Want to Become an Atlanta SEO Expert?

Prominent Placement is a top Atlanta SEO expert, yet we're also for everyone knowing more about the inner workings of search engine optimization and pay per click - it's high time our industry got "de-mystified," so to speak. With that in mind, here are various online tools you can use to assess your online visibility (and your competitors!). The more familiar you become with search engine marketing, the better client you'll make for us!

Background:

Guide to Calculating Your Marketing ROI (PDF): Prominent Placement's free downloadable guide for our colleagues to help assess profitable marketing opportunities. The guide contains an easy-to-follow scenario that illustrates the 6-step methodology, as well as fill-in-the-blank worksheets to also take advantage of.

Introduction to SEM: A short primer provided by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) that provides a broad overview with understandable and succinct explanations of search engine marketing (SEM).

SEM Glossary: Another concise resource provided by SEMPO, this glossary objectively defines important terms for potential website marketers to reference.

Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization: This free guide from SEOmoz provides a complete overview of many of the processes, techniques and strategies used by professional search engine optimization specialists.

Keyword Research:

Keywords and Phrases 101: An About.com article written in layman's terms with links to numerous additional write-ups on everything SEM-related.

KeywordDiscovery: A subscription-based online tool that compiles keyword search statistics from over 170 search engines world wide, to create a powerful keyword research tool.

Wordtracker: A subscription-based online tool to help SEO experts identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client's business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.

Webmaster Toolkit: The free online Keyword Research Tool will help you research appropriate words and phrases to include in your webpage's body text to aid in promotion. Simply enter the sort of word of phrase you wish to be found under, and the tool will suggest some additional words and phrases you can think about using.

Yahoo Search Marketing: The free Keyword Selector Tool allows you to enter a term related to your site and shows you related searches that include your term as well as how many times that term was searched on the past 30 days.

MIVA: A European-based search engine with a free key word generator to help choose relevant keywords. Simply enter a key word and they'll show you not only how many searches that key word has received in the past 30 days, but also additional related searches that include your key word.

Site Visibility:

MarketLeap: An online resource site offering three terrific free utilities:

• Search Engine Saturation: This simply refers to the number of pages a given search engine has in its index for your website domain. Once you run your search engine saturation report, you can compare the numbers as a percentage of your site's availability (visibility) to the search engines.
• Keyword Verification: This checks to see if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword. It's important to be in the top 3 pages of a search result because most people using search engines don't go past the 3rd page.
• Link Popularity Check: This is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your website's online awareness and overall visibility. Simply put, link popularity refers to the total number of links or "votes" that a search engine has found for your website. The tool was designed to help website owners find out who is linking to their site, but also to give a useful benchmarking report to quickly show where you stand in comparison to competitors and other major online players.

FyberSearch: The free "URL Breakdown" tool allows you to take a look at a website from the perspective of the FyberSearch web crawler, FyberSpider. A web crawler is a program that connects to a website in order to process and/or catalog the data found on the specific web page. Most major search engines such as Google and Yahoo have one of their own. Each one is a little different but for the most part, the "see" web pages in the same way. The URL Breakdown tool will allow you to see if a web page is search engine friendly and may help you achieve higher rankings in search engine results.

SearchWho: Another free online utility that displays what a search engine crawler may see when visiting one of your pages. Just enter the web address for one of your pages in their form.

SEO Chat Keyword Density: Keyword density is important since search engines use this information to categorize a site's theme, and to determine which terms the site is relevant to -- the perfect keyword density will help achieve higher search engine positions. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for 'keyword-spamming').

Pay Per Click Advertising:

Pay-Per-Click Advertising 101: An About.com article written with easy to understand concepts and terminology with links to numerous additional write-ups on everything PPC-related.

Yahoo Bid Monitor: Free service that allows you to type in a search term and will display the bidders, their bid amounts, as well as the ad copy for that term.

Competitive Intelligence:

Alexa Traffic Rankings: Free resource that provides current and historic information on site traffic, other sites visited by a particular site's visitors, contact info, and how long the site has been online.

URL Trends: Allows you to view any URL's Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, popular search terms and incoming links all in one place. Also, one great thing about this tool is the ability to subscribe to changes to the results via RSS - making hands off monitoring of your site or a competitor's a possibility.

Fagan Finder's URL Info: This free resource is like the Swiss Army knife of site information, giving you one-page access to dozens of pertinent check-ups and assessments.

Find out more about the approaches that set us apart from other website optimization companies. And to discuss your overall search marketing needs further, please contact us.