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SEO tool for dummies

If a client has made better search engine ranking a key requirement of a redesign, or if you’ve decided your own site isn’t getting the amount of traffic you think it deserves, there really is no alternative—you need to think about SEO. Some of the tools can be a bit overwhelming, and if you’re just getting started you might not be sure what to make of all the data something like Google Analytics is giving you. It’s hard to be a skilled SEO surgeon from the outset, and sometimes what you really need is just some basic tools to get you started.

PageRank Checker

Google ranks a web page’s importance from 0 (not important) to 10 (very important). The higher the PageRank, the more likely a page will show up in a search. Enter a URL at PageRank Checker to get the current details of a single web site, web page or a domain name.

Technorati

Technorati indexes over 112 million blogs and tracks which sites are being linked to most often. Use the site to see which blogs are linking to your site, and how your site compares to the rest of the blogosphere.

Validate Your Code

Search engines can’t “see” the beautiful design of your website and all the great photos and graphics that you’re using. When a search engine spider visits your page it has many of the same requirements as someone using a screen reader. This makes an accessible website a more search engine friendly website (the excellent article High Accessibility is Good Search Engine Optimization explains this is more detail). A good first step in making your site more accessible is ensuring it doesn’t contain any coding errors. Use the w3c’s online validation tool to test for errors.

Checking and improving the HTML for your webpage can help improve a sites SEO. Look through your HTML and watch for the following:

• fix any errors reported by the validation tool
• make sure you are using Header tags (eg. h1, h2, h3 etc) for headings, and not just paragraphs with styling applied to them
• make sure those headings are descriptive about the content of your page
• every image element on your page should have a descriptive ALT attribute – don’t forget that a search engine can’t see the image and relies on this text to make sense of the content of your page
• get rid of any empty or unnecessary html tags. The higher the ratio of good content on your page to overall page size, the better the page will perform
• ensure your page has a meaningful title attribute within the head of the document – this will become the text of the link to the page in any search engine results, so it’s very important.
  eg <title>Design Meme</title>
• make sure you also have a good concise description of the content of the page (or site) in your meta data. This will become the text shown alongside the link to your site in search engine results pages.
  eg <meta name="description" content="Design Meme - A Resource for Web Designers and Developers created by Stuart Robertson with Tools, Tutorials, and Resources to Help You Build a Web Site." />

If you find looking at raw HTML a bit overwhelming you can also try using these 2 Firefox extensions to help: X-Ray for revealing the tags within the body of the page, and Professor X for displaying the content of tags within the head of a document.

There is a lot more you can do to improve the SEO of a website, but I’ve seen quite a few sites that would benefit greatly from this small amount of SEO First Aid. If you’ve done all these basic steps and you’d like to do a bit more work on improving how your site performs in search engines, then it’s time to move on to some of the more advanced tutorials and tools.

Hopefully some of the SEO experts who stop by the site will be able to offer some suggestions for which articles and tools to check out next!

thanks to http://www.designmeme.com/

Posted in: seo

Tags: seo, seo tool

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 7:44 pm and is filed under seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.