SEO Best Practices

Some time back, in fact quite some time back I wrote about SEO tools, and I intended writing about more such website promotion tools, but I kind of got distracted and wrote about a whole lot of other stuff and forgot about my intension of writing about some more SEO tools that might be useful when promoting your website.

One word of precaution though, use these tools sparingly, remember these are after all software and search engines don’t necessarily love them always. Also, the data you get may not always be a 100% accurate, sometimes website blocks the software from indexing their site or accessing the content, in such cases you may not find the information that you were looking for. Having said that, these tools are still very neat, they help a lot in analysis and fetching data for you at lightening fast speed!

So here goes, I am compiling a list of five useful and popular website promotion tools :

1. SeoQuake : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/seoquake-seo-extension/
SEOquake is an analytic seo-tool for Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers. You can get information about any website with SEOquake; information in terms of Page Rank, Alexa and a ton of other stuff. For more information on SEO quake go to http://www.seoquake.com/

2.Opensiteexplorer :  http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
Opensiteexplorer will provide you Link metrics for any website. It will provide you the Page Authority, Domain Authority, Linking Root Domains, Total Links, Facebook Shares, Facebook Likes, Tweets, Google +1, among other things. Nice!

3. SEO Tool Bar :http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/
SEO tool bar is quite amazing actually. After installing the toolbar, you can view the  below-mentioned information about every site you visit -

Link Information will show the number of links pointing to the domain and to a particular page, Directory Information will provide you the number of pages listed in Dmoz, and in Yahoo! directory In additional to the above it provided information on Google Page rank, Age of a domain, traffic estimates, social bookmarking sites related inforamtion, and links from authoritative domains suchs as .edu, .gov etc. Amazing!

4. Spider test: http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/
This is another useful tool to have. This will show you exactly how a search engine will see your page. It really helps because you see exactly how the search robots see your page. Your useful content may not be at all visible to the robots, this is quite an eye opener. You can rearrange your content and design so that your site is search engine and human friendly. These tools are indeed very addictive! In a healthy way though!

5. XML sitemap generator : http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Xml sitemap generator is another very useful tool. An XML sitemap is usually submitted to Google so that search engines can crawl your website better. And most of all, the search engines will know about the existence of all the pages that exist in your site, which otherwise they may not have known or indexed.

I will take up some more useful website promotion tools in my subsequent posts.

Let’s find out the benefits of linking from the searcher’s and Webmaster’s perspective.

You are searching for some information, say you wish to gift someone a bottle of wine and you wish to get information on brands, and popular wines. You go on to a search engine and type in the keyword. You scroll down the list of sites that comes up when you search with that keyword. You click on the most relevant site, perhaps you like the title, or the description describes exactly what you want…

When you arrive at the site, you find that the web site basically has a few lines of information on wines and there are a whole lot of links from each of the pages. Would you like to explore further?

I would much rather go to a Wikipedia for my informational requirements or, to a really good portal on wines. Links are good, link farms are not. Think about it; if you need information, would you not rather go to a web site that is well established or authoritative? As a searcher who needs quality information, I would rather get it from a web site that gives me the information minus the other distractions. Having said that, if I find that there is a suggestion of another site on the relevant topic I may be inclined to click on it. But when too many links and ads pop up from everywhere, I would click my way out.

For webmasters, if you need to link, link to good quality, and relevant sites that will really-really be of benefit to your visitors. This is where you will provide benefit to your visitors and not when you have 100s of links from your site which are not even relevant. The game is changing and search engines are getting smarter. You will find that sites like the one I described above are fast disappearing from the search engines. I won’t say that they are completely gone, but the search engines are getting good at weeding out the low quality sites that only exist because of link farming. You need links; but not just any link will do. Obtaining links that are relevant to your site’s visitors are important. Keep adding unique content and promote your website.

The fact remains that the web site’s exit to, by, and for visitors.

You may find my earlier article “linking for users” useful.