With SEO being such a big part of web development, it would be good to know some tools to help evaluate progress and how well your optimizations are going. Thankfully there are numerous sources to reference as well as free easy to use tools that will come in handy.
If your project is to SEO an existing site I’d recommend running some of these reports before beginning the project. This will allow you to show the client or whomever at the end of the project how well you were able to improve their site. It will also give you an idea of what to look for if you are unfamiliar with SEO or what needs the most work on a particular site. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Base is yet another beta service of the popular search engine. It allows users to find things based on predefined attributes instead of keywords and to search through content that might not be on any website.
There are many item types available for posting to Google Base, but my experience has been with Products because of its importance in the e-commerce industry. Base is significant not because people search it directly, but because Google Product Search, formally know as Froogle, retrieves its results from it. Product Search is a useful tool to e-commerce because it allows retailers to advertise their products for free. From personal experience I have found that Product Search can bring more traffic to an e-commerce site than an expensive Adwords Campaign.
Product Search is unusual because it searches through the afore mentioned predefined attributes and displays results based solely on matches. Fees and commissions are not accepted so they can not influence the output. This can help even the playing field for even the smallest of online retailers. Products are defined by attributes (some required, some optional) and are entered either one at a time, through a number of bulk formats including XML and CSV, or by using their API.
Because Google Base/Product Search offers a virtually unlimited amount of free advertising, I would strongly recommend its use to any online store looking for more traffic. Be warned, it takes more to implement than a basic Adwords Campaign. I suggest finding a method to create entries in bulk or using their API because submitting individual entries would be prohibitively time consuming in many cases.
I’m not really sure how I stumbled across this wonderful, simple tool, but SEOFeast (seofeast.com) has been an incredible resource to me in the last few days. It a website that packs a whole lot of functionality into it’s single page, yet remains lightweight, well-designed, and uncluttered.
The page is essentially just a tool to check out information related to SEO about any website with just a few clicks. Simply type in the domain you want info on, and select any of the various types of information you want. Some examples of what is available are: Yahoo! Incoming links, Google Incoming Links, Google Pagerank, Domain Age, and Whois info. Interestingly, they also have tools that will validate your html via W3C and your CSS.
Maybe one of the coolest features though, is that they’ll display a history of each statistic you request from them. For example, here is a screenshot, and an enlarged photo of a search of Yahoo! Incoming Links for SysgenMedia.com:
Overall, SEOFeast isn’t offering any new, groundbreaking tools… and it isn’t even offering any services that are difficult to find for free elsewhere. But what it does do is place all of these tools at your fingertips on a single page instead of making you track down the various pages where you would normally need to go to find all of this disparate info.
So, for all of us out there, I’d like to thank the guys over at SEOFeast for a job well done. Keep up the good work guys!
