For small businesses and fledgling companies, being able to get the best out of your website at the earliest possible opportunity will strongest possible position for rapid growth. You have your website built, you’ve filled it with content and optimised the pages. That means your work is done, right? Unfortunately it isn’t as easy as that otherwise we’d all be rich. Once you have your site up and running, you need monitor it to find out where you stand within your industry and make regular tweaks to iron out any flaws which are contributing to the failing of your website.
“But how do I find out whether or not my website is working and how do I make it 100% efficient?” I might hear you say. The answer is simple; use the free tools that are around you. They will show you where your site is excelling, where it is failing and will likewise do the same for your competitors. Getting an extra-detailed analysis of the market you’re working in and the big players within it will help you to devise your plan of attack once you decide to create your own foothold within it.
Here we’ve put together a list of 8 helpful tools when combined together will give you all the information you need to run an effective website for your business. The takeaway from using these tools should leave you with a pretty comprehensive plan on paper of what you need to do to begin the ascent to the top of the SERPs.
#1 Keyword Optimisation
Finding keywords to match your products is easy and there isn’t actually much thought needed to brainstorm them; if you’re experts within the industry like you claim to be then the keywords should come naturally. Likewise, finding words that are popular within the industry is easy also. The trick however is to find words that your competitors aren’t using but can still match the products you sell. Effective keyword optimisation is arguably the most important on-page optimisation technique a website can use. Google Adwords shows you the search volumes of a particular query. You can query as many keywords and phrases as you like; not only does it show you the local and global search volumes for each but it also suggests similar words and phrases that may produce larger searches that may be lesser competition.
#2 Page Rank
Page rank is a mythical number designed for ego boosting. It doesn’t have any ranking factors in the eyes of the search engines, however if you have a higher page rank, then the chances are you are doing things right in terms of SEO. Page ranks exist for every indexed page and range from 1-10 with 10 being the strongest. We suggest that if you have a page rank of at least 3 then you’re doing most of the things correctly. A page rank of 6 and above are extremely strong pages. If your website or any of it’s pages are a page rank of 6 or above then you’re obviously a force to be reckoned with within the industry and are more than likely influencing a huge proportion of the market already. A great tool to check page rank can be found at www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank. Alternatively, there are extensions available that you can add straight to your toolbar so whenever you visit a page, the page rank is shown immediately in the toolbar.
#3 Link Building
Link building is one of the most influential ranking factors in 2012 and refers to the amount and the authority strength of links pointing to your pages. A link from an authoritative website is basically an appreciation of your page from a reputable source; a thumbs-up. Google recognises the amount of acknowledgements a site is receiving from third party sites and will rank them higher if there are numerous links and those links are strong; from sites with higher page ranks. OpenSiteExplorer is a great free tool which will show you the amount of links pointing to a specific page. You can check your own pages and even your competitors to get an idea of where you are within the industry at the moment and how far away/infront you are in relation to your compatitors. It also shows you the page authority, domain authority and the linking root domains. All of which are ranking factors for search.
#4 Search Engine Saturation
Search engine saturation (SES) is the name given to the number of indexed pages you have on your site throughout the search engines i.e. Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. The more pages indexed, the more potential reach you have as each page will be targetting different keywords enabling you to potentially rank in a number of various search queries. The key to improving your search engine saturation is content. The main way in which companies create more pages is by incorporating a blog within their website. Consistently pumping out news and information will give you better SES and, at the same time, will get more eyes viewing your content. The more eyes you have looking at your blog and it’s content the more inclined visitors will be to browse your products. More browsers naturally equates to increased sales. It’s up to you to increase your saturation, however if you find yourself struggling for time, it is advised that you outsource your copywriting so your site doesn’t look ‘idle’. If you was wondering what your SES is, there’s a free tool at SEOBook that will scrape the information for you. You can also use this tool to compare your saturation with competitors’.
#5 Search Positions
Appearing higher in the search engines is a major factor which defines successful, lucrative websites from mediocre/’stale’ websites. A website which has reach to high volumes of searchers is more likely to convert those searches into sales. Searching a query on Google and then laboriously wading through each results page to find out where your page is ranked would be a thankless task with no guarantee that you will even be ranking in the top 5,000,000 reults. Fortunately in the digital era there are tools that will do the wading for you. There is a great blog post by Yoav Ezer offering free downloads of a Microsoft Excel tool designed to scrape results, visualise your search positions and monitor your rankings. Knowing where you currently rank for specific keywords will give you a better understanding of which pages you need to be optimising further with back links etc.
#6 Site Maps
Sitemaps are designed to organise your website. They offer search engine spiders – who crawl the pages – easier routes to your individual pages meaning they’re able to index them quickly and efficiently. Google are placing extra emphasis on site speeds as a ranking factor in recent times therefore will de-value a site and it’s pages if it is difficult to navigate. www.xml-sitemaps.com is a good resource to quickly create sitemaps for your site in XML and HTML format, meaning that not only do the search engine spiders get easier navigation of your site, but human visitors will also find it easier to navigate. Usability is arguably the most important ranking factor for 2012, so having an easily navigate-able site will definitely set you apart from your competitors.
#7 Meta Data
There is a lot more to on-page optimisation than simply incorporating a few relevant keywords here and there within your page. Areas of the page such as the meta tags, titles, images and meta descriptions to name a few, are all opportunities to optimise your page further. How can you tell if your page is optimised enough though? Google Rankings ultimate SEO tool is a fantastic free service which offers an SEO analysis of all your meta data, titles, images and content and gives you a comprehensive review of all your pages. It’s a great way to find the places you missed that could be better optimised for search. CMS plugins such as Yoast’s WordPress plugin are great time saving tools as well as they can check your on-page optimisation while you’re typing your content.
#8 Site Analytics
I thought I’d save the best until last in terms of analysing your website’s efficiency. In order to ensure your website is working at 100% efficiency, you need to delve deep into it’s stats and facts. Google Analytics is a free web-based tool created by Google to help websites spot where they may be going wrong and helps them improve. It tracks the traffic visiting your site and offers detailed information about these visitors. It is the most popular analytic software on the market and has the ability to visualise your websites information and have a good nosey at the numbers. You can find out things like traffic visiting the site, the time on site and time spent on pages, conversion rates, where your visitors came from and what search terms they used to get there. The advantage you have over your competition by knowing fine details like these will enable you to emphasise the areas that are working the best for you and implement them quickly whilst your competitors still use trial and error techniques.
So, in a nutshell… For any start-up company, beginner marketer or small business. The benefits you can get from utilising these free tools around you will put you ahead of the game and will have you motoring up the search rankings quickly. After all, the big players in the industry only got to where they are by using these tools so why shouldn’t you? Blow away the competition immediately around you and aim for higher ground. There’s no point in treading water or looking behind you when the only place you should be concentrating on is straight ahead!
Had enough on-page optimisation? Check out our post about more advanced off-page techniques.
Join in the conversation to add some free tools that I may have missed. The aim is to help young businesses as much as we can so the more tools at their disposal the merrier.
