Improve Your Website on a Budget: SEO

by Scott Chapin June 11, 2008

There are countless tools available to make incremental improvements to your website ranging from free to thousands of dollars per year.  I'm taking a look at five categories of tools and presenting some low-cost starter options as well as how to take it to the next level.  We've looked at external research tools and content optimization.  Today, we move on to our next topic, search engine optimization.

Part 3: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engines can easily drive 50% of your site traffic.  (If you don't know where your traffic is coming from, checkout my top 5 useful filters).  SEO is the practice of monitoring your current positions on search engines and working to improve them over time by optimizing content and other factors.  Since Google currently controls 68% of all US searches (Hitwise), it only makes sense to start with their tools, but there are others that can be helpful too.

Google’s Webmaster Tools

The webmaster tools from Google allow you to look under the hood of Google and see how your site is doing and what consumers are searching for relative to your website.  The setup is relatively simple, registration and site verification, and the benefits are immediate.  Once you've setup your account, you are given access to some great information like diagnostics on what Google is finding on your site, links to and from your site and any pages that might be in Google that are no longer available.  But the best feature is the "Top search queries".  Through this, you can not only see what the top search terms that are receiving clicks (available in your web analytics), but you can also see the top 20 searches that were performed (in a month) where your site was listed in the results.  This is a very unique view of how you might be better found by those that don't even know you exist.  Analytics show what people did click, but "Top search queries" shows what was searched on, even if they didn't click.  You may find search terms where your rank is low that you might want to consider for optimization.

SEOQuake

Google's tools give you a great look at the back side of searching, but other tools like SEOQuake give you a front-side look at overall site positioning.  SEOQuake is a browser plug-in (for IE or Firefox) that displays publicly available data for the page that you are viewing.  Some of the stats displayed include Google PageRank, # of pages indexed (Google), inbound links (yahoo), and Alexa rank.  My favorite feature here is the Density measurement.  This tool simply indexes the content in any give page and displays the counts for each word, including a keyword cloud of the most popular words.  It's not rocket science, but it is very handy.

There are countless other tools both free and paid available.  I regularly use include ClickTracks and Web CEO for search engine site rankings and other general analytics.

Following SEO best practices and using tools like these to monitor your overall rank is an important step to improving and maintaining your website.

Next time... Web Analytics (coming soon)