If your website is not ranking highly in search engines, you are burning money! However, optimizing your website for search engines can often be confusing and time consuming. Here are some useful free search engine optimization (SEO) tools to make it easier for you to improve your rankings.
1. Understand Your Website Performance – Google Analytics
Google Analytics is simply a must. Having a website without an analytics tool like Google Analytics is like flying a plane without an instrument panel. There are easy-to-read graphs that show you how many visitors you’ve had, how they found your website (eg from Google Adwords, organic search, referring websites) and what they did (eg request a free report), or didn’t do, once they were there.
Crucially, you can also find out what keywords users typed into search engines to find you. The key with analytics is not to get overwhelmed by all the data, but to ask yourself “what does this mean?” and, more importantly, “what action should I take now.”
Installing Analytics is quite easy, you just need to add a few lines of code to each page of your website. Visit the Google website or chat with your web developer.
2. Google ‘Page Rank’: The Google Toolbar
Google gives each page you visit (or “crawl”) a score to reflect the importance you place on that page. This is called “pagerank” (PR). It is a score out of 10, and the higher the better. It is only a rough guide, but it can be useful to analyze your website and also to judge if you accept reciprocal links with another website. All things being equal, I would rather have a link from a page with a rank of 4 than a rank of 1. Most small business pages are generally in the 1 to 4 range.
Search for “Google Toolbar” on Google, click the link and follow the download instructions. Once installed, go to the “settings” and “options” toolbar, and enable the “page ranking and page info” button. Now load your home page in the browser. Mouse over the page range button. It should display the Google Page Rank (PR) for your web page.
3. ‘Last Crawl Date’: The Google Toolbar
The same toolbar button can be used to easily find out when Google last crawled your website. Most likely it will be in the last few weeks. You can check each of their web pages.
Load your home page in the browser and click the black arrow on the “page rank” button. Then click on “cached snapshot of the page”. You should see a date there.
If Google never crawled the page, or the date was more than a few months ago, you probably need to develop more external links to that page. I would also recommend visiting Google Webmasters – Site Status for more help. (It’s worth spending a little time on the Google Webmaster website as there are some very useful tools.)
4. Competitor Analysis – “SEO for FireFox”
This tool will not work in Internet Explorer (IE). You will need to download the Firefox browser.
SEO for FireFox” allows you to see a lot of useful SEO data about your competition. It was created by the famous (in SEO circles anyway) Aaron Wall of SEO Book.
Below each search result, there will be two additional lines of SEO data (shaded in blue) related to that website. (For example, if you’re a business coach looking to rank for “business coach Sydney,” type that into the Google search box.) By clicking on the right field, you can find how many links your competitor has, who is linking to them, how old your domain is, and who owns that domain, among other things. This data can be very helpful in planning your own SEO strategy. If your competitor ranks highly for a keyword, they must be doing something right!
The tool can be downloaded from http://www.SEOBook.com. (You can also watch his instructional video.)
5. Quick Link Checker using Yahoo!
If you want a very easy way to find out who is linking to your website or a competitor’s website, and you don’t want to download any tools, go to the Yahoo website.
In the search box, type “linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com.au -site:www.yourdomain.com.au”, where http://www.yourdomain.com.au is the name of your website. (This technique will not work on Google, since Google does not display a complete list of links.)