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.

Once installed Rank Checker can be quickly accessed from the bottom of the Firefox browser as a pop up window. From here you can set up profiles to check your position in the SERPS for your domain and the results are stored in the profile for later checking the history.

This tool also has a scheduler so you can set it to run automatically. I find Rank Checker to be great for quick in house ranking information, although it is basic in the way that you do not get any fancy graphs to show your clients, it is very effective as a history ranking information too.

SEO for Firefox

Another tool I use daily and also from Aaron Wall’s SeoBook.com, “SEO for Firefox” is an addon that will display extra SEO information in a Google or Yahoo search. You can also customize this tool to display the information that is relevant to you, from the Google Page Rank of the URL to how many links the URL or domain has in Yahoo, how many .edu links the domain has and many more features. All this being vital to see why your competitors are ranked where they are.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Sit Explorer is great for showing you the back links to your site that they have indexed. You have options to display only links from outside your domain or all links and is a great way to spy on your competition to see where they are getting links.

SeoMoz

SeoMoz is by far the best and most trusted SEO site I know of. Rand Fiskin and his team are both likable and talented people who through their blog offer lots of valuable SEO information. SeoMoz have lots of free tools for use but by joining as a pro member you get access to even more. Their free tools include ;
“Trifecta” – where you can measure how strong your page appears in the search engines.
“Back link checker” where you can view all the links to your site.
“Linkscape” – for free you get access to Linkscapes basic features that gives you lots of information on how your site is fairing in the SERPS. Pro members get even more in-depth  information that can used to compete with your competition.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is easy to set up and free, just go to http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html . After signing up you just add some Javascript to the pages you want to track and that it. After 24 hours you will be able to see all sorts of valuable information about your visitors and how they found you. And all for FREE !! .

Well there are lots more tools out there so feel free to post any comments here about any of the SEO tools you use.

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.

So one place you can easily and quickly create this type of link is on a blog. There are lots of free platforms you can go to and set up your own blog where you can create an article/blog post about your product or service and then link the appropriate text back to your site. Articles should be at least 400 words long and you should make the links go straight to the appropriate page on your site. It is also a good idea to link out to other resources from your article to make the post more informative to the reader.

Some of the places I use for blogging are:

• Wordpress.com – Creating a blog here is free and it gets indexed by the search engines quickly as wordpress.com will list your blog in their own blog. I like wordpress because of its ease to set up, the great free templates you can choose from and the built in stats that come with it. Your blog will go on a sub domain of wordpress, eg. myblog.wordpress.com
• Blog.co.uk – A UK based blogging platform. They also have free options, is easy to set up and show you stats. Being UK based is good if you are promoting a UK website. Your blog again will go on a sub domain of blog.co.uk .
• Blogscene.co.uk – Another UK based blogging platform that creates your blog in a sub folder rather than a sub domain. This is a bonus as the domain itself will pass on more rank juice to your blog which in turn will pass on more ranking to your site.

After creating your blog then you can go to your social media sites and promote the blog there, get the word out about your article and help drive traffic to your site.

For niche keywords this is a sure fire way to get your site listed highly in all the major search engines very quicly.

Why not create a blog on your own site?

For larger sites this is also a great idea, especially for e-commerce websites. Blogging about new  products and linking back to the product page can help tremendously in promoting your product page in terms of SEO and for giving your clients more information about the product.

Remember to be active and post articles frequently to maximize the benefits of this great SEO tool.

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.

Firefox web development Addons.

Firefox is both a great web browser and an ideal tool for web developers. There are simply loads of free addons to make your life and day to day work tasks easier. The one I use most when building a webpage is FireBug. This tool gives you, with the click of a mouse, detail about any page you are viewing, it can show you all the DOM elements on the page and their related CSS styles, it lets you manipulate the DOM to test or see where problems are and also has a JavaScript debugger built in. One the the best thing I find with FireBug is the ability the view AJAX XMLHttpRequest POSTS and Responses so for testing AJAZ applications it is simply great..

Firefox also has an added called “Web Developer” which when installed can be a great tool for testing XHTML and CSS to see if everything validates. This addon also lets you disable JavaScript and CSS easily and is good for resetting sessions and clearing the cache.
You can download FireBug here – http://getfirebug.com/ .
Download Web Developer here – http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

Testing Locally

If you are like me and use PHP and MySQL then you will have to set up a local web server to test your work. For the non technical there is a great all-in-one download that will set up a  development environment on your PC in a few easy steps. XAMPP by Apache Friends is a simple download and install to have your own local web server up and running so you can test your MySQL AND php Applications before going live.
Download XAMPP here – http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

SQLyog MySQL GUI client.

When creating databases it really is quicker to have a good GUI client to help you set up all your tables and to test queries before you put them in your page. I use SQLyog from www.webyog.com, its fast, easy to use and great for testing your database queries.

Follow the guidelines below for some basic on-site and off-site SEO tips for.

On-Site Tips

Read my post on how to code a page for SEO

Domain name ( www.mydomain.com )
If you have not yet registered your domain name try and find a name that will include your  major keyword, keep it fairly short though. If your market is only in a particular country try to get your domain name with the countries domain extension, for example .co.uk for the UK or .es for Spain.

Hosting your site
If your niche market is based in a certain country, go with a reliable hosting company in that country.

Page file name ( www.mydomain.com/filename.html )
When creating the pages on your website put the main keyword for the page in the filename.

Page title tag
Your page title tag should not be more than 70 characters in length and have your main keyword or phrase at the beginning. For example
<title>My keywords – My website title</title>

Page heading ( <h1></h1> )
Try to place the <h1> tag on your page as near as possible to the top in the page code. Include the main keyword / key phrase in the <h1> tag as well.
Keep any css and javascript in external files this will keep your code clean and lean.

Off-Site Tips
So you have created your website and hosted it with a good, reliable hosting company.
Now you need people to come and visit your site !
Creating good quality back links to your site will quickly push your site to the top for your niche keywords :

Social media
You can get your first links from social media sites, this will allow the search engines to find you and index your site. The search engines spider the social media websites regularly and will follow the links you create back to your site. Doing this also gives you the opportunity to spread the word about your site to a community of people.

Mixx.com
This is a good and currant Social Media site to start on, create a profile at www.mixx.com and submit news links. These news links are then posted on mixx.com and the search engines will follow them to your site. You can also edit your profile on mixx and create another link back to your site.

There are lots of other sites out there that function in a similar way to mixx. Here is a list of a few of them that I find to be useful;

1. digg.com
2. misterwong.com
3. reddit.com
4. propeller.com

Social bookmarking
The Social bookmarking sites are also very good for getting back links to your site and again, for spreading the word about you new site throughout the vast online social network. Some of the best bookmarking sites I have found are listed below;

1. stumbleupon.com
2. folkd.com
3. delicio.us
4. buzzflash.net

By following these basic tips you should be able to get your site ranked highly for your niche keywords. In my next article I will talk about blogging for SEO and how this can rocket your site to the top !

Want some help or advise? post a comment below.

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.

1. Declare the document type;
   The most common is the Transitional
   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
2. Give the document an xmlns attribute and set the page language code.
   <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
3. Declare the head element of the page
   <head>
4. Define the character set used in the page.
   <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
5. Define the page Title element
   <title>Title of the page</title>
   The page title should be around 40 to 70 characters in length and be a description of the text content of the page. The title should also include the main key words / phrases that you would like it to be found for in the search engines. It is possible the most important part of the page in terms of SEO value and is what the search engines use as the link through to your site in their search results pages.
6. Define the page description.
   <meta name=”description” content=”detailed description of page” />
   The meta description of your page should contain approx 25 words or around 150-200 characters and should be a detailed description of the page content. The meta description has no direct SEO effect but is normally used by the search engines in their results pages as a description of the link through to your site, and so should be an added incentive for a user to click, containing relevant keywords / phrases .
7. Include external CSS and Javascript files.
   <link href=”css/styles.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”all” />
   <script src=”js/functions.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
   Always keep your CSS and JavaScript functions in external files as this keeps your page code cleaner and easier for the search engines to spider your pages.
8. Close the head element
   </head>
9. The document Body
   <body>

Important XHTML elements of a page.

<h1></h1>
This is the main text header for the page. There should be only 1 <h1> element on a page and like the page title it should be a short description on the page text content.

<h2></h2> / <h3></h3>
Sub heading h1 to h6. Use these to split up your paragraphs with sub headings. You can have numerous h2 to h6 tags on your page.

<p></p>
The paragraph tag, used for the paragraphs of text on your page.

<strong></strong>
Used to bold text. Search engines will put emphasis on any text that is bold on your page. Do not over use this tag but if possible you could bold up your most important keywords.

<em></em>
Used to italicize text. Like the <strong> tag the search engines will put emphasis on text inside this tag.

<a></a>
Used for creating links. The <a href=””> attribute is used for the link and will pass page rank to the page it is linking to unless you add a nofollow attribute, <a href=”pagename” rel=”nofollow”> . When linking out to other sites it can be a good idea to use the nofollow attribute so you can pass all your page rank internally in your site.

<img>
When adding images to your page always include an image ALT attribute along with width and height. eg. <img src=”myimage.gif” width=”100” height=”50” alt=”keyword for image” /> Width, height and the ALT attribute are all required for valid XHTML.

Summary

The text content of your page is obviously very import in how the page will rank, Try to have a minimum of 300 words on the page written grammatically correctly. The text needs to be both engaging and interesting for your user at the same time written so the search engines can spider the page and index your content with ease. Code your pages using external CSS and Javascript and use relevant and semantic XHTML formatting.

Next Step

Promtote your web page.

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.

You need to decide :

• who you are aiming your words at
• what it is you expect of them
• and what they will get for their time or investment,

These points are crucial to your text, and getting them right can be make or break for a site. But, before we go into creating the main body of text lets look at what to do with your copy in the opening visuals of a page. Remembering first impressions count……

When someone opens up the site in question they need to see immediately and exactly what it is all about, and, as we have discussed, what’s in it for them, so bullet points are really handy here.

Don’t have too many as the eye will just see them as a block of text and then most likely dismiss them. So maybe a maximum of 4 – 5 bullet points revolving around the facts and advantages of the subject matter. These then need to be positioned artfully in the opening visuals, usually above the clear and attractively positioned call to action.

The “Call to Action” in itself is imperative as this is what tells your viewer what to do or where to go, and it can be anything as simple as “BUY NOW” or “SIGN UP HERE” 

It will pay you to really think about these above points, do some research, all the info necessary is out there at your fingertips.

Now onto the text body :

If this is your first time remember it’s going to take a few drafts to get the main body of the text just right, and nobody is going to read the first one, so don’t worry about getting it perfect at first, just start playing with words around you subject matter. You can keep a note of things that pop into your head at the bottom of the page, like a kind of “skeleton  text”, points that you don’t want to forget and will add into the text later where suitable.

Did you know surveys have shown that sites containing text that answers all the “Likely to be asked” questions are more successful with their audience? So make sure you cover all the details.

You can add humour too, tastefully, and only if appropriate, but if you get it just right your reader will remember the text for longer, every body likes humour and good humour gets discussed……….

Put some personality in there, Joe Vitale, (who is in my opinion one of the best copywriters on the net) said “Remember every thing you were taught in school about writing – Well forget it !” What he means is talk to people in your copy, don’t focus on writing an award winning piece of English literature. Make your text engaging, market appropriate of course, but make it fun to read……..Do Not Bore People !!!
 
One of the most important keys to good copy is having the reader think the text is written to them personally……if you can get to people on an emotional level you have done it! Don’t scare people though, we are talking about positive emotional levels here !!!

Use colour within the text, if its broken up with headers in an eye catching colour its easier for the reader to digest, personally I like grey for the text body rather than black, its softer on the eye.

Another good tip : If you get “Writers Block”,  walk away, do some thing that will make you laugh or something that will lift your spirits. Come back to it when you feel inspired, don’t write for the sake of writing – your reader wont thank you!

Last point for today, and probably the most obvious one – Have your copy proof read by some one who knows how to spell !!!!!!!

Now has anyone noticed there is one very significant element I have left out here –
The SEO value of the copy ! But that’s for next week…….

Have fun
Leona

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 !!!!!

Navigation, where do we put the navigation bar ?

Well this may sound really boring but the very best place for the navigation is where people expect it to be ! That is in a horizontal bar under the top banner, now you may be wanting to flex your creative muscles and have an exciting looking navigation area else where on the page, unfortunately however that will only hinder the average viewers ability to quickly suss out how navigate through the site, leaving them thinking “Ooo, a wee bit to complicated for me”, and –click- that’s them gone!

Your client’s logo should also be presented where the viewer will expect to see it, which is on the top left of the page……..

You see many people when browsing the net have other things on their mind, so designing a site that is easy to absorb and navigate is vital. 

Now let’s get to the fact that you have a really limited amount of space here. Trying to get as much as possible into that 1000 x 600 or so pixels is not the best idea, it just confuses people or leaves them straining to find what it is they are looking for. Space things out properly, in fact white space itself is a big selling tool. White space subconsciously says to the mind of the viewer – “ok, this isn’t complicated” which lets the viewer then absorb details. So leave enough space between things, white where possible.

Make sure you let the viewer know what it is you want them to do, if the site is ecommerce then having products featured on the home page is important.

You can use your colours to lead the eye to the “call to action”. If the colour scheme of the site is blue & green, then a red or orange button will certainly attract the eye very quickly. Red by the way (for those who don’t know) also has a subconscious trigger – It says, among other things, “urgent” ! So if you have red anywhere on the page, the viewer’s eye will clock it within the first few second. A very good colour for logos! Red demands attention.

I know this is an obvious one but – Please check spelling & grammar, believe it or not too many people don’t. Encourage your client’s personality to come through in their text, if they are American use American English, if they are British use the correct British spelling. The internet is a cold place so text should be engaging; making the reader feel like the site is talking to them, which can encourage confidence. When possible it’s always best to have a professional website copywriter to at very least proof text before it goes live.

Another cool thing to do with text is use a couple of colours, it helps people to view it as something interesting to read and breaks up a text heavy page once the viewer starts scrolling down.

This is really just a brief intro, which I hope has been helpful, I will be posting more on this blog frequently, if you have any comments or there are topics you want to discuss just let me know…….

All in all if you enjoy what you are doing and aim to do it to the best of your ability you cant really go wrong……have fun with it, learn from your mistakes and keep an eye on the professionals at the top of the tree……….and if any of you “Top of the Tree” experts want to add to this please feel free……..

Have fun

Leona