iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant

Here’s some great SEO and webmaster tools, all web based, all now linked from one handy spot.

Check your link popularity

Estimate the difficulty of achieving top ranking for a particular term

Find the age of a website (useful for google)

Simulate your site in Google (useful if not yet listed)

Find out your page size

View your server and browser headers

Code to text ratio calculator Aim for 50%

Excellent Keyword density checker

Google Page Rank Checker – great for mac users or if you don’t have google toolbar

Find your rank in Google

Find your rank in Yahoo

Over the last year there’s been a massive increase in business blogging as businesses catch on to the idea that by creating a blog of their own, they can connect on a more personal level with their customers, who can directly respond to news and comment on new site features, involving the customer in an dialogue with the website and increasing the likelihood that they will return to the site.

Blogging also has the positive side effect of boosting a sites search engine ranking, as Google in particular loves regularly updated pages (automatic in a blog), fresh pages (again many blogs can be set to automatically create a new page each time a new post in created in a blog, and blogging around keyword related to your site will get you more search engine visibility, over time.

The size of the blogosphere has doubled every five months over the last year and a half, according to blog analysis firm Technorati.
Their analysis suggests that the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003. The company tracked 3 million blogs as of the first week of July, and has added over 1 million blogs to its stable since then. Other stats suggest that a new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds. That roughly translates into 15,000 new blogs every day.

How to get a blog

Easy blogging setup can be achieved by getting an account at Blogger or at Microsoft’s spaces. Or you can use popular software such as my favorite Movable Type which is more flexible and configurable and so more capable of being optimised for search engines, as well as more easily adapted to look the way you want it to look.

Once you are up and running the key thing is to post to your blog, often. See my article Promote your blog for more information.

Get the right keywords for your blog

Many of your visitors come across your site from a Google search. Your site will be found from words and phrases that you use in your postings. So make sure that you use the words you want to be found under in your blog – in my case ecommerce and internet.

Write regular interesting content for your blog

Choose a topic or set of ideas to discuss regularly. Get people commenting and make sure that you comment back. Regularity is also important. You need to develop a posting pattern for your blog so that people can tell whether to come back every day or only once a month.

Provide good blog content

Don’t just make your blog a stream of consciousness from the days events. Provide useful information that’s worth linking to.

Use keywords in your links and titles

This is increasingly key to success. The words you use must go deeper than simply your content. Make sure that your page titles contain your keywords too.

Publish an RSS/XML feed

Syndicating your headlines via an RSS feed allows people to use a newsreader or news aggregator to view your latest posts. They will then click through when they see something of interest.

Analyse your webstats

A favorite for me, this – see web statistics analysis.So, do these actions have an effect? You can only tell if you look at the log files for your server. These will give you basic trend data, lists of referring sites and search engine statistics. Use this information to find out your most popular pages and to track the origin of your visitors.?

Comment on other people?s blogs

Find other blogs and make comments on their postings. You will often be able to provide a link back to your blog and Google will eventually notice this.

Google
Speaking of search engines, here’s the new google suggest which is kind of like autocomplete for web searches. Very nice, I’m going to use it and see how useful it is.

Accoona Search Results for google

Another new search engine has launched – however, my results were not very good. A search for google doesn’t got any relevant results in english at least. Google shouldn’t worry.