Life after SEO breakfast

Following up from our SEO tools for starters post, I’d like to suggest some other tools and operative commands (commonly called operators) to use on the major search engines.

After you have researched your keywords, built your site and put it live you will need to measure, test and analyse your progress.

3 of the most handy tools to track and analyse your progress are:

• Google Analytics is good for tracking traffic and user behaviour, converting keywords – know which words work, which pages work, which ones don’t where you need to work most. It is also free. There is a slight delay on the results, about 24 hours.

• Google Webmaster Tools tells you where your links are coming from, if you have any errors in your URLs, sitemap or robots.txt files. Free as well.

• Clicktracks can be used to analyse your user behaviour, manage your PPC campaigns and the content on your site but unfortunately, is not free.

One of the most obvious issues about having a website is to get traffic. There are many ways to do this, even a few link building tools out there to help – I would recommend doing it yourself though because this is a very subjective task (or it should be) and software can’t be intuitive like humans when it comes to deciding whether a site is good enough to link to or whether it would add value to your site by linking to you. You can try social media to get links; it is time consuming but can be very rewarding in terms of links and traffic earned as well as knowledge gained. There are a lot of articles you can read to help with your research into this area, and we can start you off with some of our own suggestions on using social media to get links and traffic on our blog.

On the subject of links, you can use Yahoo! Site Explorer to see which sites you are getting links from. You can also use the “link:” operator to see where you are getting your links from. Simply type link:www.example.com into a search engine search box, www.example.com would be your website – it has been suggested that you receive more results from Yahoo! than you do from Google when trying to find backlink results, but you can compare this yourself.

Other operators you can use are:

· site: - Indexed pages in your site (site:www.website.com)

· cache: - The current cache of your site (cache: www.website.com)

· info: - Information we have about your site (info: www.website.com)

· related: - Pages that are similar to your site (related: www.website.com)

A great way to see where your competitors are getting their links from is by using the link: operator or by simply typing in you competitor’s website into a search box surrounded by “ “s e.g. “www.example.com” – this will show you which web pages contain that URL. You could then try and get links from those sites too.

Another way you can keep an eye on your competitors is by downloading some SEO Plugins for your browsers – such as SEO Quake. These types of plugins allow to you view how many links, the Page Rank, Alexa rank etc your competing website has – underneath its URL in the search engine results.

This is just a brief look at some analysis tools and operators, for those who would like a more in depth look at operators, there are some handy tips for Google operators listed here. As a bonus, a way for you to check if your URLs contain any of your keywords, try typing “inurl:(keyword) site:www.website.com”, and to see if your site’s meta title contains any of your keywords (and they should!) type “intitle:(keyword) site:www.website.com” into a search box on your engine of choice.

Interleado’s “All in one SEO workbench” offers search engine marketers a chance to analyse their site/s against 45 different SEO factors too – using only one tool. There is a free trial available as well as a short video demo outlining the SEO software capabilities – this includes social media tracking and a press release distribution tool.

What are your favourite analysis tools?

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