October 9, 2006 There are a bunch of them. I would like to share some of my favorites. First, though, I would like to say a thing. All tools are not 100%. Nothing is. Tools for SEO are online and rely on information given by different sources. For example, there are tools that check link popularity. Google will not ever let you know how many links they consider. This would give a little info on how they determine ranking and they don’t want that. Some tools check for ranking. Ranking is a relative term. Google has many different data centers, and a site that ranks 23 for a keyword on one center, may show a different rank on a different center. So let’s look at some neat tools to use.
Site Report Card
This one is a pretty cool overall tool that shows a few different aspects of a site that can and likely do affect rankings. It shows different aspects on a scale of 0-10. It’s a good idea to get everything as close to a 10 as possible, but not always easily done as some Flash conventions are not seen as acceptable for this one. It also shows link popularity and inclusion which is a good way to judge how many of your pages are indexed. Also, the spell check shows less than satisfactory results sometimes, as there are words that we say and type that aren’t in the tool’s dictionary.
Overture Keyword Selection
This is a tool that was setup to show how many times a certain word or term was searched for in a month’s time. This can help decide on what terms you want to optimize and market your site for. If you were thinking about a term that got 10 searched last month, might want to look at other terms. If there were 17,234,879,240 searches, might want to look at variation of a term with the next tool.
Google Keyword Tool
This is one of my favorites. This tool will show you a vast number of variations of a word or term, so that you aren’t trying to get your site to be number 1 on Google with the term «cell phone.» So you can check into other terms, use the previous search tool from overture, and decide on your best plan of action for optimization and marketing.
Search Engine Watch, SEO Book, WebProWorld Sometimes, the best tool in the world is the help of others. These are two of my most favoritest forums and my favorite blog (next to mine, of course). I have yet to even ask a question that was not answered, and the amount of information provided here is immense. Make sure to get more than one opinion though. In the real world, people have a tendency to speak on things that they don’t completely understand or even remotely have experience in. Also, learn to know the mods on these. You will start to notice that the majority of the posts are answered by a few individuals, and they are incredibly smart.
There are also a number of other tools out there that «check meta tags.» Please be wary of these. I’m not saying not to use, but I am saying that everybody has their idea of what is acceptable. WideXL, for example will tell you there are too many keywords or shine out your «poison» words. First, if I have 21 keywords, don’t tell me I have too many of something Google doesn’t look at. Obviously you probably don’t want to have 5000 keywords as there are some search engines that use them, and a hit is a hit (if it’s relevant). And «lingerie» is not a poison word. Look up «lingerie» in Google. See number 1. Look at their keywords. Yeah.
So, check out these tools, research your SEO, be mindful of the information and/ or advice you get. Even from here. I try my hardest to keep the information here as correct as I can, but everyone makes mistakes. Unless you have tested it and counted the consequence, it hasn’t really happened in your world.
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