SEO Best Practices

In continuation with my earlier article on SEO keyword research tools, in this article I discuss the Competitive Research Tools that are available for free.

Alexa – Alexa provides a lot of details but it is biased towards webmasters. Even then it gives us an approximate idea. Alexa provides the % age of internet users on a daily, weekly, monthly, and three monthly basis. It provides a web sites’s worldwide rank, the top search queries… I have used Google.com in the below mentioned example:-
How does all this information help you?
It gives you a reasonable idea of the wedsite traffic, the website’s popularity all over the word, the top search queries that the visitors use to find the website…this data will help you fine tune your website and provide you insights on your website traffic too.

Quantcast – In addition to the monthly traffic, Quantcast provides very detailed demographics report.It is excellent!
Quantcast also provides a detailed list of sites and categories that visitors who visited this site visit.

How will it help you in your Analysis?
To begin with, the demographics provide you with a fairly good idea about the profile of the visitors visiting the site, what are their interests, and what other sites do they visit. You can compare your website’s demographics against your competitors and get a lot of insights.
  
Google Insights – As the name suggests, Google Insights is indeed very insightful. On searching with keywords that you wish to compare, Google insights displays a graph that maps the worldwide interest in the keyword over time. It lists the top 10 locations (regional interests) that is searching for the keyword(s) and search terms which includes top searches and rising searches.

How is it helpful for you?

Not only does it show the regional interest in the particular keyword(s) that you are searching with but alos gives you an idea of
the most searched terms associated with that keyword and most importantly which search terms are on the rise!

This will certainly help you as a starting point and also to optimize your website further.

Archive.org -(Wayback machine)
Amazing website, I love the name…our new age time machine that takes us back…way back and you can find out what the website looked like way then… how many times it changed it’s design…some websites have changed beyound recognition!

The way back machine helps you keep track of how your website or your competitor’s website looked back then and what changes have happened, have the changes helped?

Go ahead use the way back machine, get some interesting insights as well as have some fun… it is really great!

SEO tools are tools that help you with researching and analyzing various factors that help with optimizing your website for both search engines and visitors. These tools reduce your time and provide you a lot of valuable data.

SEO tools are fast becoming the most sought after, there are tools that help you with your keyword strategy, competition analysis, link analysis, all of these help in SEO ranking. In this post I will go over in detail about the SEO keyword research tools that are very popular and these tools are available for free!

Keyword Research tools :

Wordtracker – Go to: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
Type in the keyword for which you need keyword suggestion and click on “hit me”. You will get a lot of suggestions for your given keyword. Wordtracker will also give you the number of searches for each keyword.

KeywordDiscovery  – Go to:http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. 
Enter the image code provided, type in the keyword in the field provided and hit “search”. You will get a list of related keywords.

Wordstream- Go to this url – http://www.wordstream.com/keyword-suggestion-tool
On the left panel you will find the free keyword tool. Type in the keyword for which you are looking for suggestions and click on the “Get suggestions now” button. The page displays keywords related to your search term. Against each keyword you can see the relative frequency. This is Wordstream’s estimate of how often a particular keyword is searched on. A higher relative volume means the keyword is searched on more often.

Google Adwords-The url that you need to go to is,  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal,  type in the  keyword or your website url or both and hit the “search” button.  You will get related keywords against which the volume of competition, global monthly searches, local monthly searches, and local search trends are presented. Clicking on the magnifying glass against each keyword will give you trend for that keyword. The google trends page provides you the regional interest, the top searches and the rising searches.

I have covered some of the popular keyword research tools here, you can go through some more keyword research tools that are available. After completing your research , you will have an exhaustive list of relavant keywords, you can now zero down to the ones that are most searched for and most relvant for your business. I would suggest that you also include long tailed keywords as well, while the search engines might not show a high count against these keywords, there are people who do search for these keywords, and you do not want to miss out on those opportunities.

While all of these keyword research tools are very helpful, they are not always exact.

The keywords suggested through these tools may or may not result in an increase in traffic but they are most certainly worth a try.

I will take up other SEO tools in my next post.