SEO PowerSuite is a collection of four tools that aid you in those tasks. The suite consists of the following four tools:

• Rank Tracker for tracking search engine rankings
• LinkAssistant for link management and campaigns
• SEO SpyGlass for backlink and competitor research
• WebSite Auditor for onpage optimizations of a web page

All tools are available separately or bundled in the SEO PowerSuite. Lets take a closer look at each individual tool.

Rank Tracker

Tracking ranks in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo or Ask is one of the most important tasks of a webmaster as it is one of the ways to determine the success or failure of optimizations. It is also used as a way to monitor rankings to react immediately if big changes (usually drops) are noticed.

Rank Tracker is profile driven. Each profile consists of a domain name and up to five competing domain names that you want ranks tracked for.

All major and many minor search engines can be selected to be monitored. Most users will probably stick to the big three Google, Bing and Yahoo, but hundreds more are available for selection.

Rank Tracker keeps record of rankings over time, and displays them as a graph in the main interface. It does not end here though. Webmasters can not only monitor rankings but also the visits (pulled from Google, requires a Google Adwords account set up), KEI (an indicator of a keyword’s competitiveness) and Keyword suggestions (to get new keyword ideas).

The extensive options allow lots of customization. One of the most important ones is the ability to add proxy servers to the program. You may know that some search engines – like Google – display different rankings based on location (and several other factors). Proxies can also help to avoid being temporarily blocked from the search engines which can happen if you make to many requests in a set amount of time.

Search engine API keys can be added in the options as well which limits the maximum number of lookups you can do but makes sure on the other hand that you won’t be temporarily blocked.

A scheduler is available to run ranking checks automatically. Export options are available, which can be handy to process data in other applications or as a means to send reports to clients.

Seo SpyGlass

Seo SpyGlass has two main purposes. It can be used to find new pages that you could try and get backlinks from for your project, and to analyze a site’s backlink structure.

Regardless of the method, you end up with a list of backlinks that you can process further to retrieve data such as PR, Alexa traffic rank, IP address, anchor texts, or the link source (e.g. forums, directories or blogs), and the strength of each individual backlink. A competitors analysis furthermore reveals information about a site’s backlink profile. The information presented here can give you insight about link building strategies and the overall strength of the competitors site.

The program can be quite useful for a number of purposes. You can for instance sort the backlinks found by Pagerank or Alexa rank to find links with a lot of linking power (you still need to contact the site owners, register an account or do other things to get a backlink from the site pointing to yours).

You could also try and replicate your competitors link structure. Sites that link to your competitors website may also be willing to link to yours.

Website Auditor

Before you start looking at external means to improve your site’s ranking in the search engines, you may want to make sure that the site’s on-page factors are optimized as well. On-page factors like the title, headings, links or other HTML elements can have an impact on the rankings of a site in the search engines.

Website Auditor can analyze factors for a single page or multiple pages of the same domain. It first checks for available pages linked from the selected root domain before it offers to run the analysis for each page. Analysis includes checking for HTML and CSS validation errors, total links on the page, a page’s title, meta description and keywords, and a page’s PR. The program furthermore keeps tracks of broken links, monitors domain statistics (Alexa rank, DMOZ or Yahoo directory listing, Compete rank, Google Pagerank), Social Activity, overall PR distribution and link statistics (do follow, no follow).

Links are displayed in a table like structure which makes the data very accessible. Reports can be generated at anytime, which is useful if you do the analysis for a client.

Webpage reports can be generated which highlight missing page elements, errors or other factors that can influence a page’s ranking in the search engines.

Link Assistant

Keeping track of link building efforts can be a time consuming task. You can theoretically use an Excel spreadsheet for that, but that would mean updating it regularly. Plus, it is not really practicable for large link building projects.

Link Assistant helps you manage and track your link building campaigns. The tool can search for prospective link partners based on select factors. It tries to extract a contact email address from the pages to make emailing webmasters easier.

The program supports email templates that you can use or create to customize link proposal messages. A build in email client makes sure that you can handle everything from within the software.

It is usually a good idea to create a custom email address for use in the program to make sure that you catch only related emails in the application.

Verdict

All four tools ship with everything that one would need to get started. They all support proxies, can all be used to generate report for clients or your own, and come with an impressive feature set ideal for experience webmasters who want professional tools for the job.

Free limited versions of all tools are available as well. They usually limit the number of results that you can retrieve or manage.

Giveaway

We have two licenses for each tool to give away today. Please leave a comment below for a chance to win a license. You may add which tools you are most interested in.

The things that I look at first are essentials, like a page’s Pagerank or Alexarank. While they have lost much of their appeal in recent years, they still are helpful in getting a first impression of a site and a site’s progress over time. You simply know that something’s wrong if the Pagerank drops from 6 to 4, or if the Alexa rank drops considerably.

Swoosty SEO Tools is an extension for the Firefox web browser that displays both the Pagerank and the Alexarank in the Firefox status bar so that they are visible all the time.

But those are just two of the features of the extension. A right-click on the menu button in the status bar displays a menu packed with additional features and options.

The features are divided into service or search engine specific information, for instance the number of backlinks in Google, the indexed pages in Bing or the Alexa traffic details.

Links to several other services are provided, for instance to McAfee Site Advisor, GoingUp which analyzes the website or a Whois lookup.

And then you have got site specific features that are executed by the extension directly. You can take a look at a site’s robots.txt, check the keyword density of a specific page, generate a link report or highlight a specific keyword or all nofollow links on the page.

The majority of features you’d expect from a SEO analysis tool are there, even though most of them are not that comfortable to reach. An option to place some of the features as icons in the status bar or in the right-click context menu would improve this considerably.

So is something missing? More direct information in the status bar, for instance a site’s compete rank could be interesting for some SEOs, and a link to Google’s Webmaster Tools section and maybe some Analytics services would also be nice.

Swoosty SEO Tools is nevertheless a near complete SEO tool for the Firefox web browser. You can install the add-on directly from the official Firefox add-on repository over at Mozilla.

This showed me however that I need to diversify my Internet portfolio even further to limit the damage such a drop can cause. Ghacks is back in full strength after the recovery and I have all intentions to keep it that way.

What are my plans for the next year?

I want the site to grow organically, and add more “permanent” content like the Windows Update or Firefox article which are five to ten times the usual size of articles here at Ghacks.

I plan to continue working on Ghacks and publish my 3-5 articles every day. That along with continued support from writers such as Jack or Mike will keep the content fresh and you, my dear readers, happy.

But it is not only what I want, it is also about what you want. I would like to know what your expectations are for the coming year.

What would you like to see? Should we cover a topic that we have not so far? Drop a topic? Add more articles about in a specific niche? Add or remove static contents? Add new features, functions or widgets to the site? Let me know everything that comes to your mind, even if it sounds silly.

I’d like to know what you have in mind so that I can collect and think about it. There are of course a few things that I cannot change. The ads for instance or some page elements that are important for SEO. I could however create a donators account for instance which would remove ads from the site for donators.

Let me know what you think, and thanks in advance for your input.

Offpage optimization is usually a consideration during development of a site, and checked again once the site has been uploaded to the Internet. Some webmasters prefer to audit a website regularly, even though that’s usually not required for onpage SEO, unless code or design have been changed in the meantime.

SEO Doctor, is a free Firefox add-on to audit a web page’s onpage SEO optimization. The tool displays various information in Firefox’s status bar / add-on bar that give the webmaster direct assessments of a website’s onpage optimization level.

SEO Doctor uses Google SEO guidelines to compute a page’s onpage score. Each score has a score between 0 and 100, with 100 being the best possible one.

A click on the information in the status bar breaks down the score, showing optimized, semi-optimized and unoptimized page elements.

Additional information are displayed for each item that is part of the final score. The H1 tag score element for instance displays the number of H1 tags on the page, and an explanation that only one H1 tag should be displayed on each page of the website.

Each entry contains a “more info” link that links to additional information on the developer’s website. What are the elements the add-on is basing its score on?

• Page Rank Flow
• Web Analytics
• Meta Description
• Number of links
• H2 Tag
• H1 Tag
• Page Indexable
• SEO Friendly URLs
• ALT Image Tag
• Loading Time
• Title Tag

Some webmasters may prefer an audit that goes into greater detail, but that’s usually not necessary for most. Webmasters who need every edge they can get may want to consider getting a more sophisticated tool, but the majority of webmasters should be fine with SEO Doctor.

Is there anything missing that can make a big impact on a site’s visibility in the search engines? Not that we can think of.

Another interesting option of the add-on is to display link information. The add-on lists the total number of links, and divides them into internal and external links. All links are listed on the very same page, sorted by count and percentage values.

Links can be exported to CSV as well to analyze them in other programs. A right-click on the add-on’s status bar information displays a complex context menu with dozens of additional options. It offers quick access to various SEO metrics that are often used. It is for instance possible to list the number of indexed pages in Google (which is not very accurate), open the page in Yahoo Siteexplorer, open Alexa, Compete, AdPlanner, Quantcast or Website Trends traffic statistics, perform various link lookups like displaying a site’s backlinks in Yahoo Siteexplorer, running various link diagnosis tools or opening the SEMRush analysis page for the page.

Those quick links alone can be very valuable for the search engine optimizer. SEO Doctor is available as an add-on for the Firefox web browser. It is one of the most sophisticated SEO add-ons for the web browser, and therefor highly recommended. Webmasters can disable the status bar information at anytime, which is great as it is quite dominant in the status bar. (Thanks to Rarst who discovered the add-on).

The only available option is counting the results manually, which can take some time depending on the number of results per page. The Google Chrome and Firefox add-on Google Ordered Lists has primarily been designed for search engine optimizers who want to assess a website’s ranking on first glance.

The extensions are compatible with all supported result page sizes, from the standard ten results to the maximum of one hundred results per page.

search results

Ordered lists are shown as decimal numbers by default. This can be changed in the extension’s options, so that Roman numerals are displayed instead.

Google Ordered Lists can be helpful for users who track search engine rankings manually in Google, especially those who display more than ten results per page. It may also be interesting for users who want some orientation, again more so if more than 10 entries are displayed in Google.

Firefox users can download Google Ordered Lists from the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository, Google Chrome users from the Google Chrome Extension Gallery.

One of the options in Google Webmaster Tools is to set a preferred domain. Most domains can be accessed with and without the www subdomain in front of the domain name. This means that you can type in ghacks.net and www.ghacks.net to reach the same property. This does not have to be the way and one mistake that new webmasters often do is to miss selecting a preferred domain.

Domains with and without www are two different sites in the eyes of the search engines unless the site owner tells them that they are the same.

It can happen that search engines list results for domains with www, without www or both. The main disadvantage of this is that the link juice that flows to a domain is divided among the two different domains weakening the domain.

If you add one of your sites to Google Webmaster Tools and want to set a preferred domain you will likely run into the error message:

Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://www.example.com/. Please verify http://www.example.com/.

The above example is shown to a webmaster who registered the site without www in Google Webmaster Tools. This will be shown to the webmaster even if the domain was verified before.

Why is it appearing? Because Google thinks www and non-www are two different domains. To get rid of the error the webmaster needs to add the www.example.com domain to the webmaster tools as well and verify it before making the default selection in the Site configuration > Settings menu.

The added domain can be deleted afterwards in the Webmaster Tools, it is only required to be there and verified to set the preferred domain.

Search engine optimization has on the other hand no rulebook where everyone could get the information needed to optimize the website for the search engines.

There are literary millions of opinions on how to do SEO right. Most have some optimization techniques in common like placing a relevant keyword at the beginning of the page’s title or acquiring niche relevant links from other websites.

But there are also many myths and half-true information that can get webmasters into trouble.

Google has released a SEO report card in pdf format which is concentrating on Google Product Pages but can be used for other websites as well. The main goals of the Google SEO Report Card are:

• help users find our pages more easily in search engines
• fix bugs that annoy visitors and hurt our pages’ performance in search engines
• serve as a good model for outside webmasters and companies

The report is divided into three parts:

• Subject I: Search result presentation
• Subject II: URLs and redirects
• Subject III: On-page optimizations

The subjects and topics are listed in short form at the top and explained in detail afterwards. Experienced search engine optimizers will probably not find anything new in the listing but it can be very helpful for webmasters who just begin as a webmaster and those who want a straight answer from an authoritative source.

The Google SEO Report Card is provided as a download link at Google’s Webmaster Blog.

New websites are not found by default and SEO, done knowingly or not, helps increase a website’s visibility so that it attracts visitors and search engines. Everything that improves the visibility is SEO including submitting the website to search engines or directories, writing articles on the website, twittering about the new website, doing link exchanges or building links.

SEO Tools help the webmaster in the process. They provide many features that could also be handled manually but time constraints usually make those tools the best choice. Search Engine Optimization extensions for Firefox handle many tasks for the webmaster. This ranges from displaying information about a website like its Pagerank, Alexarank or backlinks over the IP address, domain age, country the web server is hosted in, directory listings to website validations and keywords.

The following ten tools are SEO extensions for the Firefox 3.x web browser.

General Purpose SEO Extensions:

SEO Quake

SEO Quake offers two features. First a SEO toolbar that displays information about every website visited and integration in major search engines like Google or Bing to display factors for the websites in the search results.

The extension displays the Google Pagerank, indexation in Google, Bing and Yahoo, Alexarank, domain age and links that point to other pages on the same domain and external domains. Lots of information that can be very useful for Search Engine Optimization.

Webmasters should make sure to only turn on the extension when they need it as it can lead to a temporary Google Ban because of all the connections that it establishes in a short amount of time.

Sen Seo

Sen Seo is an add-on that integrates itself into the Firebug web development add-on. It can analyze the onpage factors of a website to provide the webmaster with information about optimizations that can be done on the page to improve the website.

It analyzes for instance the title, meta tags, page content or domain and provides suggestions on how to improve those factors.

SEO Status

A lightweight add-on that places two elements in a Firefox toolbar. These elements display a website’s Pagerank and Alexarank. The add-on offers additional information in its menu including website whois information or backlink checks.

SEO Open

Provides a context menu with many options including checking backlinks in various search engines, cached pages, Pagerank, Alexarank, keyword density and more. The options look very similar to the ones provided by SEO Status.

Web Page SEO Analysis Tool

This extension can be used to perform a basic analysis of a page. Information that are displayed include general status, meta tags listing, meta tags analysis, the pages displayed within search engine results, keywords found in the anchor tags, keywords found in the image “alt” attribute text, keywords found on the page, URLs found in the page, headers returned from the server.

SEO Toolbars:

Foxy SEO Toolbar

A toolbar that provides links to many information about a website. From keyword research to network information, backlinks and Pagerank. Definitely one of the most extensive SEO extensions for Firefox.

Webrank Toolbar

A toolbar that displays the following information: Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Quantcast Rank, Pages indexed in Google, Pages indexed in Bing, Pages indexed in Yahoo.

SEO Toolbar

The SEO Toolbar shows PageRank, Alexa Rank, Popularity Index Rank for any website you visit on the one toolbar. Other SEO features include Search Engine view, server header view, Wayback Machine button and links to many SEO forums and websites.

Specialized Tools:

Google Semantics

This Firefox extension helps to get synonyms for keywords for Latent Semantic Indexing. Search engines use synonyms in their relevancy calculations.

Google Camo

A Firefox extension that simply manages and monitors your Google personalized search results. This plug-in is designed to allow SEOs to easily and automatically opt out of Google personalized search when signed out of their Google account.

SEM Tools

A complex extension for search engine marketing with the following core features:

• Search box to quickly check Google and Yahoo in other countries/languages.
• Search box is fully customizable and can find the current search term on most search engines.
• Search box can open multiple pages at once either in separate tabs or in one tab in frames.
• Highlights text ads by color based on companies in Google and Yahoo.
• Get Links will grab all URLs and link text from any page and then you can filter them and select just the ones you need.
• Check a list of URLs to make sure they are all working and find out what page they actually redirect to.
• Grab a list of campaign names and campaign IDs from the Google Adwords campaign page.
• Keyword creation tools like join, replace and group.
• URL decoder uncloaks the URL of ads on sites like Yahoo and Baidu.

There is also another tool which currently displays an error message when trying to access the page at the Mozilla website. It is called Search Status. The extension displays the Pagerank, Alexarank, Compete and mozRank in a Firefox toolbar. It can be installed by visiting the search results page for SEO at Mozilla and clicking on the Install Addon button next to the add-on (after scrolling down to locate it).

Search engine algorithms have become sophisticated over the years and some changes can have great impact on a website’s visibility in the search engines. Most SEO tools assist the webmaster in this regard by analyzing the contents of the website and relevant ranking factors to propose improvements to influence a website’s rankings in the search engines.

Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Toolkit is part of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer which can be downloaded from the Microsoft homepage. The core components of the Web Platform installer will be installed with the SEO Toolkit.

The Search Engine Optimization Toolkit can be found in the What’s New section of the installer.

A new analysis can be started once the installation has been finished. The webmaster needs to supply a project name and url of the website. The advanced settings limit the number of urls and download size per url as well as other settings like ignoring nofollow and noindex attributes, authentication or external link definitions.

The number of urls and the performance of the local Internet connection and that of the web server influence the time it takes to retrieve the data and generate the report. The report concentrates on onpage factors of the website. It is divided into the five sections Summary, Violations, Content, Performance and Links.

Summary:

Displays a basic summary that includes the url, start and end date, downloaded items, links and violations. This summary seems to be buggy as it reported back 0 links and violations which did not correspond with the data found in the violations and links section of the report.

Violations:

Violations are divided into warnings, information and errors. The violation summary lists all violation categories, their level and count. Typical violations are page titles that are to long, broken hyperlinks or mission descriptions. Some of the violations that are listed on the page are not seen as such by members of the SEO community. It is therefor recommended to research the entries before starting to make changes to the website. Violations can be listed in the summary view or sorted by most violations, by category or violation level.

A double-click on an entry will load the urls where those violations have been found.

This opens a window with powerful information about urls with violations. The tabbed interface provides detailed information about the page (content length, title, meta tags or url), the violation type and recommended actions, page header information, content (source or website), word analysis (total words, unique words, two words, three words, text), incoming (from the same domain) and outgoing links and additional violations found on that specific page.

Another interesting option is to display the routs to the specific pages. This will list the top 5 routes that visitors can take to reach that specific page on the website.

Content:

The content category lists various content related information about the analyzed website including duplicate files, titles, descriptions, keywords as well as large content, content that has not been found or pages with broken links.

Performance:

Lists the performance of the pages that have been crawled by the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. This category lists slow pages which can be sorted by directory, content type and pages with many resources.

Links:

Provides a detailed analysis of the links found on the pages that have been analyzed. It provides an overview of the pages with the most links, the pages that are linked the most, redirects, links that are blocked by robots.txt, links by protocol and link depth.

Export options

The SEO toolkit will also allow you to export your results as CSV files which may be loaded and viewed in Excel or other spreadsheet software. For an example of this, take a look at the ‘Violation Categories’ tab. You’ll see each of your violation categories listed. Here you can see my site showing 2146 various violations!

You can generate a CSV file with details of the Violation using the ‘Report’ button at the top of the screen. This selection will offer a comprehensive report if you choose “Export all violations”. Once data is in a CSV file, you can manipulate and resave as an Excel file.

If you prefer to customize the fields that are reported, you can do this using the Query Engine use the which is available by pressing the ‘Query’ button at the top of the report, and selecting ‘New Violations Query’.

(via Web Platform Blog)

Verdict:

Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Toolkit offers a detailed analysis of a website’s onpage SEO factors. Errors that are reported by the tool should be fixed by the webmaster as soon as possible. Violations or warnings on the other hand need to be analyzed more carefully to avoid over-optimizing a website.

SEO tools like WebCEO or SEO Elite are normally used to track rankings of keywords. It is also possible to check them manually which is fine for a few selected keywords but impossible for webmasters who track hundreds or even thousands of keywords.

I recently came upon a post on a blog that explained how to track Google rankings in Google Analytics. It did not work at first and I had to fix an error before the ranking tracking was actually working. Below is now the explanation on how to track a website’s ranking in Google.

You start by adding a new profile to an existing website. Start by clicking on the Add New Profile link on the right side of the overview of all websites that have been added to Google Analytics.

Now select to add a profile for an existing domain, select the domain from the drop down list and give it a unique name, e.g. website rankings. A click on continue will create the new website profile which will initially track the same data that the original profile is tracking.

You will be taken back to the profile overview page. Click on the edit link next to the newly created profile. Click on the Add Filter link on the right lower side of the profile detail page.

We need to create three new filters:

Filter name: Ranking 1
Filter type: Custom filter – Include
Filter field: Campaign Medium
Filter pattern: organic

Filter name: Ranking 2
Filter type: Custom filter – Include
Filter field: Campaign Source
Filter pattern: google

Filter name: Ranking 3
Filter type: Custom filter – Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Campaign term, (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Referral, (\?|&)cd=([^&]*)
Output To -> User Defined: $A1 (position: $B2)

It then takes a few hours before the first rankings can be checked as the new profile will start tracking traffic beginning with the time it was created.

The rankings are then accessible by clicking on Visitors > User Defined when checking the stats of a website. They look like this

And there you have it. A dead easy way to track keyword rankings in Google.

It is not often that a search engine invites users to test it’s search infrastructure. Google invited webmasters yesterday to test out their next-generation search engine infrastructure. Interested users can point their web browsers to http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ to perform a live test.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Webmasters usually have the advantage of being able to check how their websites rank for certain keywords which makes it easier for them to spot differences. Most users who commented in the original post at the Google webmasters website mentioned that search results in the new search engine would be more relevant. It was also noted that less spam websites would occupy a position on the first three search results pages.

A quick test for some of the keywords that Ghacks ranks for did not reveal any major changes. Please post your opinion about Google’s next-generation search infrastructure in the comments.

There are obviously two factors that play a role here. The amount of traffic that can come from Twitter depends largely on the Twitter users who post links pointing to a website on Twitter. The more users and the higher their follower count the better. It certainly depends on the content as well but the content is usually of interest if it is posted by a user.

Some webmasters like to monitor the dynamic process more thoroughly. The default Twitter search engine is no real help when it comes to discovering links pointing to a specific url or website on Twitter. BackTweets is a third party search engine that offers more reliable results. A search for ghacks.net would reveal nine results at the Twitter search engine and more than 4000 results at the BackTweets engine.

Results display the Twitter user who made the post, the post contents and the time it was posted. A click on the user icon or name will open the Twitter user page. A good way of finding new users to follow (and to thank them for posting links). An advanced search form is available as well which can be used to search in a specific date range or by Twitter user.

Backtweets is an interesting service for webmasters who want to analyse and increase the traffic that Twitter is sending to their websites.

FireFox – This isn’t really a SEO tool per se, but more of a requirement. Most SEO tools on the Internet require FireFox and the reason is simple: FireFox allows plugins. FireFox is an amazing browser which has gained astounding ground since its release leaving Internet Explorer to the not-so-tech-savvy and those who are currently using Internet Explorer to download FireFox!

NoDoFollow – This is very handy tool to find whether links on a site are no-follow or do-follow. When doing SEO for Google, Internet marketers prefer their site’s back links to be do-follow. Do-follow back links raise a website up in Google SERPs more so than no-follow links. It’s important to know whether a site gives do-follow links or no-follow links when doing link building. The NoDoFollow Firefox plugin (yes, you’re going to need FireFox for this one) allows link builders to differentiate between do-follow and no-follow links.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Anyone looking to earn money from creating and doing search engine optimization on niche sites will have to do keyword research. Those versed in SEO already know this, but there are a lot of SEO newbies out there who have neve rheard of keyword research. This is extremely important. Doing keyword research often means the difference of making cents or dollars online. It’s a good idea to know which keywords make money and which don’t before spending time and money doing SEO for a site. Doing keyword research prevents that time and money from being wasted — most of the time. Surprisingly, there are a lot of people who don’t even do keyword research!

SEO for Firefox Extension – This is a major time saver. Those who’ve ever had a full piggy bank as a child and counted out all the change before taking it to the bank where the teller just dumped the change into a machine that counts the change in a matter of seconds can appreciate the time saved with this addon. Those on dial-up will also appreciate this. When doing keyword research it’s important to know the Google Page Rank of a site and how many back links from Yahoo of probably hundreds of sites depending on how many keywords researched. Instead of inputting each site into some online Page Rank checking and manually going to Yahoo to find how back links a site has, this tool allows Googlers to see ALL this information and more right in Google search when they’re researching each individual keyword.

Website Marketing SEO Score Tool – This is actually pretty cool. This tool gives web site owners to see what’s wrong with their website. This tool gives each site a score and tells what could be done differently. Of course, anyone can manually check all this stuff themselves, but this is great for a nice pick me up and it can be used as a learning tool.

All in One SEO Pack – Have a niche site? If so, you probably use WordPress. I’m not making fun of Blogger users, but those using WordPress do have a significant SEO advantage over those who use Blogger. If you’re a niche site person like me, you’ve probably got WordPress. This tool configures WordPress blogs to be very SEO friendly and is highly popular among literally the whole niche marketing crowd. It’s important not to use something because it’s popular, but because it works. However, this is popular for a reason.

The program will then analyze the text and display various statistics about it in the lower half of the interface. Statistics are divided into the three tabs General, Word Statistics and Unique Words. General lists the word and unique word count, lines and full size of the text.

The Word Statistics tab displays all words of the text including the time they have been used and their percentage. Next to that are word phrases and their occurrence in the text. The Unique Words tab lists all unique words of the text document.

The information provided by the text analysis might be interesting for webmasters who optimize their text for search engines.

Text Analyzer is compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5.

Advanced tips are not that easy to come by and most websites running a WordPress blog do not have them implemented. This article will list some options that center around the nofollow tag. Nofollow basically tells search engines like Google to not count the link vote that is usually being passed when linking on the Internet. Why is that beneficial? A website has a certain linking power. Each link that is pointing to internal and external resources gets a piece of that linking power. Not all pages should be treated equally however which is what this article is about. It makes for example no sense to pass linking power to internal pages that you do not want to link for, think of privacy policies, contact pages, login, log off or social bookmarking links.

WordPress themes come with a surprising amount of links, the majority of which is not set to nofollow. Here are a few areas where you should consider placing the nofollow link tag in a WordPress blog:

• The more (read more) tag. The page is already linked from the title of the post properly.
• WordPress meta data
• Pages like Privacy Policies, Contact Us
• Social Bookmarking links

To add the nofollow link one would simply add the rel="nofollow"
tag to the link structure which is not a problem if the link is displayed in the source code of the theme, for example:

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example Link</a>

There are however links (like the previously mentioned more tag) that cannot be manipulated in the theme source as the link is created by a php function.

Here is how you make the more tag in WordPress nofollow:

• Open the file post-template.php in the wp-includes folder.
• Locate the following line beginning with:

  $output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink()..

• Replace it with:

  $output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink() . "#more-$id\" class=\"more-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">$more_link_text</a>";

• You basically add the rel=\"nofollow\" tag to the line

This ensures that all more tags will be nofollow from then on.

Apart from the reason that content is weighed most heavily by Google, all other so called “methods” are temporary. In the beginning there was the “fill your site with invisible keywords” method. The point of this was to create a huge chunk of text containing keywords, and setting its visibility to none. This means its still in the code, so Google sees it, but users don’t. Try that now and you’ll get a ban in seconds. Then came the meta tags period where people used to give huge-long descriptions and lengthy meta keyword lists. While not such a ‘sin’, it won’t give you what you’re looking for.

My point is that everyone wants to cheat search engines and while it is of course a possibility, its only a matter of time before they get ahead of you. If you’re lucky you fall back a few hundred places, if not, you’re banned. As with every other business you have to work at it. I mean gHacks has 4,851 posts right now, over almost four years, that’s about 3.5 posts every day. Not all are written by Martin nowadays, but I bet he started the blog alone, and up until not too long ago he had a day job.

So if you want to go instantly to number one, you really need a great idea, like Twitter, Remember The Milk and so on. Otherwise you will have to keep at it. if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’ll find so many little successes on the way. When I started my own blog, Hack Your Day after about a 5 days if you typed “Hack Your Day” into Google I was at number 8-9, Hack a Day, Lifehack and so on were in front of me. After a month or so I was at number 1. This is of course of no use at all, but still a small victory, showing I’m doing something right.

If you’re doing a project on the web, especially a blog, keep in mind that you won’t be successful in a matter of days, it will most like take years if it ever happens at all. Hey, if it was easy, where would the challenge be?

Someone who wants to earn money from blogging needs traffic more than anything else. It is not hard to put Google Adsense on a blog and earn money with it. The ad might not be optimized but it will still earn money if the blog receives traffic. Without traffic, there will be no money no matter how optimized or clever the ad units are.

Blogging for a period of three years teaches a lot if you are eager to learn. Bloggers learn about search engine optimization which is a profession in itself, about monetization, about the blogging plattform, how to interact with visitors / customers / fellow bloggers and more.

It’s a steep learning curve but if you master it you will be successful. Here are a few blogging tips that helped me a lot:

• Keep Going: That’s the most important part of it all. Many bloggers give up after blogging for a few weeks because they cannot see that traffic comes in. No visitors equals low motivation and that’s usually the point when they decide to quit.

  Some search engines apply an automatic filter to new websites (some call it sandbox) that prevents them from ranking for popular keywords to avoid spam. It is natural that new sites will not rank well for terms like business or credit cards while they will have lesser problem ranking for long tail keywords.

• Keywords: Speaking of which. Keywords are the essence of a blog. Search engines analyse blog posts and pick out keywords that they think the blog post is about. They then give the keyword a score and compare it to other sites that rank for that keyword and place the new website on a specific rank in the search engine for that keyword. Other factors may weight in like the new blog filter but that’s basically how it works.

  If bloggers are serious about traffic generation they need to understand the keyword concept and how they do keyword research. Keyword research meaning to find profitable low competition keywords that the blog can most likely rank well for.

• Long Tail Keywords: Long Tail refers to keywords that are very specific and usually consist of a few words. Blog is not a long term keyword while How To Create A Blog is. Long Tail keywords receive less traffic than their more generic counterparts but that traffic is usually targeted.
• Build a Network: If you blog on your own you will miss opportunities. It is impossible keeping up with all the news and trends related to blogging. A network of bloggers that target the same niche can help each other in several ways. If they come upon an interesting topic or option they will inform their fellow bloggers about it. They can also promote the blogs of other network members in their own blogs.
• Don’t read the Chows: Don’t read the blogs of those so called probloggers. The only thing they usually care about is their own bankroll. The products that they promote will earn them money because other bloggers will join or buy them because of their recommendations but there will be no or small gain for the little guy who bought the product. Their sites are about an image that they have to keep up and about upselling products to newbies. Stay away from them. Look at my link list for recommendations.

Here is a short link list:

• Make Money For Beginners
• Internet Marketing School
• Seo Zombie
• Google Adwords Keywords Tool (Keyword Research)
• Wordtracker Free Keywords (Keyword Research)
• SEO Quake (Firefox Extension)

If you read the three blogs posted above you will learn a lot in short time. Those are honest bloggers who do not try to sell you yet another “make money in no time” product that only works for them because they can sell it to you.

Seo Zombie is a site that I discovered a while ago and the guy does a good job as well, his Keyword Sniping Case Study sounds interesting and might be a great way to learn if he continues posting updates.

The keyword research tools are essential to discover keywords that can be target that pay well and have enough traffic to make them worthwhile.

Seo Quake finally is a Firefox extension that displays all kinds of “SEO” information like Pagerank, links and domain age on the screen.

If you have any questions about blogging let me know and I try to answer them.

Professional webmasters use search engine optimization software to check the search engine position of their keywords. Those software applications provide a history, comparison and access to hundreds of other information that can all be useful in determining why a website is ranking the way it is.

Low budget webmasters have to either rely on manual searches which is so time consuming that one could spend a whole day checking a few dozen keywords in the major search engines.

That’s where SERPs Finder comes into play. The basic SEO tool can check the search engine position of a given keyword in the major three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Windows Live).

It checks the first hundred results only for Google who like to temporarily ban an IP from their search engine if excessive use has been detected. The other two search engines are checked for the first 1000 results.

It is only possible to check the results in one search engine at a time. The user will be notified if the website is found in the results and the search engine position checker will load that search result’s page in the default browser.

SERP’s Finder is no tool for webmasters who want to check hundreds of keywords but it is great for small websites with only a few keywords.

Keeping track of rankings can however be a tedious task, even if you have one website and only a few keywords that you want to observe. With five keywords and three search engines it would mean that you would have to perform 15 searches and click through several pages until you find your website in the results. Now assume you do not have one website and five keywords but ten websites and 50 or even 100 keywords.

You would be sitting in front of your computer all day searching for keywords and writing down the rankings of your websites that you find. That’s where SEO software is extremely helpful. You add a url, the keywords, choose the search engines and let it do the rest. It takes only minutes to compile the results which gives you time for other tasks.

There are a handful of SEO programs available, most sell for $100+ Dollars which is an investment that most site owners do not want to make, especially when they are in the beginning stages.

Web Ceo is one of those softwares that sells for $339 normally. The company however is clever enough to offer a free version of their product which does not have all the functions that professional webmasters would need but enough to keep track of several web projects.

It offers four basic functions, these are: Find your niche, promote your site, analyze your site and maintain your site.

Find your Niche:

Find your Niche helps you find the relevant keywords that you should target in the search engines. This is done by a number of ways including analysis of the website, of competitors or of search engine results. It helps you optimize your pages for certain keywords and gives advice on changes that could affect search engine rankings positively.

Promote your Site:

Offpage SEO is probably the most important aspect of it all. You can build a highly optimized website that does not rank well because it has virtually no incoming links. This function lets you find possible link partners, manage pay per click campaigns and submit urls.

Analyze your site:

Check the websites ranking in the search engines, get traffic reports and analyze the link popularity. This is a great way to observer search engine rankings for your website and that of your competitors.

Everything can be scheduled so that rankings are updated regularly. As I said earlier Web Ceo is available in a free version which should be sufficient for most webmasters. There is however a promotion going on currently where you can buy the smallbiz version for $149 instead of $339 and the professional version for $249 instead of $479. (smallbiz for all webmasters, professional more aimed toward SEO professionals)

My suggestion would be to test the free version. This version should be sufficient for most webmasters. If you run into limitations and like the software you can still make a purchase. I for one am perfectly happy with the free version.

We have two different approaches though. The first is to get a so called double ranking. If two pages of a website are on the same results page the lower ranking one gets moved just below the higher ranking one. If you have the number 1 spot the lower ranking one will get the number 2 spot even if it would only qualify for number 9 or 10.

That’s two spots of ten already. What happens if you submit a site to a social news or bookmarking website ? Right, it gets a new entry in the search engines that points to the original url that the marketer wants to promote. Many social sites like Digg have such a high standing at Google that their results are often seen in the top 10 or 20 if you search for a keyword.

There is another way that is currently possible. Google treats subdomains as if they were different domains. Marketers create keyword rich subdomains that are pushed in the search engines as well. So, even if you expect to see 10 different results the reality could be different.