We’ve listed what we think are the best free tools for optimising your website or web page for modern search engines. Here are our top 10.

Top 10 SEO Tool. 1 IWebTool
iWebTool is a website offering a plethora of useful online tools, including a pagerank checker, backlink checker, search engine position checker and keyword suggestion tool to name but a few. Check them out.

Top 10 SEO Tool.2 CopyScape
CopyScape is a search engine dedicated to locating duplicate content on the web. Want to make sure no-one is stealing your content? Simply enter your website/webpage and it will search the internet and report back if it finds any part of your webpage duplicated on another site. A fantastic tool.

Top 10 SEO Tool.3 Google Analytics
Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting.

Top 10 SEO Tool.4 Google Rank Checker
This is a great free Google Position Checker tool that will automatically query Google’s search engines. It checks if your URL appears in the first 1000 results for your chosen keywords. If the URL is present, it will output what position it occupies.

Top 10 SEO Tool.5 Meta Tag Analyser
Designed by SeoCentro, this Meta Tag analysis tool helps webmasters analyse their website pages. This search engine optimisation tool analyses not only the Meta Tags but also tries to mimic the same spider technology as the search engines spiders them self! Awesome…

Top 10 SEO Tool.6 Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
This is a great free tool that allows you to take a peak at keywords and phrases that are being search for on the web.

Top 10 SEO Tool.7 SEO Tools – Search Engine Optimisation
This is another great website that offers a plethora of free Search Engine Optimisation tools.

Top 10 SEO Tool.8 SEO Check list
The SEO Check list brought to you by webconfs.com. This one is a must budding SEO beginners. With its unique point scoring check list you will be well on the way to producing a search engine friendly website!

Top 10 SEO Tool.9 SEO Tutorial
Another great guide from webconfs.com. This SEO tutorial will guide you through all the important factors needed to optimise your website for the search engines.

Top 10 SEO Tool.10 Free Google site map generator
phpSitemapNG is a free Google Sitemaps generator written in PHP, but also generates RSS-based, txt-based and HTML-based sitemap files. It will spider your website and also your filesystem (of course, as you prefer). You can download and use it for free, the licence is GPL.

NB: Don’t forget though, if you’re a customer of Pixel Internet, you can use our own free Google Sitemap generator supplied with all Pixel Internet web hosting plans!

If you feel we have left something out, or would like your own SEO web developement tool added to this least, please feel free to leave a message below!

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Everyone wants to achieve good website rankings, but how do you get to the top on the major search engines like Google or Yahoo?

We’ll this really the million dollar question and unfortunately there is no definitive answer, however we have listed what we think, are the top 10 SEO tips that you can implement yourself, which will ultimately help your websites visibility on the search engines.

SEO Tips 1. Develop Your Key Phrases
Begin by researching your key words and phrases. What products or services do you offer? Where are you located? What’s your area of operation? Perhaps most importantly; what would you search for? Try to put yourself in the mind of a potential customer.

SEO Tips 2. Optimise Your Page Title
The page title is one of the most powerful elements of your website that you can easily optimise. Ensure you use your important keywords, this will help search engines better understand the content of the webpage. Keep it short and to the point; some search engines (like Google) will only display as little as 66 characters including white spaces

SEO Tips 3. Optimise your Page Description
Description Meta, likely to be one of the first things (second to the page title) that your potential customers will see. Write a maximum 150 character description employing all your important key phrases. But most of all remember your trying to stand out from the rest, so make it clear, punchy and to the point.

SEO Tips 4. Write interesting, helpful and ‘human’ content
Now that you’ve written your page title and added your description and keyword Metas, it’s time to start the most involved process of all – writing your page content.

Quality page content is really a balance between grammatical license and readability – incorporating your target key phrases for use by search engines while still putting across a coherent message to your human audience.

SEO Tips 5. Remember those Alt and Title Tags

Adding Alt and Title Tags
Don’t ignore your Alt and Title tags, they can play a big part in your site optimisation.

The Alt tag is the text you see when you move your mouse over a picture or graphic. For example, move your mouse over this graphic of the Pixel Internet logo:

The Alt tag is very useful to screen reading software used by the visually impaired.

The Title tag is the text that appears when the mouse is moved over a text link such as this link here.

SEO Tips 6. BLOG!
Blogs can be a fantastic marketing tool below are just a few reasons why;

1. Structured content – Blog software such as WordPress, with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to categorise content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.
2. Crawlable URLs – Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl.
3. Internal links – Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for ranking on long phrases.
4. Inbound links – One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other – much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, which in turn encourages links and traffic.
5. RSS – Links to RSS feed URL’s that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity and when RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.
6. Fresh content – Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.
7. Active community – Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.

Look here for a great reason to get your WordPress web hosting with Pixel Internet!

SEO Tips 7. Build up your inbound links
The best place to start any linking strategy is with web directories. The two biggest by far are Yahoo! and the Open Directory (used by Google). Being listed in these is an absolute must as they generate huge amounts of traffic.

There are plenty of other directories you should get listed in too. Global, local and industry-specific directories abound on the Internet. To find them run a search for ‘web directory’ on your favourite search engine. The directories that come up highest in the search rankings will probably generate the most traffic. You can also check these directories of directories:

• Open Directory’s directory of web directories
• Search engine colossus
• Best Free Directories
• Internet search engine database
• Business Directory

SEO Tips 8. Build your website using clean accessible HTML
Here 5 great reasons why you should validate your website;

• Troubleshooting unknown problems – Sometimes, you may be encounter a coding or layout problem and have absolutely no idea what’s going or where the problem lies. Even though W3C’s validator uses advanced language, you can get a pretty good idea on where some of your problem areas are.
• Know what your website will look like – With discrepancies between browsers and Internet Explorer slowly losing its stranglehold on browsers, you should place importance on making sure your website looks identical to the way it does in your preferred browser. Of course, there are exceptions such as browser specific bugs. But do your research on those as well.
• Search Engines like properly formatted HTML – If you decide to open up a <p> or <h1> tag and never close it, that may have been a lost opportunity when a Search Engine spiders your website.
• Encourages Usability – For example, W3C doesn’t let a site pass validation unless all the images in the document have an alt attribute. eg. <img src=”my-goldfish.jpg” alt=”A picture of my goldfish” /> This can only help people with screen readers and search engines.
• Helps you understand coding basics – A validator will let you know if you’re using a CSS or HTML attribute that isn’t capable in some browsers. It will make sure that instead of using &, you’re using & instead.

SEO Tips 9. Be patient!
Getting good rankings on a search engine takes time and a lot of hard work, but most of all a bucket load of patience. There’s no quick fix so beware of companies offering such services. SEO and Internet Marketing can also become very addictive, you’ll find yourself checking the SERP’s (search engine results pages) daily, panicking because your have moved down two places…… WELL DON’T, otherwise before you know it all your hair will fall out and your once thriving social life will have all but disappeared.

SEO Tips 10. We said be patient!

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