Driving traffic to your Web site could mean the difference between making it big or closing up shop. Search engine optimization (SEO) tools help you bring your Web site to the top of the list for search engine results, bringing more people to your site. The following are five online SEO tools that will help you increase your Web site’s search engine rank. The best part is they are free.

Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool will help you determine the best keywords to use for your site. The right keywords are critical in attracting customers. With this SEO tool, you enter your chosen words or phrases and get a list of related words and phrases that have proven to be popular for searches for your type of business.

Search engine spiders explore the Internet for Web site content and then rank sites according to their relevance. A spider simulation tool allows you to view your Web site in the same way a search engine spider does. You might have a colorful and attractive Web site, but if it doesn’t attract the attention of search engine spiders, you won’t have a good search engine page results (SERP) ranking.

The competition is tough when it comes to Web sites. Most businesses have a site, and they are all vying for the attention of potential customers. To make your Web site stand out, you can use Google Analytics . With this SEO tool, you can find out if your visitors come to you through search engine results or links and which parts of your Web site they’re interested in. If you have a Google AdWords ad, this SEO analytics tools reports the return on investment (ROI) for your chosen keywords. This SEO tool can help you redesign your site, improve your marketing techniques, and boost your search engine page rank.

Incoming links to your Web site play a large part in determining your ranking among other Web sites on search engine results pages. Search engine spiders usually see incoming links as a good indication that a site is legitimate and trustworthy. SEO Book’s SEO toolbar enables you to see how your link profile compares with other sites ranked on Yahoo! and Google. You can keep one step ahead of the competition by regularly checking how well your links are working for you. This SEO tool can also help you find Web pages you’ll want to link to for improved rank results.

Another valuable SEO tool from SEO Book is the Rank Checker. You can monitor how your Web site moves up and down on the search engine results pages of Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. You can check other Web sites’ rankings, too, and get an idea of why other sites are ranked higher than yours are. This SEO tool gives you the ability to check your rank, make changes to your Web site, and then recheck your rank to determine if your changes made a positive or negative difference on how your Web site rates with other sites.

What do you think about these tools? Know of some better ones? Share your opinion!

1 Comment

Are you looking for Firefox extensions to save you time and sanity while boosting your productivity and workflow while Affiliate Marketing? Well you’ve come to the right place. Check out our top 7 Firefox extensions below.

1) SEOToolbar

Wow, what can I say? SEO Book packs so much into this extension. Want to know every intimate detail about your competition? Just visit any page to get the low down on it’s page rank, pages indexed in Google and Yahoo, Alexa.com rating, Compete.com rating, SEMRush.com traffic value, as well as the age of the domain and links to the wayback machine to see what the site looked like in it’s infancy. It also scours social bookmarking sites del.icio.us, digg, twitter and stumbleupon to see how many links are on each site accordingly.

2) Roboform

Do you sign up for new Affiliate Networks all the time? It’s a drag typing the same thing day after day. Let Roboform do all the heavy lifting. It’s also great at remembering login information for multiple accounts with one click logins.

3) Google Global

Do you travel a lot? Maybe you don’t live in the region that you are marketing to. Google Global allows you to view organic and paid traffic as they appear in different cities, regions, ip addresses and zip codes. This plugin is essential if you are using AdWords.

4) refspoof

Refspoof allows you to change the referring url that your browser passes on. It’s good if you want to cover your tracks or test out some of your own projects.

5) FireFTP

Need to make some quick changes to a landing page at 3 in the morning? I don’t think that your designer/developer will be happy with a phone call that early. No problem use FireFTP to access your website and make those minor changes yourself. Just make sure you know the HTML basics so you don’t break the layout of the page.

6) IE Tab

Is Firefox your default browser? If so sometimes you forget to check what your landing page or design looks like in Internet Explorer. Make sure there are no mistakes because the majority of the Internet still uses IE. If you’re on a mac you will need to either run bootcamp or windows inside of a virtual machine such as Parallels or VMWare.

7) User Agent Switcher

Switch between user agents within Firefox to see how web pages react. Useful for getting into areas that only allow Googlebot (naughty naughty) & a few other things.

If you know of any other good extensions please let us know in the comments section.

1 Comment