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Search Engine Optimization or SEO

Posted on 06. Jul, 2009 by admin in SEO

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 h1 and h2 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:

Deter­mine your posi­tion in search engines

* Cre­ate search engine rank­ing reports

* Mon­i­tor your site’s place­ment in search engine results

Research and choose keywords

* Iden­tify the most searched and least com­pet­i­tive keywords

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

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

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.

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.

Related Posts:

• The Seven Secret Skills Of SEO Work
• Search Engine Opti­miza­tion Is The Most Com­mon Part Of An SEO Company
• SEO Makes Web­sites Homoge­nous and Bland
• The Abuse of Search Engine Optimization
• Ben­e­fits of Search Engine Optimization

Tags: becoming-lifeless, bring-visitors, does-it-need, engine-optimization, largely-due, maybe-even, rely-on-more, the-popularity, the-top, the-web, you-need, your-business