Google SEO Website Health Check Tool

In this video, Aaron Wall of SEOBook goes over the Website Health Check tool.  It shows you some very important information about a web page, so you can find out if your website is properly optimized.

The information you can find out includes:

• Whether you have proper title tags.
• Whether you’ve included a meta description.
• If you have duplicate title tags.
• If you have duplicate descriptions.
• And much more.

You can export the information to CSV so you can look at the data later, compare it against future or past information, and manipulate it however you need.

The tool is very handy, and it’s free, so I was really happy to watch this video.  I’ve been playing with the tool myself, and it has shown me a surprising nubmer of things I’ve missed in some of my sites.  I’m going to be really busy over the next few days fixing some of these problems!

Create Google Friendly Page Titles

This is another video by Aaron Wall of SEOBook.  It tells you how to come up with great page titles that will not only get you ranked well in Google and other search engines, but will also get clicked when users see them in teh SERPs.

First, he says you shouldn’t stuff a bunch of keywords into the title.  Page titles should be very clickable, because they are the link users see when your site shows up in the listings.

Also, the earlier your keyword appears in the title, the most prominent it is.  However, he suggests putting one or two words in front of the main keyword, because sometimes pages can be filtered from the search results if the keyword appears immediately at the beginning.

Aaron also says you should make sure to use the meta description, because this is what appears as your description in Google.  If you don’t use this, Google will either use a seemingly random snippet from your page, or it will pull the description from DMOZ if you are listed there.

This is a very handy guide to choosing page titles that are both SEO and user friendly.

SEO Keyword Research Basics

Keyword research is one of the most vital elements of any SEO campaign.  In this video, SEOBook’s Aaron Wall explains some different keyword research techniques and tools, and how you can find the keywords that will help you get more search engine traffic.

One critical component he mentions is using your existing traffic to determine the new keywords you try to rank for.  Aaron claims it’s easier to rank for keywords that are related to the ones you’re already ranked and getting traffic for than it is to rank for brand new keywords.  (So basically, if you were ranking well for “equestrian videos”, then it would probably be easier to rank for “horse show videos” than to rank for “saddles and bridles”.)

Aaron says you can use the WordTracker keyword tool to find those related keywords and keyword groups, and he demonstrates this.

Hey also shows a tool called Quitura, which can be used to find related phrases that might work for a certain keyword.  The site is rather “smart”, and is able to find related phrases that may not actually contain the exact seed keyword.

He also shows other tools, such as Compete, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and a spreadsheet he created that helps you with this type of research.

As usual, Aaron has create a very useful video.  The tip about targeting keywords related to those you already rank well for is absolutely invaluable!

Link Building for SEO

In this video, Will Reynols discusses ways to build links for SEO.

For example, he says sites with “?” and “=” in their URL are not as useful for SEO purposes. He says he never gets links on pages with those symbols in their URLs.

He also says you should focus on getting links from pages with fewer links rather than focusing mostly on PageRank.  He says a link on a PR 3 website that has only 10 outgoing links would be far more valuable than a link on a PR8 site that has 800 outgoing links.

He warns about people who sell links on their site or trade reciprocal links, but include the “nofollow” tag.  You should always make sure this tag isn’t included on links to your site.

He says you should try to make sure all of your incoming links include keywords.  Instead of getting links that say “http://www.yoursitename.com” you should ask people to link to you with “Your Keyword”.

Next, Will says SEOChat.com has a tool for checking out the PageRank of the various sites that link to your competitors, or to your own site.  He also talks about a very useful SEO plugin for SEO.

He also says you should just ask webmasters for links.  You might get a yes or a no, but it only takes a small amount of time to ask, and those yes’s you get will be extremely valuable.

Will is absolutely outstanding in his SEO knowledge, and I absolutely love his videos.  I recommend taking a look at all of his videos!

SEO Best Practices by Will Reynolds

Will Reynolds talks about the 5 things that a lot of people believe are incredibly important in SEO that actually DON’T make much of a difference.  Then he goes into some of the  strategies you absolutely SHOULD use.

He mentions that keyword research is absolutely the most important part of SEO by far.  He says he spends more time on keyword research than any other phase.

He says the meta description tag is extremely important, because this is what will help you get more clicks when people see your link in Google.

Will Reynolds SEO videos are really good information, and I always watch them whenever I see them.  This guy truly knows his stuff!

Top SEO Tools

This video talks about some of the most important SEO tools.

SpyFu is one of the most important tools.  You can use SpyFu to research the keywords people are using for their websites and AdWords keywords.  It will show many of their competitiors, as well as other domains owned by a particular company.

Next, he talks about a huge page of information about Google SEO.  He doesn’t mention the URL, but I know the page myself.  You can see it here.

HitTail is the next tool he talks about.  You can place some code on your page, and it will tell you which keywords are being used to find your pages, and where you rank for those keywords.  It will also show you which keywords you should optimize your pages for.

This video only shows the first three of 20 SEO tools.  It’s useful, but it does try to direct traffic to a website to get the rest.

Google’s Matt Cutts SEO Tips

This is an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts from usatoday.com.

In it, Matt goes over the five most important, basic, common sense SEO tips, and how you can use them to get better rankings in the Google search engine.

1. First he talks about keywords.  He talks about how you should put keywords on the page.  Very much common sense.

2. Next he talks about how important title tags are.  He mentions that when some searches on Google, the title is the first thing they see, and it is what they click.  So they aren’t just good for SEO, but for getting people to click YOUR link over someone else’s.  Also, he mentions the importance of the meta description, because that is also what is shown to users, and will help get them to click.

3. Then they talk about how to get links back to a site.  Matt suggests starting a blog.  Having a blog that links back to your site will not only help you get links back to your main site, but can also help you build a community where you can keep in touch with your customers.  He also recommends participating in Google News, StumbleUpon, etc. and using those sites to get ideas for the kinds of things people want to know about.

4. Matt claims one of the biggest misconceptions about getting into Google is that you have to pay for it, but you don’t.  He also says that buying advertising on Google AdWords will not help you improve your ranking.

5. Matt also says it usually doesn’t take very long to get into Google.  The entire index is refreshed every month.  He says you can go to Google to submit your site, and you can also use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap.  This can help you get indexed in days instead of having to wait potentially weeks or months to be found and indexed.

Overall there are some useful tips, but nothing groundbreaking.  The best thing I got our of it was that I need to be submitting a sitemap for every website I make.  I often forget this, and it really makes a big difference when I do it.

Matt Cutts On Removing Pages from Google

In this video, Google’s Matt Cutts discusses the method of removing a page from the Google index using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

He goes over some ways to keep pages from being crawled and indexed in the first place, too.  So if you have pages on your site, like your download pages, that you don’t want indexed, you can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to get the pages removed.

If you’ve never checked out the Google Webmaster Tools, I highly recommend it.  The tools are incredibly useful, and they will be invaluable to you in many ways.

They will help you:

• Submit your sitemap to Google.
• Find out the top search terms people use to find your site.
• Find out where you rank for those search terms.
• Find out if there are any errors on your site.
• Find out the backlinks your site has.
• And more!

SEO Toolbar from SEOBook

The SEO Toolbar is a Firefox Addon that gives you a lot of information about the sites you visit.  This information can be extremely valuable to your SEO efforts.

You can find out about the number of backlinks a site has, how many edu and gov backlinks a site has, whether the page is found in DMOZ and Yahoo, the site’s PageRank, it’s age, and more!

There’s also an advanced information button that will show you more information, including bookmarks in del.icio.us, number of Diggs, number of Stumbles at StumbleUpon, posts on Twitter, and a lot more.

There’s also information about their Alexa ranking, Google Trends for Websites, Compete, and other stuff that shows you data about the competition.

There are dozens and dozens more features.  I could honestly go on an on all day, but you should definitely pick up this tool right now!

By the way, did I mention it’s FREE?

Click here to get the SEO Toolbar!