An introduction to tools to help marketers assess SEO effectiveness

More DIY tips for SEO

Whenever I'm training I'm nearly always asked for useful tools that aid the digital marketing process. This is particularly the case when discussing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the process of getting better search engine rankings.

I have therefore drawn up this introductory guide to the SEO process for marketers, starting with an introduction to search engine spiders Robots. We'll also discuss two of the free tools/techniques that are available from Google to assist you with this initial phase of SEO.

First step:Help Search Engine Spiders or Robots read your pages.

Spiders or Robots are bits of software that read your pages to find new and updated pages, and returns the content to the Search Engines to be indexed. If they can't read your site, then your website will not be ranked.

We'll follow this up in separate introduction posts looking at Keyword Research (finding out what people are searching for), On-Page Optimisation (ensuring our keywords on our pages are in the right place) and then finally looking at Link Building and Social Media "Signals".

These links and signals are what Google is looking at to judge the importance of your page, and act as a vote of confidence to help increase your rankings.

Second step:Search Engine Spiders

The Search Engine Spiders (also known as bots or robots) crawl your website, follow the links on your pages and send your content back to the search engine so it can then be accessed and ranked, called 'indexing'.  Generally, the more often you update your content and the more important your website is seen, the more effective you will be in ranking  (we'll cover the importance of freshness when we look at link building), the more often the spiders will return to look at your content.

There are certain practices that can stop the spiders from reading your content in the first place, and clearly, if your website can't be read, you your site will not be ranked.

A good example of this is building your entire site in Flash. Flash is a proprietary technology from Adobe that allows you to build animated and interactive web content. Unfortunately, Google and the other search engines find it difficult, or choose not to read the content inside Flash. Basically, the search engine reads the 'box' that contains the content, rather than the content itself.

Check the spiders are crawling your website?

To check Google is visiting your website and when the spiders last visited, you can use the following technique for a page using a Google operator.

How? Go to Google but instead of searching for a word or phrase, type the following into the search box: cache:www.yourwebsite.com. This will return a copy of your website and detail when Google last visited your site.  If there are no results, then Google hasn't visited your site.

Using Google Webmaster Tools

For real insight into how Google's spiders are accessing your pages and if there are any problems,  you need to install Google Webmaster Tools.

To set this up, you'll need a Google account (you can set one up in a couple of minutes) and to prove that you own your website.  During the set up, Google will ask you to prove this by either editing your web pages code or to create a new page with a specific name (as this demonstrates to Google that you control the website).

Once installed, Google Webmaster Tools will:

• Provide a Google's view of your site and diagnose any problems

It will demonstrate how Google crawls and indexes your site and identify specific problems to prevent Google from reading it. Probably the most important feature to what we've been talking about.

• Show you data about your links and traffic

You can view and download data about internal and external links to your site with the new link reporting tools. Find out which Google search words/phrases drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there.

• Share information about your site and review your site's performance
  

This allows you to tell Google about your pages with Sitemaps: which pages are the most important to you and how often they change. 

It also has some beta(test) features that allow you understand how fast your pages load in comparison to other sites. This is important as it is one of the factors that Google considers when deciding your rankings.

Google Webmaster Tools is a powerful and very useful additional to your Digital Marketing tools and will give you some real insight that can help you improve your search engine rankings.

For more digital marketing tools, take a look at our latest compilation of 12 Digital Marketing tools on Target Internet.

Thanks to Daniel Rowles for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Daniel is Managing Director of Target Internet and host of the popular Digital Marketing Podcast. You can follow him/her on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.