SEO Hints and Tips and Free SEO Tools

Do you realize that if you manage your website, SEO tools, and pay-per-click tools, you can literally have as many leads as you want from your website? I assume that a website should convert approximately 5% of the viewers to doers, taking some kind of action that you want them to take. So, all we have to do is make sure the website does convert viewers to doers, and then we make sure weve got the right amount of traffic arriving at the website. All quite manageable. Today, were mainly talking about how to get the traffic to your website through Search Engine Optimization, SEO.
Here is a list of the best tools Ive found to do SEO and a quick review of some of the top issues for SEO. Most of these tools are either free, or can be tried for free before buying
Most search engines are looking at your site to find relevant search words. How relevant determines your eventual search engine position.
How do they determine relevancy? Although every search engine has slightly different rules, here are some of the key ideas. Keep in mind, they could change tomorrow. Search engines are continually changing because just as soon as they determine how to find the relevant search words on your site, someone finds a way around their rules. Then search engines change the rules again.
A key word usually has to show up in each of the following areas of your site, with a density that falls within a range that search engine would like to see. They also like to see the words at a certain position in that area, usually at or near the beginning of these areas:
Areas search engines look at:
1) Meta tags (title, description, and keywords) (NOTE: Im told that most search engines dont consider meta tags any longer, but I keep seeing my keywords pop up from the meta tags). 2) Body text of the site 3) Headlines 4) Alternate text behind the graphics 5) Links, and link text
How do you choose the right keywords?
Heres a big warning: Consider what people are looking for, not who you are or what your product is. For me, I would rather be found for small business help than for my company name, The Leaders Perspective. Obviously I want people to find me, if by chance they are looking for me by name, but just think about this:
Arent there more people in the world looking for small business help or business help than could possibly be looking for my name. Those looking for my company name are those that I have probably met personally and sent them to my site. Thats a small number, in comparison to the number of companies on the internet looking for help that dont have any idea who I am.yet anyway.
Here are some tools to find the right keywords.
1) http://inventory.overture.com
Enter a keyword, and Overture will return the number of times that keyword was searched for in the last month. It will also show you other variances of that same keyword and the number of searches for each variance.
Use this to brainstorm keywords. (NOTE: Ive also discovered this is a VERY useful tool to use before sending out any kind of marketing. Find what people are looking for and then make sure those words show up in your marketing, AND in your website.
2) http://www.wordtracker.com
Now, this is an even better tool. This one contains a thesaurus as well, so it will show lots of other ways people have been searching for the keywords youve typed in.
This tool also has a way of measuring the RIGHT keyword that is even better than Overture for Search engine optimization.
Overture reports the number of searches last month for that keyword, so you can find the words that have the greatest number of searches.
However, Wordtracker, reports the greatest number of searches for the words with the LEAST competition.
When you are doing SEO it wont do you any good to go after the words that have been searched for the most if there are millions of competing sites. Its just not likely that you COULD get a page 1 ranking among millions of sites.
So, Wordtracker helps you find words that have been searched for ENOUGH to give you traffic, but at the same time have the least competition. They provide their own proprietary ranking that finds the best search words that you are likely to get a search engine position for.
Just make sure that the words you end up with from that search actually are words that someone would be looking for to find you.
Hint: I use Overture to find the greatest number of searches and use that for pay-per-clicks, and use Wordtracker to find the right search words for Search engine optimization.
Here are some other useful tools.
Tools that help you Learn Search Engine optimization while guiding you through the process.
Internet Business Promoter will provide not only an analysis of many of the search engine sensitive stats, but will give you almost a step-by-step how to fix your site. Although this has ended up down the list, this is probably the number one greatest tool to learn search engine optimization.
www.axandra.com
Another similar tool is http://www.wpgsales.com/
Link Popularity
Search engines tend to give websites that have more external links from other websites pointing at them a higher search engine ranking. Here are a couple of free tools to track your link popularity, and to check our competition as well. www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com
http://www.marketleap.com (this one shows a graph if your history)