Search Engine Optimaization (SEO) tools for a ...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) websites that I frequently visit and consider very valuable for all companies that want to grow rapidly on the web.

So here comes a number of SEO related websites that have helped Optimalprint to become one of the most visible and fast growing website for online printing in the Nordic region. SEO work is no rocket science, only a lot of hard work. No programing experience is required to start working with SEO, only the ability to read english and put in many hours of hard work. Good SEO-work will give you rapid payback.

Most Important SEO Lesson - If I can only give you one recommendation related to effective search engine optimization that would be to create valuable content for your customers and thereafter optimize your site. There is little value in pushing customers to your site but not providing "sticky" content. Remember customer feedback, blogs and statistics related to page views and conversion rate will greatly influence your long term positioning on the search engines. Thus, short term "effective" SEO work that generates low degree of customer satisfaction will not provide long term value to your company.

SEOmoz is an excellent site on Search Engine Marketing. This company has a really cool concept that I have never experienced before, at least not so clearly stated! "Basics About our Services. Our current contract minimum is $10,000 per month". This is clear customer communication I really enjoy reading the blogs on this site and recommend that you become a premium member for $ 39 / month.

SEO Book by Aaron Wall writes excellent summaries on hot SEO topics. In addition Mr Wall provides you with all the SEO - tools that you need in order to get your company and it's services visible on the internet. I have primarily used the SEO keyword selection tool. Type in any word (keyword) that you think will drive traffic to your site. You will get a good indication on the number of searches for that word. Furthermore you get the search volume separated between Google, YAHOO! & MSN. At the bottom of the page you have a great link summary to blogs, trends, competitions and much more.

Submit Express gives you instant understanding of how your competitors have structured their site and also how your own site is crawled and understood by the search engines spiders. Check out the free tools such as Meta Tags Analyzer and the Link popularity check. Linkage to and from your website ( just for you that are quite new to SEO-world) is critical for you sites visibility. But remember it is not the number of links that only counts is is also very important to get good quality links. For quality links check the link directory recommendation provided by SEOmoz.

SEO Company providing a collection of great links and forums. Very good start site for browsing within all areas of the SEO community. Take your time to go through the recommended links, it will save you time and money. There are a number of free SEO-tools available on the Internet. This site have spent considerable amount of time mapping the SEO world, leverage on it.

Wordtracker is one of the most frequently used Keyword Tool around the world. Quick explanation about keywords and why it is important. Keywords are the words, or more correctly "keyword phrases", that all people around the world and in the different countries use when they search the web. Consequently if you want you products or services to be visible on the web you must understand how your potential customers think, i.e. what words or phrases do they use when they search and find the services that your company and competitors offer. The better you become at understanding and analyzing this the more visitors you will get to your website. Wordtracker helps you to analyze the keywords or keywords phrases. My experience as a European oriented company is that Wordtracker is very North America oriented. However they have launched a keyword database for UK. Since Optimalprint's launch in the UK the importance and usage of Wordtracker has grown significantly.

Digitalpoint is a great free keyword tool that provides queries from both Wordtracker and Overture. It is a great tool that separates results between Wordtracker and Overture results.

Keyword Discovery is a tool that you need to pay for but it is good value for money. The nice thing about Keyword Discovery is that you can do trend analyzes, i.e. when during the year is it important to work with the keywords and when should you start to prepare for SEO on the keyword phrases. In addition, just like in Wordtracker, you get access to project folders and competitor analyses. All results can be easily saved in different keyword folders. Another great thing is to use the Industry analyses. In short this gives you a possibility to select a specific industry - lets take printing - and receive the 1.000 keyword phrases that have generated the most traffic to websites providing services within printing.

Spider Simulator that will map any website in the world in terms of how the spider read a website. A "Spider" is a term that is often used for the machines that Google, YAHOO!, MSN etc send out to visit websites all over the world. The purpose of the visits are amongst other reasons to map and understand the information that your site provide to the visitors. Depending on a number of parameters the spiders basically decides the quality of your website and thereby significantly influence the position that your website will be given on the different search engines. Thus, it is important to structure your website in a manner that gives all the visiting spiders an easy access but most importantly give them the right input and information.

Quintura - is a fun tool that works like this: you write any word you can think of and Quintura gives you an answer that explains what surrounding words that a search engine spider are used to find on a website. The importance of the surrounding words are visualized on Quintura by enlarging the most important or common surrounding words. A quick example - if you write "Printing" you receive an answer that displays roughly 20 words such as Business Cards, Brochures, Services and Industry. Why is Quintura an important tool for you? Well, there is a phrase that you will encounter when you start working with SEO called "Latent Semantical Indexing" (LSI). In short, LSI means that the spiders are used to find the words that Quintura display on the pages that the search engines present to their users, in our example "Printing". Finally, to the right of the LSI window you can see all the top ranking sites for that specific keyword phrase on Google.

Optimalprint has been live since February / March but has already on local domains such as www.optimalprint.se, www.optimalprint.no and www.optimalprint.com grown very rapidly. You can check all sites and how they grow in terms of number of visitors and the page views that these visitors generate via www.alexa.com and then go to Traffic Ranking. Alexa can help you evaluate competitors and potential online marketing channels. My experience is that you should use the results as an indication on how the website is developing, don't focus so much on the exact data.

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