Every Internet marketer's goal is to get a good rank in the search engines. With
search engines driving as much as 80 percent of a site's traffic,
search engine optimization is a crucial component of any Internet marketing
plan.
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There are two ways to go about improving a site's search engines. You can
either hire a search engine optimization company; or you can do the task
yourself.
Search engine optimization is not a complex task. The techniques revolve
around the following components: title of the web page, keywords, meta tags,
themes, and link popularity. All you need is time, patience and an understanding
of how these factors interact to get you the desired rankings.
If you plan to do it yourself, below are some useful tools you can use to
improve your search engine ranking (best of all, these tools are free!):
Themes
Search engines are now including the "theme" of a site in their
ranking algorithms. With theme indexing, the search engine now looks beyond each
web page as an individual entity; rather, it considers the entire theme of the
site.
Web Page Theme Inspector
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/theme.cgi
This free tool tells you the theme a search engine use to categorize your
site. This tool does this by giving out a list of words that your site is known
for in a decreasing order, and the relative weight of each word.
Keywords
The choice of keywords is the most important aspect of search engine
optimization. Your keywords must not only be in your meta tags, but your title
itself should contain the main keywords that you are targeting. Even if you load
your meta tags with a gazillion of keywords, you may still not achieve the
results you need if you do not include your keywords in your title.
Keyword Analyzer Tool
http://jimtools.com/keywordanalyzer/index.html
Most search engines consider the number of times a word is used in the web
page. The best keywords to use are those that appear most frequently in the body
of the web page (except of course for articles like "the",
"a" and others). The greater the number of keywords found in the body
of the web page, the greater boost it will give to a site's overall ranking for
that keyword. This free tool analyzes web pages to determine which words and
phrases are most used.
Good Keywords
http://www.goodkeywords.com
A program that tells you the number of times a keyword is searched in
pay-per-click engines. It helps manage your bids at various pay per click search
engines like GoTo, Lycos, 7Search, etc. Use it to find the right bid words,
research and optimize your bids and analyze your competition. Even if you do not
use pay-per-click search engines, it will give you a clear indication of the
popularity of the keywords of your site. It comes in free (7 search engines) and
professional (12 pay-per-click engines and more functions for $59.99) versions.
Keyword City
http://www.keywordcity.com/Enter2.html
This site gives information on the most popular keywords on the Web, arranged
alphabetically and by subject. It uses data from Overture (GoTo.com), and
calculates the ratio of pages found to number of requests (on Goto.com) to rank
desirability score for use as keyword on a web page. While it will not analyze
your site, use this site as a reference to determine the popularity of keywords
used in your site, not just in one search engine but the entire Web. It also
gives the top 10 keywords.
Link
Popularity
Link popularity refers to the total number of links or "votes" that
a search engine has found for your web site. Search engines rank the more
popular sites - those with more sites linking to them -- higher than those with
fewer links. The quality of sites that link back to your site are also
considered (e.g. you'd get more points if Yahoo or Fortune Magazine links to
your site compared to a free-for-all site).
Marketleap Visibility Index
http://linkpop.marketleap.com
More than the standard link popularity tool, this site offers a benchmarking
mechanism to help you determine where you stand relative to the whole industry
and your direct competitors. Easy to use and fast, you simply enter your URL,
along with up to three comparison URLs, then see at a glance how you measure up
in terms of sheer numbers of links to some major sites on the web. Your site is
considered "Having a Limited Presence" if less than 1,000 sites link
to you, or a "900 lb. Gorilla" if you have 500,000 references. You can
then click on the report to see link count listings from the major search
engines that are queried. This free tool considers results from MSN Web Search,
Google, HotBot, AlltheWeb, Altavista and AOL.
Link Popularity Check
http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com
Similar to MarketLeap's Visibility Index, it allows you to compare the
popularity of your URL relative to three comparison URLs. It checks results from
a more limited number of engines - Lycos, Google, Altavista and MSN. The results
indicate the number of links from these engines, as well as bar charts comparing
the results. However, we note that it always produces 0 results from Google,
although clicking on the details shows that there are links to the site.
Web Ferret
http://www.zdnet.com/ferret/index.html
An all-in-one search tool, WebFerret provides a handy and efficient way to
find sites and information on the Web. Simply enter your keywords and this nifty
tool will give you a list of web sites from different search engines. It will
give you search results from various search engines, including HotBot, AOL
Search, Lycos, etc. You can then visit each one of the sites that WebFerret
generates based on your keyword and then request that site to link to you. You
can also use it to conveniently look-up sites that link to your site. This tool
is free, although a paid professional version is also offered.
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