SEO Tools
Other than using lynx to test your site, there are several other tools I would recommend utilizing in your quest for better SEO. One great tool is the SEO Analysis Tool from SEOWorkers.com. This tool quickly analyzes the page, and provides excellent reports on the size and relevancy of your meta tags. It also provides data on the frequency of keywords, singly and in groups of two and three. Here is a part of the a report for sparkred.com:
I’ve already mentioned utilizing Google Analytics to monitor what keywords are bringing you good traffic versus bad. I’d also recommend another Google tool, Google Webmaster Tools. Google provides a TON of useful data here. You can see things like the crawl frequency, page response times during the crawl, and page rank of your pages (including a by month breakdown). You can also use quick links to see related pages, pages which link in to your site, all the indexed pages of your site, and more. It also gives you diagnostics into any problems with the crawl or your meta tags.
How to Promote Your Site
In order to drive traffic to your site and to increase your ranking in search engines, such as your Google Page Rank, you want high quality links pointing to your site. By high quality links I don’t mean spam links, link farms, or the like. I mean links on relevant sites pointing your site, driving high quality traffic.
There are two halves to this. The first is to provide really good quality content on your site. This means having a great site, it means updating your site frequently, and it means providing non-core but helpful related content. An example of that might be having a blog that provides related content. For instance for MyShoeStore.com you might have a blog with posts about the latest fashions and how to match shoes to each look, the best sales you’re currently running, the 10 most extreme shoes of all time, photos of the shoes worn by celebrities that week, etc… You want something that will have people returning to visit your site more frequently, and something that will make other people link to your site in their blogs, tweets, Facebook pages, IMs to friends, and so forth. If you have a blog post about the shoes on the red carpet at the People’s Choice awards, people will link to that from tons of forums discussing fashion. Those a great links! Relevant high quality links bringing in high quality traffic. And you just need a blogger. A college fashionista who wants to get into fashion journalism will do it for cheap.
The second is to promote your site on other sites. Find forums and communities that are filled with the people you want to attract to your site, signup, and contribute to the community conversation. Note I didn’t say spam the community. Post useful stuff. Even stuff that links to sites that aren’t yours. Be a real contributing helpful member of the site. In your site profile, have a link to your site, and when it’s relevant feel free to link to your site, your latest sale, whatever, as long as it’s relevant. Obviously if you’re an ATG developer or a VP of IT, it’s probably not you doing all this, but have someone do it.
Those two things are how you get traffic and a high page ranking in the search engines. It’s all about having good content and being an upstanding citizen of the relevant online communities.
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