W5P2: Search Engine Services

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Search Engine Services

Search engines provide sophisticated tools and access to detailed data reports to help webmasters (and SEO’s) improve their website quality and rankings, however, the assistance and data are limited. That’s why it’s vital to develop your own set of resources and learn search engine optimization yourself.

Both Google and Bing offer webmasters advanced tools for accessing and analyzing important website data. In order to get the greatest benefit, you need to understand the advantages and drawbacks of both Google and Bing Webmaster tools. By combining them, you will gain greater insight into the factors contributing to your online success or failure.

Google

Information InformationGoogle offers lots of free information to help webmasters (and SEO’s) learn how to improve website visibility. Available resources include Search Console, Webmaster Education, Help Center, guidelines, forum, blog, and videos.You will need a free Google account to get stated.

Search Console

Formerly Google Webmaster Tools, the Search Console is the place to start understanding and improving your websites visibility. Once your website is verified, Google will provide you with detailed reports about your website.

Some of the features Search Console can assist you with:

  • Geo-targeted data
  • Preferred domain
  • URL parameters
  • Crawl rate
  • Malware
  • Crawl errors
  • HTML suggestions

Google will help you diagnose your website for errors and make suggestions for better performance. You will also be able to view, classify, and download data about internal and external links to your website allowing you to see exactly how visitors arrive there. Google also offers tools for uploading sitemaps and designating URLs to prevent canonicalization issues.

Google Webmaster Education

Learn Google best practices through the free Webmaster Education program by watching the instructional videos and reading the PDF downloads. Information is available for webmasters of every experience level.

Other Relevant Google Resources

  • Webmaster Guidelines – Google’s platform for dispensing best practices information designed to help get your site found, crawled and indexed.
  • Webmaster Help – Google online reference source for finding all of the Webmaster resources.
  • Webmaster Help Forum – Not only will you find the answers to common questions, this is the right sport to post your questions to Google employees (and very knowledgeable community members).
  • Google Central Blog – The source for official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index.
  • Google Webmaster Videos – The official YouTube channel for Google Webmasters offers instructional videos and in-depth explanations of Google best practices.
  • Search Console API – Advanced users can create their own applications and access Googles’ API to see sites as Google sees them, discover crawling issues and help improve site visibility in Google’s search results.
  • Google My Business – Google optimization tools that connect businesses directly with customers through Google Local Search, Maps and Google+.
  • Google Analytics – Analytic data offers the webmaster an opportunity to find their audience, increase click through and conversions by goal setting and monitoring site visitor actions.
  • Google +1 – Google social community adds another way for webmasters to connect with their audience and build an engaging experience.

Google also offers specialized products aimed at helping businesses get online and grow. Some of these products are fee based and others are free. For a complete listing checkout this sitemap of business solutions.

Read MoreREAD: Google Search Console is a free service that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search. This Google Search Console Help Section will give you a deeper understanding of how Google views your site, giving you the ability to optimize for better visibility.

Read MoreREAD: Organization is a vital component in today’s SEO arsenal and that begins with setting up your Search Console. This guide, How to Set Up Google Search Console – Free Search Engine Optimization & Webmaster Tools for Your Website, by Bruce Clay will walk you through the various Search Console features, and what actionable data is available to webmasters.

Bing

Information InformationLike Google, Bing offers webmasters (and SEO’s) free access to a great tool set that will generate data to use and address potential search engine optimization problems. Available resources include Webmaster Tools, Webmaster Guidelines, Webmaster Help and How-To Guides, blog, and email support. You will need a free Microsoft account to get stated.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools is the control panel for working with and understanding Bing. Once your website is verified, Bing will provide you with access to detailed reports and tools designed to drive more visitors to your site.

Some fo the features Bing Webmaster Tools can assist you with:

  • Website performance overview
  • Crawl rate
  • Page index control
  • Traffic summary

Bing’s full featured tool set will assist with all phases of site crawling, indexation, and site code recommendations. Bing reports will help webmasters understand what leads visitors to their site and identify what to focus on to increase traffic. Bing also offers research data to help webmasters understand exactly what people are searching for and where to expand.

The Bing SEO Analyzer will scan any URL you enter from one of your verified domains and build a report to let webmasters know if the page scanned is in or out of compliance with a set of 15 SEO best practices that will identify some of the most common page-level recommendations.

Bing Webmaster Tools now offer SEO reporting based on a set of approximately 15 SEO Best Practices to help webmasters identify some of the most common page-level recommendations.

Bing Webmaster Guidelines

Bing guidelines are not as comprehensive as the information available from Google, but they do cover a broad range of topics that are intended to help your content be found and indexed within Bing. Advanced information is available for experienced webmasters.

Other relevant Bing resources

  • Webmaster Blog – Bings devoted space for offering insight into the news, trends, people, and technology behind Bing.
  • Webmaster Help & How-To Guides – Bings reference for Bing Webmaster Tools as well as guidelines on how to be successful in Bing search. The help is organized into different categories which you can browse from the navigation menu or use the search box at the top of the page.
  • Bing Places for Business – Bing optimization tools that allow businesses to add a listing for their business on Bing local search.
  • Webmaster Email Support – Having problems and can’t find an answer? Bing offers account holders access to Bings employees to answer your questions.

Read MoreREAD: If you;re ready to get started with Bing Webmaster Tools (of you just want to find out more), go through the Getting Started Checklist, by Bing. It will help you configure your site, explain the reporting options, explain how to use the diagnostic tools, assist with content removal, malware and spam, as well as covered advanced topics like Bing Places for Business (local).

Read MoreREAD: Bing Webmaster Tools provides some great data for webmasters to use and address potential issues. If you’re not familiar with all of the features, check out this article by Simon Heseltine (Search Engine Watch): Bing Webmaster Tools: An Overview. This guide will walk you through the various features of Bing Webmaster Tools.

Other SEO Tools & Resources

Moz.com – Free & Paid

Moz offers SEO tools and marketing resources to help webmasters optimize business listings, track social media performance, conduct link research, access SEO metrics for web pages, and more. You will have to setup an account to gain access.

Free Tools

  • Followerwonk – Take a deep dive into Twitter metrics and analytics. Analyze and segment your followers, compare users, and find out how to engage your audience.
  • Open Site Explorer – Research and compare backlinks with competitors for intelligent, targeted link building. Identify top pages, view social activity data, and analyze anchor text.
  • MozBar – The MozBar is a browser extension (FireFox and Chrome supported) that provides you with easy access to link metrics, page elements and SERP results while you surf the web.
  • MozCast – An experiment designed to help you keep track of the day-to-day changes and fluctuations in Google rankings. MozCast is your daily “weather report” showing turbulence in the Google algorithm.

Paid Tools

Moz paid research tools are available to Moz Analytics subscribers and include:

  • Fresh Web Explorer – Analyze mentions of your brand, your competitors, and industry topics to discover the latest relevant content being published on the web.
  • Rank Tracker – Our Rank Tracker tool retrieves search engine rankings for pages and keywords, and stores them for easy comparison later.
  • On-Page Grader – Get instant insight into your on-page keyword usage to help you rank higher and optimize for your targeted search terms.
  • Keyword Difficulty & SERP Analysis – Find out how difficult it is to rank for specific keywords based on the top 10 competitor sites that currently rank for them.
  • Local Listings – Claim your local U.S. business listings on Google+ Local, Bing Local, Yelp, and other prominent local search engines.

SEO Book – Free & Paid

SEO Book offers a wide array of SEO resources including Firefox Extensions, online SEO tools, training, videos, blog, and forum all designed to help webmasters build and market websites. You will have to setup an account to access.

Free Tools

Paid Tools

  • Firefox Extensions – Website Health Checker and Duplicate Content Checker.
  • Local Rank – Links to top ranked Google pages from other top ranked results.
  • Hub Finder – Finds pages that link to competing sites that are likely to link to your site.
  • Competitive Research – Find out where your competitors are succeeding in search.
  • Domain Name Finder – Get keyword suggestions and find associated domain names.
  • SEO Site Planner – Plan out your SEO strategy from beginning to end.
  • Keyword List Comparison – Use this tool to compare keyword lists against each other.

In addition to wide collection of webmaster tools, SEO Book also offers an extensive collection of training modules including step-by-step guides, videos, and mindmaps all designed to make their users experts at SEO.

Bruce Clay – Free & Paid

Bruce Clay, considered one of the top search engine optimization companies since 1996, offers a complete library of SEO training as well as an extensive suite of SEO tools designed to make optimization easy, simply and fast.

Free Tools

  • Search Engine Optimization/KSP Tool™ – This keyword tool provides keyword statistics that assist with search engine marketing decisions.
  • Domain Report Tool – The tool checks Google, Yahoo! and Bing and reports how many pages are indexed for each of the Web sites you enter.
  • Server Response Checker – When search engine spiders come to your Web site, you want to make sure they can crawl around easily to index the maximum number of pages possible.
  • SEO Cloaking Checker – The SEO Cloaking Checker detects whether a Web site uses “cloaking,” a server technique that some sites utilize to try to fool the search engines into awarding rankings the Web pages do not deserve.
  • Hide Google Options – The Hide Google Options browser plugin allows you to take control of your Google search results page by keeping the Google “Options” panel as an elective feature (Firefox and Chrome supported).

Paid Tools

This robust and full-featured collection provides advanced search engine optimization tools including:

  • Integrated research tools
  • A comprehensive page analyzer
  • An exceptionally fast search engine ranking monitor
  • Several detailed ranking report modules
  • Initial link analysis
  • Research your Site and Competition
    • Analyze Your Page Construction
    • Search Engine Ranking Monitor
    • Report and Analyze your Search Engine Results
    • Develop a Multi-purpose Links List

webconfs.com – Free

Webconfs offers an extensive collection of free SEO and webmaster resources including tutorials, articles, and too many tools to list them all. Here are the top SEO tools:

Free Tools

  • Similar Page Checker – Search engines are known to penalize websites that contain duplicate / similar content. Your content could be similar to other websites on the Internet, or pages from within your own website could be similar to each other. This tool allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages.
  • Search Engine Spider Simulator – This tool simulates a search engine crawler by displaying the contents of a webpage exactly how a search engine would see it. It also displays the links that a search engine would follow (crawl) when it visits the webpage.
  • Backlink Anchor Text Analysis – This tool helps you determine the link text used by your backlinks to link to your website.
  • Backlink Builder – This tool helps you build a LOT of quality backlinks. It searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL” etc, most of the results could be potential backlinks. Text links are important for ranking well in search engines.
  • Backlink Summary – This tool will give you a summary of your competitor’s backlinks.
  • Keyword Density Checker – This tool will crawl the specified URL, extract text as a search engine would, remove common stop words and displays the density of your keywords.
  • Redirect Check – It is import that a search engine is able to follow any redirects that you may have set up. This tool helps you determine whether the redirect you have created is search engine friendly.
  • Link Price Calculator – This tool will help you provide SEO Services by determining the appropriate amount you should be paying (or charging) per month for a text link (ad) on the specified URL.
  • Reciprocal Link Check – This tool helps you ensure that your link partners are linking back to your website. It also determines the anchor text used by your link partners to link to your website.
  • Cloaking Checker – This tool tries to detect whether a website is ‘cloaking’ its contents for search engines.
  • Domain Age Tool – Older domains may get a slight edge in search engine rankings. This tool displays the approximate age of a website on the Internet and allows you to view how the website looked when it first started. It also helps you find out the age of your competitor’s domains.
  • Keyword Suggestions Tool – This tool will help you determine relevant and popular keywords related to your website.
  • Website Keyword Suggestions – This tool tries to determine the theme of your website and provides keyword suggestions along with keyword traffic estimates.
  • URL Rewriting Tool – This Search Engine Optimization tool helps you convert dynamic URLs into static looking HTML URLs.
  • Keyword-Rich Domain Suggestion Tool – Having a KEYWORD-RICH domain name is an important factor for Search Engine Optimization. This tool will suggest keyword rich domain names.
  • Alexa Rank Checker – This SEO tool allows you to get the Alexa traffic rankings of you and your competitors.

Small SEO Tools – Free

Small SEO offers webmasters a huge collection free tools aimed checking or analyzing almost any website issue, plus tools to analyze competition, and a blog with plenty of “how to” SEO and marketing articles.

Free Tools

Other Options

It isn’t necessary to subscribe to expensive SEO tools in order to be successful as there are many free tools available that will give you the information you need to be competitive. Search engines are also offering better tools than in the past and it is highly recommended you create accounts will Google and Bing Webmaster tools. To maximize your time and efficiency, it’s recommended that you develop your own resources (bookmarks) for completing the repetitive tasks to be successful online.

Read MoreREAD: If you’re analyzing data and making decisions based on that data – make sure you’re using the right tool. You need to stay current with SEO trends and familiar with new (and improved) tools as they become available. Victoria Edwards (Search Engine Watch) offers a nice collection of SEO tools in her article: 13 Essential SEO Power Tools. As Victoria points out, some tools lose their effectiveness over time as the industry changes.

Read MoreREAD: Still looking for SEO tools and resources? The resources mentioned above should be able to answer any question you have, but if you’re still looking for another approach – try this collection of free tools from Moz.com. Cyrus Shepard has assembled a great collection of tools in his article: The 100 Best Free SEO Tools & Resources for Every Challenge. This interactive collection is easy to navigate and get your work done. I highly recommend you bookmark it.

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