Freelance Developer

In accordance with my previous article about search engine optimization tips, I will in this article concentrate on how to dissect your website and figure out what needs to be done. And I'll only use free tools doing it :)

How many links do you have?

Search engines computes your importance rank according to how many people have linked to you. And its also important to have high ranking sites linking to you.

You can do this by easily supplying in a Google search field: "link:http://mysite.com/"

How are your pages seen as the user get hits from your page?

In your google search box do "site:mysite.com". This will list all pages that Google has indexed about your site. Here you can also see how they are represented when a search gives you a hit. This is where the meta tag description comes in handy.

How does a search spider see my web page?

A search bot, spider or a crawler doesn't see your web page as a human does. Contrary to a human being the spider will only see text. It cant see images, placement of text or anything else. Just text. So head on over to SearchWho and enter your site there to get a taste.

What queries are people using to get to my pages?

For this you will need to install Google Analytics. Its a great free tool for giving you statistics about your web traffic. It will tell you from which sources traffic is generated, and if its from search engines - you get a drilldown of what keywords was used as well. Nifty.

With this data at hand you can do your own searches for the same keywords and see how the results look like. Are they compelling? Or would you actually rather click on the competition?

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