Free Tools for Webmasters

A website is only as good as the content it holds and although you can have outstanding content if it is not properly optimized you may not be getting as much site traffic as you deserve. We take the approach of building a website around our content and only after we are happy with the amount of content we have created do we start to “dress up” the website. We do not worry with graphics and colors of a website until we are completely happy with the content.

It is our belief that too many webmasters put to much time, effort and emphasis on how their website looks and if they spent that time creating content their website would fair much better in search results. If a visitor happened along one of our websites before we were happy with the content it may be quite ugly! While we too believe a website has to be attractive, there are to many websites on the Internet that are very pretty but never found by the number of visitors you may think. A website can be the most attractive website on the Net, but if it doesn’t have good content that is properly optimized it will never attract the amount of visitors it could.

Once you are happy with the amount of content your website holds you must then properly optimize the content to receive the best results. While many will tell you if you just write your content like you would be talking you will be OK. Yes that is correct, you will be OK, but is OK enough? Why not spend a little extra time and go from OK to great?

The most important part of doing some on page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is optimizing your meta tags. Be sure to really think hard about what your Title and Description should be for each and every page. We believe the optimal number of characters for your Title is around 50 and your description should be no shorter than 100 characters and no longer than 140. The Title and Description are very important to search engines and optimizing these tags can improve your page rankings dramatically with very little work.

Next you should calculate your keyword and keyword phrase density for the entire page. You can calculate this by dividing the the number of times a keyword appears by the total number of words on the page. This is somewhat cumbersome and time consuming so you are better to find a Keyword Density Tool on the Internet. You can do a simple search and find hundreds to choose from. We personally use the tools at www.rankingtoday.com.

Ranking Today offers free as well as paid tools but the free tools will most likely work fine for you. Use their Keyword Density Tool and it will calculate your percentage for all the words on your page. They will also examine the meta tags on your page and rate how good they are. Ranking Today will give you parameters they recommend for keyword density and while no one really knows what is optimal, following their guidelines should serve you well. SEO Book is another good resource and they too offer many tools for free.

If you have not done any on page optimization on your pages yet, we highly recommend you use these free SEO tools. The entire process can be quite time consuming but it is time very well spent and if properly optimized you should see better results in as little as 30 days.