The
Tools of the Trade
By Sumantra Roy
Before you start optimizing your site for the
search engines, you would need to arm yourself with some tools to help you. What follows
is a brief review of 4 software programs that we find invaluable when we are optimizing
our clients' sites.
Wordtracker:
The first and most important step in any search engine positioning
campaign is identifying the keywords for which you should optimize
your site. WordTracker's keyword research service is the only
one on the Internet that will provide a comprehensive and powerful
database of the most popular keywords in your industry. It has
features that all other keyword research tools lack - for instance,
it will help you identify related keywords that you would otherwise
never have thought of, it differentiates between singular and
plural keywords and tells you which version is more popular,
it helps you identify popular mis-spelled keywords (which generally
have very little competition) in your industry etc. It has a
free trial version which will help you identify a few keywords.
However, we recommend that you subscribe to its paid service
as otherwise, you will not be able to discover quite a few keywords
that can turn out to be extremely valuable to you. You can find
more information on WordTracker at http://www.wordtracker.com
Optilink:
Link popularity has quickly become one of the most important
factors that influence your rankings in the search engines.
What is important is not only the number of sites linking to
you, but the quality and relevancy of the sites that are linking
to you. If you are trying to improve the link popularity of
your site, until now, there has been no easy way of checking
the quality and relevancy of sites that are linking to you or
the quality and relevancy of sites that you are thinking of
asking for links from. You could have done it manually, but
it would take a tremendous amount of time. However, a new software
product called Optilink automates this process to a large extent.
In addition to doing an excellent job in helping you determine
the quality of sites that already link to you or might link
to you, it also does the following:
i) analyzes the link structures of your top
ranking competitors and tells you why they rank well, so that you can emulate the same
tactics that your top ranking competitors are using.
ii) allows you to do "what if"
analysis - it tells you what sort of rankings you can expect if you adopt a particular
linking strategy.
iii) monitor the sites that you have exchanged
links with to ensure that they are still linking to you and are linking to you the way you
want them to.
If you are thinking
of improving the link popularity of your site, or are already
doing so, we highly recommend that you obtain this product before
you proceed. You can find more information on Optilink at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/optilink/
Zeus: An excellent way of
improving the link popularity of your site is to exchange links with other sites that are
related to yours. However, the main problem with this method is the sheer amount of time
that is involved in identifying sites that you want to exchange links with. You may often
find that the number of links that you manage to get is not worth the time that you spent
in trying to get those links. Zeus will allow you to locate and exchange links with sites
that are related to yours and manage those links on an ongoing basis in a fraction of the
time it would take for you to do it manually.
You can download a
free trial version of Zeus at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/zeus/
While the program does take a while to get used to, the results
that you can obtain with it are simply phenomenal. We highly
recommend that you download the free trial version and try it
out.
In fact, we recommend that you use both
Optilink and Zeus as they are complementary to each other - while Zeus helps you quickly
locate hundreds of potential link partners, Optilink tells you which of these sites are
worth getting links from and which of these sites you should avoid.
Agent
Web Ranking: Once you have optimized your site
for the search engines, you will need to continuously check
your site's rankings. We have found Agent Web Ranking to be
the most reliable tool for telling us how our clients' sites
rank in the search engines. Apart from the major U.S. based
search engines, it also supports plenty of European search engines.
One problem with most such position reporting software is the
fact that the search engines constantly change the way they
display their search results. This means that most position
reporting software get outdated very quickly and it often takes
an unacceptably long time for the company producing the software
to prepare an update. However, Agent Web Ranking is the only
program which has a guaranteed 72 hour turnaround time - i.e.
if any search engine changes the way it is displaying results,
it will have an update for that engine within 72 hours or less.
You can find more information on Agent Web Ranking at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/agentwebranking/
Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected
search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have
Sumantra's company place your site at the top of the search
engines, go to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com
For more advice on how you can take your web site to the top
of the search engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter by going
to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/wsletter.htm
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