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This is the third in a series of tools which can not only be used to help improve your website, but also used to analyze the sites of your competitors.

In todays article I look at two desktop based applications.  One is a complete site analysis and optimization tool while another is a good link analysis and management tool.

Both of these tools should go into your arsenal of web tools to help improve your sites search engine positioning while also allowing you to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.

Yesterday I started a series on competitive intelligence gathering and how you can use it to assess your competitors and the market space. 

In this article I continue with this theme:  Introducing you to a couple more tools I like to use on a regular basis.  One is web based while the other is a freely downloadable application.

Sometimes it is hard to figure out who your online competitors are, or worse, what they are doing to beat you.  Sometimes it feels like you are beating your head against a wall because no matter how hard you try you just can not figure out how they are doing it.

In this article, I look at some of the tools you can use to gather competitive intelligence about your competitors and the online market space in general.

Over the past few articles I’ve brought you different tactics you can use to help build quality links to your site.

And while I am going to continue to bring you even more of these tactics I thought it would be good to step back and take a big picture look at why link building is important.

Further, I wanted to look at other things you should be considering when you are doing your link building:  Namely managing your online reputation.

I recently attended a search engine marketing seminar and there was lots of discussion about how to mass market your site online.

Because that is essentially what search engine marketing is:  Marketing to the masses.  But a question came up as I was listening and that is:  How does a website market to early adopters?

In this article, I hope to address some of the points you need to cover to market to this distinct group of people.

I recently had the opportunity to ask questions of some Google staffers.  There were some questions I felt I needed to get verification on, so when I had the opportunity via a conference call I took it.

In this article I highlight some of the points made during the call so you know what Google thinks.

I was recently helping someone troubleshoot some problems at SearchEngineWatch forums and it struck me that I should write an article about this and other issues.  Because sometimes when you run into a brick wall and can not figure out why your site is not getting listed or even crawled in the search engines it is not always a site issue.

In fact, sometimes it is a server issue which you may or may not have control over.  In that case, it does not matter what you do to your site, you just aren’t going to get it listed.  This article covers some things to look at and how you can go about fixing them.

Flash movies can be a great thing. They can help catch eyes that are otherwise bored with static looking pages, and they can help tell a story better than plain text.  However the use of flash must be tempered with the ability to rank in search engines.  This article describes some of the considerations and recommendations when using flash on a website.

I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve consulted on where, without a word to the SEM team, the site owner re-launches with a brand new site.  Sometimes it’s a simple cosmetic change but more often than not its a completely new site with new page naming conventions and new folder hierarchy.  In this article I am going to try and explain how you can minimize the impact to your search engine rankings when performing a redesign.

There are many in the industry who use IP recognition to serve ads or fool search engine spiders through cloaking.  Yet I’m here to tell you that there are many other uses for IP recognition as well, such as improving your search engine positioning, and serving geo-targetted content.

Search, both organic and paid, continue to evolve and mature.  No longer is it a matter of tweaking meta tags to get top listings.  In many cases it can take months or years to achieve top positions in competitive keyphrase markets.  However, there are some future considerations one must be aware of with search so that they can take advantage of them.  This article outlines some of the future innovations I see coming.

Many times it is advantageous to purchase multiple domain names even if you only have one website.  However in doing so you could risk getting penalized for duplicate content if the search engines find the different domains and index the site under those different domains.  This article explains how to make sure that doesn’t happen

For those of you not familiar with “Creative Commons”, it is a term coined by creativecommons.org that is used to describe photos, music, and text that are freely available to reproduce/copy on your own websites/newsletters with the only condition being that you give credit to the author of the content you are reproducing.

So basically its free content.  All you have to do is provide a link to the original source. 

Here are two places to search for “Free Content”

http://creativecommons.org/find/

-and-

http://search.yahoo.com/cc

For example, a Simple search for the word “SEO” produced 142,000 pages of content in Yahoo, most of which is free to use.

I’m sure many of you can think of a ways to utilize these tools.  For all of you link builders out there you should seriously consider licensing your website/content with creativecommons.org.  Syndication is one of the easiest and best ways to get free links.

For all of you hard core Google SEO Junkies out there, here is some great reading.

New Google Patent

There is some very interesting comments about the age of links being important.  More of a reason to participate in our permanent links program!!

Don’t over look this form of on site optimization. This comprehensive article on seoconsultants.com outlines the many ways you can optimize your URLs.
Read the article. http://www.seoconsultants.com/articles/1000/urls.asp

Not covered in the article is the practice of using one host name to align both http://example.com and http://www example.com. This will ensure that your site receives the highest page rank benefit, because all your inbound links are counted together. This is very important if your site has a lot of natural links.

Scrivs has a good post explaining this.
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