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Top 5 Free SEO Tools that Anyone Can Use To Improve Their Site

July 16th, 2010
SEO is always one of those ambiguous things you know you should do, but you don’t know how exactly to go about it, and even after you do something to your website you don’t really know if it worked or not.

Well, there are tools out there – a lot of them free – that will help you optimize your website for those search engine spiders and track how your website is ranking as well. You should use them. Here are five that I like:

WooRank (http://www.woorank.com/)
Scores your website based on your traffic estimation, content, in-site SEO, backlinks, usability, and server information. Great tool to use for an overall feel for your website. Great interface as well.

Ranks Webmaster Tools (http://www.ranks.nl/)
Multiple free tools to analyze your website including keyword density, search engine comparisons, keyword proximity analyzer, link validator, etc. I use this to dive into specific keywords and locate problem areas.

W3C Link Checker (http://validator.w3.org/checklink)
Allows you to check all out-bound links on your website to make sure they work. Pretty simple and effective.

RankChecker (http://www.rankchecker.net/)
Free online tool dedicated to just checking your organic rankings. You can identify up to 10 specific keywords to track and it also gives you top performers for those words so you know who your top competitors are.

Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com/)
This one is less for SEO than just general best practice. Though, you probably wouldn’t want your client’s plagiarized website appearing in the same search results as the original website your lazy web programmer copied.

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Project 2: Where Marketing Works for Everyone

June 29th, 2010

I don’t think I need to tell anyone that the arrival of the internet has and continues to revolutionize the world of marketing. Consumers are no longer at the mercy of companies pushing their products and services onto them. In the fast-paced realm of the internet, all control is in the hands of the consumer. With just a few clicks, these now all-powerful consumers can go where they want to go, find what they’re searching for, and take what they need. If you’re a business trying to push your product onto a consumer with the internet, a simple click on their part can make you completely disappear.

How then do you market your business to consumers who have mastered the ability to avoid you? It’s simple: you no longer need to search for them when they are more than willing to search for you. Just as the internet has given more options to consumers, it likewise has provided more opportunities for marketers to reach their target market.

Running an online marketing campaign is all about laying down a clear path that will lead your prospective clients directly to you. A successful campaign essentially is like handing your prospects the cheat sheet to a maze with them on one end and you on the other. You are ensuring that everything is in place so that when anyone begins searching, they will inevitably walk down the road that leads to you.

Project 2 was ultimately conceived in order to fulfill this purpose: enabling a company’s prospective clients to find them by searching online. Since this type of marketing is about people searching for what they need, it is no wonder that the most efficient methods of online marketing are search-related.

It starts with a simple keyword search on Google. If your website has been properly optimized, the results of that simple search are going to make you immediately visible to that person. Expert search engine marketing puts your ad right in front of them as soon as they click the ‘Search’ button. Of course, nobody wants to show up at a dump when they are envisioning a mansion in their head. Chances are you already have a website; these days, it’s now uncommon to not have one. But is yours clean, simple, and professional enough to convince your visitors to stick around?

At the end of the day, Project 2 could be considered the ultimate matchmaker for businesses. We’re making sure a business and a customer find each other, both with needs that the other can fulfill, to form a strong, long-lasting relationship.

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5 Key Tips to a Simpler Code

June 21st, 2010

No matter how you format your code, as long as the coding is correct, it will work. However, depending on how you format it, it may be hard to read and understand; or even if it’s not hard, there are ways to make it faster to understand, which you would want to do if you need to go over your code, or if someone were going to take over the project. Here are some tips to make it simpler:

1. Always indent; it may not seem like much, but indenting your code helps everything look cleaner and clearer. Indenting makes it easy to know what content is under which tag, where a tag ends, and if there are errors, such as a missing closing tag, you are able to determine the reason for it much quicker.

2. When using the tag “<br />”, it is best to leave it at the end of the line rather than at the front.

3. When choosing names for classes and IDs, make certain the code is clear in what it refers to rather than looking for a quick, short name. For example, if you have two menus on your site, it would be better to name the first one “top-menu” instead of naming the first one “menu,” and the second one “side-menu.” When you’re editing the CSS, or if another person takes over the project, there will be no confusion.

4. Get into the habit of adding comments. Comments are helpful in the long run, especially in larger files. You don’t need to comment on every single item on the page, but insert enough comments so that you can easily understand what everything does.

5. Format your code so that each line has only one tag. Leaving all your code on one line makes it less understandable to read, and more difficult to indent. There may be times when you want to put multiple items on the same line; if a tag has no content in between its tags or the only item in between is text, leave it on one line. If you put text and “<br />” tags in between other tags, use additional lines. Any text that comes after a “<br />” tag should start on a new line.

Follow these tips and you will find it easier to review your code.

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Prioritizing Your SEM Budget Across Search Engines

May 25th, 2010

Google Yahoo Bing

Here’s a question for you: How do you prioritize budgets across search engines? Or do you?

If you don’t, you should. If you do, here are some things you may want to consider.

What do I mean by “prioritization”? If you have a budget of $20k for next month’s SEM campaigns, how do you distribute that across search engines? Most people I talk to actually just go with their “gut feel” – which mostly translates into 80% Google, 10% for Yahoo and 10% for Bing. But is that distribution getting you the best return? No – most likely not. What is the best way? Read on and find out.

First, my method of prioritizing assumes three things
1. You already advertise or are open to advertising across multiple search engines
2. All search engine campaigns are optimized regularly
3. You have website analytics implemented that captures conversion data (optional – but highly recommended)

A side note – if you’re starting out new campaigns – distribute budget according to market share. As of the most recent report from comScore (March 2010), the market share is Google (65.1%), Yahoo (16.9%), and Bing (11.7%). Yes, those are just the top three engines and if you use others that’s fine. Most use just the top three so I’ll continue with this example. Since the top three don’t equal 100% of market share, I calculate what percentage they are of the total (the percentage of the percentage… confused yet?). So the budget distribution I would then give is: Google (69.5%), Yahoo (18%), and Bing (12.5%). Then as you accrue traffic data, you would alter budgets according to the outline below.

pie chart

There is one main question to ask when you prioritize budget: How well does it convert? If Bing converts the best for you, followed by Google and then Yahoo – you should max Bing out first, then max Google out, and then give whatever’s remaining to Yahoo. Otherwise you’re just throwing money away. That’s why analytics is so important. You need to base your budget distribution according to ROI and give more money to the engine that gives more back.

So what if you don’t have analytics? Or your client isn’t interested in implementing analytics? You have to base your decision off of the information you have – which is until the click. In this case, unless you have data to prove otherwise, you have to assume clicks are worth the same no matter what search engine they come from. If all the clicks are worth the same, you’ll want the ones that cost the least, so order the search engines according to the lowest CPC and funnel budget so the lowest CPC engine is maxed out, then the 2nd lowest CPC engine, then give the remaining to the 3rd.

I realize there are multiple factors to consider as well (such as companies that want certain ads to show up in the #1 spot on every search engine for particular keywords – so no changing budgets on those campaigns!), but this is a great baseline to start from to make sure you’re making the best use of your budget before you move on to other optimizations.

A lot of SEM managers I know spend most of their optimization time weeding keywords and writing ad copy, and yet this simple practice that should take just 15 minutes could have a huge impact on conversions.

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