Online Help & Tools

Tools, Search Blogs

& Online Help

Michael Motherwell

SEO Bloke - WMS Consulting

http://www.wmsconsulting.com.au/cebit/

Conference @ CeBIT Australia

Darling Harbour, Sydney

2 May 2007

Danger Will Robinson!• Tools Are NOT the Key• Those Who Can’t Do, Make

Tools• Snake Oil Salesmen

– Most A Waste Of Money– Most A Waste Of Time As Well

• Usually, There’s A Free Alternative

Google Webmaster Central

• www.google.com/webmasters/ • www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

The Tools

• Requires Validation (Metatag or File)

• robots.txt Validator

• Shows Crawl Errors

• Shows Detailed Links (+ Anchor Text)

• Shows Limited Queries

• Manage Sitemaps (XML Feed)

Yahoo Site Explorer

• http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ • Check links• Check Indexing (Last Date, Pages etc)

Google Analytics • www.google.com/analytics/

• Pros – Free (As In Beer)– Easy To Implement (JavaScript)

• Cons– Privacy– No (To Little) Support– Challenging Terminology

Keyword Research

• Overture - Australia – USA – All

• Wordtracker (trial) – Uses Dogpile

• Keyword Discovery (trial) – Uses ISP logs

• Digitalpoint – Wordtracker + Overture

• Google’s Tool – No Numbers

Online SEO Tools

• Links– Current Link Popularity– Digitalpoint Backlink Tracker

• Search Engine Saturation (Pages indexed)

• SEO Browser – How SEs See Sites

Programs

• Xenu Link Sleuth – Sitemap Creator

• Webbug – Check HTTP Headers

• Find Link Partners– Zeus– Arelis

• Link Analysis– Optilink

Browser Add-ons• IE

– Google Toolbar (To Check PageRank)– Alexa Toolbar– Yahoo Toolbar (Google’s Better)

• Firefox– Web Developer Toolbar– SearchStatus – (Alexa + PageRank)– SEO-For-Firefox

• Be Careful!

Keeping Up To Date• RSS Feeds

• Benefits– Keep up to date trivially– Keep track of all the

“Latest”

• Drawbacks– Can become “Noise”– Can get worse than Spam

Feed Readers• Programs

– Great News, FeedReader, FeedDemon

• Email As Well– Opera (integrates with Mail)– Thunderbird (Mozilla Email Client)

• Online– Gmail– Bloglines

Recommended Blogs• Matt Cutts (aka GoogleGuy) • Official Search Engine Blogs• SEO Blogs

– Search Engine Land (News)– SERoundtable (News)– SEO By The Sea (Patents)– SEOMoz (Ideas)

• My List

Newsletters

• Advisor – Weekly Q/A + Guest Article

• SearchDay – Daily Article + Links

• Search Engine Guide – For SMEs

Forums• Webmasterworld – Biggest (And Noisiest)• Search Engine Watch – Abandoned• HighRankings – Friendly, “White Hat”• Cre8asiteforums – Ultra-Friendly, Civilised• Digitalpoint – Technical Focus• SitePoint – Coders And Programmers

Thanx!

Michael Motherwell

Ph: (02) 9365 4571Em: michael@wmsconsulting.com.au

All URLs: http://www.wmsconsulting.com.au/cebit/Blog: www.insearchofstuff.com