Blog
Use the sidebar to search through our blog, it's really helpful.
8 SEO Tools for Perfecting Search Friendly Design
by Justin Briggs in Development on Dec 18, 2009
Love it or hate it, you can’t deny the value of organic search. A Forbes study in June asked what marketing tactics are best for generating conversions. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) came in first. SEO even placed second as the most effective tactic for affecting brand perceptions. As SEO grows in value, so does the value of search friendly website design.
I want to dig into eight of my favorite SEO tools that I use to optimize sites for amazing organic search rankings.
1) Lynx Text Web Browser
The Lynx web browser is an easy way to test for SEO related factors. You can browse a design without CSS, images, cookies, and JavaScript. This creates a very raw experience with many of the limitations experienced by search bots. If you’re looking for something easier to use, check out the SEO Browser.
The Lynx browser is great at identifying issues associated with jQuery, AJAX, or other miscellaneous JavaScript issues. JavaScript can often result in navigation issues, hidden content, and even duplicate content. In my post, 9 SEO Tips for Attractive Search Engine Friendly Web Design, I discuss how jTip, a jQuery tooltip, can create massive duplicate content problems. These can be avoided by testing for the search engine experience.
The theme of my Barcamp presentation was to consider Lynx as one of the major browsers when testing for cross-browser compatibility. I think this is a great practice for any developer interested in search friendly design.
2) Live HTTP Headers
When you make a request to a server, the server returns a response called a HTTP status code. This status code provides information about your request.
A few common status codes:
200 – OK, the server successfully returned the page
301 – Moved permanently, the page has moved permanently to a new URL
404 – Not found, the server can’t find the page requested
You can learn more about status codes over at Google Webmaster Help.
Keeping up with status codes is important and Live HTTP Headers is a great tool to do this. This tool helps diagnosis issues such as not found URLs returning a 200, redirects sending a 302 instead of a 301, long redirection chains, and redirection loops. All of these create crawl and indexing issues with search engines.
3) SEO Book Website Health Check
The SEO Book Health Check tool is one of my favorite SEO tools for checking a site’s indexing health. It quickly spots issues such as duplicate titles and duplicate descriptions. You may be shocked when you run this tool and discover how much “junk” you have indexed.
It is important to manage crawl priority because Google will only index a limited number of pages on your site. If they’re spending their crawl resources on “junk” content, your “money” pages may not be crawled or indexed. If a page isn’t getting indexed, it can’t receive organic search traffic.
4) SEOmoz Toolbar
This one is simple, but effective. When reviewing a site, I often have to check meta descriptions, titles, headings, bolds, and alt attributes. Digging through source code to do this can be a pain. The SEOmoz Analyze Page feature does the legwork for you and provides an easy to read summary, which can be exported to Excel.
5) SEOmoz Term Target
If you’re a developer, and you don’t have time to memorize all the on-page ranking factors, Term Target is for you. It provides a page with a letter grade scoring the effectiveness of its keyword targeting. The results print out what’s good and what’s bad, which is a simple action list for targeting keywords.
6) Xenu Link Sleuth
This tool is a bit ugly, but oh is it sexy. It is a multi-threaded link checking tool that will crawl the links on your site and return a massive amount of useful and actionable results. I’m not even going to go into all the great things you can do with Xenu Link Sleuth, because Ann Smarty already took care of it.
7) Google Page Speed
If you didn’t already know, site speed will be a ranking factor in 2010. It’s hard to predict the full impact of this, but Google seems serious about it. If you want to improve the performance of your site, check out the Google Page Speed tool. Yahoo also has a great tool called YSlow, which is similar in function.
8) Google Webmaster Tools
One of the best ways to optimize your site is to look at the feedback coming directly from Google via the Google Webmaster Tools. Want to know if Google is having any errors crawling your site? They have that. Want to see what keywords Google is seeing on your site the most? They have that too. Want to see how you can improve your HTML? Yep, they have that as well.
I recommend verifying your site with Google Webmaster Tools and checking in periodically to find any issues your site is having.
Sorry! This entry is no longer accepting comments.
Unless I’m missing something, the SEO BOOK WEBSITE HEALTH CHECK tool can only be had if you sign up for the $300/month SEO training plan? Great tool as it may be, that seems rather a lot to get it!
I need to double check what’s behind the wall now at SEO Book. I had a paid account there for a while. I’ve had the add-on installed for a while and it still works, even without an on-going membership there.
I think the SEO Book program is bit pricey for a lot of people, but the community there is great. There are also a lot of other really useful tools. The price of SEO Book though is really justified by the private forums.
Nice tips =)