into practice what I learnt last night – very good.
I am just adding keywords into my metatags, does it make any difference if in lower or upper case?
Regards
Mark Steadman
Steads
EssexMax said,
Hi Mark – Hope last night’s course was of use. The rule I work to is this:
Title tags – Every word with a capital at the front, e.g. “Essex Max Help & Advice” (Looks good in Google listings)
Description tags – As per a normal sentence, e.g. “On this site, we offer help and advice on SEO. Detail on how to improve your site”
Keyword tags – Largely redundant these days, but if you’re going to use them, all lowercase, e.g. “southend, southend search engine, search engine course”
Any more questions – please fire away!
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