Jan 18, 2010

My Digital Life Editorial Team

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15 SEO Tools from Google Essential for Publishers and Webmasters

SEO, or search engine optimization, is an important and essential for the success of a website. Done properly, SEO can improve both the volume or quality of traffic to the website from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

Google, been the most popular search engine in the world, provides lots of tools and services to publishers, advertisers, webmasters, bloggers and etc. All these tools are meant for various seemingly unrelated purposes. While not explicitly marks as online SEO tools, when these Google online tools been used together, these free services from Google can provide formidable and valuable information, statistics and suggestions to optimize a web page or web site for higher search engine results ranking position (SERP).

Here’s the list of 10 Google SEO tools, all of them free.

1. Google Webmaster Tools – Google Webmaster Tools provides publishers with detailed reports about web pages’ visibility on Google, such as indexing status, internal and external pages that link to the site, Google search queries that drive traffic to the site, crawl errors, and many other features and tips which allows webmasters to improve the site, such as using robots.txt, sitemaps, and preferred domain.
2. Google Analytics – Essentially a web traffic tracking and analytic tool that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. With Google Analytics data, publishers can make decisions on what’s the popular contents to publish.
3. Google Traffic Estimator – A tool for Google AdWords advertisers, but the Google Traffic Estimator can be used to get an idea how popular or how many page views will be the content that based on certain keywords, topics or phrases.
4. Google Keyword Tool – Another tool for Google AdWords advertisers, which can be used to get new keyword ideas to generate the content, or put in the best words inside the articles to attract more visitors via search engine.
5. Google Search-based Keyword Tool – Another Google AdWords tool which can be used to find and generate keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to the website, based on actual Google search queries.
6. Google Website Optimizer – A free website testing and optimization tool, which can be used to find out what site content and designs which best resonates with the visitors, by letting Website Optimizer to show different versions of website to visitors while tracking the performance of each version.
7. Google Zeitgeist – Follow the trend is not only applicable as investment strategy, publishers can get idea for new content based on trending subjects or topics too. Google Zeitgeist lists most popular, fastest rising and fastest falling search terms and keywords for the past years.
8. Google Trends – If past data of Google Zeitgeist is not meaningful for SEO, Google Trends allows user to view and compare the how often (up to 5) keywords or terms are been searched on Google over time, how frequently the topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.
9. Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, which is essentially advanced version of Google Trends, users can compare search volume patterns for a phrase, word or terms across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties, regardless of popularity.
10. Trends for Websites – Google Trends for website traffic data, which displays visitors and ranking by region, related sites visited and related keywords or terms searched. Important to get a knowledge of competitors.
11. Hot Trends (Searches) – For publishers who want to jump on the bandwagon on what’s happening right now, Hot Trends 批top 40 fastest-rising search queries right now, updated continuously throughout the day.
12. Google Ad Planner: A media management tool for website advertisers and publishers, but potentially provide valuable information on own and competitors’ websites, with statistical profile on information such as traffic statistics, visitor demographics, visitors interests, related sites, keywords search for, daily unique visitors and etc.
13. Google PageRank via Google Toolbar – Google PageRank represents the relative importance of the web pages on the Internet, which also represent quantity and quality of backlinks made to the web page. PageRank values help authors to determine which subjects are likely to success to attract attentions of others.
14. Google Related Links – Not exactly a SEO tool, but the Related Links gadget helps webmasters to retain visitors on the websites, reduce bounce rate and increase page views on their sites.
15. Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide – A guide on SEO from Google, in PDF format.

A side note is that the combination of Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Website Optimizer is called Google Trifecta, signifying the importance of these three tools for webmasters. Check out also more Google Tools listing.

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2. Free Google Trifecta Webinar on Webmaster Tools, Analytics and Website Optimizer
3. Add and Embed Google Maps, Google Checkout and Google Search to Web Page Easily with WebAssist Dreamweaver Tools for Google
4. Change to ads about Feature in Google Adsense Ads
5. A Glance At Google Merchant Search