SEO Tips and Tools
SEO Tip of the Month
Favorite icons, or "favicons," appear next to the URL in most browser windows and in bookmarks. Although it won't affect your search engine rankings, favicons provide a nice visual cue for your site, especially in a bookmarks folder. Visit Punk Labs' ConvertIcon service or DynamicDrive's FavIcon Generator to create one easily or check out this good PhotoShop tutorial.
Free Keyword Research Tools
The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool is a fast, free easy-to-use tool powered by Wordtracker that can help you discover what keywords you should be targeting for your website.
Digital Point Solutions offers another handy free tool that tells you how often a phrase is searched for and provides suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords.
Keyword Discovery's keyword research tool is considered the keyword tool of choice by many search industry experts. WESST is among its satisfied subscribers. Sign up for their free trial version and check it out for yourself.
Register for two free hours of keyword research from Wordtracker, a premium web-based subscription keyword research service.
This tool from SEO Chat issues a percentage score that indicates how difficult it would be to rank on the first page for specific keywords or keyword phrases; higher percentages mean greater difficulty.
Free Link Tools
Unlike a lot of tools that only check a single page for broken outbound links, Dead-Links.com's tool checks for broken links throughout your entire domain.
LinkPopularity.com's free tool that allows you to query Google, Yahoo, and MSN and reports on your link popularity.
Miscellaneous Tools and SEO Resources
Bad Neighborhood's cool tool will scan the links on your website and flags potential problems with your linking strategies, such as linking to bad neighborhood.
XML-Sitemaps.com offers this free online Google XML sitemaps generator.
Sign up with your Google account for Google Analytics, this free service offering website traffic measurement and interactive reporting. A great way to see how visitors actually interact with your site.
Register for one of Search Marketing Now's free Webcasts and learn the latest search engine marketing techniques from the industry's leading authorities with the convenience of attending online.
On-demand search marketing Webcasts sponsored by iProspect are an excellent resource for learning SEO/SEM strategies, tactics and solutions. Just fill out a registration form and you can view any Webcast listed on the site at a time that's convenient for you.
WebSiteOptimization.com offers a cool web-based tool that will analyze the download time of any Web page.
SEOmoz is a Seattle-based SEO company that provides education, tools, resources, and paid services for search marketers and site owners worldwide.
A section of Search Engine Watch called SEM Basics: A Guide for Webmasters and Search Marketers provides links to tons of useful search marketing information – from properly submitting to search engines to search and user-friendlhy page design.
The Internet Archive (IA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining an archive of the Web and multimedia resources. The Archive includes archived copies of web pages taken at various points in time, as well as software, movies, books, and audio recordings. Be sure to check out their "Wayback Machine" that gives a snapshot of web pages throughout their history
Ecommerce Times offers free access to e-marketing articles that will help you conduct business successfully on the Internet.