Every good optimisation company will offer potential clients a couple of SEO tools they might find useful. It’s a part of the education and information ethic of the industry. It’s your job to make sure the tools you find are the tools you’re going to find useful.

Tools that Come with a Price Tag

There are quite a few tools available for purchase to help with your SEO. It’s important to be cautious when it comes to these. There are one or two really valuable tools that professionals use to help with their search engine optimisation, but many of the tools out there will either be unhelpful to site owners just starting out, or altogether useless.

Most tools have had plenty of reviews in the industry, so do a review search before buying. Talking to an SEO professional can help with tool selection, and you can discuss your concerns with us at www.SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk.

Free SEO Tools

There are a lot of really handy free SEO tools out there. There are also a truckload of handy articles listing the ‘best’ of them. The trouble is, most of these are forms of blatant self-promotion.

There’s no real harm intended in this kind of self-promotion. The SEO companies that produce these tools are genuinely aiming to provide something that is going to help potential clients, to gain their interest and respect. An optimisation company will naturally want to promote their own search engine optimization tools. All this means is that you need to practice a little caution when selecting the tools to use during your campaign, cross-referencing where you can.

What’s the Harm in Being Caught in a Scam?

If you’ve used a free SEO tool that wasn’t particularly helpful, you’re not usually going to come into harm. It’s annoying when you check your ‘true Google position’ and finding out that you’ve just been given information you could have found in the search engine. It’s not really anything more serious, though, than a waste of time.

Wasting money on useless SEO tools is another matter. Most companies operate on a tight budget during their optimisation, and money wasted on a lacklustre program could be money invested in good content or a couple of links. It is vital to check the reviews of any tools you’re thinking of buying.

It’s important to check up on every SEO tool you choose to use. There are free tools that are far less than what they advertise. Tools that are old, outdated or come from designers who have a less than perfect knowledge of search engine optimisation could actually do harm to your site’s ranking. This will happen, of course, only if you rely on them.

Choosing the right tools for you will take some time, and more than a little trial and error. It can help to ask the advice of your optimisation company when planning tools for the ongoing maintenance of your site, and you can talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about the sort of SEO tools you may find handy.

The SEO Community – Your First Resource

It’s possible to waste a lot of time on the many search engine optimization tools available. For that reason, it’s really a good idea to dip into a couple of the industry forums to find out which tools will be useful for which purposes. One of the best things about the SEO community is that working professionals are in the habit of chatting together in forums, meaning that anyone can dip in and get some advice.

There are usually a couple of threads running about SEO tools. Often, experts will announce a new tool they’ve designed, or promote one that they’ve used. Read through a few posts to get an idea of what people think generally. Also, take note of the level of experience needed to use the tool. While many online tools are useful for the SEO newcomer, there are a few that are at the professional level of sophistication.

Should I Trust Free SEO Tools?

There are all sorts of pitfalls for the average site owner around the net. There’s plenty of bad free SEO advice out there, some of it actively damaging to your site. This is why you should always cross-reference before making any bold moves. When it comes to free SEO tools, however, it can be hard to know which are trustworthy because there really isn’t anything to cross-reference them against.

In terms of trustworthiness, you can generally rest easy. Most online tools enable you to access information that is freely available. A dose of caution is advisable for any free tool that requires you to enter private information. As with any other area of the internet, offering up private information without checking the references of a site means taking a huge risk, particularly when the site is offering something for free. This doesn’t mean that all such tools are dangerous, but simply that a little research is required.

Don’t Just Stick to Online Tools

The vast majority of the work you’ll do is going to be online. Not all search engine optimisation tools are online tools, however. Some of the best SEO tools you can find are the ones already sitting in your own head. List-making, flow-chart drawing, brainstorming and other basic business skills can all be valuable.

People tend to jump straight for the technical wizardry available just because SEO is a technical field. It’s easy to forget that a large part of your site’s success with the search engines rests on your ability to communicate – not just to search engines, but to other human beings. There are very few search engine optimization tools on the net to help with this. Luckily, there are plenty of relevant SEO tools that you already have.

Tool 1: Your knowledge of your industry. It wouldn’t occur to most site owners that their own knowledge could be considered a valuable search engine optimization tool. With the amount of relevant content you need to produce, though, your knowledge can be an incredibly valuable thing. The best kind of content to feature on your site is content that has a strong topical link to your keywords.

Your knowledge of your industry will come in most handy when planning and assessing content. Even if you obtain the services of a professional writer, as many businesses do to keep up with content needs for SEO, you should take a hand in content planning. Using your familiarity with your industry can help you build attractive content and fill gaps your competitors are missing.

Tool 2: Your site, as it is. There is so much emphasis on changing a website during optimisation that there is a serious danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Unless you’ve done everything completely wrong, your site should have its own SEO strengths. These strengths can be used as tools for the rest of your search engine optimization campaign.

Tool 3: Your own sense of spelling and grammar. This can be a tricky topic for some people. A large percentage of the English-speaking population would say that their spelling and grammar probably isn’t up to scratch. Even when your own spelling and grammar isn’t that great, you’d be surprised what you pick up on. Most people subconsciously pick out flaws in written work, and this will help you when analysing your site’s content. If something doesn’t read right, don’t be afraid to question it. It will help your site maintain a professional level of content.

There are, of course, plenty of technical SEO tools that you can and should use for your optimisation. You can talk to us about the more valuable tools for your site at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. However, the value of your site and your own skills should not be underestimated for SEO. In the end, you may find that these are the tools that are the most helpful.

Code validation checkers are the unsung search engine optimisation tools heroes of the net. This is mostly because they are often the unused heroes of the net. If more sites bothered to validate their code, the internet would be a far more smooth-functioning place. The fact that it isn’t can be used to your advantage.

Why Does Code Need Validation?

As anyone who has worked with any HTML will know, code can be deceptively simple. A couple of characters here, a couple over there, and you can create a truly impressive page with all kinds of interesting elements. Unfortunately, all it takes is a couple of characters out of place for the whole thing to fall in a heap.

This is where code validation comes in. A validation checker runs through the code of a web page and highlights any problem areas. A good validation checker will tell you what kind of errors you have on your page, and give you a couple of warnings about what those errors can mean. The validator won’t provide a fix for your errors, though – there’s only so much you can expect from free SEO tools. The process of code validation is very simple, and the way it can help your site is simple as well.

Code validation is nothing new. The information technology industry has been using it for many years in order to test and check programs. Web designers and those otherwise involved in keeping the net operating have used it as well. Not a lot of site owners use validation checkers, though, which is why those sites that do can be at a significant advantage when it comes to the search engines.

How a Validation Checker Can Help Your Website

Code validation checkers are very useful search engine optimization tools because they encourage clear communication. It’s all about the way your site talks to the search engines. Think about it like a bad telephone line. If your site is talking to the search engines, but the static on the line means is getting in the way, this can mean that the search engines don’t understand what your message is. A simple, free check of your code, which will take mere seconds, can identify the problems you need to fix.

There are a number of great things about these kinds of SEO tools, the main one being that you can find validation checkers for free. Another great thing about validation checks is that the errors you correct could be impeding the way your site is shown on different browsers. In fixing your site’s code, and improving performance overall, you’re achieving far more for your site than a good place in the search engines.

1. The structure of a site has a direct bearing on how well it can be perceived by search engines. Search engines send programs known variously as ‘robots, ‘spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ to investigate the internet and find out what’s on sites. Not just this, they use algorithms to process the data returned to them by crawlers and determine the relevance and popularity of sites to be listed on their results pages. Site structure is important because it will always affect the ways in which ‘crawlers’ see it and its content. SEO services agree that if there are three or more links to each and every page from others on the site, then it can be said to be well structured for search engine optimisation. If a site’s structure inhibits the number of internal links, then you can safely say that it’s not structured well. Crawlers need to be able to read as many of your ages as possible, and these links are the paths they will take. A site needs to be structured in such a way as to allow for easy and readily available navigation to and from a site map. A site structure that goes out of its way to be user friendly can generally be said to function well in terms of crawlers.

2. Site structure can help improve navigation between pages. It can be said that we see four ways in which optimisation can be improved by a publisher – search engine results pages, on-site optimisation, off-site optimisation and on-page optimisation. URL optimisation comes under the heading of on-site optimisation and it’s very important. Search engines take URL’s into account. Website structure should include good URL’s. In this context that means they should be short, meaningful and not overfilled with keywords.

3. The structure of a site affects its capacity for growth. It’s easy to imagine having to add new sections to a site at a moment’s notice – indeed it’s very common. If it’s something you can do without too much effort then you’re lucky. The fact is that for some it means rewriting the entire navigation system for their site, and that means their structure is not optimal for SEO. Search engine optimisation services generally agree that you ought to be able to increase the size of your site by 30% without needing to substantially alter your navigation system. Given the current climate of change and the increase in social media, it’s easy to imagine having to add content for new users. And so it can be argued that if your site doesn’t allow for its easy inclusion then it’s not useful. Site structure needs to allow for change in a world where it’s the only constant.

4. Search engine results page ranking can be improved with good site structure. The result page on a search engine gives the user their first glimpse of content after they’ve entered text into the query box and hit enter. It’s worth remembering that it’s very wrong to assume that all users will go for the number one search engine choice. Website structure can be seen as one of the SEO tools at your disposal for making your listing attractive to those faced with multiple choices on a search engine results page. If a short description makes it clear to the user that your site offers more relevant material for them, they’ll choose it first instead of what’s number one. They have free will and don’t always assume that most popular is best.

It is to be hoped that after thinking about our tips you are in a better position to improve on your site structure for SEO. There is a lot more to say about the subject, but it can be summed up by saying that consistency in terms of featuring keywords and exploiting user friendliness for navigation make for a good site. Good site structure can clearly help you get to where you want to be, which might be near the top on results pages, but it’s ultimately on a user’s desktop.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s only publishers whose sites are obviously failing on the results pages that need to improve SEO. However successful your site is, there’s a very good chance it could be performing better given some optimization.

If you’re wondering what to look for when examining your site for flaws, don’t despair. We’ve put together a list of ways in which you can approach self assessment for SEO.

Have a Look at How You Currently Rank and for Which Keywords

Search for your product or service from all the big name search engines and see where you appear on results pages. If you rank well with one of them and not others, it’s a good idea to look at the criteria they have that’s different from the others.

Basically any information is useful. Make notes about keywords that are leading people to your site, and potential variations of the words preceding or following them. Thinking with SEO in mind means being open to new ideas and actively using your imagination.

Fresh SEO tools are there at your fingertips if you look closely and use your imagination. It is very likely that acting the part of a user finding your site will reveal ways in which you can improve.

Run Google Analytics for a Couple of Weeks

Don’t know what Google Analytics is? It’s a range of tools provided by Google to help you learn more about your place on the web. You can track visitors to your site and compile useful statistics. Running Google Analytics can give you an overview of the big picture, and show you where you’re succeeding and where you’re going wrong.

Read Your Content from a User Perspective

It’s well known that we often lose sight of the wood when surrounded by trees. In a similar way, you might be obsessed with the content on your site and still get it completely wrong. One of the best free SEO tools is fresh and original content. How sure are you that it’s a description of what you have on your pages? Take some time to access your site from a user perspective and read the material as if it were on another site. If it’s impossible to wear the shoes of an objective visitor, find one and study their reactions. You might be surprised by which things you thought were good actually receive a negative response, and vice versa.

Check Your Links

Think about your site with good link building in mind. How many of the links on your pages are unnecessary or irrelevant. Try to think like a user again, and follow the links to see if the sites they lead to are, in fact, any good. You might even find that some of them are no longer valid, and broken links make for a shoddy site.

And Finally, Get a Good Search Engine Optimisation Company to Do Most of the Work for You

Having taken a good look at your site and where you’re going wrong in SEO terms, don’t try to fix everything yourself. Bear in mind that without the necessary experience you could easily make things worse rather than better, by overfilling pages with new keywords for example.

Remember that good SEO is an investment in future prosperity, and that the returns on that investment can be better than you’d ever imagine. The internet reaches millions of people every day, and search engines are a powerful tool in bringing users to your pages. Without them acting as intermediary, showing the way to pages, you wouldn’t receive traffic and without it, no more business. Think big and shoot for the stars. You might be surprised how far you go!

Choose an SEO company with Experience and a Proven Track Record

You might find that a lot of people you talk to in the industry think they know a great deal about SEO. The fact is that it’s a more complex fiend than most people realize. A really experienced company will know that strategies today are not the same as they were last year or even last month. The search engines keep a lot of their methods for determining rank on search results pages closely guarded, and discovering the finer points of what makes them tick is an ongoing learning process.

Choose a Company That Understands the Importance of Keywords and Links

When you choose a company to you use you should definitely make sure that they understand the complexities of SEO. They should know about the algorithms used to determine rank and they should understand the latest opinions about keyword strategies and linking. Look for a company with testimonials and, of course, a professional website.

Choose a Company That Advocates Sound Ethical Practice on the Web

Search engines do not tolerate any spamming methods these days, yet some publishers who are attempting to increase their ranking on results pages still cling to duplicitous ways of bringing users to their sites. Whether or not these methods produce any short-term gains at all is a matter for debate, but what’s certain is that in the long-term they’re very damaging. Search engines are wise to all spamming methods. They actively seek culprits out and punish publishers who use them. When your goal is to rank highly on results pages, being banned from them all together would be a very undesirable result.  Good strategies like featuring good quality relevant links are known in the industry as ‘white hat’ methods, and those that trick users are ‘black hat’. Choose a ‘white hat’ company if you want to secure lasting SEO benefits, and if you care about being in favour with search engines, which of course you should.

Choose a Company That Will Advise You on Ways of Maintaining Good SEO

A reputable company should not take your money and simply leave you with an optimized site. Real experts know that SEO is something that needs constant maintenance and with that in mind you should receive a lot of advice about what to do to move with the times and maintain the standards you have.

In conclusion, remember that good SEO is an investment. Getting onto the higher places on search engine results pages will give your site incredible exposure and bring a great deal of traffic to your site. Don’t treat employing a company for SEO as a chore, or simply pay them and assume they’ll do everything for you. Learn how things work and get good advice. Don’t assume you know everything. Be ready to receive guidance and take advice, even if it means changing things on your site that you thought you wouldn’t need to.

Remember that the best companies are the ones who will advise you to establish and maintain high standards. View the experts who advise you as friends of your site, who will act as matchmakers to bring you and potential clients together harmoniously.

Remember that the returns of good SEO will be measurable and lasting. It’s an investment in your site’s future online.

As Google assert throughout their own guide, good practice is what’s going to get score you points with search engines when it comes to getting onto search results pages. With this in mind, you won’t need to be told that the title of a page ought to offer a concise and accurate
reflection of its contents.

The title tag is a crucial element of a site for both users and search engines. Almost every SEO expert agrees that they are the most important place to feature keywords.

Before moving on to our four tips to help you get the most out of title tags, let’s consider the important places where we find title tags. In the uppermost space on internet browser software we’ll find a title tag. While it’s not the place on a page that receives the most direct attention from users, it’s still a very prominent position. Another very important place we find title tags is on search engine results pages. Keywords in title tags will be highlighted there after a user has performed a query. Seeing the title tag for your site leads users to you, and that’s what’s important.

Having established that title tags are extremely important, let’s move on to our four tips. We hope you’ll enjoy reading them and they’ll give you some good ideas!

1. Short is usually sweet. Search engines will not display title tags that are over 70 characters long. If a title tag does exceed that length, a series of dots will indicate that it had to be cut short.  Search engine optimisation services agree that staying within 70 characters is advisable. Having said that, if your SEO strategy involves featuring multiple keywords in the title tag you might want to consider making it longer. Bear in mind that Google advise you to keep it short!

2. Feature important keywords near the beginning of the title tag. Know the importance of keywords and get advice from a good search engine optimization agency about getting the most out of them. One of the things they’ll almost certainly advise is that you position keywords close to the beginning. This is because it’s almost certainly more helpful from a ranking standpoint. Not only that, it gets the attention of users too!

3. Think about your brand. Why not consider the potential for using the title tag for a little extra exposure? You’ll need to decide whether this fits in with your overall strategies, but if it does then why not open the title tag with a mention of your brand. You might decide that it’s more important to feature keywords there, and some search engine optimization services advocate featuring the name of the brand at the end of a title tag instead of the front. You can get advice and decide what’s best for your company!

4. Think about reaction. An emotive title tag might invite more actual hits than a bland one, unless your area of business involves a high degree of specialised functionality. Think about keyword usage, but also consider the impact of your title tag as a whole. This applies particularly to those of you who have opted for a shorter, punchier title tag. Consider the experience of the user now as at every stage of designing a site. The title tag needs to be useful but it also needs to fit into the user’s experience well. If yours is a trendy site, for example, you’ll want a trendy title tag! Try to use the title tag to convey something about your attitude and your product. It’s a vital opportunity since more people are likely to see it than most of your other content.

In conclusion, take care of your title tags and they’ll take care of you. Don’t let traffic pass you by through allowing your title tags to languish like broken signposts at the side of a busy road. Think about employing a reputable search engine optimisation company to help get the most out of title tags, keywords and everything else!

Most good SEO services pay attention to the content of advice pages provided by search engines without falling into the trap of thinking they’re telling us everything we need to know. If nothing else, the search engines are providing you with free SEO tools and you should take advantage of that. We have to assume that the big name search engines know more than anyone about SEO link building, search engine optimisation tools and online SEO tools, it’s just that they’ve not been very free with the information until now.

We recommend that you take note of what they suggest you do, since they’re the ones you’re trying to please in order to reach your audience. There are some common themes in all the SEO literature provided by the search engines, and here are some points you should certainly address.

Good Practice

Feature sitemaps. All of the major search engines recommend that you feature a sitemap. A sitemap will enable users and search engines alike to navigate your site with ease. There are many different ways of creating a sitemap, and you should be aware of them and how your choice of which to use will affect your performance.

Choose a Format

XML is the format most often recommended. XML stands for Extensible Mark-up Language and it’s very easy for search engines to read sites that are created using XML. They have the disadvantage of featuring very large files which can prove to be a hindrance. RSS sitemaps can be read easily as well, and can easily be created to update automatically when fresh content is introduced to the site. They are harder to manage than XML sitemaps due to this updating process. Text based sitemaps may be the simplest version recommended by search engines. They do not allow as much scope for adding Meta tags, but there are benefits to keeping things simple. If all the search engines are telling you to have a sitemap, it would seem very foolish not to, especially given the fact that users like them. Our advice is to make one and to make it using one of the three methods here.

Get Technical

Use the text file provided for robots. The robots.txt file acts as a visitor’s guide for automated travellers to your site, and this means those sent by search engines to crawl the internet and send back information about what they find. This information is used to index your site, and it’s therefore crucial for SEO. It’s precisely these robot crawler programs that will be travelling along the links to and from your sitemap, for example. It’s a very wise idea to follow the advice of search engines to provide well for your visitors in these files. Use the commands at your disposal. The ‘disallow’ function ostensibly allows you to prevent robot crawlers from accessing specific pages or folders. This is important if you want to inform a search engine that duplicate text within your site is for printable versions, etc. It pays to remember that not all robots are good robots. Some are sent by unscrupulous web users to steal information. For this reason, you should be wary of what you include in your robots.txt file.

Conclusion

The three main services provided by the big name search engines are Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center. It’s a very good idea to check them all out with a view to improving your search engine optimization. Learn about what they’re telling you to do in terms of what we’ve mentioned here, but bear in mind such common issues as backlinks, outbound links, keywords and feeds as well. Get advice from a good search engine optimisation company about ways of implementing the strategies they suggest without compromising your existing or planned SEO methods. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that search engines are generously giving you any information that will privilege your site above any others.

Someone with little or no experience of what constitutes good free SEO tools might ask why keyword research is necessary, since if you market mineral water, for example, ‘mineral’ and ‘water’ must be your keywords. What more is there to think about? Quite a lot, in fact.

If you’re one of the thousands of new or minor producers of mineral water, and by Minor we mean not ‘Evian’ or ‘Perrier’, using just mineral and water as keywords is unlikely to get you onto the top spots on results pages, since they’re already taken for those keywords by major players in the industry, who already have a reputation and popularity. It’s much better to be specific about your product, and to conceive of ways in which to market it effectively from an SEO perspective.

If the mineral water is sourced in the Highlands of Scotland, use those as keywords. If the water is high in a particular mineral that is particularly good for the cardiovascular system, then ‘heart’ might be a good keyword. In that way, someone typing ‘mineral water highlands Scotland heart’ might well find himself or herself at the door to your site.

The process of deciding on keywords is a complicated one, and involves careful consideration and much research. We’ve compiled six tips to help you to get the most out of your important keyword research.

1. Experiment with searching on your own. Find out which words are taking you where on the Internet. Try to get a feel for some keyword strategies that appear to have worked well for others. If you’re marketing mineral water, be exhaustive in searching for competitors and find out where they are ranking. Compile a list of the keywords used most often. This list will be a valuable tool when you decide which keywords to have for your site, and which you should forget.

2. Do some research into what keywords are already bringing users to your site. Assuming that you already have some kind of website up and running, which you are going to optimise, use Google Analytics to track the searches that are bringing you up on results pages. If you discover that as a small producer of mineral water your site is ranking on page 63 for the keywords ‘mineral’ and ‘water’ then you know where you are coming from. Data collected from Google Analytics can really help you to decide what keywords are going to work best for you. The information will also serve you well in charting progress you’ll make from SEO.

3. Research more obscure keywords for lengthier searches. It’s estimated that upwards of 70% of searches are from queries containing multiple keywords. Investigate which words are likely to feature before and after main keywords in searches, and include them on your pages where possible too. If you’re marketing mineral water and you feel your product has a calming effect for example, describe it as such for those people who might search using that word.

4. Don’t overuse keywords. With keywords there can be too much of a good thing. Search engines realized long ago that the method of judging a site’s relevance for users using keywords was being abused. For that reason featuring an over-abundance of keywords is likely to incur their wrath. Seek advice from professional SEO services about what’s enough and what’s too much, to be sure.

5. Remember that keywords are not the end of the story. Keep in mind that there’s a lot more to search engine optimisation than keywords and that although you’ll have made a great start with your research there are other SEO tools like links that need just as much attention.

6. Be ready to adapt to change. SEO is an ongoing process, and that applies to keywords as much as to anything else. Be ready for the market to change and for new opportunities with keywords to present themselves.

Consult an SEO agency with a proven track record for more advice on the latest methods of keyword research, and keep up to date with SEO developments online to get more information.