Webmaster World Las Vegas - SEO Tools
One of my favorite sessions on the first day of the webmaster world conference was the site review forum. Anyone in the audience can place their business card in the hat for random review by a couple of SEO experts. Most of the input is quite helpful and can apply to almost anyone who owns a website. The top problem that kept arising was the lack of a 301 redirect to the www, meaning that if you simply typed domain.com without the www the page would return an error. Most web savvy people would then try adding the www, but most end-users/customers aren’t that web savvy.
Another thing that I am always interested in is the tools that other SEO experts use to quickly get information about a competitors site. One of my favorites is domaintools.comwhere you can find out not only domain ownershipbut nifty things like how many other site are hosted on the server, blacklist status, IP location and whether or not the site is listed in Yahoo or DMOZ. Another cool toold is the backlinks checker from Google, Yahoo and MSN search which can tell you how many people are linking to your site. MSN search also has a tool that can tell you which sites you link to.
There are several other tools that are useful when keeping a watchful eye on your websites or those of your competitors. One that is good for checking headers is the tools from SEO Consultants. If you are more interested in on page metrics and SEO then the new RankQuest toolbar may be the ticket. It allows you to check things like Keyword density, code to content ratios and many other SEO tweaks.
The bottom line for creating a successful website hasn’t changed for nearly 10 years.To make awebsite that the search engines like Googlewill gobble up and enjoy, there are just two main rules. Number one, content is still king and always will be. If you want your site to do good in the search engines, create at least one new page of unique content every day of the year. This will ensure that your site grows naturally and gives something fresh for the spiders to grab every time they com calling.
Number two, is the importance of relevant links to your site from other related websites. The only way the search engines will ever know if your site is important is if other websites point to yours. Now if you somehow add 20,000 backlinks in one week forget Google because your site is done. The goal is to grow your site slowly and naturally which means adding a few new linkbacks each week. Sean Pecor of MarketingTool.com has speculated that the golden ratio of conent to linkbacks is somewhere in the area of 1:100, meaning 1 linkback for every 100 pages of content on your site. I think this is a good general rule.