Many people ask me what tools I use and where I find good information about SEO. I’ve compiled a list of answers to those questions over time, and I’ll share them here with you.
Tools:
Free SEO Tools
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Google AdWords (non-account access to the Keywords Tool)
- Google Analytics
- Google Webmaster Tools
- HTTP Compression and HTTP Conditional GET Test Tool
- HTTP Compression Test
- HTTP Viewer
- Internet Marketing Ninjas Free SEO Tools(a large collection, including:)
- IIS SEO Toolkit
- Open Site Explorer
- Rich Snippets Testing Tool
- SEO Browser
- W3C Validator
- WebPageTest (page load performance test)
- Annie Cushing’s Must-Have SEO Tools
Firefox Add-ons
- Firebug
- Flagfox
- Foxy SEO Toolbar
- Google Page Speed
- HTML Validator
- Interclue
- SEOmoz mozBar
- User Agent Switcher
- Web Developer toolbar
- X-ray
- YSlow
Chrome Extensions
Resources:
Learn more about SEO
- Bing Webmaster Center blog (especially the SEM 101 series of posts) (this was my work during the previous two years before I moved into doing SEO for Bing’s content sites in the autumn of 2010. For selected article titles and links, check out my Additional posts on SEO page.)
- Google SEO Starter Guide
- SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO
- Web Performance Best Practices (recommendations from Google on improving page load speed)
- Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site (recommendations from Yahoo! on improving page load speed)
Search Engine Guidelines & SEO-related protocols
- Bing Guidelines for successful indexing
- Google Webmaster Guidelines
- Microformats specs
- Robots.txt specs
- Sitemaps specs
- Schema specs
Blogs
- Bing Webmaster Center
- Bruce Clay Internet Marketing
- Dana Lookadoo (YoYoSEO Consulting)
- Dana Lookadoo’s Twitter page (yeah, I’m a big fan of this amazing woman!)
- David Mihm (Local Search)
- Duane Forrester (aka Mr. Bing)
- Google Inside Search
- Google Webmaster Central
- High Rankings
- Internet Marketing Ninjas
- Matt Cutts (Google web spam and SEO spokesman)
- Mike Blumenthal (Local Search)
- Search Engine Journal
- Search Engine Land
- Search Engine Roundtable
- Search Engine Watch
- SEO by the Sea
- SEOmoz (SEO tools and information)
- The SEO Ace (and you seriously thought I wasn’t going to plug my own blog?)
- WebmasterWorld
Conferences
Tech Geek Fun
Advice
Make sure you are clear on this: SEO is like wealth-building. It takes time to reach its full benefit. Any attempts to shortcut that by using “black hat” (aka malicious) SEO techniques that search engines consider to be either page-level or link-level types of web spam will only result in penalties that will ultimately make your site unreachable in search. If you value the integrity of your business’ domain name, don’t risk killing it and your online business presence by trying to shortcut the natural, legitimate process of earning page rank.
To make your site successful, do the following:
- Learn what search engines expect to see (review their guidelines)
- Learn what data you can provide on a page to help the search crawler understand what the page is about (aka metadata)
- Create great, original, text-based content
- Lastly, think in terms of making your site great for human users. SEO is merely an extension of that (although beware of putting text content in images, scripts, Silverlight or Flash, because search crawlers can’t reliably read that content, thus it will likely never be indexed).
