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SEO Trade Secrets - 8 Great Tools for Search Engine Optimization
by Glenn Murray ©Copyright 2004

About 80% of website traffic comes through search engines. And 
research shows, if you're not on the first 2 pages, most people 
won't find you.  

This article isn't about how to achieve a high ranking. That 
topic has been done to death over the past few months. We all 
know the basics now... Submit your site to the major search 
engines, scatter a generous helping of the right keyword phrases 
throughout your site in real sentences, then get a lot of other 
relevant sites to link to your site. That's it. 

This article is about what tools to use to make your job easier. 

1) Choosing Keyword Phrases (costs approx USD$7.50 per day)
To decide what keyword phrases to use, subscribe to 
www.wordtracker.com for a day and do some analysis. Simply 
enter a keyword and WordTracker tells you how often people 
have searched for that keyword in the last month or two, how 
many competitor sites are using that keyword, and how many 
searches it expects in the next 24hrs. 

2) Measuring Keyword Density (free)
To measure the density of the keyword phrases on your page, 
go to http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php and type in the domain 
and keyword phrase you want to analyse. It'll give you a 
percentage for all the important parts of your page, including 
copy, title, meta keywords, meta description, etc. The higher 
the density the better. 

3) Check How Search-Engine-Friendly Your Site Is (free) 
Search engines send out spiders (or robots) to investigate your 
site. These tools allow you to see your site from the spider's 
point of view. 
- http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.search-engine-viewer.htm
Enter your URL and it gives you a summary of the things you 
could improve. 
- http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go? - Poodle 
tells you how many links the spider will see and investigate. 

4) Check How Many of Your Pages are Indexed (free)
Go to just about any search engine and type 
site:www.yourdomain.com. The search engine will then tell 
you how many of your pages it has indexed. 

5) Monitor Your Position in Google (free)
No need to waste time clicking through hundreds of Google 
search results looking for your site. This tool allows you 
to enter a keyword and a domain name, and it searches Google 
to see where your domain is positioned. Go to 
http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor-query.htm to 
download the setup file. Then just install. 

6) See How Important Sites Are (free)
The Google Toolbar is an indispensable tool. One of the things 
it can tell you is the "importance" of every site you visit 
(in Google's eyes at least). You've probably heard a bit about 
PageRank or PR. PR is Google's measure of the importance of a 
site. Basically, the higher your PR, the higher your ranking. 
This tool gives you a snapshot of the PR of every site you visit. 
Go to http://toolbar.google.com. 
TIP: It's good to get links from other sites with high PR
- especially if they contain the same keywords as your site.
WARNING: Apparently the Google Toolbar monitors your internet 
usage. As yet, it's unclear what it uses this information for. 

7) Monitor What Sites are Linking to Yours (free)
Google News Alerts (http://www.google.com/newsalerts?hl=en) and 
Google Web Alerts (http://www.google.com/webalerts) will 
tell you who's linking to your site. Simply set up an alert 
to be notified when Google finds www.yourdomain.com. 

8) Getting Help (free) 
If you're new to SEO, the first thing you should do is check 
out Google's guide to SEO at 
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you already 
know the basics, there are a number of forums you can subscribe 
to to post questions. These forums are free, and they're 
frequented by countless SEO experts. And when I say "experts", 
I mean EXPERTS! Some of these people do SEO all day, every day. 
And like many technical experts, they're only too happy to help 
– for free. The best forum seems to be 
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3, but 
http://searchengineforums.com/Forum28 is ok too. If all else 
fails, you can try sending Google an email. Go to 
http://www.google.com.au/contact/index.html, but don't hold 
out much hope of help here. They'll eventually answer, but 
there's no guarantee on the quality of their response... 

This is just a snapshot of the tools available out there. 
Doubtless there are better tools available, but these will 
certainly get you started. 

Enjoy!

================================================================
Glenn Murray heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be 
contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. 
Visit www.divinewrite.com for further details.   
================================================================

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