Welcome to part two of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last article we discussed the variety of

Firefox extensions used for SEO. In this article we’ll discuss some of the free and affordable tools you can use to better your organic optimization efforts. By affordable I mean for virtually everyone so I’m going to set the bar at $100/yr or ownership. Admittedly, we use tools that cost more than this but many of those tools will be out of some people’s price range.

Here are some of the key tools you need to use to help insure the successful optimization of your website.

Google Keyword Tool

Many of you are likely familiar with Google’s keyword tool, but it needs to be noted. This is a great resource for researching keywords. As with all keyword tools, it has its limitations and most would agree that it seems to overestimate search volume but nonetheless it is probably the best of the keyword tools out there, especially at the price.

Keyword Discovery

No individual set of data is perfect and no stage of the SEO process is more important than keyword research and selection. Keyword Discovery is a great tool to compare with the Google keyword data. Where you find commonalities you know that 2 independent sets of data agree. With a free trial that may itself work for many – it’s certainly worth looking into.

Keyword Spy

While the paid version of this tool is more than the $100/yr. max I noted previously – the free version provides some great data. Simply enter a competitor URL and you’ll find out some valuable data about the keywords they rank for both organically and in AdWords. This is great for competitor analysis as well as for finding keywords you might not have thought of.

Xenu Link Sleuth

A fantastic free tool that crawls websites, reporting back all the broken links. Over time, almost all sites get broken links. Running this tool periodically will help you find them so you can fix them.

Google Webmaster Tools

Arguably one of the most important of the SEO tools. Google Webmaster Tools allows webmasters (and SEO’s of course) to see their website the way Google does. With this tool you’ll get to see what your site is appearing for in the results, what pages on your site are linked to but don’t exist, and a wide array of errors and statistics.

With this information you can repair a number of issues. If your site is appearing for phrases that you’re not getting traffic from, you can review your titles and descriptions to see if you can improve your clickthrough rate. Xenu won’t show you the links from other sites that are pointing to pages that don’t exist – Google Webmaster Tools will. You’ll also find good backlink information for your site as well as a lot more.

Page Prowler

Page Prowler is a backlink research tool that allows the user to collect large amounts of potential backlink information, sort that data by site strength, and then proceed to pursue those backlinks. The value of this tool is primarily in the time it saves. It has no function that could not be done manually, but it can compile data that would otherwise take a person hours or days to collect quickly and easily.

Full disclosure – Shawn (the developer) asked me to advise on the development of this link building tool and I’m also assisting in it’s marketing. I was extremely impressed with Shawn’s first version of PR Prowler which includes some great functions and information. I felt the need to note this, but I’ll also note that we at Beanstalk use this tool regularly. I would not include it here if it didn’t deserve to be and I’d include it here if I had nothing to do with it other than my using it.

Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking is probably the most affordable of the better rank checking software programs. It has a ton of great features including scheduling and auto-report generation. You can set the searches to take place slowly to reduce the impact on the search engines. I still recommend to run it in the evening to further minimize your impact during high-volume search periods.

Multiple Keyword Rack-Checking Tool

This is probably one of the most popular tools on the Beanstalk site. One of the pet peeves I always had with online rank checking tools was checking rankings one-at-a-time. This tool allows you to check your rankings on Google ten at a time. Apparently others agree as it’s the most used tool of our set.

136 SEO Tools

While we’ve tried to include a solid set of very affordable tools in this article, you might find value in tools we don’t use. The “136 SEO Tools” page is regularly updated and includes some very interesting (though not part of my daily arsenal) tools. Highly recommended to visit at least once. I have it in my bookmarks and check back every couple months to see what new tools have been added.

Next Part

In part three of this article series we’ll be taking a look at a slew of invaluable SEO resources that you need to visit regularly to keep up-to-date on this ever-changing industry. While there are more than can be listed in a single article, I’ll be covering my first points of access when I’m looking for news or others’ opinions on SEO and search engine events.

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The global financial downturn is driving millions of people to try to earn extra income from the Internet, without losing what little they have.

Many thousands of internet entrepreneurs have succeeded and attained financial security. So what is their secret? How do they get a steady stream of visitors to their website and how do they persuade them to click the “Buy Now” button? By far the majority of marketers use a combination of Google Adwords and Search Engine Optimization.

Google Adwords carry millions of small ads every day, for every conceivable product or subject imaginable. So it must be the way to go, right? Sure, many people are making a good living from Adwords and a few can make a fortune at it. But, if you’ve tried it, then you’ll know it the true difficulties involved.

Being potentially very profitable, this market is very difficult to break into. First, you have to learn how this thing works, then you have to constantly improve your ads and you will need to spend money before you find the best performing keywords and the most profitable ads. You can set a daily limit to your spending but just twenty dollars a day will mop up 600 bucks in the first month.

Most popular keywords cost anywhere from 50 cents to 2/3 dollars per click, so twenty dollars won’t buy many clicks and, at a click-through rate of two or three percent, you will not get many visitors per day.

There are only about eight slots for ads on each page of Google, so the competition for these slots, particularly on the first page of results, is very fierce and often very sneaky. Each of the eight “tenants” of those valuable places on Page 1 are striving to get to position one, which, on average, gets over 70% of the traffic on that page and the only way to do that is to push the others down. All the Adwords users on the second and third pages are also fighting to climb up the greasy pole.

It is now possible to buy software that will allow you to spy on details of competitors’ campaigns and to see what keywords they are using and even what they are paying for each keyword, so you can potentially bid slightly higher and gain a higher position. If you do get your ad on Page One or Two, someone will be sniping at you with this type of software. Even if you have gained a comfortable position on Page 1 of Google, it is a constant struggle to maintain that position.

There is an alternative approach to running a successful Google Adwords campaign. You can employ a specialist team of experts, with the experience and the time to do the whole thing for you. The problem is, they won’t be interested unless you’re going to be a big spender on Adwords. That’s why I say that Google Adwords may be one of the most difficult ways to make money on line, certainly for a newcomer with little money to risk.

So how about Option Two? Search Engine Optimization. Surely this is the ultimate solution!

You learn how to design and build a web page which meets all Google’s guidelines (and I’ll tell you what they are) and then you get on Page One, with a page which costs nothing to be there and wait for the money to roll in. How cool is that?

This is all you need to do. Find a suitable keyword phrase (preferably 4 or 5 phrases) which gets at least 100 searches a day and which does not have many heavy hitters in the competition. 1,000 searches a day is obviously much better but is likely to have strong, well-established competition.

Then you need to get a domain name which incorporates the main keyword or phrase and build your web page so that it includes the keywords in the Title of the page; in the Description of the page; in the URL of the page; in the Headline of the page and in the Anchor Text of all links to other websites. That’s not too difficult, is it?

Then, to convince Google that yours is an “Authority” site, you need to get multiple links to your page, from other related sites, dealing with the same subject, whether it is Health, or Family, or whatever. The more important these other sites are, the more weight Google gives to these links. I can tell you, getting these links is hard work.

Here’s a real example. My website is on Page One of Google, for the phrase “Stop Arthritis Pain”, out of 2.1 million results. Last time I looked, it was at position 6, on Page One, and has been there for months. The same search phrase is on Page One of Yahoo (at position 2), out of 21.7 million results. Impressive eh?

I’ll bet you’re thinking “that page must be pulling in a ton of money”. Well, it isn’t. The reason is, that keyword phrase is not a popular search term and only gets about 20 visitors a day, so it makes a few dollars a day but nothing significant. Think about those other twenty million pages, who are getting even less traffic than those on page one.

So, if you can get onto Page One of the big search engines, you may make a lot of money but 99.9% of the pages up there are having no impact at all, in terms of making money for their owners. In many cases, it’s a lot of time and effort for no reward.

A well established method, used by High Street businesses for many years, is gaining credibility in online marketing. Make money by giving stuff away for FREE! We’ve all heard of BOGOF – “Buy One, Get One Free!” How about, “Get this valuable stuff, without buying anything”? Many internet marketers, smarter than I, claim to be making excellent earnings with this method and without the aid of Google Adwords or the Search Engines.

This is a quote from an expert, who has many profitable websites from using these methods -

“There is no more powerful way to sell your product than by ‘preselling’ it with free and useful information, typically with a free ebook.”

Next, Learn Here More About Google Adwords … And Then Watch This FREE 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO Course

Everyday it seems, people are asking me the optimum numbers of inbound links they need to acquire for their website in order to rank well in Google.

My answer is going to seem a little flip, but it is the honest, best answer.

Answer: You need more inbound links – of equal or higher quality – than what your competitors have.

Albert Einstein argued that any mathematical formula that required pages of calculations did not contain within it “the mind of God”.

So when Albert Einstein developed E=mc2, then Einstein had fulfilled the promise of a simple formula that could encompass the brilliance of God.

When people wonder as to how many inbound links they might need to acquire in order to rank in the Top 4 of Google’s search results or even the Top 10 of Google’s SERPs, they are generally hoping that someone will be able to give them a numeric answer, so that they know whether they can afford to undertake the process or not.

I understand the WHY of the question, but there is no canned answer that will work for everyone.

Remember, your competitor may be asking the same question and undertaking the same processes as you are, trying to accomplish the same goal.

No one can truly begin to understand the answer to this question, until one has take the time to do an Inbound Link Comparison Analysis of all of your competitors in the Top 10 spots of Google’s SERPs.

• You need to look at the Top 10 listings in Google for a particular keyword.
• You need to do backlink checks for all ten URLs in Google’s search listings, and you need to check those numbers across a variety of sources, including Google, Yahoo and any other tool you can find to do a check. (Google and Yahoo both tend to understate the actual link counts. While Yahoo will show you more than what Google does, they also show a number of “no consequence” links in their results.)
• You need to look at the quality of a few of the pages that offer links to the URLs in the search results.

This is not an easy process to undertake. I have done it before, but the best you can hope for is a “snapshot” of what is out there, and therefore, what you need to accomplish.

Note: If Wikipedia turns up in your search query, few people with small budgets will ever be able to dislodge Wikipedia in the search results. What they make up for in a small number of inbound links, they more than make up for with links from dozens or hundreds of PR4, PR5 and PR6 pages. Wikipedia is the king of Internal Linking, and they use that to a great degree to rank extraordinarily high in Google’s search listings.

Your analysis should seek to uncover how many links a page has to it.

As a general rule of thumb, Google will show you less than 1% of the existing number of links for a web page. Yahoo will sometimes show closer to 5% of the existing number of links for a web page, but they will not show you the highest quality of those links.

So, as you strive to gain a “snapshot” picture of the playing field, you want to take Google’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 100. Then you want to take Yahoo’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 20, then cut the number in half to acknowledge the number of worthless crap links they have in their database. Once you have achieved these two numbers, then I tend to call the truth “somewhere in the middle”.

With your “somewhere in the middle” number in hand, then you need to look at the quality of links to a few of those search listings, to get an idea of whether those links exist on higher quality pages or simply junk pages.

If those links are on junk pages, then the goal could be achieved by just working the numbers. But if there are a lot of high PageRank pages in the mix, then whatever number is in your hand, should be multiplied, perhaps 100-fold, to overcome the quality of pages that link to your competitors.

If you get the idea that my simple formula leads to a complicated answer, then you are right.

All of the numbers that I have included in my sample formula are based on rough speculation, as the “snapshot” offers you your best hope of understanding the challenge in front of you.

While the number of inbound links may be relatively easy to determine, the link quality is a factor that is really hard to pin down.

• If you determine that you only need 300 inbound links to rank with the big boys, you may be right.
• Your 300 inbound links number should also be quantified against the number of links that Google will count worthy, so you may need 1200 links to get 300 links that Google will deem worthy. This calculation depends more on the “quality of your content”, rather than the “quantity of your content”.
• When all is said and done and your 300 Google-worthy links have not yet put you on page one, then you know that the quality of the links pointing at your competitors is greater than the quality of the links pointing to you.

If you were hoping for an easy answer, I am sorry that I could not help you with that.

But with this explanation of the challenge, you may be better prepared to answer the big question, the question that is really on your mind:

=== Are my hopes of achieving good rankings in Google within my reach?

I tend to throw “worry” to the wind and just start working. I don’t worry if I can afford to do it or not. I simply start doing, and I know that in one month, one year or five, I will have built enough value in my website that my competitors are going to be the ones who are trying to figure out if they can unseat me!

The key to success with www.ezinearticles.com is quality and employing keywords in the correct density.

Keyword Density means how many times you use a certain keyword in your article.

People tend to overuse keywords with an intention of attracting the search engines but unfortunately what happens is the articles end up reading oddly. I personally prefer to keep the keyword density below 2%.

I realize that recently 1-2% keyword density has been a lot more effective.

However, for a long time 1-3% was the perfect keyword density…at least in my experience.

Here are 7 tips that might help increase your views and Click Throughs.

1. Be serious and professional with your headlines/article titles. And have your strongest keyword in the title too.

2. Talk to your readers in a conversational tone.

3. Be a teacher! Remember your article must give away a solution or some useful knowledge.

4. Use a 1-3% keyword density and try to be as nonchalant as possible with your keyword placement.

5. ALWAYS write 100% unique articles, don’t go spinning and twirling.

6. Give a strong, but REALISTIC call to action in your author resource box and include a link to your site of course.

7. Make sure your article delivers what it promises.

Next, Discover Here More Tips On How To Make Money Online …
… And Then Watch This FREE 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO Course