| |
SEO Tools
We have collected some easy-to-use tools that can give you a better idea of how the search engines are presently seeing your site(s). You can use these tools to check to see if you are indexed or ranked, how your site looks to the Search Engines, whether your keywords are standing out the way they should be or a number of other things that should be important to you and the welfare of your site.
1) Indexed Pages Tool - This tool will query all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, and AlltheWeb) and tell you how many URL's are indexed in each. This could be slightly different that the number of pages in your current site. If you or someone else had other pages using the URL in the past, there is a chance that these older pages (URL's) are still indexed.
You will notice that the totals vary greatly from search engine to search engine. This is because the results shown represent the number of links that are crawled by that search engine (which will vary based on the size of their database and whether they preserved older site pages/URLs). You may see one or more report zero and that should be construed as a problem if your site has been online for any length of time (longer than a couple of months).
2) Search Engine Spider Simulator - A lot of content and links displayed on a web page may not actually be visible to the search engines, e.g. Flash based content, content generated through JavaScript, content displayed as images, and so on. Basically anything rendered on the client side may not visible to search engines.
This tool simulates a search engine by displaying the contents of a web page in exactly the way the search engine spider would see it.
3) Use the Search Engine Keyword Position Tool to check the search engine result pages of Google, Yahoo, and MSN to see what position your site holds for a particular keyword phrase. Ranking for the proper keyword or phrase is vital otherwise customers and prospects will never be able to find you.
 |
 |
|
|
 |
| |
Search Engine Keyword Position Tool © SEO Chat™
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
4) This Meta Analyzer Tool will analyze a website's meta tags. Although the use of meta data is certainly in question, analyzing a competitors “keyword” and “description” meta values is a good way to find ideas for key terms and effective copy for your website.
Meta Types:
About Meta Tags At one point meta tags were considered a relatively important factor by search engines. AltaVista and other older search engines used them to help determine a site’s theme as well as relevance to a given term. This is no longer the case. Search Engines now rely on much more advanced techniques to do this. That said, meta tags still have some life left in them. They are still used as the snippet of a site's content in the Search Engine's result pages by Google, and possibly other search engines. And, they still have a little influence with some search engines in determining a site’s content and every little bit helps when fighting for top placement.
5) Use this Keyword Difficulty Check Tool to see how difficult it would be to rank for specific keywords or keyword phrases. This tool issues a percentage score that indicates how difficult it would be to rank on the first page for this term; higher percentages mean greater difficulty.
6) The Keyword Density Tool is useful for understanding whether your site is optimized for the keyword or phrase you intend it to be or whether you have ample density for ranking by any of the Search Engines.
Keyword density is important because the Search Engines use this information to categorize a site's theme, and to determine which terms the site is relevant to. The perfect keyword density will help achieve higher Search Engine positions Typically the keyword density should be between 3-5% of the page content for the Search Engines to realize what your page is about. It's equally important WHERE the keywords live on the page.
Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for “keyword spamming”).
This tool will analyze your chosen URL and return a table of keyword density values for one-, two-, or three-word key terms.
In an attempt to mimic the function of search engine spiders, it will filter out common stop words (since these will probably be ignored by search engines). It will avoid filtering out stop words in the middle of a term, however (for example: “designing with CSS” would go through, even though “with” is a stop word).
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
We hope you find these tools useful. If you have any suggestions about other tools you would like to see here, let us know. Also, if you see that the results are not what you want or expect, we can help. Don't let your site go unnoticed.
Contact us by email or call 352.617.9823. Our office hours are 9-5 EST Monday through Friday to learn more about getting the right mixture . |
 |
