Good SEO Tools

Is there a better place to learn about good search engine optimization than the search engines themselves? Probably not.

Google’s Webmaster Tools is a good place to begin, so I’ll provide a quick summary of what Google offers and encourage you to visit and use the tools yourself.

Here’s a link to Google’s Webmaster Tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps.

Before using Google’s tools you must have a Google Account.

Once you have an account and login to the Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to add your site(s) by entering the domain into the Add Site field and clicking the OK button.

After adding your website, you’ll be asked to verify your site which you’ll do by uploading a HTML file with a specific, unique name you receive from Google or by adding a meta tag to page headers. The easiest for me was to create the HTML verification file and upload it ot my seb server. After uploading the uniquely named HTML file, you merely click the “Verify” button.

After you’ve added your web site and verified it, you can log off and wait for Google to visit. After that happens, you can log in to your Google account and see the results of the visit. You’ll have access to three sets of tools; Diagnostic, Statistics, and Sitemaps.

The Diagnostic tools include a summary of the web crawl of your site, a list of any crawl errors, an analysis of your robots.txt file, you can manage your site verification, adjust your site’s crawl rate, the ability to set a preferred domain for your site, and the option of choosing enhanced image search for your website.

The Statistics tools include crawl stats, query stats, page analysis, and index stats.

Finally, the Sitemaps tool is the interface you use to submit your sitemap to Google. Of course it’s only my opinion and I’ll right more later about it, but the nicest sitemap tool I’ve found is the GSiteCrawler by SOFTplus. Not only does it create Google-compliant sitemaps, it also generates Yahoo! urllist.txt files.

So, if you want to see how Google sees your site, explore Google’s Webmaster Tools. It’s a great place to begin your SEO work.

Yesterday I wrote about SpiderTest.com that “One thing I would like to see in addition to a word list of the 20 most frequently occuring words, is a phrase list of the most frequently occuring 2, 3 and 4 word phrases.”

Keyword Density Analyzer scans a web page and reports the keyword density of 1, 2 and 3 word phrases. It’s quick, easy (just enter the URL of your web page) and does a good job of reporting the 1, 2 and three word phrases in columns.

There are several differences in the reports of SpiderTest and Keyword Density Analyzer. Keyword Density Analyzer reports the most common 1 word phrases are loans (10x), borrow(9x), lenders(8x), financial(7x). SpiderTest reports the top 4 as financial(11x), loans(11x), about(8x), borrower’s(8x).

The results of both seem to be off. When I open my favorite text editor, Notepad++, and word count the index page of www.lendersandloans.com, I get these results: loans(18x), borrow(15x), financial(14x), lenders(11x), etc. Then, if I set the word count to match whole words only, I get: loans(9x), borrow(2x), financial(11x), and lenders(5x).

Conclusions: Online SEO tools may not be as accurate as you wish them to be. It’s obvious something is amiss when comparing the results of these two online SEO tools. And while there may be a good explanation, it escapes me at this point. One thing I do like is that the keyword lists provided by SpiderTest and Keyword Density Analyzer offer a great starting point for starting keyword analysis using a good text editor.

First tool for the GoodSEOTools blog is SpiderTest. Spider Test is a free tool provided by Web Positioning Centre, which focuses on ‘Ethical Search Engine Optimization’

I’ve just checked the home page of LendersAndLoans.com, the site of Wheatworks’ free ‘Wise Borrower’s Guide‘.

SpiderTest is quick and the results of the test include some helpful pointers which I’ll correct in the next few days.

First, there are more than nine words in the page title, ‘lendersandloans.com, wise borrower’s guide and directory of financial resources on the web’. SpiderTest suggests nine or fewer.

Second, SpiderTest suggests the one bit of javascript be moved to an external file.

Third, there are three (or more) nested tables. SpiderTest suggests using CSS instead of tables for positioning.

SpiderTest also provides a list of the 20 most frequently occuring words on the page. Here’s where I think your page content becomes crucial. Fortunately, the words I want to appear in the search engines for this site are already in the > 2% area. I’ve read (have no proof that it’s true) that if you wish a word to be helpful to your search engine results, it should have a percentage of at least 2%.

One thing I would like to see in addition to a word list of the 20 most frequently occuring words, is a phrase list of the most frequently occuring 2, 3 and 4 word phrases.

Finally, a nice thing about SpiderTest is that the results provide a good explanation for the warnings and suggestions. Run one of your sites through SpiderTest and see what you find.