Sunday, August 8, 2010

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Put Your SEO on Autopilot

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Even SEO Experts Need SEO Software

I Use online and offline tools as I go through my best practices checklist. Its near impossible to measure results on the larger scale and for the long-term without SEO software. You can optimize a webpage without it, but scheduling and running robust reports that include competitor data? You will need some sort of software for SEO analytics and project management.
Here are some shortcuts to the SEO software I use the most often. Please be advised that I may get a commission when you purchase some products from this website. However, I only talk about software I've used at some point and recommend.

SEO-Friendly Content Management Systems (CMS)

First and foremost, if you're website is not already on an SEO-enhanced version of Wordpress, you should pick my eBook, SEO in a Day. After downloading, you'll have the option to have us handle the installation for you.
For lead-generation websites, there is no better solution than Wordpress (don't buy into that Developer who tries to convince you into Drupal, he'll leave you stranded - there are many more Wordpress Developers than Drupal Developers). Fire your webmaster and SEO agency, pick up a few complimenting products (shown below), and you're all set.

 

 

Got ECommerce?

Unless you're only selling a few products, Wordpress may not be the ideal scenario for you. There are only a handful of SEO-friendly shopping carts. Stay away from OSCommerce or anything not mentioned below. Zen Cart, Joomla and Ektron are robust, but can be very clunky and difficult to "hack" into an SEO-friendly solution. None of these bozos are smart enough to have an affiliate program, so I'm going to spam their Google Analytics until they do. Click on all of the links below to help me with my crusade.

Free SEO Software & Tools From Search Engines

As you can imagine, the search engines don't really approve of software designed to make automated queries to their database. To reduce the amount of automated load on their servers, they've opened their doors to Webmasters to help provide them as much insight about how they see your website as possible.
Case in point, Matt Cutts, Principle Engineer at Google, is featured almost daily on YouTube.com answering questions sent to him during an open-door question/answer session in late 2009. He may also be answering random questions sent to him via email, his blog (MattCutts.com), and Twitter.
Below are the accepted tools offered up by the respective search engines as an alternative to SEO software:

Google Webmaster Tools

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Bing Webmaster Toolbox

Keyword Research Tools

SEO software designed to help you determine the best keywords to target on your website are referred to as "Keyword Suggestion Tools" (KWST) and there are several available online. However, many KWSTs are man-made and skewed, so its important to know which KWST is right for your website so you're not wasting your time optimizing for keywords that nobody is searching for.
Before you go out and buy keyword software, I encourage you to follow these steps first (as you may find out that keyword software is not all necessary):
  1. Analyze your payper click campaigns to identify keywords that produced leads or sales
  2. Survey and brainstorm with employees, managers, and with customershttp://screencast.com/t/YmE3Yzdm
  3. Study Goals in Google Analytics for several week (or months) to understand what keywords convert
The leading KWST available today is still WordTracker, which recently went through a face lift. WordTracker offers more than just a quick query of potential keyword opportunities. This software actually takes 120 days worth of data and organizes it into a robust database, which when queried not only returns an estimate of how many people are searching for a keyword, but also how many other websites are competing.
I used to prefer WordTracker becuase I could save queries and run scheduled reports. I also like the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) computed by this SEO software (a result of calculating a number of searches with number of competing sites).
You don't have to pay for a year's worth of use, now you can use WordTracker for 7 days free. Give WordTracker a run through and see for yourself how this keyword research tool works.
A new leader is emerging in the Keyword Research area and they go by the name of Trellian. The tool is called KeywordDiscovery.com and the technology is getting so advanced that they actually have relationships with the major search engines to provided aggregrated queries and Long Tail Keywords the search engines don't typically display in their Pay-Per-Click keyword suggestion tools.

Other Keyword Research Tools

Other SEO Software

Want to know what SEO software I use? Check out the list of tools below. Each has their own individual purpose, such as the Xenu's Link Sleuth that validates all the links on your website to insure a good user (and web crawler) experience. Qualidator Site Analyzer is a new SEO software tool that provides some wicked insight to SEO and general web development obstacles; definitely try that one out. Contact us if you believe something is missing from this list:
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Posted by gumagu at 1:34 AM
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