I’ve just spent 3 days at the 25th annual ACCM Show in Orlando, FL and wanted to share with you a few very helpful tools to help you better manage your SEO and Site Optimization campaigns. Oh, and these tools are completely free to use with the exception that you might have to register for a user account or two.

• Google Webmaster Tools
  If you are not using the various free tools that Google provides then shame on you. You’re ultimate goal is to rank well in the search engines and you have the biggest search engine of them all providing you with free tools to help you do just that. With Webmaster Tools you will be able to monitor and adjust how Google search bots deal with your site. It will tell you what errors it has encountered, when it last crawled your site, the top keywords that land visitors on your site and where you rank for those queries in Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
• Yahoo Site Explorer
  This is Yahoo’s version of Google’s Webmaster Tools and although they offer some of the same features Yahoo does offer a few extra features to allow you to basically carve out the way they view your site. You can manipulate your URL’s to exclude some of the extra query information that is tacked on to the end of your site’s pages.
• Rex Swain
  The main tool I am referring to from Rex is the HTTP Viewer tool. This nifty Perl script allows you to read through the page headers of a website and basically see what the spiders and bots are seeing when they visit your website. Another outstanding use for this tool is the ability to view what HTTP responses you are handing back to browsers, bots and spiders. Why would you do this? If you are transferring your site from one domain to another or migrating pages a great way to make sure you have the correct redirect setup is to use this tool and verify it is working how you had planned.
• Google Analytics
  If you are not already using an analytics tool you need to change that as soon as possible. Analytics tools allow you to see how your visitors are using your website. Stop assuming how they use and start making well informed and educated decisions based on actual visitors data. This is the quickest method to find out what areas or your site are working and what areas or not. Once you have analytics setup be sure to setup the e-commerce and site search portions if they apply to your website. The site search allows you to know exactly what your visitors are wanting to find on your site, so repeat the the search yourself and make sure you agree with the results you are presenting. Another analytic to monitor is the bounce rate. Find your highest and lowest bounced pages and try to mimic what you are doing right on the low bounce to the high bounced page. There are much more tips but these should get you headed in the right direction.
• Compete.com
  This website lets you take a very close look at your competitors to see what keywords they are optimizing for and how you are comparing to them for those keywords as well as other factors. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to knocking on the door and asking to login to their analytics account.

Did I miss a great tool (which is very possible since this is such a short list) feel free to share you favorite tools with me in our comments section.

Filed under: Web, analytics, optimization, seo, site tools