Here’s Some Cool Free SEO Tools

Lately, as I’ve been browsing the web, in my own constant search for knowledge and gems of wisdom, I’ve encountered some sites with some exciting tools to help me improve my search engine rankings.

SEO Browser

The first one is kind of bizarre. It allows you to “see” your website exactly as a search engine spider would see it. To use it, you go to http://www.seo-browser.com/ and type in the address of the page you want to test. It thinks a minute and then displays all of the elements of your web page that the search engines would index. Here’s the important part: If it’s not shown here, the search engine spiders don’t know it exists!

So, for example, all of those fancy photos and graphics? They’re great for adding visual flair to your site, but they won’t show up for the search engines. To have them be more impactful, add a few keywords into the “alt text” part of your image tags.

What about all the javascripts that make your page do fancy rollovers and other special effects? Nope. Nuthin’ They don’t register on the search engines, either. And that main page that’s nothing but a huge flash window? Invisible.

What is shown is content. Words, text, links. That’s what the search engines are paying attention to.

Search Term Extractor

Another great tool is the Term Extractor. You might think that you’ve gotten your keywords written into your page really well. You might think that your site is ready. But run it past the Term Extractor first. This tool will count up all the words in your site, and see how many times each one is duplicated (except for “at”, “the”, and a few others like that). Which words are really best represented in the text of your site? The answer may surprise you.

If your most critical keyword shows up at the bottom of this list, then you’d better go back and rewrite your text. Include more instances of that word or phrase. Then test it again!

The Page Strength Analyzer

This is a great tool to get an overview of your total search engine effectiveness. It checks a big list of factors and sources to see just how much search engine muscle your site has. It checks some of the most important factors like:

1. An overall Something-Out-of-Ten ranking number. This is valuable to gauge your effectiveness. It’s not the same as Google’s page rank, but it’s still good to know.
2. How many links point to your page and to your site. This is critical information, as we all know that it’s inbound links that drive search engine rankings!
3. Your domain’s “age rank”. In recent years, Google in particular has been giving preference to sites that have been around longer. The best way to win at this game is to simply not go away.
4. Your site’s Alexa ranking. Alexa is a site that tracks sites values based on a lot of varying factors. It’s a great way to learn a lot about your site.
5. Links found at Technorati, del.ico.us, wikpedia and DMOZ. These are very valuable sites to get linked to and from, and each one could be the topic of an article on its own. It’d be a good idea to check them out!

Using these three simple tools can give you great insights into the current status of your website, and how to improve it! And the price is right! FREE!

Mark is the co-director of http://seotrafficmagnet.com, the search marketing consulting arm of Clickincome (http://clickincome.com). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his MoBoy blog.