Have you opened up Google Webmaster Tools recently? If not, you should, because you’ll find a bunch of new features. Your webmaster tools dashboard shows top search queries, links to your site, crawl errors, sitemaps, and more, as you can see in the screen shot. From the dash, you can get more information on any of these. The next screen shot shows all the webmaster tools options that show up in the left hand column of your dashboard.

If, for example, you’re looking at your top search queries, which is located under the “Your Site on the Web” menu, you can go down to the bottom of the list where it says “more” and click. You’ll be taken to a page with a graphic representation of your queries by date, and a breakdown of individual search terms, and where you rank for them, as seen in the next screen shot. Also under “Your Site on the Web” you can find links to your site, keywords, internal links, and subscriber statistics.

You used to only be able to see your site’s top 100 search queries, but now you can see many more. If your site ranks for more than 100, you’ll see page buttons at the bottom of the “Top Search Queries” list. And the graphic that appears of your top search queries used to be something you had to download and make into a chart yourself, so this new feature is especially handy. You also get a date range selector like what you have on Google Analytics so you can narrow down your data for a particular time period.

Under the “Site Configuration” menu, you can visit sitemaps, crawler access, sitelinks if any. These are the internal links that Google sometimes puts in search results, as you can see in the screenshot. There is also a “settings” section, in which you can set geographical targets, view your crawl rate stats, and parameter handling, which some webmasters use for more efficient crawling with fewer duplicate URLs. You don’t have to set any of these, because there are defaults, but some webmasters may want to. Some people have raised concerns that having country-specific sites will cause duplicate content issues, but this isn’t the case, so setting geographical targets will not harm your rankings.

Diagnostics is another handy set of features. From the Diagnostics menu, you can check for malware on your site, crawl errors, crawl stats (which gives you Googlebot activity over the preceding 90 days), and HTML suggestions. The HTML suggestions page tells you if there are any problems with malware on your site, and a breakdown of title tag information, which includes duplicate or missing title tags, short title tags, non-informative title tags, and long title tags. It also alerts you if there is non-indexable content on your pages. Just FYI, the Malware diagnostic used to be under the “Labs” menu, but late in 2009 it “graduated” to the Diagnostics menu.

The Labs menu lets you play with new tools that may or may not stick around. One thing you can do is see what your site (either the homepage, which is the default, or a specific page, whose URL you type in) looks like to the Googlebot by choosing “Fetch as Googlebot” under the Labs menu. Once you click on “fetch” you’ll get a listing of your site and under Status, you should see “Success” and a green check mark. Click on “Success” and you’ll see the source information for your page as it is seen by the Googlebot.

You can make a Sidewiki for your site under the Labs menu, too. It may not be something you’re interested in, but a Sidewiki is a browser plugin for IE and Firefox that adds a universal commenting system for any and every page on the internet. To use it, you have to install the Google Toolbar for IE or Firefox, and Google says they’re working on a version for Chrome. When you install the toolbar with the Sidewiki in it, you go to a landing page telling you how to use it. Sidewiki entries are displayed with the most useful and high quality entries first, based on running the Sidewiki information through an algorithm to determine this. Toolbar haters will probably want to skip this one.

The Site Performance option under the Labs menu basically leads you through installation of the Page Speed browser add-on for Firefox that helps you figure how fast your site loads and what you can do to maximize load speed. Page Speed runs a bunch of diagnostics against a page and analyzes various performance parameters based on things like resource caching, upload and download sizes, and client-server round trips. You’ll get a red / yellow / green grading scheme for all the parameters, plus specific suggestions for making your page faster. It also does some automatic optimization such as compressing images and “minifying” JavaScript code.

This is very valuable information, and there are even suggestions and hints on how to do things like speeding up your site by installing a Firefox add-on called Page Speed. Honestly, you could spend half a day going through the data you now get from Webmaster Tools and probably come up with a dozen tweaks to your site that will fine tune its performance. Initial reaction to the new tools – particularly the top search queries – has been very positive.

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If you haven’t checked out our tools page, you should. We’ve got all kinds of things to make it easier to evaluate and improve your own website and find out how your competitors stack up.

The Google PageRank Checker (see screen shot) does exactly what it says. You type in a URL and it tells you the site’s Google Toolbar PageRank. This is a “snapshot” of Google’s mysterious, patented PageRank formula that conveys the authoritativeness of a given page. There’s not actually a publicly accessible tool for finding the patented Google PageRank, but Google Toolbar PageRank will help you determine how authoritative a page is when used with other factors like a page’s back links, anchor text, and number of links. Keep in mind that a high PageRank doesn’t necessarily mean a site will rank high in the search results. PageRank is great, but search engine optimization is the key to ranking high in most cases.

Back links are links that point to a site from other sites. They are a prime source of PageRank juice (though not the only source). Having a lot of high quality back links that are obtained honestly will seriously help your site’s Google rankings as well as PageRank. The Backlinks Comparison Tool lets you compare the number of back links to a list of websites. It couldn’t be easier: enter a URL on each line, then hit “Get Backlinks Count.”

The Google+Bing SERP Preview can show you how a web page will appear in the Google and Bing search results. This will help you improve your title and meta description tags. The screen shot shows a test case for lilengine.com with the fields filled in. You click “Preview” to get your results (seen in the next screen shot). Once you have your results, you can click on the “Compare” button. A new window will come up showing you how the results actually look in either Google or Bing results.

Our Official Google Blog Feeds is a site you should bookmark if you haven’t already. In one place it gives you live feeds from the following Google blogs:

• The Official Google Blog
• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Base: Google Base Blog
• Checkout: The offical Google Checkout Blog
• Content Central Blog
• Conversion Room
• Custom Search Engine Blog
• Google Ad Manager Blog
• Google Affiliate Network Blog
• Google Analytics Blog
• Google Maps Blog
• Google Mobile Blog
• Google Online Security Blog
• Google Website Optimizer Blog
• Inside AdSense
• Inside AdWords
• Social Web Blog
• Full List Via Google Reader

The Link Report Tool analyzes the links on a given web page and generates a report. You type in a URL and click on “Generate Report.” You have the option of filtering links in a number of ways. For example, you can have it check all the links, broken links, internal, outbound, or redirected links, nofollow links (the kinds that search engines won’t follow), or unknown links, which for whatever reason can’t be analyzed. If you click on the link in the report, you’ll get a brief summary of the link, including the URL, the anchor text, the http response, and problems encountered. You can also view the link HTML from the web page. You can see in the screen shot the initial results of a report on a page from Techdirt.com.

You can use the Google Penalty Checker to test for possible penalties from Google. You enter a domain name in the box and click “Check” to get a quick check of whether a site has been penalized. If you see warnings related to keywords on your site, you might want to investigate these. They may not mean a penalty has been issued, they do indicate that your SEO could be improved. If a site is not penalized, your result will be a happy green check mark indicating Google seems to think it’s A-OK. If a site has been penalized, you’ll see a big red “X” instead.

If you want to know the keywords a domain is ranking for in Google search results, you can use the Keyword Position Checker. You simply type in a domain name and choose which version of Google to check against (Google.com, Google.ru, Google.de, or Google.fr). The results include keywords, position, result count, and URL of the page in the results.

Our Keyword Competitors tool shows you the competitors that rank for the same keywords as your domain. Type in your domain name. You’ll get a report showing you your competitors. In the results, if you click on a competitor you’ll get a side-by-side comparison of keywords both of you rank for, and what position your site ranks for a given keyword.

Hey, wanna get a sitemap for your new website? Use our Sitemap Builder. It’s easy. The tool crawls your website and makes a Google Sitemap. If you don’t have a sitemap, you should. It helps search engine crawlers like Googlebot find the pages on your site, determine their relative importance, and tell which pages have recently changed. You type in your domain, and in a matter of seconds the tool will generate a sitemap, as you can see in the screen shot. You can easily download your sitemap in several different forms.

These aren’t all the tools in our toolbox, and we’re always updating and adding tools, so check out the tools page often and use these tools to help your site make it to the top of the search results.

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If you’re looking to work your way up the search engine rankings, and who isn’t? Then one way to get some good insights into what works and what doesn’t is to see what your competitors are up to. What does that top ranking site have that your site doesn’t? It is surprisingly easy to find out these things, or some of them at least. One of the great things about the web is that finding who your competitors are is easy, as is comparing services and products. It’s a given that customers usually return to sites that are easy to browse and that have generous amounts of information, even if the visitors don’t partake of all of it.

Analyze The Top Sites in Your Niche

Once you find out what the top ranking sites in your niche are, what should you do? Well, here are several things you can do.

You can find out some very interesting facts. For example, you might discover that a lot of the inbound links come from websites that the competitor owns. This isn’t always easy to find out, but it’s very informative if you can. The “whois” information may not give you much to go on, but if you do discover that this is the case, you may realize that owning some legitimate websites on the side can help attract more traffic to your site.

You might discover when browsing through your competitor’s site that even though the information on your site is similar, their site has a very different structure – a better optimized structure. It could make a big difference in their search engine ranking. You might discover that your competitor is using a bunch of keywords and key phrases that you never even thought of.

Start off simply enough. Get a pad of paper and a pen and make notes as you thoroughly do your own “crawl” of your competitor’s site. Look over the pages as they appear first, then go back and look at the source html. On most browsers you get this by pressing ctrl+U. If not, this command can often be found in the “Tools” menu of your browser. Don’t worry. You don’t have to be an html genius to learn from it.

Look at their title tag. Is it well written? Does it reflect a common syntax used throughout the site? On the home page, look for the H1, H2, and H3 tags. If you find them, your competitor uses heading tags within the page. Try to identify the actual text used in the headings. You will more than likely find some paydirt key phrases within these tags.

Look for nofollow tags. These are used to spread PageRank throughout the site. Doing this is what’s known as having a themed structure, and it can be very beneficial to your ranking. If you find this pattern, they either know their SEO or they’ve hired someone who does.

How do they do their navigation? Is it in a drop-down menu? Is it search engine friendly? In the footer is there a text menu?

Look at the anchor text: is there a pattern of keywords there? If certain words appear there often, they are almost certainly target phrases.

Check the Google PageRank of the pages you visit. If a page has a notably high PR, pay closer attention to that page. These are often pages that have the information that visitors choose to link to. It could give you some clues for adding similar content to your website.

Backlinks and PR

Here’s another cool thing you can do with your competitor’s website: back link analysis. SEO Book offers a free back link analyzer that you can download here. You enter simple information as you can see in the screen shot. When you run the program, set it up to acquire Google Rank and Alexa Rank for each back link. This is a matter of checking two boxes. The back link analyzer automatically filters out “rel=nofollow” links.

When you’re done, you can sort your results by PageRank and Alexa Rank. The reason for looking at both Alexa and PageRank is that each has its advantages and disadvantages. PageRank may be quirky due to whatever they’re penalizing recently, so you could miss out on a quality site because of its low PR. Alexa Rank is a measure of popularity, but doesn’t say anything about how Google views its quality. So use both as a system of checks and balances.

If you really want to delve into things, put your report data from the Back link analyzer into a spreadsheet. Make a copy where you sort the data by Google PR from highest to lowest. Then get rid of the ones that rank less than 4. Have another copy where you sort by Alexa Ranking from lowest to highest, and then do another sort by Google PR from highest to lowest. Get rid of the ones that have a negative Alexa Ranking. Congratulations: you now have lists of authority pages that link to your competitor.

So now that you have that data, what do you do with it? If you filter the links by domain, you can see how many links per domain the competitor is getting. If one website is repeated a lot, then you can bet that the competitor owns the website (or has bought a link from them). You can try running a “whois” on the domain, but you may not get a satisfactory answer.

Here’s another thing: if you see that a lot of the links are from the competitor’s own website, then chances are they have good content. If so, take note. You may need to focus on increasing your content or the quality of it.

Next you should figure out which of those links you’d like to get yourself. You can probably get several just by asking. It certainly can’t hurt (unless you accidentally ask for back links from sites that happen to be owned by the competitor, and even then, you might get a link).

In the midst of all this competitor sleuthing, don’t forget about your site. You’re doing this to learn, so be ready to apply some of what you find out to your own site, and hopefully you’ll get a boost in the rankings as well.

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Whether you have a blog or a full-fledged e-commerce site, you probably are curious about how many people visit your site, which pages are most popular, how many page views you get, and how long visitors stay around. Fortunately, there are several free analytics programs you can get right online to help you dig into the numbers your website is generating and learn what stories those numbers tell. Four such programs are Onestatfree.com, Google Analytics, Piwik, and GoStats.

Onestatfree.com

Onestatfree.com is a free subset of onestat.com, which provides web analytics for marketers and webmasters. The paid version starts at $125 per year and provides information on visitor behavior, conversions, and online advertising, plus a full range of website statistics software. Onestatfree is a hit counter that is password protected and has the ability to track an unlimited number of pages. It also gives you information about your visitors and your site for free. You can see an example of the information Onestatfree gives you on the first screen shot. To get Onestatfree, just go to onestatfree.com and register. You’ll be given a snippet of code to insert into your website’s source code that will start monitoring and analyzing visits to your site.

Onestatfree has a directory based on web statistics, and when you use the service, your website is automatically listed in the categorized charts based on web statistics. This is a way to easily see the most popular websites in each category based on Onestatfree statistics. Your site starts being listed as soon as the first visit is tracked by the counter. Categories of websites in the directory are: Arts, Business, Children, Computers & Internet, Culture & Religion, Education, Employment, Entertainment, Finance and Money, Games, Government, Health & Fitness, Hobbies & Interests, Home & Garden, Life & Family, Marketing, Movies & Television, Music & Radio, News & Media, Personal Homepages, Pets, Science & Technology, Society, Sports, Tourism & Travel, and Weblogs.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is perhaps the most famous of the free analytics packages. It gives you a broad range of information about your site, including advertising return on investment, cross-channel multimedia tracking (as you can see in the second screen shot), customizable reporting, and many ways to visually represent your site’s analytics. Using Google Analytics is also a matter of installing code into the source code of the website you want to track. Users of Google Analytics include some big names, like The American Cancer Society, Discount Tire, Yelp, Huffington Post, and RE/MAX Global Real Estate.

If you use Google AdWords, then you can integrate Google Analytics with it and review your online campaigns and track things like the quality of your landing page and your conversions. You define conversions as sales, lead generation, page views, or downloads. You can also use Google Analytics with Google AdWords to determine which ads perform best. You can identify poorly performing pages by looking at where your visitors come from (their referrers), and their geographical location. You can add up to 50 site profiles to Google Analytics, and each site must have traffic lower than 5 million pageviews per month, unless the site is tied to an AdWords campaign, in which case it can be bigger in terms of visitors.

Piwik

Piwik is an open source, GPL licensed website analytic software program that is downloadable. Piwik gives you real-time reports on website visitors, including information like which keywords and search engines they used, what language they use, and which of your pages are most popular. Piwick calls itself the open source alternative to Google Analytics. It is a PHP MySQL program that you download and install. After the installation process, you get a JavaScript tag that you copy and paste into the source code of websites you want to track. An example of the type of reports you can get is shown in the third screen shot.

Piwik is constantly adding new features, like goal tracking, that can help you optimize your affiliate income if you participate in an affiliate program. Piwik 1.0, to be released in 2010, has already added some new features, like a one-click update check, new JavaScript tagging, and a dashboard to track multiple sites.

Gostats

Gostats is another free hit counter that provides stats on not only the number of visitors to your site, but also information about page views, page popularity, and return visitors, as you can see on the fourth screen shot. Like the other free analytics software programs, you visit gostats.com, create an account, and copy and paste a small bit of code into your website’s source code. GoStats will then start tracking your site data. If you want more data than the free version of the software provides, you can upgrade to the professional version of GoStats. Another interesting page on the GoStats site is a huge chart comparing web hosting services in terms of price, how much disk space and bandwidth they provide, monthly cost, and initial setup cost. The three plans highlighted in green at the top of the chart are paid listings. You can narrow the chart down by specifying monthly costs or setup costs.

If you upgrade to GoStats Professional, you’ll get comprehensive site and data analysis, with regular reports and displays of visitor traffic on a map of the world.

Web analytics can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be. Whether you simply want the ego boost of knowing that your blog is being read, or whether you need lots of numbers crunched in order to maximize your site’s profitability, you can get that functionality easily. While Google Analytics is the leader of the pack, there are plenty of other options that you can try so you can find the analytics that are right for you.

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In Part I, we talked about how to determine if your site has been banned or penalized by Google and what to do about it. This part delves more into Google penalty folklore, and how the search engine is constantly changing and evolving to counter nefarious work-arounds that people develop to game the search engine world.

In August and September 2009, Google made changes that demote a site by 50 places in the rankings if you are penalized. At this time, variation of anchor texts grew in importance even more than it had in previous years. The “rules” of building natural anchor text change a lot. Not that you should stop using natural anchor text. More on that later.

Here are five things you probably shouldn’t spend much, if any, time worrying about anymore:

1. Alexa Rank is tilted enough toward online marketers that it does not tell nearly enough of your web traffic story to be worth much.
2. Google back link data can be dicey. Suppose a random sample is returned with your most spam-laden link? Don’t make major decisions based on Google back link data. You want the kind of links that come along with good content. You’ll find them with little page widgets like the one in the screen shot.
3. Google cache date is overused to where great pages can be returned with no cache set. Therefore cache date is irrelevant too.
4. Google PageRank can be randomized to throw SEO experts off. Apparently Matt Cutts has confirmed this, as can be seen here.
5. Precise anchor texts are officially “out” since anchor text filters have been in effect for quite some time now.

The so-called “minus 50 penalty,” a filter in Google operates on the domain, page, and keyword level. In other words, pages drop by 50 positions in the ranking because of over-optimization of keywords the page has been linked to, either internally or externally.

What does this mean? Un-optimize your keywords?

Actually, yes.

Since the moods of Google change fairly rapidly, the things that worked last year may not work now. If you’re hit with a penalty, all you can do is fix the problem, suck it up, and move on starting today. Various webmasters have said that it takes 60 days to get rid of the penalty, so the sooner you deal with it the better.

Something else you must do is change up your anchor texts. Don’t just use one hot keyword to link all your links. And you can’t just vary them singular and plural. You have to use everything from natural language phrases to pieces of keyword phrases to misspellings and typos. What you don’t want is to overdo the linking with the hot keywords and phrases. Write your anchor texts as if you don’t care about squeezing every last bit of juice out of a particular keyword or phrase.

When it comes to anchor text variety, your best bet for figuring it out is to check out what your best competitors are doing because there’s no exact number of times a keyword text can be used to anchor links. The key is not to be too far out of line when compared to your competition.

Page level penalties are becoming more common, whereas before, penalties were usually applied at the domain level. In many cases the page level penalties are hitting home pages of  sites. Key phrase specific penalties are becoming more common too. This happens when there are easily detected paid links pointing to a page with exact anchor text for one key phrase. The problem is, the page can continue to get search traffic for some phrases, but not the one you want.

Apparently the reason Google does it this way is that sometimes Google susses out paid links, and sometimes it doesn’t. If the algorithm is going to hand out penalties for paid links, it needs to prevent itself from messing things up for a site too badly if the algorithm thinks there are paid links when there aren’t. Therefore, they limit the penalty to one specific page and one specific key phrase so that an entire site isn’t penalized in the even to of a mistakenly applied penalty. Of course, the best thing to do if you have paid links is get rid of them and wait for your site to be crawled again.

These page level and key phrase specific penalties are sometimes hard to detect, but there are some things you can do that might give you clues that your site is on the receiving end of a page level key phrase specific penalty.

• If you have paid links from a link network that it would be easy for Google to pick up. Get rid of them. If you haven’t been penalized yet, you will. It’s just a matter of time.
• Paid links use identical anchor text and point to the exact same page. Again, get rid of them.
• If the page linked to doesn’t have a good ranking for the target key phrase, you can be hit with a “minus 30″ penalty or worse.
• If the page ranks OK for similar key phrases, then you could be the target of a key phrase level penalty. Test your ranking across several similar key phrases.

In the long term you’re always better off using above board link practices, such as the following:

• Don’t purchase links for Page Rank. Seriously, why would you do this? Google uses PageRank mostly as a signal that it has been banned. The ego-stroking that a high PageRank gets you isn’t what gets you traffic, search engine ranking, or conversions. Make yourself not care about it.
• Don’t have links on duplicate content pages such as article sites and article directories. And don’t add links into ancient pages without changing their content.
• Put in some no-follow links on relevant pages. If you add a no-follow tag, it still passes along relevancy and trust, even if PageRank juice isn’t passed along. Not that you would care, because you know not to care about PageRank, right?
• Links on relevant pages and in appropriate context are what you need. Simple, but true.
• Domain trust is very important, both from your domain and from domains linking to you. Domain trust has to do with domain age, and that site’s links. If your page has a link from a page that links to bad neighborhood sites, then by the mysterious Google transitive property, you may look sleazy by association.
• Conversely, “juicy” pages pass value to you if you put a link on it. Juicy pages are ones that rank for a keyword or phrase that is important to you, regardless of PageRank or other metrics.

The moral of this long story is that while domain level penalties appear to have peaked, you have to watch out for page level and keyword specific penalties. While Google’s intentions in doing this were probably honorable, these penalties can be a little harder to figure out than domain level problems, particularly keyword and key phrase level penalties. If you have paid links, shady links, or happen to link to a nice looking site that itself has questionable link issues, you need to fix these things now. It isn’t always easy finding out which of the sites you link to themselves link to porn or other dodgy sites, but it’s worth checking out. The bottom line is that if you shun all questionable practices, build links organically, and continue to provide fresh, relevant content with natural sounding anchor text for links, your site will bubble upward and is almost certain to resist getting penalized.

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Has your website’s search engine ranking dropped drastically for no apparent reason? It is possible that your site has been hit by a domain level penalty from Google’s web spam team. A domain level penalty means your whole site has been demoted drastically in the search engine rankings – not just certain pages of it. The bad news is this can be difficult to pin down. While there are tools to help you figure out if your site has been penalized, there is a degree of speculation about it.

When your site’s Google search engine ranking takes a hit suddenly, then you can pretty easily conclude that you have done something wrong in the opinion of Google. They’re not all that specific about what happens when they “catch” you doing something wrong, and exactly how they penalize you. But in general, there are a few categories into which these mistakes fall, and there are ways to make a reasonable conclusion about which sin you’ve committed.

Here is how to figure out if you’ve been hit with a site level penalty.

• Is your site still indexed?
• If not, you may have been banned. If you think this is the case, verify it with Webmaster Central, fix the problem you think caused you to be banned, and file a re-inclusion request.
• If your site is still indexed, find out if it still ranks for its domain name.
• If not, you may have been hit with a penalty for keyword stuffing, manipulative linking, or cloaking. Get rid of your bad outbound links – particularly any paid links. Then go to Webmaster Central, beg forgiveness, and submit a re-inclusion request.
• If your site does still rank for its domain name, find out if it still ranks highly when you search on five or six unique terms in your title tag.
• If it doesn’t, then your links have probably been cleansed of any value they had. If Google finds out about any attempts to pass link love, it penalizes it. Fix the problem, plead your case with Webmaster Central, ask for re-inclusion, and next time get your links honestly.
• If your site still ranks highly when you search on several unique terms in your site tag, then you’re probably not penalized at all, but just lost ranking naturally. Maybe some spam comments got through, or maybe it’s time to review your on-page SEO.

Google Penalties Explained

Cataloging the various Google penalties people have come across is like trying to herd cats. Whatever relationship exists between the punishment and the crime either isn’t transparent, or is not handled evenly across the board. Being banned is, of course, as bad as it gets, since your site is suddenly not able to be found. This usually only happens when some kind of serious deception is going on on the site. But there are a few activities that have been pinned down as sending the Google gods into a frenzy.

Domain level redundancy is one thing that can get you penalized. This is what happens when webmasters clone sites. In other words, they point the Domain Name System (DNS) from several domains into the same directory. This makes each domain display exactly the same site.

If you duplicate the same content over several pages or sites, or if someone copies your site or content, Google will ding you for content redundancy. If you think someone else is ripping off your content, check Copyscape and see if you can track it down.

Purchasing a number of domains, each of which address separate keyword targets is now considered punishable.

If Google thinks you’re a link seller, your links will rapidly mean zilch. If your links do not pass on PageRank juice, they’re worth less than the pixels they’re written on, even if you are using them on your own site.

There is a certain amount of mystery surrounding the Google “sandbox” theory. Some people believe that young sites are penalized. You don’t see this penalty unless you try to SEO the heck out of it within the first few months of the site’s existence. Apparently there is a certain amount of dues paying your site has to do before your SEO starts getting respect from the big guys.

Does your site support (or appear to support) porn, gambling, or “male enhancement” sites? Well, duh. Of course you’re going to get penalized. Same with spam.

If your site may be perceived as a threat to national security, like if you sell fake IDs or something, your site will be penalized. If a third party hijacks your search engine rankings by means of cloaking and proxy, unfortunately, your site gets hit with a penalty. This one is mostly Google’s fault. The same is true if an affiliate uses content from your site, or if your competitor intentionally links to you from “bad neighborhood” (porn, gambling, etc.) sites.

And, of course, there’s the fact that the Google algorithm isn’t perfect. Algorithm quirks can have the same effect as a penalty if it makes your site unreachable.

If you want to find out if your site has been penalized, we have a free penalty checker tool you can use if you go to http://tools.lilengine.com/penaltychecker/. Click the button below to give it a try.

You just input the address of the site you want to check out, and you’ll get a result either like screen shot one (when a site does appear to have been banned or penalized) or screen shot two (when a site is not believed to have been penalized).

If you suspect your site has been penalized, there are a number of steps you can take to find out if it has, and why. Once you fix the problems, you can request re-instatement by the Google search engine and eventually get back in its good graces.

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Face it: even if your website is a personal blog on a topic that you are passionate about, and isn’t an e-commerce site, it’s still dispiriting to look at your stats and find that only half a dozen people have visited. Everybody wants their site to get noticed. And there are enough web users that no matter what the topic of your site, there are plenty of people out there who are interested in it. What your site needs is probably some search engine optimization (SEO) to bump the numbers up and get more eyeballs on your page.

Ultimately, the success of a site depends on your ability to effectively communicate with readers. There is no substitute for content that people like, though there are things you can do to tip more traffic your way. A lot of people with blogs (whether they are designed to drive traffic to e-commerce sites or not) discover that there are a number of SEO plugins that can automatically do some of the SEO work for them. These plugins, such as Google XML Sitemaps, help the major search engines index your site better. With a sitemap, the crawlers have a much easier time “seeing” the structure of your site and retrieving it efficiently. Google XML Sitemaps notifies all the major search engines whenever you post new content.

With plugins, however, there can be too much of a good thing. More than four or five plugins and your site may slow down, and in some cases plugins can crash each other, in which case neither is helping your site. Not all SEO tools are plugins, however, and there are a number of SEO tools that help you do those things that you may not be so sure about doing, like generating meta tags.

That said, since so many new webmasters use WordPress for hosting, here are a few of the more popular plugins for WordPress SEO and what they do.

SEO Smart Links automatically links the keywords in your posts to corresponding posts and pages. This is awesome because it provides a way to keep visitors on your site and clicking those page views. In addition to the automatic functions, you can specify custom keywords and the URLs you want them to link to.

Robots Meta is a simple plugin that lets you ad meta tags to hide comment feeds from the search engines, hides internal search result pages from search engines, and hides admin pages from search engines, thus keeping your SEO info from being “diluted” by these things.

HeadSpace is a popular plugin that is capable of automatically generating post tags from a post’s content. This is terrific for people who have a hard time categorizing and tagging posts.

All In One SEO Pack is the most popular of the WordPress repository of plugins. It allows you to optimize parts of your site like the site title, the keywords, and the page titles. It can also generate keywords based on content of the current post. As you can see from the screen shot, this is extremely popular – at times being downloaded over 40,000 in a day!

One thing you need to do to be able to optimize your site is to see how it looks to the search engine crawlers. You also want to be able to generate meta tags with some help for optimum results. It is good to see if you have duplicate (or nearly duplicate) pages on your site (which can harm your search engine ranking), and to see if anyone else out there is stealing your content (and readers). Here are a few tools that you might consider.

Similar Page Checker, by webfconfs.com helps you determine if your web page content is too similar to another page on the same website. Search engines will ding you for having pages that are too similar on your website. All you do is enter the URLs and Similar Page Checker compares the content.

Webmaster Toolkit’s Web Page Analyzer checks your page to ensure that you have keywords in bold text, header text, link text, document titles, meta keywords, and meta descriptions. This is considered an “entry level” tool, but it may be perfect if you’re just starting out with SEO for your site. As you can see from the screen shot, it couldn’t be simpler: you enter URLs and keywords and Web Page Analyzer checks for optimization.

Code to Text Calculator by Stargeek tells you the ratio of text to code. The higher the ratio of text to code on a page, the better. You enter URLs and it calculates the code to text ratio.

Copyscape is a workhorse tool that helps you find websites that are ripping off your content. It also finds websites that quote you. The copyscape website has information about what you should do if you find another site taking your content without permission.

If you find out that one of your URLs is banned by the Google database, you’ll probably be angry about it, but it’s better to know than not to know. Google Banned Checker Tool 1 lets you know if your URL is in the Google database. Keep in mind that if your site is new, it may not show in the Google database, but that doesn’t mean you’ve been banned. This toolkit is primarily for people who think their site has been punished by the Google gods.

Cache.it by cached.it shows you a lot of information you probably don’t know about your site, like your IP address, meta tag text, Alexa ranking, ping time, and PageRank.

Meta Tag Generator by SearchBliss does exactly what it says, creating up to nine meta tags.

Another “spider-view” tool is Search Engine Spider Simulator by webconfs.com. It shows you what your site looks like to the web spiders.
SEO isn’t just in the purview of big web companies. You can use SEO tools for whatever kind of site you have, whether you’re selling fishing tackle or reviewing movies. There are a lot of tools available to help you get your site indexed and seen by a lot more people, and these tools are worth your while.

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Google Website Optimizer is a free Google tool made to help you get better conversions on your website, whether that means signing up for your email newsletter, or buying your product or service. You test different versions of your content to determine what is going to attract the most users and get them to stick around long enough to convert. Suppose you are using click tracking and conversion tracking to try to figure out what visitors are doing when they visit your pages. Maybe you’re getting visitors a-plenty but very few buy products or subscribe to your newsletter. This is where Website Optimizer helps.

You choose what parts of a web page you want to test, whether it’s promo text, a headline, or whatever. Then Google runs an experiment on part of your site’s traffic in an attempt to figure out which content on your site is most attractive to visitors. Once Google has amassed enough data on your site’s experiment, they will send you reports and suggestions for optimizing your site.

If you’re not the webmaster or administrator, you will need that person’s help to put the experiment code onto your site to enable the optimizer to track traffic to different versions of the page. You’ll end up with two kinds of reports from Google. One is a combination report and the other is a page section report.

The combination report shows results for all page combinations that were made from the variations in page section you created when you set up your experiment. This report will show how well a particular combination does compared with the original site and other combinations. The estimated range of conversion rates gives you the main snapshot of overall performance. You’ll get the actual numbers, in case you’re into hard statistics, but you’ll also get simple bar graphs that show red for underperforming content and green for better performing content.

Google advises that website owners not make major site changes unless a large quantity of data has been collected, because the more data gathered, the more likely the results are to be accurate.

Your page section report is focused on the variations on each page section that performed best. It is possible, however, that by your simply picking the best-performing variations may not be optimal, since there may be interactions among certain variations that the algorithm cannot capture. In other words, the page section report is not a magic bullet that you can use to get rid of all the bad pages and implement all the good pages, so that suddenly your site will take off.

You’ll also get relevance ratings on each page, which tell how much impact a particular page has on the test that Google Website Optimizer is running. The higher the number for a given page, the more important that page is for getting conversions.

Conducting Tests With Website Optimizer

When you go to the Google Website Optimizer page, you’ll see something like what is in the screen shot. When you click on the “+” sign, you’ll be taken to a page where you’ll be asked what type of testing you want done: A/B testing or Multivariate Test (See second screen shot.). A/B testing is simpler and works best with new sites and sites that don’t get much traffic. The multivariate tests let you test multiple sections of a page simultaneously, such as the headline, a picture, or promotional text. In order for multivariate tests to work well, they need to be done on sites that get plenty of traffic.

Suppose you have more than one conversion page. Google Website Optimizer tests can track more than one goal. All you do is place the conversion code from your experiment on each of your conversion pages. The caveat is, Website Optimizer only reports one conversion per visitor. Suppose you get a really enthusiastic visitor who buys something and signs up for your newsletter. Website Optimizer will only count one conversion. That way you see which test page gets the most conversions regardless of conversion type.

If you’re doing an A/B test, you’ll make different page versions. They can be totally different if you want. The Optimizer will test their performance to see which one works best. If you’re doing multivariate testing, however, you won’t be able to change the layout of the different sections on your page.

If you already use Google Analytics, you can use Analytics and the Website Optimizer together. If you have customized your tracking scripts for Google Analytics, you’ll most likely want to customize your website optimizer tracking scripts in the same manner. The help center for Google Analytics will show you how to change your Website Optimizer tracking scripts.

There are a few other things to know before using the Google Website Optimizer. For one thing, you have to set up  a Google AdWords account. This does not mean that you have to create an AdWords campaign or buy advertising. It’s just that the Optimizer is part of the AdWords interface. You can set up AdWords with a few keywords and some random ad text. When you get to the part where you enter payment details, leave it empty. At this point, you’ll have an AdWords account and will be able to do Website Optimizer tests without buying AdWords ads.

With the A/B test, you are not limited to only two test versions of a page. You can test almost an unlimited number of versions at the same time. The actual number will depend on how many sites you’ve already set up Google Analytics on. All you do is specify more alternative pages when you set up the test. And though you technically can test very different web page designs at the same time, this isn’t recommended. Suppose one page clearly out-performs the other. You won’t know what caused the big change: was it a graphic? headline? something else? You won’t know what to do to other pages to get the same jump in performance. If you take the time to test one-by-one changes, you can see which changes are going to make the most difference.

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Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google to help new and experienced webmaster check on their indexing and raise the visibility of their website(s). Among the tools in Google Webmaster are those that check the crawl rate, list sites linking to the user’s site, determine what keyword searches on Google bring the user’s site into the search engine results pages (SERPs), determine click-through rates of SERP listings, show statistics on how Google indexes the user’s site, create a robots.txt file and submit sitemaps.

The range of tools offered on Google Webmaster Tools can help webmasters significantly raise their profile by search engine optimization (SEO), and traffic generation. To make Google Webmaster Tools work with your particular site, you have to install a snippet of code into your site. Google Webmaster Tools make a great partner to Google Website Optimizer as far as getting your website as prominent as possible.

If, for example, your site has a page in which you offer your visitor some free report or software in exchange for their email address, you could use the Google Website Optimizer to test two versions of that page to see which one converts best. This lets you streamline your SEO efforts and cuts back on some of the trial and error part of it.

Google Webmaster tools was launched in 2006 to help webmasters create sites that are friendlier to search engines. There is also the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program. It lets domain hosts use Google’s application programming interface (API) to get their customers up and running with Google Webmaster Tools.

There are many steps you can take to help Google find, rank, and index your site.  They can be classified as Design and Content Guidelines, Technical Guidelines, and Quality Guidelines.

Design and Content Guidelines

Every site needs a clear hierarchy and text links. Each page needs to be reachable from one or more static text links.
The sitemap should give visitors links to the important pages of your site.

• Make sure your site has good content, and make sure pages accurately describe the content.
• Think of the words visitors probably type to find your site and include those actual words in your content.
• Important names, links, or content should be in written text rather than pictures. the Google crawler doesn’t “see” text contained in images.
• Have <title> elements and ALT attributes that are accurate and descriptive.
• Look for dead links and improper HTML
• Keep links per page under 100
• Give images descriptive filenames and surround them with descriptive text.
• Text embedded in images is “invisible” to the image bot.

Technical Guidelines

• Try out a browser like Lynx to look at your site. Most search crawlers “see” your site like Lynx does. If your site is overloaded with JavaScript, session IDs, Flash, or cookies, the search crawlers may not find your site very navigable.
• Check that your web server allows the “if-modified-since” HTTP header. It lets the web server tell Google whether or not content has changed since the last crawl. It saves you valuable bandwidth and overhead.
• Make sure the robots.txt file on your server is current so it doesn’t block the crawler. You can test your robots.txt file using the robots.txt analysis tool in Webmaster Tools.
• Check your site’s appearance in different browsers to familiarize yourself with what your visitors might see.

Quality Guidelines: A List of Don’ts

Before listing the specific practices to avoid, don’t assume that just because a particular practice isn’t listed that it’s OK. If you’re using trickery like registering common misspellings of popular sites, Google might well penalize you in the search engine results pages (SERPs) or ban you altogether. Ultimately, looking for loopholes and technicalities may not serve you well.

• Don’t use cheap tricks that might improve your SERP ranking. How would you feel about your competitor doing the same?
• Don’t participate in paid link systems or link farms in an attempt to increase your SERP ranking or PageRank. Avoid
• links to “bad neighborhoods” on the web. It could adversely affect your ranking.
• Don’t use hidden text, hidden links, “cloaking” practices or questionable redirects.
• Don’t use automated queries with Google
• Don’t cram pages with keywords that aren’t relevant to your site.
• Don’t create a bunch of pages, domains, or subdomains that all have basically the same content.
• Don’t create pages with malware like viruses, trojans, and phishing.
• Don’t make doorway pages just for the search engines that have no real content.

When you believe your site is ready and follows all the design, technical, and quality guidelines (especially the latter), then you can submit it to Google at www.google.com/addurl.html. You should also use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap. A sitemap helps Google cover your webpages more effectively.

Starting up a website can be hard work, particularly if you’re new to the world of style sheets and HTML. It isn’t enough to simply create a great looking site filled with interesting content and wait for people to discover it. Particularly if you have an e-commerce site or a blog from which you want to earn money, you need to make your site as friendly as possible to search engines. Google Webmaster Tools are specifically for this purpose: getting your website the notice that it deserves.

While it may be tempting to take shortcuts like buying a bunch of back links, it can be bad for your site in the long run. The best way to build your site’s following is to submit a sitemap, and follow the guidelines listed above for proper ways to promote your site. And, of course, the ultimate “tool” for getting your site popular and keeping it popular is to provide fresh, rich content on a regular basis.

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In August 2008 Google launched its tool called Google Insights for Search. It’s like Google Trends on steroids. There are many new features designed with advertisers and marketing professionals in mind to help them (and anyone else who is interested, such as the average website owner) understand search behavior.

Google Trends displays how frequently a search term is queried in relation to the total search volume throughout all regions of the world in different languages. Google Trends produces a graph where the horizontal axis shows a simple timeline (which goes back to 2004), and the vertical axis is how often a term gets searched for devided by the total number of searches worldwide. It also produces popularity broken down by location and language.

Google Insights is a more sophisticated tool to help people gauge interest in relevant search terms. For example, Google Insights can help you figure out which messages go over best. Suppose you make high-end espresso machines. You can use Google Insights to determine whether your advertising should highlight money savings over coffee shop coffee, taste test results, or performance and features. Google Insights can also be used to determine seasonal variations in search behavior and to help advertisers and marketing professionals create more effective brand associations.

As just a quick example, typing the search terms “espresso,” “home espresso machine,” and “gourmet coffee” in the category “Food & Drink” for 2009 yields the data you can see in the first screen shot. when you look at the graph of “Growth Relative to the Food & Drink Category” you can see that it takes a big jump in December that is most likely due to Christmas shopping. Looking at the terms by region, you can see that Greece, Netherlands, and Germany are the regions that searched most on “espresso.” The only blip at all for the term “gourmet coffee” comes from the United States, and it’s very small.

But you can also learn that the top three searches of related terms are “coffee espresso,” “espresso machine,” and “cafe espresso.” The top three rising searches are “espresso on line” (popular in Italy), “espresso apparaten” (tops in Netherlands), and “cowgirl espresso” (the most popular in the U.S.). With this information I could zero in on Greece, Italy, and Netherlands and try to get to the heart of the popularity of the search terms there.

Researching With Google Insights For Search

You are not limited to Google web searches. You can also analyze results from Google News, Product Search, and Image Search. You can break the data down even further from there. For example, you could look at hot Google News searches over the past week, month, or quarter. Queries can be broken down by region into individual metropolitan areas. This is a tool that news journalists find helpful in gauging interest levels in different subjects among their readership base.

One researcher gauged the interest of the U.S. college basketball tournament known as “March Madness” for a period of one week during March 2009. The results showed that interest was highest in the states of Kentudky, Iowa, and Kansas. In 2010, journalists could gauge popularity of search terms related to the World Cup in South Africa in various regions around the world. In a nutshell, what Google Insights does is help anyone who is interested (webmaster, ad agency, small business owner, academic researcher, or otherwise interested party) measure interest in search terms relative to their particular area of research.

Suppose, for example, you have a seasonal business, perhaps a surf shop in Torquay, Australia. While you know that your peak business will occur in January through March, maybe you want to know when people start querying about surfing holidays in Australia. If you plug “surfing Australia” and “surfing holidays Australia,” you’ll discover that with the exception of 2004, there are peaks of interest at the beginning and end of each year as one might expect. This can be seen in the second screen shot.

But scroll down further and you can see that the rising searches include “rip curl australia,” “asp surfing australia,” and “surfing in australia.” Further probing shows that Victoria is the state with the most searches, and Melbourne is the city with the most searches on “rip curl australia.” So as the theoretical owner of a Torquay surf shop, I may decide to pitch my advertising especially aggressively in Melbourne.

You can use Google Insights to flesh out keyword ideas and perhaps tweak any Adwords Campaigns you’re running. You can download the results to a spreadsheet for convenience. To download data to spreadsheets you will have to sign into your Google account. Google Insights is available in 39 languages, and will soon add a forecasting feature that will be available for some queries. An Animated map function will allow Google Insights users to see how interest changes with time and location.

Google Insights is a flexible enough tool that users can think of countless ways to use it. Beyond just expanding your keyword lists or looking at economic trends, you can use it for things like satisfying your curiosity about why some other site ranks higher in the search engines than yours. Even historians of the post-2004 era will find a wealth of information about how search queries evolve over time and across world regions.

Small business owners, ad agencies, and marketing specialists can use Google Insights to compare brands in real time over real markets. If there is a clear indication that a particular ad campaign is working well in a particular region or city, they can more accurately target offline advertising and even promotional events. Research using Google Keyword Tool has shown that search volume estimates are reasonably accurate, particularly in terms of relative value. That means that you can have a healthy amount of trust in the results you get from using Google Insights.

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