SEO Tools and Tricks that Help You Think like a Search Spider - More Problems and Solutions
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Problems:
- You have fewer backlinks than your competitors
- You have poor link partners
- You're linking to a site that I've banned
- Your backlink text is repetitive and/or bad
- You have no fresh content
Google is the best tool to use to diagnose the above problems. The Google "link:" operator allows you to check your backlinks and evaluate the sites that link to your page. You can tell whether Google has banned a site, if the URL is not in their index at all. Use the "site:" operator for this.
You probably know whether the content on your site is fresh or not, but if you want to know what Google thinks, then click on the "cache" link next to your listing to see the last time Google paid your site a visit. If it was over a week ago, Google got bored and wandered to greener content pastures. It's time to add some new content. You can also use the "cache:" operator to get cache information. Here's a complete list of Google's operator commands (what they mean and how to use them). You can also download and utilize the Google Toolbar to check PageRank and view your backlinks.
Google may only show a handful of backlinks, when you have thousands. The reasons for this are not entirely certain, though it may have to do with how Google weighs each incoming link in terms of popularity and/or relevancy. With this in mind, I recommend using one of the free link popularity tools available online. A couple of my favorites include the link popularity tool on Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com, MarketLeap's Link Popularity Checker and SEOChat.com's own tool to evaluate link popularity. If you have a lot of backlinks it will quickly get tedious to try and read all the link text to check for duplicity in language. The best tool I've found to do this is SEO Elite, which isn't free but will save your hours of time (and time is money, folks!)
Problems:
- You have duplicate content
- Your site is slower to download compared to your competitors
- You have dynamic URLs
- You don't have a site map
- Your navigation is image-based
- You have no ALT tags or meaningless ALT tags
The above is a miscellaneous list of problems that can be diagnosed as follows. Check CopyScape for duplicate content or perform a search for an exact line of text on the page you are evaluating. Alexa.com will tell you how fast your website downloads compared with others competing for your key term (assuming you are in the Alexa database). You probably know whether your site uses dynamic URLs, but if you're not sure, click into an interior page and check for odd characters in the URL, such as question marks or equal signs. You can use any browser to see the URL string of a particular page in your site. Google has been indexing dynamic URLs, but if the string is particularly long and the variables particularly profuse, Google may not index the entire site as well as it would if the URLs are search engine friendly and/or do not contain as many variables.
A site map is self-explanatory. It's a page that lists links to all the pages of your site. If you don't have one, create one so that Google can find all of your relevant pages easily.
If you use images for all of your navigation and don't assign meaningful ALT tags to them, a site map is especially critical. Googlebot can't read images; it just sees code. If you scroll over a navigation image and no text appears, it means that you have not assigned an ALT tag to that image. You can also view the source code and review your images that way. Assigning meaningful ALT tags to images helps with usability as well as search engine friendliness (for people with slow connections or browsers that have images turned off, for example), though the best case scenario is to use text-based navigation in place of image-based navigation.
Conclusion
The tools that are available to help you analyze your search engine friendliness are profuse and often free. This article just scrapes the surface of what's out there. Read forums to see what the experts use and try out the tools yourself to find your favorites. Proper diagnosis of search engine friendliness is the building block for creating a comprehensive, competent search engine optimization strategy that will definitely give you an edge over the competition.
Keep in mind that while it is helpful to approach SEO from the search engine's perspective, you are not writing for the search engines. You are writing for your visitors. So don't overdo it.
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