For anyone serious about search engine optimisation (SEO), having the right tools is a must. SEO involves a lot of constant analysis, and so having a selection of SEO tools on the ready can save a lot of time. It is possible to develop your own SEO tools, however unless your building something very specific, the tool you need probably already exists.
We recommend using Mozilla Firefox as your primary web browser, as this allows you to install and use a number of ‘add-ons’. There is a huge of SEO tools available from the Firefox website, which are completely free! These can be great for day to day checking and analysis, and are a great feature!
Our top 4 favourite SEO add-ons are:
Web developer:
This adds a number of menus to your Firefox toolbar that have all kinds of useful web developer tools for analysing a site.
Greasemonkey:
This allows you to create simple scripts for modifying how you view the web.
Rank Checker:
A tool created by SEO Book, that allows you to quickly check the position of your keywords against your chosen domain.
Seoquake:
This allows you to investigate many important SEO parameters and information about websites shown in Search Engine Results Pages, extremely useful for quickly finding information about competitor sites.
Here at Elevator SEO, we have decided to start 2009 with a bang and have invested some time in a new style for our website. Additionally we have included some new categories in the blog, including an SEO glossary and an SEO tips and advice section. These blogs are available as a free online resource for anyone who visits the site, but also it provides a free online SEO reference for our clients.
There a lot of changes happening in the SEO world in 2009, and already some websites have started noticing some differences. It seems that Google is going to cracking down on inbound links, which is currently a popular belief following a “no comment” from SEO expert Matt Cutts. It also seems that there are going to be some considerable improvements in SEO for interactive media, such as Flash, as Google seems to be giving a lot more importance to video.
Other predicted changes include changes to the Page Rank algorithm and the way sites are ranked in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Ultimately these changes are being made so that Search Engines can provide us with the most relevant information for our search (and hopefully improve their service), but this may have some dramatic affects in competitive industries.
The one thing that we can always rely on, however, is content. If you have good quality, unique and regularly updated content then you should always do well. Remember our guidelines for SEO content writing when writing any new content for your site.
DMOZ (dmoz.org) is one of the most famous human edited directories, also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP). It is also still free to be listed in the directory, however the waiting times for inclusion are known to be very long. The DMOZ index is used directly by Google, and they are known to provide lots of other smaller, regional directories with their index.
Human edited sites are always deemed more trustworthy than a directory which accepts automatic submissions, and as such your site needs to meet the requirements or it will not be included. DMOZ has a very high Page Rank (it has a PR of 9!) and their internal pages have an average Page Rank between 4 and 6!
Getting listed on DMOZ can make a huge difference to your site, and is considered a must have link by many. If you have waited a long time and you still haven’t been listed, you can even become the editor of a particular section. There is work involved with this process, but you may be able to get your site included a whole lot faster!
Canonicalization is an internal content duplication issue on a website, and occurs when the same information can be accessed (and indexed by search engines) from different URLs. This occurs when URLs have not be standardised correctly, and the most common form is being able to access sites from both www and non-www headers.
For example, the same content can be accessed using 4 variations of the same homepage:
http://www.domain.com
http://www.domain.com/index.htm
http://domain.com
http://domain.com/index.htm
http://www.domain.com/index.htm?selection=26
Search engines may cache all the versions of the URLs resulting in site-wide duplication, which can lead to content duplication penalties. Surprisingly, canonicalization is a very common problem.
Canonicalization can be prevented by setting your preferred domain in Google webmaster tools, and using 301 re-directs to permanently direct the browser to the preferred URL.
A blog is basically an online journal, usually available within the public domain for other people to view. Blogs are also used in the form of news sections to websites. There are lots of blog platforms available on the web, with the most popular being wordpress, blogger and livejournal.
The activity of updating a blog is called “blogging”, and someone that owns or uses a blog is called a “blogger”.
Blogs are great for creating discussion, and are reasonably easy to setup on your website. Many websites use blogs as news pages in order to get more traffic to websites, as they can be search engine optimised and Google favours news and blog sites as they tend to be regularly updated, with unique content.
