Simple and free search engine optimisation tools
5 February 2009
All over the Internet and in newsletters I'm always seeing annoying adverts saying submit your website to 500 websites for only $20 and silly things like that.
But did you know that having lots of links to your website isn't always a good thing?
That's right. If you have a link from the BBC's website or from Facebook, YouTube and other big well known sites - then this is really good. But having links from small insignificant websites may be seen as bad.
Small websites that don't receive many visitors and never update and just sit there really, or any spam websites (covered in adverts and not actually doing anything) having links to you makes Google think that the 2 websites offer the same kins of content - and so their website receives some of your PageRank and at the same time your website's score goes down.
I want to share with you today some excellent and free SEO tools, not to submit your website all over the Internet, and probably get penalised, but tools to find trends in activity and PageRank scores.
The only PageRank checked I've found so far is
www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
I know Google Toolbar also offers a PageRank service - but I personally don't use Google's Toolbar (one of the very few products I don't use)!
Next I will suggest Google Analytics. This requires some code being placed on your website and so you may just need a web developer to copy and paste the code in.
Once installed Google Analytics shows how many got to your site, search terms used, pages visited, how long for and where people leave your site from.
Google Webmaster Tools is my next highly recomended tracking website, as this shows you any broken links within your website, any internal and external links, which pages are being crawled by Google and allows you to upload sitemaps to try and urge Google to crawl more pages.
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
And lastly, and probably my favourite, is a tool that will access your website's code and let you know incoming and outgoing links, the relevance of your keywords, description and title tags and is an all round very helpful tool.
I hope you all find these links as helpful as I do, and please do share more examples if you think they're of interest.
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