SEO Services You Should Use
Below are five (kind of six) of my favourite SEO services. You should use these to monitor and improve your own SEO results.
Tracking your own SEO
By no stretch of the imagination should you be attempting SEO without signing up for a webmasters account and tracking how Google sees your site. If you do not have your site linked to a Google webmasters account go do that now.
Webmasters shows site errors, allows you to submit a sitemap (important) and shows you what links Google sees coming into your site (and therefore what links it doesn’t see.) Information is power. Webmasters tools is information. Therefore: webmasters tools = power. Get it. Got it? Good.
Google Analytics or Statcounter
I prefer Statcounter because I don’t have to wait to see real-time results. Analytics seems slow and doesn’t appear to count correctly enough for my needs. Install both and you’ll see the difference. I prefer statcounter so I can easily track where visitors came from. It’s possible in Analytics but it’s nowhere near as simple.
Either way, you should definitely have stat tracking somewhere on your site (if you use WordPress, add it to footer.php just before and it will show up on every page.
Tracking your SEO allows you to know what’s working and what’s not. You can’t make changes without knowing what needs fixing or you’ll just blindly stab around until something works.
See your site how Googlebot and other search engines see your site. You can easily see what you meant to show up vs. what is actually coming through Googlebot. Often you’ll be shocked at how a site looks to Googlebot.
Learning more about SEO
Straight from the horse’s mouth. Google blogs about search engine stuff and how to optimize your own site quite frequently. It’s worth adding to your rss reader and following. Their info is sometimes basic but this is the first place to start when trying to learn SEO.
SEOmoz is a relatively “new” website (in Internet age) and controls a good many SEO tools to run on your site. Some are free while others are not but the site, the info on it, etc. are all very valuable.
