An SEO consultant can cost you an average $100/hour, and for many new or small businesses, it’s a luxury that’s simply not in the budget. Here are some helpful (not to mention free) resources I’ve found on the internet that can help you begin taking control of your site optimization:
Google Webmaster Tools – Quickly analyzes Google search performance and allows you to make adjustments in the following areas:
- Sitemap – Allows you to check and register your sitemap with Google
- Robots.txt – Allows you to check and install Robots.txt for crawler access.
- Sitelinks - Shows which internal pages your site links to and overall depth of your site.
- Change of address – Allows you to perform a 301 redirect when you change web address so that old URLs redirect to new site.
- HTML suggestions – Gives you suggestions such as optimal meta description length, frequency, use of title tags, etc.
- Top search queries – Allows you to see the top search keywords people typed to find your site.
Firefox SEO Toolbar – Includes free access to the following resources:
- PageRank: (Google PageRank) An estimated measure of global link authority.
- Age: Shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
- Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) Shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at your domain.
- Page Links: (Yahoo! link) Shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page within your site.
- del.icio.us: Shows number of times your pages have been bookmarked on Del.icio.us.
- Technorati: An estimate of the total number of links to a site from your blog.
- Alexa: Shows page rank based on website traffic .
- Cached: (Google site:) Shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google.
- dmoz: Searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
- Bloglines: Shows you how many people are subscribed to your blog via Bloglines.
- dir.yahoo.com: Shows if your site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
- WhoIs: Makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.
RankQuest add-on for Firefox – Includes the following information:
- Metatag Description Analyzer – Checks length and relevance of metatag descriptions on each page of your site.
- Keyword Analyzer – Checks number of keywords you’ve imbedded in each page of your site.
- Code Cleaner – Scans programming code of your site to determine where errors occur.
- Link Checker – Checks page links within your site to ensure they are routing properly.
