In the last post, we took a look at a great SEO Keyword Tracking Tool called Rank Tracker. However, full featured as it is, it has just one problem – the cost. Today’s post focuses on another tool – not quite as powerful as Rank Tracker, but one with a big advantage – it’s free.

Available as a download from SEO Book, the name of the software is Rank Checker and it’s available as a Firefox plugin (To IE users out there – shift to Firefox if you’re serious about SEO. You need the add ons) after a free registration. After installing onto Firefox, you can select in from the “Tools” menu or from the bottom right of the screen. There you can enter the URL  whose rank you wish you check, as well as the keywords to check for.

You can set the delay between queries and what’s more, you can remove personalized results from Google that can skew the rankings. I’ve found that it hangs if you have a very large number of keywords for a single site (like if you have 30 or more), but if you need to periodically check Google or Yahoo in an easy and cost free manner, this is the tool for you. The best part however, is the way it collates data from the past and presents it chronologically so you can see your rankings history over a period of time for each keyword.

Rank Checker has more features and you should visit the website of SEO Book to view the updates for this remarkable tool. Several of my clients have asked me how I’m able to generate the reports that I do, and I gratefully direct them to the source – as should you!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Today we look at one of the most powerful tools for professional SEO experts to measure their success – the Rank Tracker tool. We saw earlier how professional SEO experts need to check the rankings of a variety of clients at the same time at regular intervals and compare the results.

Rank Tracker comes in two editions. One for webmasters and one for SEO professionals. The Enterprise edition is a full featured tool set enabling HTML or PDF report generation for various keywords over time. It also helps a great deal with keyword research, allowing you to view KEI information and sort keywords accordingly. It’s abilty to suggest keywords based on seed phrases is very impressive and it allows you to choose several mechanisms for various suggestions.

The only downside to this great piece of software is the price, which is expensive. The “Enterprise edition” costs $250 and is meant for SEO professionals whereas the “Professional Edition” sells for $100. As of now however, it’s one of the only pieces of software that even comes close to providing all the features that are needed for professional SEO. It has a trial version which you can use indefinitely – but it’s inability to save your progress doesn’t make it even a simple replacement.

Next week, we look at some free software that performs a few of the same functions as Rank Tracker.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Professional SEO experts have a variety of clients they perform SEO for. As we all know, SEO is an ongoing procedure. One of the biggest challenges is measuring progress in SEO and few professionals know how to do it. It’s reasonably easy to state the goals. – it’s the implementation that is difficult. Each of your clients wants to rank on two or three search engines for a particular set of keywords.

Progress is measured in terms of whether or not that client’s website ranks higher or lower in the SERPs for those keywords over time. And these measurements must be done regularly – at least once a month. But this can quickly turn into a difficult procedure. Even if you have just five clients, each of whom wants to rank for 10 keywords (A great underestimation), you have to perform 50 searches and compare the ranks with the previous month. It’s quite a daunting task.

In the next few posts, I will be reviewing software that tracks ranks on various search engines and compares them over time in order to make the work of SEO professionals easier. Some of them are paid and some of them are basic, but free. I hope you can use them to improve your SEO expertise and reputation.

Popularity: 5% [?]

No professional SEO expert can afford to do without Google’s Webmaster tools. With Google being the dominant search engine that netizens use to find your sites, Google’s webmaster tools allow you to track how often and how much of your website the Google spiders are downloading.

Also, you can maintain a “sitemap” of your website that you submit to Google. The sitemap allows the spiders to reach even those URLs that are hidden away and are not easily accessible to spiders. In addition, you can “alert” Google in a variety of ways when you add or change content. You can remove outdated pages and prevent them from showing in Google’s index.

Google’s Webmaster tools also allows you see if there are crawling errors when Google visits your site. Meta descriptions, Titles and descriptions are all covered in it’s ambit. And finally, it lets you see which keywords were detected on your site and how your site ranks for various phrases – though I prefer Google Analytics  – more on that later.

For Google Webmaster Tools to work, you have to own the site or at least have read/write access to the files since it requires you to verify the site with either a meta tag or a specific HTML file.

Popularity: 8% [?]

The issue of linking in SEO has been hotly debated for years. In fact, it’s one of the most interesting topics for SEO because it creates a moral dilemma. To link or not to link? A literal reading of Google PageRank algorithm shows us that whenever you link out, it leaks a bit of PR from your page. Hardcore SEO gurus use this as a reason to explain why you mustn’t link to external sites.

However, this ignores the social nature of the web. In our first post on SEO software, I made the point that one must perform SEO in order to make it easier for humans to use your site and not just for search engines. By linking out, you make your site more useful to others. But how do we balance out SEO needs and usability needs?

The answer is inlinking. A logical reading of Google’s PageRankng algorithm gives us the answer. When you link to other pages in your site, you redirect more and more link juice into your web pages. Then the leak caused by linking out drops dramatically. For example, if you have just two links on your page. One to your home page and one going out, half the link juice goes out from the outgoing link. If you have 3 more inlinks, then only 1/5th of the link juice exits your site.

Most sites and blogs these days have numerous links going back into the site. Menus, archive pages, categories and tag pages. If you try and link back to pages in your site, you can happily link to external sites for the convenience of your users and suffer no significant penalty. This way, you’ll also be a good citizen of the Internet and your viewers will appreciate it.

By the way, it’s bad manners to use the rel=”nofollow” tag for links going out of your site. If you think a site is worth linking to, then do it justice by letting it have the credit for that link.

Popularity: 13% [?]

There are many ways to improve on page SEO. Of course, many proclaim that what is important is to build links to your site. But it’s also true that good on page SEO can improve your page’s visibility and your site’s ranking in the SERPs. If you have good content, don’t you want it to be found? Of course you do.

A mostly neglected part of on page SEO is the <b> or <strong> tag. Enclosing an important keyword in these tags will have a small impact on your page’s SEO. This is so because the eye of a human is naturally drawn to such text and search engines like Google try and duplicate human behavior.

However, also keep in mind that search engines are very sensitive to spammy techniques. Keep to the straight and narrow. Don’t bold more than one phrase per 250 words or so. More than that, and you risk a search engine penalizing you for trying to be overly manipulative. When in doubt, ask yourself the question – does this make my content more readable? If it does, then go ahead.

If possible, ensure that the first “bold” phrase arrives within the first 100 words. This is because the first paragraph of an article sets the tone and a bold phrase in that article is of high importance – not as important as a h2 heading of course, but certainly noteworthy.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Wordpress is a great platform for SEO, which is why I shifted all my blogs to it from Blogger. Multiple categories as well as the ability to change the URL slugs are all fantastic to make the site more accessible for users as well as search engines.

However, one aspect of Wordpress has always bugged me. If you go to a typical wordpress post page, you will find that the important H1 tag is used up by the blog name and that the most important part of the post – the title of the post – is relegated to a meager H2. There’s no easy fix for this via the GUI and your best bet is to wade into the PHP files that make up your theme and hardcode the tags yourself – a bit complex if you don’t program, but you don’t need to know PHP to do that. If you can program in any language yourself, then you should be able to pick out the syntax easily. If you’re familiar with the ASP type spagghetti code, it’ll be a breeze.

The exact file to change will depend on your wordpress theme. What you need to do is the following:

1. Find the php file that gives your blog title the H1 tag. Could be header.php or index.php
2. Use the conditional statement is_single() to check if the page being displayed is a single post page or the home page or any other archive like page with multiple posts
3. If it’s a single post page, use H1 for the post title and the H2 tag for the blog name
4. Enter your style.css and change the styles of the H2 and H1 headings so that they look OK

If this looks complex, it’s because is. There’s no easy workaround. If you know of one, feel free to post your comments.

Popularity: 18% [?]

You all know aobut directory submission services. There are literally thousands of sites out there offering to “Submit your site to hundreds of directories in a few minutes.” Experienced SEO practitioners know how to treat such claims. There are basically three problems to this.

If it was so simple…

…everyone would be doing it. And if that happens, where are you vis a vis the competition? You might argue that if everyone is doing it, then you have to do it too otherwise you would get buried (The Prisoner’s Dilemma). This brings us to the next point.

Search engines are no fools

Search engines are way past the point where they can identify directories that are used solely for the purpose of link building. Directory submisssion services are easily caught out these days. You might actually incur a penalty for being associated with these sites.

There simply aren’t so many directories!

In the early days of the web, sure there were hundreds of directories all claiming with varying degrees of truth that they were the most popular. But with the directories consolidated now, my estimate is that there are not more than 5 good general purpose directories out there.

However, there are certainly some good directories that you must submit to from where you can get traffic and link juice. Dmoz is one great place. If your page is a blog, there are some pretty good blog directories which it pays to be on. In a later article we will take a look at some of these sites. The best ones don’t let you just put in whatever you want, but have an approval process. And that is definitely a good sign.

Be wary of things that seem to easy. If it’s too good to be true, it usually is!

Popularity: 20% [?]

All SEO practitioners know the importance of building backlinks to their site. However, doing so is notoriously difficult. Especially these days when almost all user generated content contains “nofollow” links, thereby removing their value. This is a good thing as it means that you will have to work for your backlinks. Most forums follow the “nofollow” procedure as well. However, there are some forums that allow “follow” links in their signatures.

The good ones try and prevent spammers from abusing this generosity by forcing a period of several days (possible weeks) before you are allowed to use signatures in your posts. They also have a certain number of posts that need to be made over that time. This procedure ensures that spammers don’t have the time, nor the inclination to spend this much effort in creating backlinks.

However, as a webmaster, it’s important to realize that nothing comes from free – and the same is true for backlinks. Determined SEO professionals will indeed try and use these forums to build backlinks – but they will also contribute to the forums by ensuring that they make useful comments and are regular participators. When it comes to building backlinks, give and take is the name of the game. And you have to ensure that you’re really concerned about building and contributing good content if you want to improve your site listings.

Popularity: 19% [?]

If you view the general Google Algorithm for determining PageRank in their patent application, you see that the PageRank of a given page is (by and large) determined by the number of links pointing to it. What also become apparent if you dig a bit deeper, is that that amount of PageRank “juice” that gets passed along to any page through a link is inversely proportional to the total number of links on the page containing the link.

While you can’t do much about the links on someone else’s site, you can at least ensure that within your own site, you’re not “wasting” link juice. If you think you’re not, just look at on how many pages on your site you have links to sections like “Privacy Policy” and “Contact me” and maybe “About us”. Chances are, that when you look at your SEO goals, you haven’t given a top priority to these pages – and yet by linking to them, you’re lowering the value of other links to more important pages – like category pages or product pages. Oops.

So what can you do? The answer is simple – just “nofollow” all links to pages which you’re really not interested in ranking. This small amount of “sculpting” will help you just a little in improving the overall PageRank of your site for sections that matter. And a little bit of this and that is just what you need.

Popularity: 23% [?]