Tools to help you improve your website rankings
This article is the first in the Butter Side Up SimpleSeries, published every fortnight.
If you want to improve your website traffic, you’ll need to know where you stand. This article outlines a few of the many freely available tools you can use to check your progress, and make improvements.
Google Analytics
If you have a website and you don’t already have google analytics, now’s the time to register! Google analytics gives you information on the sites that people came from to get to yours, how they navigated through it and even which key words they typed into google to find you. It even shows you where in the world your traffic comes from on a map. Using all this information you can set goals and create reports. With the benchmarking tool you can even compare traffic figures for similar websites.
If you’re trying to optimise your website for search engines, signing up for analytics is the first step you should take so that you can track your progress and see which methods are working best for you. For example if you link share with another website, you’ll be able to see how much of your website traffic comes from their site.
Google Search Central
Google webmaster central allows you to see the top search queries used to find your site, links to your site, page errors and much, much more. It’s a great tool for identifying problems such as broken links and crawl errors, and the diagnostic section often offers solutions.
You can also upload sitemaps and robot text, which help to index your site for google and other search engines. For more information on site maps, go to Simple SEO – Part 2 – Metadata
Ranking Today Site Checkup
Amongst the multitude of tools offered by Ranking Today, is the site checkup tool, which rates your website in terms of how appealing it is to search engines, giving you a mark out of 5. The score is based on a number of factors, including keyword density and page load times, and the site provides really simple explanations of what the reports mean and how your score can be improved.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Again, there are many tools out there that help you to research your keywords effectively. The Google Keyword Tool allows you to either enter the URL of your site so it can scan your content for appropriate keywords, or enter keyword phrases to compare their relevance and popularity.
Researching keywords is really important for search engine optimisation – we look at keywords in more detail in Simple SEO – Part 2 – Metadata.
So there are a few of our favourite tools – there are thousands out there on the web, and many of them are free – so go for it – see how you’re doing – it’s the first step in trying to make improvements.
We are always happy to assist faithful followers of Butter Side Up, so if you need help using the tools, interpreting the results, or want to improve your website ranking, don’t hesitate to contact us.
