There are a lot of tools out there to help you identify your SEO strengths and weaknesses, from services that monitor your keyword rankings on popular search engines (SERP, or Search Engine Results Page) to more complete, premium solutions that tell you exactly what you should change to make your site rank better.

DIYSEO

DIYSEO claims to be a “web-based solution for small businesses to get search engine traffic at a fraction of the cost.” It’s basically a tool that allows you to coordinate and plan your SEO strategy, act on it based on their suggestions and finally measure and analyze the results. It costs either $49/mo or $499/yr if paid in advance, both options with a 7-day free trial.

GinzaMetrics

GinzaMetrics is a new YC-backed company that allows you to “monitor search engine rankings, track conversions and improve your SEO.” It’s geared towards larger companies and agencies by providing enterprise-grade SEO/SEM solutions. Prices vary depending on the amount of keywords you need to use, ranging from a free plan to $999/mo for their most expensive option.

SheerSEO

SheerSEO is an SEO software to track and analyze your SEO campaign that also helps you with link building. This is one of the more feature-rich applications that tracks a load of information, from keywords to rankings to social media relevance. It’s a powerful tool that’s priced pretty reasonably, with plans starting at $7/mo and going up to $199/mo for agencies.

SEO Rank Monitor

SEO Rank Monitor is all about tracking keywords – how your website ranks for multiple keywords, how your competitors rank and understanding organic search growth. They offer two plans, a basic that tracks 1 website and 100 keywords ($19/mo) and a pro plan that tracks 10 websites and up to 2500 keywords ($39/mo).

AuthorityLabs

Another SERP/keyword monitoring service similar to SEO Rank Monitor but even simpler (more bare-bones). Their pricing is also similar however they seem to offer a better bang for the buck in terms of number of sites you can watch, and they even have a live demo which is nice.

SEMRush

I’ve been playing with this site for the past couple of days but I’m already a fan – you can test it out by going to their site and entering any domain name to find how that site ranks for many keywords. It’s highly useful for finding relevant keywords to build on, however they limit the free results to the top 10 keywords. Their premium plans start at $59/mo and allow up to 10,000 results per report, plus they give you API access, which is very cool.

Raven

Raven Tools is another full-fledged SEO service that helps you monitor keywords, social media buzz and even integrates with Google Analytics to generate custom reports based on your traffic. Their base plan starts at $19/mo and provides 100 keyword ranking results, however all plans come with a 30-day trial.

SEOMoz Tools

The guys (and gals) at SEOMoz have created a number of free and paid tools that help you view backlinks, identify keywords and a “geotargeting detector” that tells you how well your website is targeted towards a certain geographic area.

SEORush

SEORush provides a quick overview of how well your site is indexed, traffic rankings and the number of social media bookmarks it has for a few popular networks. I would suggest using this tool together with something like QuarkBase to get a quick overview of the popularity of a site, and to get some quick ideas for keyword generation.

KeywordEnvy

Keyword Envy is just a quick and dirty tool to check how a website ranks for up to 5 keywords on several search engines. They also offer paid plans that offer more keywords and a few additional features.

Conclusion

Do you have any other tools you use to monitor and check the SEO status of your websites? If so suggest them in the comments and I’ll add them to the list!

And as always, remember to subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter!

• 12 Ways to Market Your Website For Free

Brand vs Community

In simple terms, a brand is any company’s identity, defined by a name, sign, symbol, design or combination of these things. Strong brands are able to connect with customers, evoking feelings like trust, reliability and satisfaction. You may get thirsty when you see the Pepsi symbol, or get hungry when you see those yellow arches – branding is not only about recognition, but also about creating a psychological link (almost Pavlovian) to your products.

While good branding can help you market and establish your company, building a community can help establish your brand both directly and indirectly to your users. A good community, in my opinion, should do the following:

1. Connect your business to your customers
2. Connect your customers to other customers
3. Connect your business to new customers by leveraging existing customers

It may sound like a lot of work and in some cases, it is, but engaging your customers can have outstanding benefits, the most significant of which being increased customer retention.

Building a Community Around Your Brand

There are numerous things you can do to create a community for your product, many of which are quick and easy to utilize. Keep in mind that the goal is to engage customers and visitors in a way that will promote your brand, create trust and form (or strengthen) that psychological connection people form with things they like. Here are a few fairly obvious steps to take if you haven’t already:

1. Start Blogging

Blogging is probably the easiest and fastest way to connect your business with customers and prospective customers alike. What you write about can be an important factor in the effectiveness of blogging, but there are several great examples to study and learn from:

• Signal vs Noise – The guys at 37signals know all to well the power of creating a community through blogging – they have a loyal following of 118k RSS readers to promote new products, updates and news.
• Peldi of Balsamiq and Patrick McKenzie of BingoCardCreator have also built a strong following by blogging transparently about their business practices and earnings.
• Paul Graham of YCombinator has managed not only to inspire young entrepreneurs but also build a following by writing insightful essays on startups

Replying to comments left on your blog can also make your users feel like their opinions are significant, even more so if you actually act on their suggestions. Keep in mind that blogging can essentially be a public window into your brand – take criticism with grace and always be kind to your customers, your reputation may just depend on it.

2. Create a Forum

A forum can be a great way to give customers and visitors a reason to go back to your site, even after they’ve purchased your product. Forums also allow your customers to connect with each other, sometimes even to the point of handling support issues. Some of examples of companies building a community by using forums are:

• WordPress – The open source publishing platform has a highly active support forum powered mainly by users.
• Gaming sites like Kongregate and Nonoba have busy forums that improve user retention by providing users yet another way of participating on the site.
• Even social networks like MySpace use forums to encourage user interaction.

Interestingly enough, communication through public forums can also create a sort of moral obligation to reply and respond to messages directed at you, almost as if your real-world character is on the line. In the end though, a forum can be a valuable asset both in encouraging both user participation and creating a customer-powered support system.

3. Leverage Social Networks

Let’s face it – social networks are getting increasingly popular and many continue to spread virally. It’s relatively quick and easy to utilize social networks for your business and use their proliferation to your advantage. There are dozens of options but here are a few quick ones:

• Create a Facebook group or fan page, invite users to it and update it periodically with news your users may find interesting. Reply to comments left on your wall to keep users engaged. Several companies have also started using Facebook to promote giveaways and competitions, with many accumulating hundreds of thousands of users.
• Twitter can be just as powerful – creating an account takes minutes yet the results can be profound. Conan O’Brien is proof of the power of Twitter followers – one of his tweets led to the instant celebrity of a random user. Twitter has enabled brands and celebrities alike to connect and interact with users directly.
• Social linking sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon provide buttons that can be easily implemented onto any website and allow your customers to share their experiences with their social circles, bringing in additional users and potential customers.

Using social media to engage your customers can be a simple and quick way to build a following for your brand. Just like blogging, what you say on these networks can have a lasting effect on the psychology of your customers – choose your words carefully and always put your business before your emotions (at least in public).

Final Thoughts

While building a strong brand can be crucial to the success of your business, building a community around it will engage your customers in new ways and can help to further spread your brand. With so many new tools and services available, many community features can be integrated within minutes, so why not take advantage of them?

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• 12 Ways to Market Your Website For Free

Use Either WWW or No-WWW

Search engines treat each sub-domain, including www, as a different website altogether. This means that if your content is accessible via www and without it, both will be crawled and ranked in search engines. This will hurt your overall page rank (effectively splitting it) and reduce the number of backlinks to your domain. Be decisive – pick one or the other and configure your website to redirect traffic there.
The technique varies depending on your web server, but here are a few quick methods:

Using Apache

First, make sure you have mod_rewrite installed and enabled. Then create or modify an .htaccess file (in your directory root) and enter the following:

Redirect to WWW

Redirect to No-WWW

Using Lighttpd

Edit your site configuration, which is either your /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf file or virtual host file (usually in sites-available), and add:

Redirect to WWW

Redirect to No-WWW

Using nginx

Edit your site configuration, which is either your /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf file or virtual host file (usually in sites-available), and add:

Redirect to WWW

Redirect to No-WWW

Using Windows

I personally have zero experience using Windows servers, however I did find this article by Electric Media that may help. There are also a few forum posts that may shed some light into the matter.

Set Preferred Domain

Using the incredibly useful Google Webmaster Tools, you can set a preferred domain for your website that Google will favor in rankings. One useful bit of information is that you must verify both www.domain.com and domain.com to be able to select a preferred domain. This took me a little searching to figure out but it makes sense – Google does really treat different sub-domains, including www, as different websites.

You can find the Preferred Domain setting under Site Configuration -> Settings in your domain settings.

Final Words

It takes less than 10 minutes to implement www/no-www on your website and set a preferred domain – if you haven’t already done so, do it ASAP! This will help improve your search rankings and will make sure you’re not penalized for duplicate content, and the results are simply well worth the time.

If you have any other quick SEO tips or suggestions, please leave them in the comments. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter!

• Quick SEO Tip 2: Submit Your Sitemap
• Using Google Analytics to Refine Your Website
• Quick Tip: Preventing Right-Click Context Menu with jQuery

Understanding Your Visitors

Analytics is a very comprehensive and capable service, however for the purposes of this tutorial, we’re going to be mainly focusing on the Visitors section. This section contains a wealth of information on visitor engagement, technical profiles and visitor trends. Getting quality traffic is hard – knowing your visitors can help shape both your design and content.

Refining Your Design

So you’ve spent weeks on an elaborate design for your website that is nothing short of breathtaking. A great design can go a long way to produce traffic, but is your site accessible to your visitors?

Screen Resolution

If your website is targeted towards professional web designers, the majority of whom have large 24″+ monitors with high screen resolutions, you can get away with a lot more in terms of design. Similarly, if your site attracts college students who mainly use laptops, your design should cater for their resolutions. Fortunately for us, Analytics provides us a breakdown of the resolutions our visitors use:

For a site like DevGrow, we see that more than 75% of visitors have a resolution of at least 1280×800. This means that I can comfortably increase the width of this site to make room for more content without having to upset the majority of my visitors. Conversely, making my width less than 800 pixels will leave a lot of white space for most visitors.

Browsers and Operating Systems

Understanding what browsers your visitors use can also be crucial to the way you design and develop your site. If you find that the majority of your visitors use Internet Explorer, you better make sure your website looks and functions correctly in Internet Explorer. Clicking on the Browsers tab will show the overall browser distribution and clicking on any of these will show version distribution:

The same logic applies to operating system distribution – if you find that a large portion of visitors use their iPhones or iPads to view your website, it will be worthwhile to make an iPhone/iPad accessible site for them.

Connection Speed

While chances are that the majority of your visitors will have a high speed internet connection, you may be surprised to see that people do still use dialup connections. Most mobile connections aren’t up to speed with DSL or cable yet either, so if your visitors tend to access your website with mobile browsers, it will help to have a thinned down mobile site. Truth be told, even if most people do use high speed connections, it can only help to reduce your page load times and file sizes as your visitors can more quickly access your content. The least it can do is help your Google rankings, as the search engine giant takes into account page load times. They offer a handy set of Webmaster Tools, one of which tests your site load times.

Refining your Content

Having an accessible design is great but quality content is key to creating a sticky website. Analytics can help you understand what people are viewing, how loyal they are to your site and where they are coming from – all of which can help shape the content you create.

Bounce Rates

This is probably one of the most critical pieces of data measured by Analytics – it is essentially the “percentage of initial visitors to a site who ‘bounce’ away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.” (Wikipedia) A high bounce rate means that people are leaving your website after visiting a single page, whereas a low rate indicates people are sticking around and exploring other parts of your website.

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

- Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist

According to Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, anything over 35% for a typical website is cause for concern. For blogs, he notes that an average bounce rate of 50% is normal. Improving this rate is a huge undertaking, however the main concept behind it is simple: make your content easily accessible by:

• Making sure your navigation menus are visible, quickly accessible and above the fold
• If you offer a product, tell your visitor what it does on the landing page and above the fold
• Include links to other internal content (related links, popular posts, recent comments, etc.)
• Reduce overall page clutter

Time on Site and Visitor Loyalty

Similar to the bounce rate, the average time a visitor spends on your site is an important metric to gauge how engaging your website is. If people like what your website offers, they will spend more time on it. If this value is low for your website, you have a few options:

• Improve the quality of your current content
• Add new content
• Integrate new feature that promotes visitor engagement (i.e. social networking)

Visitor loyalty measures how many times your visitors come to your website. If you find that the majority of users visits your site only once, the same suggestions really apply – create more engaging content or try making your site more social. Content is really king here, as people will only visit your site repeatedly if it has something to offer them that they haven’t seen before.

Final Notes

Better understanding your visitors will hopefully help you better understand the type of content you should produce and how to display it. You won’t be able to satisfy every single visitor but you can make sure your website is accessible to the majority of them by properly analyzing your traffic.

If you enjoyed this tutorial, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed or following us on Twitter for more posts like it!

• Quick SEO Tip: Set Preferred Domain in Google Webmaster Tools

1. Use Your Existing Connections

This tops my list as the quickest and cheapest way to bring at least a little traffic to your site. I have found that getting my friends and family to visit my site and give me feedback on it not only allows me to squash bugs, it also plants the seeds to build traffic (and clients) organically.

When I started freelancing several years ago, I made a website and waited for my inbox to explode with messages from potential clients. After receiving nothing but spam from the contact form, I told my family and classmates (at my university) about my endeavor, and within a couple of weeks I was receiving an e-mail every couple of weeks from a prospective client. Several of my clients started referring me to their friends and colleagues, which led to even more leads. While my actual website had very little traffic, the business was sustainable because of word-of-mouth marketing and real-world networking.

Last year I created a flash gaming website. If you’re not familiar with the flash gaming industry, it’s completely oversaturated and new sites rarely get enough traffic to become profitable. I felt I had a shot because I based my site around a social network instead of games, so I launched with high anticipation. Again I found it difficult to get traction, so I went to my friends and family. To my surprise, the site quickly spread through my friend circle, with a large number of them becoming users. My little sister spread the word to her friends at school, and within a few days my traffic doubled and continued to do so for the next several months (until my site was banned by the school networks for being too distracting).

2. StumbleUpon

If what you’ve created is truly interesting, you’re bound to get a decent amount of traffic from StumbleUpon. The more people like a page, the more it gets seen, so submit a link to the most useful and interesting part of your site. If they have to figure out what they’re looking at, chances are they’re going to leave immediately and won’t recommend the page. If you have a video demonstration or a slideshow of how your product works, try linking to that instead of something verbose.

From my past experience, StumbleUpon can produce an initial burst of traffic followed by a steady, continuous stream of visitors every day for months to come. While the bounce rate was pretty high for my site (around 70%), with larger numbers you can still retain a large volume of users.

If your site just doesn’t seem to appeal to the StumbleUpon crowd initially, you can also try advertising with them, which forces more eyes on your content and increases the chance of it becoming popular.

3. Digg, Reddit, HackerNews

Both Digg and Reddit are in the top 400 websites on the net (according to Alexa) and can bring your server to it’s knees if you make the front page. HackerNews doesn’t have as much traffic but it does have a more intellectual userbase that can provide critical feedback on your site (and a modest bump in traffic). It is, however, getting increasingly difficult to hit the front page of these sites recently (mainly Digg and Reddit), largely due to the sheer volume of submissions at any given time. Really great content will usually manage to find it’s way to the front page, however, so don’t get discouraged if your initial submissions get buried in down votes.

4. Start Blogging

Find a topic related to your website/product and start blogging about it. Not only will this keep you busy, it will add value to your site in terms of SEO and bring more traffic from search engines. A great example of this can be seen with my friends at NewMediaCampaigns.com, a local web design company that started blogging and saw an incredible increase in traffic (which has undoubtedly led to more sales).

5. Twitter

In simple terms, Twitter is like marketing magic. Send out a tweet and your message is instantly visible to all of your followers, who have the capability of retweeting it to their followers, creating a chain reaction of sorts. It’s fairly easy to get a decent number of followers, just start following a ton of people and hope they have auto-follow enabled (or are kind enough to follow back). Don’t make it your aim to market your product or website, keep the account mainly casual (talk about your life) or useful (link to useful resources) and build trust in your followers. Constantly reply to tweets your followers make and try to really connect with them, so when you do share your product or website, they will have every reason to check it out (and hopefully retweet!).

6. Make Your Site Really Good Looking

Making your site attractive and user-friendly will not only help you retain visitors, it will also allow you to submit your site to CSS and design showcases, sites that are equally as impressive as Digg or Reddit in terms of traffic. Spend quality time on making your design amazing (or hire a great designer) and then submit it to every CSS gallery you can find, including ones that are not as popular yet. Chances are if a couple of them pick up your site, the others will follow, and you will see a drastic increase in day-to-day traffic (usually with a big spike initially).

7. If You Sell Something, Create an Affiliate Service

Creating an attractive affiliate program is like having access to an unlimited number of salesmen who will spread your product like a wildfire. There are many people who make a living off of affiliate marketing and there are a number of sites you can post your offer to. If your product is compelling, an affiliate program (with a competitive commission) can increase your sales exponentially with zero capital investment (you only pay if your product sells).

8. Comment on Popular Blogs

This is somewhat sleazy but can work wonders if you do it correctly. Find blogs that cover the same general topic of your website and leave insightful comments with a link back to your blog. While it will help your page ranking if you place the link in your body (creating a backlink), it is generally frowned upon. Placing your address in the ‘Website’ field will usually suffice, and leaving enough comments every day can generate a modest amount of traffic. This one is mainly about persistence, the more comments you make the better your chances are that someone will click through to your site.

9. Create Something Unrelated But Interesting

This is not one I typically use or recommend, as it is hard to come up with something interesting, however after seeing the success people like Matthew Inman have had with this tactic, I can’t help but recommend it. If you’re unfamiliar with his story, he created a dating website in 66.5 hours and eventually sold it to competitor after a few months. One of his tactics to get new users and traffic was to create random quizzes and market those instead of the dating website itself. Visitors would then share the quizzes and their results (via badges) with friends. While the quizzes were completely unrelated to the dating site, they created enough buzz and new users to allow him to sell the site.

If you can come up with something interesting, quirky and fun (even if it’s unrelated), this strategy is probably worth a shot!

10. Give Free Samples

If you’re selling a product or service, give it away for free to people with influence. If you’re a freelance web developer trying to break into the market, make a few websites for free (nonprofits are nice) or for really cheap. Ask for feedback and recommendations, then show them on your website and tell them to let their friends know about it. The key with this tactic is to build organic traffic, creating momentum from the ground up with even a small group of people.

11. Local News

The great thing about local news media is that they’re always looking for stories (often desperately), so the news of a local starting an interesting and innovative new online business can often be enough to get you in a newspaper or on TV. If you’re a college student, find a way to get into the school newspaper and push the fact that you’re a student trying to run a business. I’ve had a few projects appear in local media and while the effects were only modest in terms of traffic, they helped build a lot of local connections that came in use later on.

12. Partner Up

I’ve saved this for last mainly because I don’t have much experience with it, however I have friends who base their entire marketing plans around strategic partnerships. There are numerous reasons on why a partnership might be a good idea (creating a better product? share userbase?) and multiple ways the partnership is structured, so I won’t dive too deep into this tactic here.

Conclusion

Marketing your website doesn’t have to cost a fortune, if you’re on a budget you can still manage to build a following with a little work. The key to getting any of the above tactics is persistence, stick with it and you’re bound for success.

This article is a lot longer than my others – did you guys find it useful or too long? I tried to tie in my personal experiences but I’m not sure if you guys really care to hear them. Please leave some feedback if you can!

• Don’t Just Build a Brand, Build a Community
• 10 Tools to Check Your Website’s SEO Status