SEO Trade Secrets
By Glenn Murray | Advertising
Copywriter, Website
Copywriter, Article PR Specialist *
About 80% of website traffic comes through search engines.
And research shows, if you’re not on the first
2 pages, most people won’t find you.
This article isn’t about how to achieve a high
ranking. That topic has been done to death over the
past few months. We all know the basics now… Submit
your site to the major search engines, scatter a generous
helping of the right keyword phrases throughout your
site in real sentences, then get a lot of other relevant
sites link to your site. That’s it.
This article is about what tools to use to make your
job easier.
1) Choosing Keyword Phrases (costs approx USD$7.50
per day)
To decide what keyword phrases to use, subscribe to
WordTracker.com
for a day and do some analysis. Simply enter a keyword
and WordTracker tells you how often people have searched
for that keyword in the last month or two, how many
competitor sites are using that keyword, and how many
searches it expects in the next 24hrs.
2) Measuring Keyword Density (FREE)
To measure the density of the keyword phrases on your
page, go to GoRank's Keyword
Density Analyzer and type in the domain and keyword
phrase you want to analyse. It’ll give you a percentage
for all the important parts of your page, including
copy, title, meta keywords, meta description, etc. The
higher the density the better.
3) Check How Search-Engine-Friendly Your Site Is
(FREE)
Search engines send out spiders (or robots) to investigate
your site. These tools allow you to see your site from
the spider’s point of view.
- Search
Engine Optimiser - enter your URL and a keyword
phrase and it gives you a great summary of the things
you could improve.
- 1-Hit.com
Search Engine Simulator - enter your URL and it
gives you a summary of the things you could improve.
- Poodle
Predictor Search Engine Spider Simulator - Poodle
tells you how many links the spider will see and investigate.
4) Check How Many of Your Pages are Indexed (FREE)
Go to just about any search engine and type site:www.yourdomain.com.
The search engine will then tell you how many of your
pages it has indexed.
5) Monitor Your Position in Google (FREE)
No need to waste time clicking through hundreds of Google
search results looking for your site. This tool allows
you to enter a keyword and a domain name, and it searches
Google to see where your domain is positioned. Go to
CleverStat.com's Google
Monitor to download the setup file. Then just install.
6) See How Important Sites Are (FREE)
The Google Toolbar is an indispensable tool. One of
the things it can tell you is the “importance”
of every site you visit (in Google’s eyes at least).
You’ve probably heard a bit about PageRank or PR.
PR is Google’s measure of the importance of a site.
Basically, the higher your PR, the higher your ranking.
This tool gives you a snapshot of the PR of every site
you visit. Visit the Google
Toolbar Download page to download. TIP: It’s
good to get links from other sites with high PR –
especially if they contain the same keywords as your
site.
WARNING: Apparently the Google Toolbar monitors your
Internet usage. As yet, it’s unclear what it uses
this information for.
7) Monitor What Sites are Linking to Yours (FREE)
Google
News Alerts and Google
Web Alerts will tell you who’s linking to your
site. Simply set up an alert to be notified when Google
finds www.yourdomain.com.
8) Getting Help (FREE)
If you’re new to SEO, the first thing you should
do is check out Google’s
guide to SEO. If you already know the basics, there
are a number of forums you can subscribe to post questions.
These forums are free, and they’re frequented by
countless SEO experts. And when I say “experts”,
I mean EXPERTS! Some of these people do SEO all day,
every day. And like many technical experts, they’re
only too happy to help – for free. The best forum
seems to be WebMaster
World, but Search
Engine Forums is ok too. If all else fails, you
can try sending
Google an email. But don’t hold out much hope
of help here. They’ll eventually answer, but there’s
no guarantee on the quality of their response…
9) List of article submission sites
For a list of approximately 250 article submission sites and article
distribution lists, as well as some useful tips and templates, please
visit Article PR.
This is just a snapshot of the tools available out
there, but these will certainly get you started.
Some additional resources:
Enjoy!
* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter, website copywriter, SEO copywriter, and article submission and article PR specialist. He heads copywriting studio, Divine Write, and is a director of article PR company, Article PR. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
. Visit http://www.DivineWrite.com or http://www.ArticlePR.com for further details, a FREE SEO eBook, or more FREE reprint articles.
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