Where does your website rank in the search engines? On the first page? On the second page? In the top 20 pages?

SEO Book’s Rank Checker is a free utility that allows you to type in your key phrases, and then quickly reports where you rank in Google.co.uk, as well as Yahoo! and Live.

If you’re interested in where you rank internationally, RankChecker will let you know your web rankings in most of the search engines worldwide.

And if you save your settings, and then RankChecker will run the report for you automatically on a weekly basis, or whatever frequency you prefer.

It is only available as a Firefox extension, which means you need to get Firefox, and then download the extension.

Comprehensive instructions are available on the download page, so I won’t repeat them here.

Do remember, however, to:

• change the Google default to co.uk if appropriate
• tick the box to Don’t Use Google personalised results, which skews the results to your personal searching prefernces, which probably favours your own website
• set the delay to be a second or two between searches
• save your search settings to use them again later
• turn on the automatic search reporting for your weekly report.

Where does your website rank for your key phrases in Google?

What phrases are you ranking well for, whether you know it or not?

And what phrases are your competitors ranking well for?

SEODigger is a free utility that shows you those keywords that trigger your site in the top 20 results for a Google search. SEO Digger maintains a database of keywords and search results that can help to assess and plan your search engine optimisation activities.

The free, unregistered version analyses a single page of your website and provides you with a list of high performing key phrase, the key phrase position in Google, and some rough and ready WordTracker and Overture data showing you the search popularity of the phrase.

It is worth taking the extra step of signing up for the free registered version because it will give you rankings of all the pages on your domain, rather than just a single page.

Taking my own business as example, I can see the key phrases in Google SERPs (search engine results page) order, in other words the phrases I’m ranking position 1, position 2, and so forth:

However, if I click on the WT column to sort the data on the popularity of phrases as measured by the WordTracker data, I can see where I’m ranking for those valuable phrases that people are actually searching for:

And what is very interesting to note (and is confirmed by my Google Analytics data) is that it’s the blog postings that is helping with the rankings, in this case the article I wrote about The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.

As always, these services do come with a bit of a health warning

• the data will not be current – it is a snap shot of the search results when the database was last compiled. My searches today was delivering data last retrieved in February. Nevertheless, it provides a useful benchmark.
• the database does not include all search phrases. You can add your search phrases to SEODigger for inclusion in the index.
• the WordTracker and Overture data is, at best, unreliable.

This article is one of a series of postings about SEO tools that you might find useful.

I have a list of new services I’ll be reviewing for you over the next few weeks, and suggestions are welcome.

In the meantime, why not take a look at some of my previous reviews:

iWebTool Collection of free SEO tools
Quirk SearchStatus toolbar
Free Web Tools
SEOBook Keyword Research Tool
Website Grader Review
Backlinks Checkers
Good Keywords Tools, especially KeyWordPad

How can you remove old web pages from the Google index?

I have a client who was advised by some cowboy search engine optimisation company to create lots of web pages stuffed full of spammy repetitive keywords.

He now knows this is a bad thing, and has deleted the pages from his site.

But the old pages still appear in the Google index. He’s been told there is nothing he can do about it.

Google will automatically remove dead pages from the search results as part of the indexing process. Pages with 404 messages (not found) or 410 (gone) will eventually be disappear from the index and the search engine results.

But this can take time.

The quick solution is to use Google’s Webmaster’s Remove URL’s tool. It can be used to remove any content that you don’t want appearing in the search results. Google says the removal request typically takes 3-5 business days to process.

The Google Webmaster toolkit is full of useful utilities for optimising your site, and learning about your site performance in Google.

Keep in mind that it might be best to simply update the offending page and let the spider re-index the new content.

You might also want to keep the content on your site, and just block Google from indexing it using appropriate meta tags and the robots.txt file.

The URL removal tool does just that: it removes the page entirely.

And remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Humans don’t like spam, and neither does Google.

Just how good is your website?

Website Grader is a free tool which evaluates your website on 5 broad search engine marketing factors, giving you a succinct score out of 100.

It’s quite a nifty little tool. And of course I like it because my site scored a respectable 93%.

It takes into consideration approximately 20 sets of factors, grouped into 5 broad categories:

1. On Page factors, such as Title tags, meta tags, Alt tags, and readability
2. Off Page factors such a Page Rank, frequency of spiders crawling, Alexa rank, and inbound linking
3. Blogosphere including Technorati rank
4. Social Mediasphere which means social bookmarking on Digg and Del.icio.us
5. Conversion to sales, checking to see if you have forms and an RSS feed

It can provide you with a useful overview of your search marketing efforts in one easy to read report.

And thanks to Pete over at Hoop Media for the suggestion.

Building high quality, relevant links to your website is a tough job, and I’m often asked for tips to make the task easier.

My advice: Spy on your competition.

There are free tools out there like Yahoo! Site Explorer which allows you to discover the links coming into your competitors’ successful websites.

However, many free services provide you with just the quantity of links, with no indication of quality. They do not provide you with the information you need to evaluate the value of a link:

• Google Page Rank
• Whether the specific page is indexed by Google
• The age of the website (older generally being better)
• Whether the inbound linking pages have duplicate IP addresses
• The relevancy of the linking page to your business
• Anchor text of the link
• How many other outbound links there are on the page
• The use “No Follow” which means the link has no value to your site

I strongly recommend using a commercial link analysis tool like SEO Elite or Axandra iBusiness Promoter.

SEO Elite costs US$167 and Axandra costs 250 euros (and yes, these are affiliate links, and thank you in advance for helping me to buy new shoes for my children.)

SEO Elite provides a quick and simple interface that allows you to get the detailed information you need to analyse inbound links. Axandra offers more functionality,

There are other free tools out there that you might also like to take a look at, but I find these aren’t available in such a reliable and effective way:

Link Diagnosis
iWebTool Backlink Checker

Listen to the automatic text-to-speech conversion of this blog posting here (1 Mb MP3 file)

One of the things I love about Britain is Radio 4. It’s great to listen to the news, listen to commentary, or listen to stories.

Sometimes it would be nice if somebody would read aloud to me all the stuff I have to read on my computer screen. I have to read a lot to stay abreast of Internet Marketing developments.

Speech readers used to be pretty rubbish, and I was wondering just how much they have improved in recent years

And so I’ve just tried NaturalReader, a free text to speech software application. It “reads” pages from Internet Explorer, Word documents, Outlook, PDF’s, and lots more.

I was very impressed, to say the least.

There is a free version, but I splashed out for the paid-for version(40 dollars) and got a much more natural sounding voice from a dude called “Paul.”

The software has the additional benefit of being able to convert your own text files into sound (MP3/WAV) files.

I did a little experiment converting this blog posting into an audio file: Listen to the text to speech conversion of this blog posting here (1 Mb MP3 file)

Clearly, it is an automated voice, but it is one I could listen to. The software was idiot proof to install, simple to use, and intuitive.

And many thanks to Andy from Local Conservatory for bringing NaturalReader to my attention.

Professionally designed websites are a must for small businesses, but there are times when a simple, quick, and free little website would do the trick.

Read on for my review of free web creation tools…

It may be that you need you want to create a site for a new product, a new service, you want to optimise for a particular key phrase, or perhaps you want to dabble with affiliate marketing. These little websites are called microsites.

I’ve done a bit of an experiment with the free web building tools to see just how effective they are. And my definition of “free” is more accurately called “cheap” – because I want to have my own domain name attached to the website, if possible, so there will be some costs involved.

The Clear Winner: WordPress

WordPress is free web building software that also allows you to create standard web pages, although it is best known as blogging software.

In the matter of 4 hours and spending a grand total of £22.78 I built the new website Susan Hallam.

I’m not sure how you factor in the cost of my 25 years experience, but I’m discounting that for the moment.

I’m using the site to discuss this experiment, so read about my free web design experiences here.

WordPress ticked all the boxes I required:

• Search engine friendliness
• Easy to use
• Free design templates
• Extra functionality like contact forms
• Web statistics to measure if it is working or not
• Flexibility in terms of content and layout
• My own domain name
• Doesn’t look “free”
• Help when I need it

The Losers

My first loser is BT TradeSpace. It fails for most of my criteria:

• it is clearly branded BT Tradespace, and looks like a freebie website
• no use of my own domain name
• very restrictive design limitations
• very limited page content
• it doesn’t look very search engine friendly

My second loser is Google Page Creator. This is a free service offered to folk with a GoogleMail account. Again, I found the same limitations as BT TradeSpace as a web design tool in terms of limitation of design and content and use of domain names.

One particular strength of Google Page Creator, however, is the ability to design your pages and then upload them to the free 100MB of hosting space. If you’re looking for a place to store stuff on the web, then this might be useful to you.

Next week I’ll be evaluating two more services: Microsoft Office Live
and Yahoo Site Builder

If you want me to try out any other free services, then just let me know.

Free web tools are always a popular topic – whether you are planning a new site, or just tweaking your existing site.

Here’s a round up of some of my favourite free web tools:

Keyword research tools help you to discover the best phrases for both SEO and PPC campaigns. I have previously reviewed and recommend SEO Book’s Keyword Research Tool.

Research your competition using the Google Toolbar and Alexa Toolbar. For those Firefox users amongst us, I strongly recommend SearchStatus toolbar. And don’t forget to research your competitors in DMOZ to see what categories they have indexed themselves in.

Promote your branding or logo with a favicon, that little icon that appears when I bookmark your site, or when your address appears in a browser. Try using Dynamic Drive’s Favicon Generator.

What colours are safe to use in a web browser? Your Pantone colour might not display safely, so use Lynda’s Browser Safe Colour palette when planning your website design.

Do you have a sitemap? You can use the free XML Sitemap Generator to scan through all the pages of your website, and create either an HTML or XML sitemap, no charge.

Is your website bloated and overweight? How long does it take your website to load? Websiteoptimization.com’s free speed test will analyse your site, and tell you how specific ways to improve your site.

Have you done a check of the quality of your website code? Or better yet, check the quality of the web designers quoting for your shiny new website? W3C’s quality assurance tools will validate your HTML, look for broken web links, as well as check out your cascading style sheets (CSS).

How well do you write? Check out how hard it is to read your web copy using this Readability Testing Tool. And whilst you’re at it, check out whether you are using your keyphrases in your copy using a keyword density analyser.

iwebtools has a great collection of tools, including a spider simulator, Page Rank predictor, bank link checker and loads more

And last but no means least, take full advantage of Google’s free tools:

• Google Analytics provide high quality, free statistics
• Google’s Webmaster Central is a toolbox full of statistics and diagnostics
• Google Alerts is a great way to spy on your competition, or manage your own reputation
• Google Checkout is offering free credit card processing til 2008
• Google Mashups lets you plot your own data on a Google map
• Get all those essential Google toys in the Google Pack: toolbars, Google Earth, Picassa….

I’m sure you have other free utilities, let me know!

I’ve been trying out SEO Book’s updated Keyword Research Tool, and as they say, it’s a cracker.

Try it out right here, right now: