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Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization
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by: Lois S.
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Search engine optimization, or SEO, is big business. If you rely on
search engines to bring visitors to your business website, you need to
rely on more than luck. Your business will lag far short of its
potential unless your site is optimized and re-optimized for search
engine results.
What is search engine optimization?
SEO is optimizing your website for search engines, acquiring inbound
links, and monitoring your traffic and referring links to use them
optimally. SEO is also studying and monitoring your competitors’
techniques.
The goal of SEO is to bring in targeted traffic that is organic, i.e.,
from search results. When people type in a keyword or phrase that
you’ve optimized your site for, you want your site to appear on the
first page, preferably high on that page. Good SEO results in increased
traffic without the cost and time spent on advertising.
The SEO industry
Where there’s a need, there’s an industry ready to help you spend money
on that need. SEO firms charge from a few hundred dollars up to
six-figure amounts to optimize your site for search engines.
If paying thousands of dollars to an SEO firm isn’t in your budget,
consider using SEO packages to optimize your site yourself.
A combination of SEO tools is needed to get the best results. The SEO
packages described below offer a variety of tools to help you optimize
your site for search engines.
SEO tools compared
While we’ve listed numerous features of each SEO tool, these
comparisons are summaries only.
Internet Business Promoter (IBP)
Known for their link popularity tool ARELIS, IBP also produces a
three-step suite of tools to help you promote your website:
1. Page optimization
• Generate, analyze, and edit keywords
• Optimize for the top 10 search engine rankings
• Optimize the title, link texts, and other parts of the web page
• Validate the HTML
• View the site via a spider simulator
2. Page promotion
• Submit your site to search engines and directories
• Search for sites that might add a link to your site
3. Results tracking
• Verify search engine positions automatically
Price: $179.95 or $349.95.
LinksManager
Links Manager is designed to help users manage reciprocal linking. It
doesn’t require any software downloads, and current links pages can be
imported into it. Some of its features:
Link organization and formatting
• Organize your links into multiple categories, subcategories, and
“most popular links” lists
• Store the links on your own server
• Highlight newly added and featured links
Link management and tracking
• Remove dead links temporarily via a dead link checker
• Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist
• Rotate links automatically
• Deny link submissions according to the criteria you set via a
blacklist
• View the most popular keywords on your links pages
Price: $19.95 a month.
SEO Administrator
SEO Administrator automates website promotion with tools that can do
these tasks:
Keywords and site visitors
• Track your site’s position for your keywords in over 30 search
engines
• Report on the keyword weight and density of your site as well as of
competitors’ sites
• Suggest keywords that are relevant to each page
• Analyze your site logs to find out about site visitors, keywords
used, referrers, and more
Search engines and directories
• Check which pages at your site have been indexed by various search
engines
• Check Google PR, the number of inbound links, and whether or not the
site is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories
• Show the automated descriptions that search engines display for your
pages
Price: from $70 to $150, depending on the version.
SEO Elite
With SEO Elite, you can find out exactly what your competitors are
doing and copy their strategies. You can find out about your
competitors’ web pages:
• Keyword density and prominence
• Their headings
• Their meta keywords
• Whether their site is listed in the Yahoo directory
• Which websites your competitors are advertising on
Concerning link partners and search engines, SEO Elite can:
• Find thousands of possible link partners
• Track details about pages with inbound links
• Check whether or not reciprocal links at other sites exist
• Indicate which of your pages search engines have indexed
• Keep a record of where your site is ranked for search terms
Price: $167.
SEOToolset
The focus of SEOToolset is to provide data to help with website
promotion. The toolset includes:
Your website
• Keyword density analyzer
• Keyword selection tool
• Reports on rankings for keywords, page names, and indexed page counts
• Link partner finder
Search engines and directories
• Engine-specific keyword research
• Traffic checker for keywords
• DMOZ category selector
• Search engine submission tool
• Search engine ranking monitor
Your competition
• Keyword research summary
• Link analysis of inbound links to competitors’ websites
Price: $90.00 per quarter per site.
Web CEO
The 10 tools in the Web CEO package are designed to help you promote
and maintain your website, improve search engine results, and analyze
site visitors. A summary of these tools:
At your website
• Keyword research
• Website optimization
• Inbound link tracking
• WYSIWYG website editing and file uploading
• Link checking
• Website monitoring
• Stats analysis to track visitors, ad campaigns, transactions, and
more
Search engines and competition
• URL submission to search engines
• Search engine rank checking
• Tracking who links to the competition
Price: $295 for one person. A free version is also available.
WebPosition
WebPosition, one of the oldest and most popular SEO tools, offers a
five-step SEO process:
1. Determine your position in search engines
• Create search engine ranking reports
• Monitor your site’s placement in search engine results
2. Research and choose keywords
• Identify the most searched and least competitive keywords
3. Optimize your pages
• Compare your pages to those of top-performing sites and specific
competitors
• Detect when your competitors’ pages have changed
• Be alerted to changes that could affect your site rankings
4. Design and submit your pages
• Use Page Builder and Upload Manager to design and maintain your site
• Submit your site to search engines with the Submitter tool
5. Analyze your results
• Track the correlation between search rankings and revenue
• Import top-performing keywords
Price: $149 or $349.
How to hire an SEO firm
If you’d prefer to hire an SEO firm instead, do your research. You’ll
be spending a minimum of a few hundred dollars, more likely thousands
of dollars for a medium-sized or larger website.
While many SEO firms are good at what they do, the field unfortunately
has its share of scammers as well. They may tell you that a variety of
tricks such as hidden text or cloaking will improve your site’s
position in search engines. In reality, these techniques may get your
site banned from search engines. More information is at these pages at
Google.com:
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html Webmaster Guidelines
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html Search Engine Optimizers
If you’re considering an SEO firm, ask how they measure success. Will
your site hits be organic? Look at the sites of SEO firms’ clients and
the site for the SEO firm itself. Do the sites rank well for keywords
at these sites? The search engine results for relevant keywords will
indicate how successful an SEO firm is.
About the author:
Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for http://www.websitesource.com
and http://www.lowpricedomains.com
with experience in the website hosting
industry.
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