I've been looking for a new Google rank checker. In reading 4th Floor Marketing by James, a student in Binghamton NY, I learned about Google Rank Checker which I'll try until I find something better. I sure miss Jim Boykins Cool SEO Tool. Any opinions on whether I should sign up for their suite of free tools?
I don't fully understandone setting on the Google Rank Checker tool. Users get to choose which region they care about. But there isn't a US region, there's just World.
Any one to explain it?
This post was sponsored by the good Rhode Island homeschooling people, thanks!
Showing posts with label free seo tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free seo tools. Show all posts
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Best free seo tools
Google, as I've written before, is the best free SEO tool (analytics, webmaster tools, adwords, search etc). The second best is yahoo. And the plugins to Firefox are amazing. In terms of third party websites:
SEO Tools - Specifically:
Search Analytics Tools - establish your marketing goals and establish a baseline for where you are at right now.
Keyword Research Tools - discover the keywords your customers are searching for right now.
Competitive Research Tools - see what keywords your competitors are targeting.
PPC Tools - buy important keywords and track the results to understand how well they convert,which helps you focus you organic SEO strategy on the most profitable keywords. Save money using these free Yahoo! Search Marketing & Microsoft adCenter Coupons.
Link Analysis Tools - start building your link profile and track your progress compared to competing websites.
Search Engine Ranking Checkers - determine how effective your marketing is by watching your search engine rankings improve.
SEO Digger - Provides great info but you really need a premium account to go to work.
SEOAnalytic.com -
Free Wordtracker - This is much like the old Yahoo/overture tool that we all liked - - I wonder where they get their data? Answer is from dogpile and metacrawler which accounts for .63% of the searches. But, their searches are not by typical or mainstream users. A big problem. I mean like what sort of person in 2008 uses dogpile? If you met someone who used dogpile to search with, what sort of person do you think it would be? Would it be someone like Joe Sixpack? Or someone really weird and fringy...Maybe from Hawaii or Alaska...
BTW - there is a decent thread on this at digitalpoint.com
SEO Tools - Specifically:
Search Analytics Tools - establish your marketing goals and establish a baseline for where you are at right now.
Keyword Research Tools - discover the keywords your customers are searching for right now.
Competitive Research Tools - see what keywords your competitors are targeting.
PPC Tools - buy important keywords and track the results to understand how well they convert,which helps you focus you organic SEO strategy on the most profitable keywords. Save money using these free Yahoo! Search Marketing & Microsoft adCenter Coupons.
Link Analysis Tools - start building your link profile and track your progress compared to competing websites.
Search Engine Ranking Checkers - determine how effective your marketing is by watching your search engine rankings improve.
SEO Digger - Provides great info but you really need a premium account to go to work.
SEOAnalytic.com -
Free Wordtracker - This is much like the old Yahoo/overture tool that we all liked - - I wonder where they get their data? Answer is from dogpile and metacrawler which accounts for .63% of the searches. But, their searches are not by typical or mainstream users. A big problem. I mean like what sort of person in 2008 uses dogpile? If you met someone who used dogpile to search with, what sort of person do you think it would be? Would it be someone like Joe Sixpack? Or someone really weird and fringy...Maybe from Hawaii or Alaska...
BTW - there is a decent thread on this at digitalpoint.com
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Why do I need one of those blog thingys?
I was just reading LisaDesign's blog, a web designer in Rapid City. And she gave the most charming answer that I've heard as to how blogs help:
It's like candy for search engines.
It's a cuter way of saying (and I quote an old post of mine and some speaker years ago): Blogging is also a great way to build position in the search engines. Its been suggested that B-L-O-G is not so much an abbreviation for Web-Log but the secret to a Better Listing On Google.
Her post explains how each article contributes to your position: like "compounding interest". I like Lisa's writing and analogies...Her website is nice, her blog is beautifully written. And I'm sure when she has time she'll upgrade her blog to SEO-friendly URLs...
For those who don't know what a search engine friendly URL is. Look at Lisa's blog. The most recent article has this URL: http://lisawebdesigns.com/?p=71
Google reads this and can't find much in that URL to help it "digest" her content. If she had SEO friendly URLs, it would read: http://lisawebdesigns.com/why-do-i-need-one-of-those-bloggy-thingys.htm . Of course, this would help Google understand that her article has something to do with things and needs and bloggies. So with user-friendly URLs, you start paying a little more attention to searched keywords and a little less to extreme cuteness. While SEO friendly-URLS are only one part of Google "digesting" your content, every little bit helps. I was working on a site built in druple today (about learning today) in which you get to tell the system the keywords to use in the URLS.
How do I know all this blog stuff? It's because I'm the co-creator and one of the first students of a course on blogging. Let me recommend that if you are starting or thinking of starting to blog, you take this course. It's fun and you learn in 8 pleasant weeks, what could take you a year of figuring out on your own, the hard way.
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It's like candy for search engines.
It's a cuter way of saying (and I quote an old post of mine and some speaker years ago): Blogging is also a great way to build position in the search engines. Its been suggested that B-L-O-G is not so much an abbreviation for Web-Log but the secret to a Better Listing On Google.
Her post explains how each article contributes to your position: like "compounding interest". I like Lisa's writing and analogies...Her website is nice, her blog is beautifully written. And I'm sure when she has time she'll upgrade her blog to SEO-friendly URLs...
For those who don't know what a search engine friendly URL is. Look at Lisa's blog. The most recent article has this URL: http://lisawebdesigns.com/?p=71
Google reads this and can't find much in that URL to help it "digest" her content. If she had SEO friendly URLs, it would read: http://lisawebdesigns.com/why-do-i-need-one-of-those-bloggy-thingys.htm . Of course, this would help Google understand that her article has something to do with things and needs and bloggies. So with user-friendly URLs, you start paying a little more attention to searched keywords and a little less to extreme cuteness. While SEO friendly-URLS are only one part of Google "digesting" your content, every little bit helps. I was working on a site built in druple today (about learning today) in which you get to tell the system the keywords to use in the URLS.
How do I know all this blog stuff? It's because I'm the co-creator and one of the first students of a course on blogging. Let me recommend that if you are starting or thinking of starting to blog, you take this course. It's fun and you learn in 8 pleasant weeks, what could take you a year of figuring out on your own, the hard way.
One last blog point: I am frequently asked what blog software people should I use? Blogger? Wordpress? Typepad? Should it be hosted on a private domain (like Http://www.BBat50.com or http://www.parentaltech.com) or sit on a shared site (like this one on http://learn-to-market-online116.blogspot.com/ or http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/edmouse)?
The long answer is take the blogging class, the short answer is that you should start by just using a shared host somewhere since it's easier and you can move it later. Do pay attention to use the most recent version of whichever software you choose. I love the recent versions of both WordPress and Blogger. The older versions are just a pain compared the simplicity of the new ones.
This post sponsored by the best homeschool curriculum.....Time4Learning.com
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Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Blog posts, corrections, RSS & Feedburner - How does it work?
I sometimes (often) make mistakes in my blog posts. After I publish them, I notice the errors and I open up the post and fix them. I've often wondered whether after hitting the publish button, will my corrections show up on every instance of my post or not?
For instance, I use feedburner to publish my posts. I've learned that feedburner sends out the posts at the end of the day (maybe Califorinia time). So as long as I make corrections during the day, the errors don't show up in the versions that get emailed out.
But, my posts also get published thru feedburner to countless readers thru RSS. And this blog is also hooked up to blogcatalog.. I just looked at my posts insider blogcatalog and my post from about 15 minutes ago is not yet there. But, once it appears there, if I make a change in the original, will it get fixed there?
I will now run an experiment. I am going to go back to my post of Tuesday May 27th, 2008 and I'll change the ending:
from: Dear reader, what would you do?
to: Dear readers, what would you do? I'm willing to pay for a real answer to this question. Contact me for details.
And I'll see whether the version in blogcatalog changes. Also whether the version in my google reader changes
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For instance, I use feedburner to publish my posts. I've learned that feedburner sends out the posts at the end of the day (maybe Califorinia time). So as long as I make corrections during the day, the errors don't show up in the versions that get emailed out.
But, my posts also get published thru feedburner to countless readers thru RSS. And this blog is also hooked up to blogcatalog.. I just looked at my posts insider blogcatalog and my post from about 15 minutes ago is not yet there. But, once it appears there, if I make a change in the original, will it get fixed there?
I will now run an experiment. I am going to go back to my post of Tuesday May 27th, 2008 and I'll change the ending:
from: Dear reader, what would you do?
to: Dear readers, what would you do? I'm willing to pay for a real answer to this question. Contact me for details.
And I'll see whether the version in blogcatalog changes. Also whether the version in my google reader changes
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Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Redirecting WWW for seo purposes...Easier said than done.
Prevailing "SEO wisdom" is that you should make sure to have the http://www.domain.com/ and http://domain.com/ directed to each other to concentrate your link power. I was just looking at how we might accomplish this. It's a little more complicated than it sounds.
There are two options for redirecting http://time4learning.com/ to http://www.time4learning.com/ says by CTO.
We are currently hosted on a Windows (IIS) platform at Verio which has some limitations in terms of being able to globally redirect pages from "time4learning.com" to http://www.time4learning.com/. Below are 2 options for your review. Currently all traffic from http://www.time4learning.com/ is technically being served by pages from time4learning.com.
(1) Use .Net technology to globally route any incoming request that doesn't have the "www" in front of it to the corresponding http://www.time4learning.com/ page. The issue with this approach is that .Net only handles ".aspx" pages. Since our site has both ".html" and ".aspx" pages we would have to configure the hosting platform to route ".html" pages through the .Net pre-processor. The pages would be rendered the same way as normal HTML pages, the downside is that we may experience a slowdown of page delivery as the ".html" pages would now be going through a pre-processing stage instead of just being served up. This would also put an additional load on the server. At this time, I do not know how significant are these issues. This option can be easily turned "on" and "off", so if there are problems, we can certainly address them quickly.
(2) Currently our main web account at Verio is "time4learning.com", this is technically where the website is hosted. Requests to "www" are handled by this domain. Verio is suggesting that we can create another website domain, specifically called http://www.time4learning.com/ copy our current time4learning.com site over to the new http://www.time4learning.com/ and then very easily re-route any traffic coming to "time4learning.com" to "www". Unfortunately, we cannot do the reverse. This option is not easily turned "on" or "off" and may require some downtime while we copy the site over and make sure everything is working. The issue is that once we create a "www" site, traffic will start to flow to it, so we have to carefully plan this type of move. Ultimately, this is probably the more correct of the options, but certainly carries some element of risk via downtime. The downtime can be managed to a minimum.
Dear readers, what would you do? I'm willing to pay for a real answer to this question. Contact me for details. (this is revised)
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There are two options for redirecting http://time4learning.com/ to http://www.time4learning.com/ says by CTO.
We are currently hosted on a Windows (IIS) platform at Verio which has some limitations in terms of being able to globally redirect pages from "time4learning.com" to http://www.time4learning.com/. Below are 2 options for your review. Currently all traffic from http://www.time4learning.com/ is technically being served by pages from time4learning.com.
(1) Use .Net technology to globally route any incoming request that doesn't have the "www" in front of it to the corresponding http://www.time4learning.com/ page. The issue with this approach is that .Net only handles ".aspx" pages. Since our site has both ".html" and ".aspx" pages we would have to configure the hosting platform to route ".html" pages through the .Net pre-processor. The pages would be rendered the same way as normal HTML pages, the downside is that we may experience a slowdown of page delivery as the ".html" pages would now be going through a pre-processing stage instead of just being served up. This would also put an additional load on the server. At this time, I do not know how significant are these issues. This option can be easily turned "on" and "off", so if there are problems, we can certainly address them quickly.
(2) Currently our main web account at Verio is "time4learning.com", this is technically where the website is hosted. Requests to "www" are handled by this domain. Verio is suggesting that we can create another website domain, specifically called http://www.time4learning.com/ copy our current time4learning.com site over to the new http://www.time4learning.com/ and then very easily re-route any traffic coming to "time4learning.com" to "www". Unfortunately, we cannot do the reverse. This option is not easily turned "on" or "off" and may require some downtime while we copy the site over and make sure everything is working. The issue is that once we create a "www" site, traffic will start to flow to it, so we have to carefully plan this type of move. Ultimately, this is probably the more correct of the options, but certainly carries some element of risk via downtime. The downtime can be managed to a minimum.
Dear readers, what would you do? I'm willing to pay for a real answer to this question. Contact me for details. (this is revised)
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Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Free SEO tools
These free tools are tremendous. I've not yet paid for an SEO tool.
Web Site Grader - It says that I'm doing a great job. 93%.
Quantcast - It gives you amazing stats on your site.
Yahoo's site explorer - Gives info on links.
Google's Keyword rating tool - The adwords tools made available for everyone.
This article somewhat obsoletes the previous one on SEO Free Tools.
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Web Site Grader - It says that I'm doing a great job. 93%.
Quantcast - It gives you amazing stats on your site.
Yahoo's site explorer - Gives info on links.
Google's Keyword rating tool - The adwords tools made available for everyone.
This article somewhat obsoletes the previous one on SEO Free Tools.
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