There are lots of valuable and free SEO tools that can help with your daily SEO tasks, below are a few of the ones I consider the most useful.

Rank Checker and Ranking History

I use on a daily basis the Firefox addon from SeoBook.com called “Rank Checker”. It is a simple but effective tool that once installed into Firefox gives you quick access to view your position in all the major search engines. You can customize it to give you position results from Google.com and any other local Google search engine along with options to search Yahoo.com or a local Yahoo search and MSN live. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest factors in ranking your web site highly in all the major search engines is the quality of the backlinks pointing to your site. Building good quality back links to your site continually over time are like votes of confidence to the search engines that your site has the correct information to show in their search results. In other words if you have a page on your website about “selling sunglasses for dogs” (for want of a better example) then building links back to your site with variations of anchor text like “dog glasses”, “buy sunglasses for your dog” etc send trust to the search engines that the content on your site will be beneficial to their search results.

If these links are also on pages that do not have many other links and are pages that are on trusted sites then they become very good backlinks and will promote your page highly. This is a great search engine optimization technique used by quality seo companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Where do I start with this, well I guess the program I use most is Abode Dreamweaver CS3, I know some developers will disagree with this but after using Dreamweaver for many years I think I am either just very used to it or stuck in my ways, but at the end of the day I do like many features of Dreamweaver.

I hand code everything in Dreamweaver and test/view what I am creating in Firefox and IE and find this to be the quickest way to create pages. So if you are building a static X/HTML webpage then there is no need for anything else, set up your CSS and webpage all in Dreamweaver and test in all the browsers you can get your hands on, I find testing in IE6, IE7, Firefox and Google Chrome suitable for most things.
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If you have a website that is focused round a niche topic or market, ie you don’t have too much competition, it can be fairly straightforward to get yourself listed very high in the search engines for your relevant keywords and phrases. Read the rest of this entry »

Create an SEO friendly XHTML page

When creating a xhtml page on your website here are some important considerations for search engine optimization. This is a basic rundown or checklist with some of the most important elements for the on site SEO of your page.

Document declaration and headers.

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lets go further into the text copy on a site :

Now I am not an expert on this and SEO copy is vast but I do enjoy a good read and I have studied enough quality books on the subject to give you a few pointers, if they help you can let me know……..

So, First things first – Who are you writing to ?

Is it a broad spectrum market, or a niche that is only relevant to, let say, policemen? (???)

That’s your first task right there - establish who it is you are writing to.
Secondly what do you want your reader to do ?
And most importantly what’s in it for them ?

Far too many people think that simply making the text on a website informative around the subject matter will get the prospective reader excited enough to sign up or buy – Wrong ! That’s a really good way to miss out on a lot of new clients.
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Where do you start ? Well as with most things in life first impressions count!  As we know, people are all too “finger clicking happy” so if the site you are working on wont do it for the viewer within 5 – 15 seconds of them landing on it, then I’m afraid  they will just click away, mouse in hand……….

So how do you get the perfect marketing reaction behind the design ?

Well firstly the design has to be market appropriate……Too many designers have a tendency to get carried away in their own creation, I’ve done it myself, all that happens is you waste time and the ego that was having so much fun gets a swift yank back down to earth when the client says – “ Mmmm, yes, but I don’t think this will impress the housewife’s am trying to sell to……” and that’s you back to the drawing board ! - Market Appropriate Design !!!!!

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