1. Web Developer - FireFox  Addon

The Web Developer extension adds lots of web developer tools to a browser for analyzing all sorts of site related technical data.

2. FireBug – FireFox  Addon

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. The Firebug is another tool we use daily. You can edit, CSS, HTML , and more live in any web page…great for testing before you dig into any real code changes.

3. Search Status – FireFox  Addon

A useful quick rank-checking tool. Displays Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete rank and MozRank anywhere in your browser, It analyses keyword density, nofollow, backlinks, robots and again much more.

4. ySlow - FireFox  Addon

YSlow analyzes web pages and provides information on why they are slow. It is based on Yahoos rules for best-optimized web sites.

5. FlagFox – FireFox  Addon

Very cool tool if you want to know some background information of a site. This tool  shows a country flag which links you to information on a map of the site and server location as well giving site security info, whois, and much more.

6. Copyscape – Content Tool

This tool checks for duplicate pages of your content on the web. Very useful if you are working with any freelancers or outsource writers. Also good to use as a quick check for external duplicate content, if you are doing an SEO Audit.

7. Google Webmaster Tools

Still free and a great tool for tracking and analyzing your website traffic.

8. Google – AdSense Key Word Tool

Google’s keyword tool that gives you monthly search traffic results for specific and related keywords. Make sure you click exact match.

9. Wayback Machine (Archive.org)

Domain History. I have used this for years. Very usefully especially if you are going to build out a brand domain and want to see if there are any negative vibes or history associated with who ever owned it before you. Also a great tool if you are buying domains as part of your link building strategy.

10. Into DNS – Domain and Server Information

Gives you lots of information about a domain, IP and Nameserver, MX records. If you are running servers it’s a quick an easy tool to use for checking the status of many things. This information is really important especially for those few SEO’s that do run there own servers, (especially cloud) and really want to generate the best Search performance.

11.  SeoMoz – Professional Seo Tools

* SEO Tools, Campaign monitoring, Community Support and much more. Known as a leader in SEO amongst Seo’s Marketers, Webmasters and Enterprise companies alike. There is a free and paid account. If you are going to have one reliable comprehensive set of tools and resources you can depend on, this is the one. But I am bias because I am a Pro Member.

Well that’s the list. These are a few of the ones we use at eMediaWright. There are a lot of tools on the web now. After years of trying many of the free ones we started to opt for the paid tools mostly because of reliability, accuracy and time. If you are relatively new to seo in the last couple of years, I would go straight to the paid ones. The reason is simple, these companies have had many years now of beta testing, getting feed back and refining. You will save your self time (which is money in most cases) Cheers. C

If you have some quality Seo Tools that you find invaluable for seo analysis, please let me know in the comments or on twitter.com/mediawright

*denotes an Affiliate Link – thought I would let you know

What are some of the current core search engine optimization and online marketing elements?

While major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! don’t reveal all their algorithms for SEO we do know a few basics for good search engine optimization, partly because, in the case of google, they tell us. Here are a few:

1. Keyword Usage – There is a myth that the more a certain keyword is used in the content of the website the more it can help bring traffic to a website. Not true. However keywords do “dominate our search intent and interactions with the engines“. A keyword is a particular word or phrase the user is likely to type and search for, during the search process for a relevant return of content. In order for a website to develop a better ranking it should have relevant keyword in titles, text and meta data.
   
2. Page titles- The page titles of the websites also hold significant relevance for search engine optimization. The title of a page is one of the first things a user and a search engine will check before going through the website. Hence a page title with the particular keyword is of great help for search engine optimization.
3. Relevant content- The most effective way to get a better SEO positioning will be to write content in your website which is relevant to a user. The fact that “content is king” cannot be emphasized more and hence website developers should pay particular attention to the content of their website. It also makes it easier for search engines to crawl pages where content matches the users search. 
4. Site Structure- The site structure of any website has to be properly constructed so that a ‘search bot’ may easily find and crawl your website. Major search engine robots look for easily accessible websites to present their results of a search. While building your website make sure that you put what you want the search engine to see, at the top of the page and remember Robots read words not pictures.
5. Link Building- Links are like recommendations from other websites which guide the user to your website. Or like my 17 year old nephew says…”That’s kind of like Cred building online right.” Yeh thats about it! It helps you create better awareness of your website,  higher traffic and a much needed competitive edge over other websites in your market. It is one of the most important and difficult tasks of search engine optimization.
6. Social Networking Sites- Adding social media widgets and follow us links to your site is a great way to allow people, Visitors, to pass on information that they found interesting or useful to their network while at the same time building your connections and site awareness.
7. Site maps- Search engines like Google go through a page’s site map before presenting it as a potential result to the user. Basically an XML code guides the the search bots to the desired content of the users search without having to go through graphic menus.
8. Local Search- Because much business happens on a local level it makes good sense to add your business and site information in lots of local search directories. i.e yellow pages, yelp etc.  Localized searches have taken precedence over normal searches. Your search results will be giving you results according to the place where you live. Location based search. This makes your search more relevant and also helps local business.

These are just a few basic key points to keep in mind while building and planning for SEO.

What are your thoughts regarding the more core aspects of Search Marketing and search engine optimization? Let us know your comments below or post it on Twitter/MediaWright. Cheers.

Do robots like your source code?

I was searching the other day for a robots.txt file  example and it took me a few minutes to find some fragmented samples in forums. So here is a quick post for you wordpress bloggers who are managing your own Search Engine Optimization..SEO.

Joomla fortunately, automatically sets up a robot.txt file when you do your install through cpanel.

With wordpress for some reason, you need to do it manually. I find this a bit bizarre especially since WP espouses to be very search engine friendly right out of the gate. Anyways here is a a basic robot.txt sample.

Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */feed
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Allow: /wp-content/uploads

# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# digg mirror
User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Copy and paste this into a file named robots.txt;

You can use notepad, word or any text program will work. Then, upload the this to the root level of your domain. Another way is to just add a plugin to your wordpress blog. There are several robot.txt plugins to choose from, some will add a meta robots tag to your wordpress pages.

Here is another more comprehensive wordpress robots.txt example.

For more tips on robot.txt and search engine optimization you can post a question in the comments section.

Note, if you are a building blog, wordpress has the best user interface and is great for fast preformatted content development. However if you are building a website with several different types of content that need function, I would check  out Joomla 1.5 and it’s joomla seo extensions.

What CMS platform do you prefer for building the best search engine optimization into your website, Joomla, Drupal or WordPress?

This is a list of SEO Blogs written by some of todays foremost SEO experts. A good place to start and keep going back if you want to stay up on the latest search engine optimization news, strategies and practices.

SEO Blogs that provide daily online marketing training.

If you have more great SEO resources or notable people to add please let me know.

Just a quick post. This a pretty cool and useful SEM tool if your an SEO advanced or just a beginner. It is a link popularity checker plus a back link analysis tool. As part of the SEOmoz portfolio of tools Open Site Explorer is powered by the Linkscape Web index. See a complete review of this tool.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

These are a collection of articles on the How To: of Search Engine Optimization for 2009. This list was compiled from several websites of leading industry professionals. It is a good place to get started and revisit when defining your objectives, strategy, tactics, Do’s and Don’ts of your SEO program.These articles range from the beginner to the advanced.

1. The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO: by SEOmoz.
2. SEO Guide for Designers: by Web designer wall.
3. The Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet: by SEOmoz.
4. The SEO Guide to Information Architecture: by Adam Audette.
5. The SEO Success Pyramid: by Matt McGee.
6. What is the Definition of SEO?: by Jeremy Schoemaker.
7. Online SEO Tools: The Ultimate Collection: by Search Engine Journal.
8. How to Get New Web Sites to Rank Quickly: by Aaron Wall.
9. Tools of the SEO Trade: by Search engine land.
10. Keyword Density SEO Myths: by Hobo SEO.
11. The Most Powerful SEO Tactic: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify: by Eric Enge
12. Content is NOT Always King and SEO is not always bad: by Thinkseer.
13. Don’t Sour Your Link Juice by Forgetting Basic SEO: by Loren Baker.
14. How Much Money is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business: SeoBook.
15. How to be an SEO Service Provider: by SEObook.

Please add your comments or suggestions for this list or any new valuable additions would benefit our readers.

If you work in Joomla a fair bit as I do, at some point you will be considering the best way to eliminate duplicate content.

Within the Joomla.org site there are a couple of options for the Joomla Canonical URL Tag that you may want to consider. These are pretty simple to use, yet I find not the most effective way to deal with duplicate content in Joomla.

Joomla Canonical and SEO extensions in general are not as effective as the WordPress SEO plugins. If you have a choice in building a client site that needs more SEO ease and effectiveness out of the box then wordpress is your best product.

Joomla however is great product for more functionality and really has a much more sophisticated open source CMS platform for easily building and maintaining more complex business websites.

So if your are building a dynamic CMS using joomla, I find the best way to solve your duplicate content issues is by employing one or both of these methods:

1. Do a .htaccess rewrite and /or 2. Do a simple redirect within your cpanel

1 .htaccess rewrite

This file is located in your public html (www) folder.

What this does. It rewrites your domain from http://yourdomain.com to  http://www.yourdomain.com

This is a permanent rewrite that will also be reflected in the address bar of your browser.

Add this script to your .htaccess.

2. The Redirect

Since Joomla doesn’t have any good Free plugins for this yet, here is a paid extension I found but have not yet tried…Joomla SEO 301 Redirect.

However if you have access to your cpanel you have two easy and better options:

1. Do a redirect under ‘Addon Domains’ and/or 2. Do a redirect under ‘Redirects’

1. Add-on Domains
Use this if you have a parked domain on top of your site domain and you want to make sure that Google isn’t indexing your parked domain. Just follow the instructions in ‘figure A’.

Figure A

2. Redirects

Use this if you want to redirect individual duplicate content pages.

i.e http://yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_user&view=photos&return=aHR0c

to:

http://www.yourdomain.com/user/Charles-Grimm/photos.html

I know I have cut to the chase here pretty quickly, but if you have any questions or comments on SEO for Joomla please let me know in the comments area. Cheers C.

Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors for 2009

If you are really interested in digging into SEO and building traffic to your site then you need to check out the new 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors list. This list gives you an “all you need to know” resource that was scored by a panel of 72 SEO experts…SEOMOZ

With 149 Total Factors there is a lot of information that you can use to engineer your website and marketing strategy for a better search engine rank.

This list is narrowed down to the top 10 factors showing the first most important factor for each category.

The Top 10 Scored Categories

Category                                 Factors

Bottom Line for Small Business

Concentrate on the top 1-3 factors in each category and you will be well on your way to a higher rank on Google and more traffic to your website and blog.

See the top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors for 2009 and the complete rankings data.

I came across Frugal theme for word press. I like the clean structure. It looks a lot like Matt Cutts (Google) theme. I am thinking about using this a main theme for all our clients that want to now add a blog to there Joomla website. The My Blog extension in Joomla1.5 is the best that is available for Joomla but it is still not as good as using a word press theme. WordPress is built for blogging and has the styling that is more suitable for copy writers. It’s SEO structure is much better out of the box than Joomla”s. It appears that Joomla is moving toward more blog type templates and better SEO and WordPress is getting more into business websites. For now  think I will stick with Joomla for websites and WordPress for blogs.

I am thinking about doing an experiment: I have just set up my SearchMarketinglife.com blog site in using a Joomla platform. I think will set up the same structure with OnlineMarketinglife.com using a WordPress platform and see which one does the best from and SEO stand point.  Hopefully I won’t get penalized by Google for duplicate content. If you have any thoughts on this please add your comments.

I came across a great SEO resource the other day. Since it can be confusing as to what are the best SEO practices; this resource by SEOMOZ helps by ranking the best organic SEO practices as voted by 37 of the top known SEO experts internationally.

Today I just want examine one of these practices. Anchor text. Some would agree that anchor text is very important in the overall Google algorithm while others will say its importance is below other key factors. What is anchor text? Anchor text are the key words and there underlining hyperlinks that appear in the content body of your articles or web pages. Google weights these words with importance because when you anchor a word or words you are saying that this is a concise description or an accurate extension of what this topic is all about.