Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A few resources for learning more about search engine optimization can be found below. See also my article on the Top 10 Firefox Extensions for SEO.

Guidelines and Tools From the Search Engines

Google

• Google Information for Webmasters — Google's information for webmasters.
• Google Search Help — Basic information about how Google search works, including concepts like stemming.
• Google Webmasters' Control Panel — Useful tools and information for troubleshooting your site. Includes Google Sitemaps control panel. Tip: the control panel itself is more useful than the actual sitemaps.
• Official Google Blog — Stay updated about Google announcements.

Yahoo

• Yahoo Search Help — Yahoo's information on how their search engine works.
• Yahoo Site Explorer — Useful tools.
• Overture Keyword Selector — An online tool that checks for popularity of keywords. See the Good Keywords tool below for a free program that does the same thing. The Overture keyword tool is not accurate. Try other alternatives such as WordTracker.
• Yahoo Search Blog — Information from Yahoo.

MSN (Live) Search

• MSN Search Guidelines — Information for site owners from MSN Search.
• Microsoft's SEO Tips — A page from Microsoft's Small Business Center that you can print for reference. It isn't that this site is an authority on SEO, but it provides insights into the company that provides the MSN search engine results.
• MSN Search Blog — Information from MSN about their search engine.

SEO Intro for Local Small Businesses

• Before You Launch that Local Small Business Website — from sugarrae.com

Semantic Markup

Basic Semantic Markup

Writing code that machines can understand.

• Intro to Semantic Markup — Read this.
• When Semantic Markup Goes Bad — Another post on the subject.
• W3 Quality Tips — Some good tips in here.
• W3C's Semantic Extractor Tool

Microformats

• The Semantic Web
• Microformats.org — Microformats are in the future. Add extra machine-readable meaning to your XHTML code.
• Microformats Wiki
• How to Use Microformats — A nice introduction.
• Microformats Cheat Sheet
• Yahoo Supports Microformats
• Technorati Microformat Search Engine — A technology preview of bigger things to come.
• Firefox 3 and Microformats — Internet Explorer 8 will also support microformats.
• Operator Firefox Extension — A Firefox extension for microformats
• Tails Firefox Extension — Another Firefox extension for microformats

Articles and Newsletters

Many of these sites have free newsletters and RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.

• SearchEngineWatch.com — A great SEO Web site, with discussion forums.
• SEOchat.com — SEO optimization tools, articles, and forums.
• 'Don't submit your website to any search engines' — an introduction to search engine submission.
• WebWorkshop.net — SEO articles, including lengthy discussion of Google PageRank.
• WebMasterWorld.com — Web marketing and search engine news. Ironically, WebmasterWorld uses a forbidden technique called cloaking, demonstrating that if you have enough IBLs and are buddies with Google the rules can be broken. For more on this interesting phenomenon, see my post on Google's double standard on cloaking.
• WebProWorld.com — More forums about search engines.

SEO Blogs

• SEOmoz's list of SEO blogs — Lots of reading material here.
• SEOmoz.org — The main SEOmoz.org blog.
• SEObook.com — Aaron Wall's informative blog.
• Jim Boykin's SEO highlights — very interesting posts from his blog.
• The Google Cache — a blog by the people at Virante.

How Search Engines Rank Web Sites

• Search Ranking Factors — from SEO.moz.
• Google's Top 10 Choices for Search Results — by Jim Boykin.

Techniques

More techniques coming soon...

• SEO Technical Tips — from BruceClay.com
• URL Rewriting — A tutorial on how to make your URLs change from dynamic ones (e.g. www.your-website.com/index.php?p=cars) to static-looking ones (e.g., www.your-website.com/cars/). This is important for search engines, not only because static URLs are better than dynamic URLs, but because when someone links to your site with the URL as the link text those keywords are counted as link text.
• mod_rewrite cheat sheet — Download this cheatsheet for mod_rewrite assistance.

Competitive Analysis

• Link Searches — from SEOmoz.org.
• Google Link Neighborhood Browser — Excellent tool from TouchGraph.com.
• Industry Inbreeding Tool — You are going to love this one.

Link Building

• How to ask for links — by Eric Ward
• Link Building Introduction — What to look for in IBLs
• Link building 101 — From Search Engine Watch.
• 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies — Another resource form Search Engine Watch.
• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 — From SEObook.com.
• 5 rare and valuable link building tactics — more from SEOmoz.org.
• Eric Ward's link building tips — Interesting viewpoints.
• 12 types of links and how to get them — from stuntdubl.com.
• Balancing the Link Equation — more from stuntdubl.com.
• Justilien's Advanced and Viral Link Building — A great source of ideas.
• "Five Link Develepment Experts" — a group interview.

Online SEO Tools

• SEOdigger.com — find out what keywords a site may be ranking for.
• Audit My PC Spider — this is an interesting spider/sitemap tool.
• WeBuildPages.com SEO tools — Some good ones here.
• Virante SEO Tools — including the amazing Industry Inbreeding Chart tool.
• LinkHounds.com Tools — This site has a great tool called the Hub Finder.
• WordTracker — This is a very useful key word analysis service. It's not cheap, but you can try the service for free.
• Ranks.nl — SEO tools for site and keyword analysis.
• GoRank.com — Tools for SEO, including one to compare keyword density across multiple sites.
• SEOmoz Tools — Some interesting SEO tools from SEOmoz.
• SEO Browser — See what your web site looks like to a search engine. You can also do this with the Lynx browser.
• Webconfs.com — Includes an interesting "backlink builder" tools.
• GoogleRankings.com — Find out where your site ranks on Google for your keywords.
• Accessibility — Accessibility-checking tools and tips. The same things that make a Web site accessible are often the same things that make a Web site optimized for search engines (on-site optimization).
• MarketLeap.com Tools — A few tools to compare how your site performs against the competition, including the link popularity tool.
• View HTTP Request and Response Header — An online tool that can be used to check response codes (e.g., 301, 302), or to change the user agent to see if the content of a site changes depending on the user agent.
• Search Tools — A good list of SEO tools and resources from one of Aaron Wall's sites.
• Google Sets Tool — an intersting Java applet.

Directories

A few links of interest. The first two are recommended by Google.

• DMOZ Open Directory — Try to get in if you can.
• Yahoo's Directory — Expensive.
• Directories With Free Submission — List of directories that allow free URL submission.

Searching Across Multiple Search Engines

• Customize Google Firefox Extension — Very useful Firefox extension that changes the Google search results page. It adds links so that you can search other search engines with the same query. It speeds up checking search results across multiple search engines.
• Mr. Sapo — A way to quickly check a lot of different search engines.

RSS / ATOM Syndication

RSS is useful for submitting items to Google Base. I think ATOM has great potential for SEO. More on that soon...

• RSS vs. ATOM
• Atom Enabled
• RSS 2.0 Specification

Other SEO Tools

• Top 10 Firefox Extensions for SEO — an essential list of SEO tools for Firefox
• Good Keywords — A free program that queries Overture for the popularity of keywords.
• Backlink Analyzer — A free program that shows what anchor text is linking into a page or site.

Lynx Browser and SEO Research

Sometimes you might want to get just the text from a web page to analyze the keywords and content.

Google's webmaster guidelines page recommends the following:

"Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site."

Lynx Web Browser — Information from Wikipedia about Lynx, a text-only browser that has some interesting uses. On Linux (for example with a Knoppix disc) you can type in some instructions at the command line, and get Lynx to retrieve all the text in a web page, and/or a list of links on the page. For example, open a terminal window in Linux and type the following:

$ lynx -dump "http://tips.webdesign10.com" >file1.txt

All the text from that URL will now be in a file called "file1.txt", along with the text from alt tags, and a complete list of all outgoing links from that page. You can then process the file how you want (for example, with SEO-related scripts). See also this Lynx tutorial.

• Lynx Homepage — Links to documentation and help can be found here.
• Lynx Examples — An excerpt from a book that has some examples of using Lynx at the Linux command line.
• Lynx Viewer — If you don't have Lynx, this is an alternative way to get a Lynx-view of your Web site. If you don't have Lynx, consider using a Linux live CD like Knoppix or Ubuntu. A Linux live CD lets you run Linux on your computer without installing anything.