Wouldn’t it be great to know where your website is in the top search engines for given keywords?
Well now you can with an SEO tool from Ranks.nl
This is really a very simple tool but it offers a useful function. What it does is bring together all the results from a given keyword phrase into one page so you can easily see where your website is positioned in each search engine. You can also use it for competitor research.
How does it work?
It’s very simple. First visit www.ranks.nl/tools/compare.html and enter your choice of the 5 search engines.
Then choose the layout and enter your keyword phrase and press submit. The pages that comes up will show a small window of results for each search engine much like the picture above.
Lookout for a Detailed Guide
I’m working on a much more Detailed Guide on using this tool for keyword and website position research, to be published soon. Subscribe to RSS or follow me on Twitter to know when it is published.
Before you optimise your website you need to assess how it’s doing using an SEO audit
How many visitors from search engines? Which ones? Need answers? Here’s what to do.
INSTANT ACCESS TO THE FULL LESSON JUST 1.99p
I’ve written up a much more detailed 4 page version of this Lesson, as a PDF instant download, with screen-shots, full step-by-step walk-throughs and extra information.
First question – do you have Google Analytics running on your website? Most people do nowadays, mainly because it’s free, easy to use and offers some valuable reports about your visitors.
If you don’t get it installed now, as it’s the best way to keep an eye of what your website visitors are doing. I’ve written a short Analytics starter guide to help.
Measure how many visitors
The main thing you need to be able to do with Google Analytics is to see how many visitors are coming from the search engines for a chosen time period, say one month.
To do this set the date range at the top and then click on “Traffic Sources” and the “Search Engines” from the list. This will open a page showing which search engines are sending how much traffic as well as other information such as page visits and time on the site.
Download and save the report as a reference
Click on the “Export” tab at the top and choose “PDF”. This will create a pdf report you can save to compare against how well the website is doing in the future. Read my guide on using Google Analytics.
Setup Goals in Google Analytics
There is no point in optimising a website for the search engines to drive visitors there, if those visitors are not interested in anything and are very unlikely to buy or convert. As part of the SEO audit you need to find out the conversion rate of your search engine visitors.
How to learn you search engine visitor conversion rate
To do this first set up Conversion Goal Tracking as outlined in my short guide Setting up Conversion Goals in Google Analytics. Then run the same report as above but this time lookout for the Goal tab in the centre of the Analytics page. Click on this and then export the report to pdf as before to keep as a reference to compare to in the future.
Lookout for Lesson 2
In Lesson 2, still with the SEO Audit, I’ll be looking at further online tools to establish how your site is currently doing and then recording everything in a spreadsheet to log how the website’s position improves, over time, as you optimise it.
Adobe Contribute is a great tool for SEO on your web pages
Easy Content Management Tool to use
Generally speaking the more you update and tweak your web page content, the better it is for the search engines. And one of the easiest tools around to do this is Adobe Contribute from Adobe.
Great for SEO too
But Adobe Contribute is also a great tool to optimise a website as you can access and edit the meta title, description and keywords (commonly known as the meta tags), very easily.
Here’s what to do…
So how do you go about optimising a website using Adobe Contribute?
1. Open Contribute and with your website in the address bar click to the page you want to optimise.
2. Click the “Edit Page” button in the top right and when the page is ready for editing click “Format” from the menu and choose “Keywords & Descriptions” from the drop-down list.
3. You should get a box open titled “Page Keywords and Description”. In this box you can enter the most appropriate phrases you think people might use to find the page. If you need help researching the best keywords I have some guides on the tools available.
4. Now you need to enter the page meta title. To do this click “Format” again, but this time choose “Page Properties”. In this box you will find at the top a long box with “Title” beside it. In this box you need to enter the page title. Read my short guide on writing effective title tags.
Meta tags all done on the same page
The great thing about editing meta tags using Adobe Contribute is that it is all done on the same pages of the website, as you do the content editing; you don’t need to visit a separate area for the meta tag editing, which can be confusing.
My thanks to www.create-a-wild-flower-meadow.com for the use of their website in the screen-shot.
