Here is a list of the best tools I've found to do SEO and a quick review of some of the top issues for SEO. Most of these tools are either free, or can be tried for free before buying

Most search engines are looking at your site to find relevant search words. How relevant determines your eventual search engine position.

How do they determine relevancy? Although every search engine has slightly different rules, here are some of the key ideas. Keep in mind, they could change tomorrow. Search engines are continually changing because just as soon as they determine how to find the relevant search words on your site, someone finds a way around their rules. Then search engines change the rules again.

A key word usually has to show up in each of the following areas of your site, with a density that falls within a range that search engine would like to see. They also like to see the words at a certain position in that area, usually at or near the beginning of these areas:

Areas search engines look at: 1) Meta tags (title, description, and keywords) (NOTE: I'm told that most search engines don't consider meta tags any longer, but I keep seeing my keywords pop up from the meta tags). 2) Body text of the site 3) Headlines 4) Alternate text behind the graphics 5) Links, and link text

How do you choose the right keywords?

Here's a big warning: Consider what people are looking for, not who you are or what your product is. For me, I would rather be found for "small business help" than for my company name, The Leader's Perspective. Obviously I want people to find me, if by chance they are looking for me by name, but just think about this: * Aren't there more people in the world looking for "small business help" or "business help" than could possibly be looking for my name. Those looking for my company name are those that I have probably met personally and sent them to my site. That's a small number, in comparison to the number of companies on the internet looking for help that don't have any idea who I am....yet anyway.

Here are some tools to find the right keywords. 1) http://inventory.overture.com Enter a keyword, and Overture will return the number of times that keyword was searched for in the last month. It will also show you other variances of that same keyword and the number of searches for each variance. Use this to brainstorm keywords. (NOTE: I've also discovered this is a VERY useful tool to use before sending out any kind of marketing. Find what people are looking for and then make sure those words show up in your marketing, AND in your website. 2) http://www.wordtracker.com Now, this is an even better tool. This one contains a thesaurus as well, so it will show lots of other ways people have been searching for the keywords you've typed in. This tool also has a way of measuring the RIGHT keyword that is even better than Overture for Search engine optimization. Overture reports the number of searches last month for that keyword, so you can find the words that have the greatest number of searches. However, Wordtracker, reports the greatest number of searches for the words with the LEAST competition. When you are doing SEO it won't do you any good to go after the words that have been searched for the most if there are millions of competing sites. It's just not likely that you COULD get a page 1 ranking among millions of sites. So, Wordtracker helps you find words that have been searched for ENOUGH to give you traffic, but at the same time have the least competition. They provide their own proprietary ranking that finds the best search words that you are likely to get a search engine position for. Just make sure that the words you end up with from that search actually are words that someone would be looking for to find you.

Hint: I use Overture to find the greatest number of searches and use that for pay-per-clicks, and use Wordtracker to find the right search words for Search engine optimization.

Here are some other useful tools. Tools that help you Learn Search Engine optimization while guiding you through the process. Internet Business Promoter will provide not only an analysis of many of the search engine sensitive stats, but will give you almost a step-by-step how to fix your site. Although this has ended up down the list, this is probably the number one greatest tool to learn search engine optimization. www.axandra.com Another similar tool is http://www.wpgsales.com/

Link Popularity Search engines tend to give websites that have more external links from other websites pointing at them a higher search engine ranking. Here are a couple of free tools to track your link popularity, and to check our competition as well. www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com http://www.marketleap.com (this one shows a graph if your history)
About the Author

Alan Boyer, CEO of The Leader's Perspective, LLC is considered one of the world's leading breakthrough specialists.

With over 35 years of business experience, he has catapulted businesses lightyears ahead in weeks. Some double, some jump 10 times.

He helps companies worldwide reach further than they EVER thought possible....FASTER

http://www.leaders-perspective.com

mailto:AlanBoyer@leaders-perspective.com

A Quick Note From The Publisher... If you like the article above, you may be interested in the following article which is also related to SEO... Flash, SEO and Optimization - How to properly use flash on your websites Flash movies can be a great thing. They can help catch eyes that are otherwise bored with static looking pages, and they can help tell a story better than plain text. However the use of flash must be tempered with the ability to rank in search engines. This article describes some of the considerations and recommendations when using flash on a website. Disney does it. And so does Oprah. Even my favorite pizza place does it. That is embed their primary navigation and important content inside a flash movie. In fact in all these cases, a good part of the sites home page is flash, rendering that section of the page invisible to search engine crawlers. Granted these are extreme cases of sites which use flash extensively, but there are other cases where even a little flash can be improperly used. There are also cases where flash is not only appropriate, it is recommended. The question then becomes how to best use flash without affecting search engine rankings. Much like the early...

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