Free search engine optimization tools are there on the internet and are made available for any webmaster to take advantage of. If you are a webmaster that is hoping to achieve a top ranking on a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, then these free search engine optimization tools are something that you definitely need to make full use of.

Sure, it is possible to have all of your search engine optimization work handled by a professional SEO firm for a large amount of money, but you can educate yourself on the whole SEO process, access great tools and complete the job yourself, all free of charge. This will save you a lot of money that you can use instead to invest in your business and make it grow.

Here are some free search engine optimization tools which you can make use of to make SEO easier for you, which would normally be quite a tedious task if you would do everything yourself by hand.

Some Free SEO Tools

SEO Quake – This is a good SEO tool that works as a Firefox browser add on. Because of this, it is recommended that when you do your SEO work, you use Mozilla Firefox as a broswer.
By using the SEO Quake free search engine optimization tool, you will be able to see SEO information pertaining to different websites immediately, like their page rank on Google, how many pages they have indexed, as well as the total mount of links which they have pointing at a certain specific page.
But why would you care about what goes on with your competitors websites? The answer is simple. You can see how far ahead your competitors are and which free search engine optimization methods you can employ in order to get ahead of them. SEO Quake will make doing this very easy for you.
Sitemap Generator – An important issue that Google takes into consideration when determining the page rank for a specific page is how easily a visitor is able to navigate through your entire site.
If your site is easy to navigate, Google will give you a good ranking because of this, so therefore having a site map that the search engines can use to navigate your site will make the process of getting all the pages on your site ranked and indexed a lot easier.
If you have built your site by using a CMS, then a site map can be generated with one simple click of the mouse. If not, then there are other tools such as AuditPC Sitemap Generator which can help you do that very quickly. Your site map will be ready within a few seconds and you will be very happy to see just how having one can improve your overall standing with search engines such as Google.
Website Grader – This is a tool that is designed to make an assessment of the marketing performance of any kind of website and this is accomplished by examining certain characteristics found on the website and then giving it a score based on the overall performance achieved.
There are several factors which are calculated in order to determine this score, such as the amount of traffic going to the site, how popular it is on various social networking site, how SEO friendly it is, as well as a host of many other different factors. But Website Grader does more than just displaying a simple score. It actually shows you some tips that you can use to improve the overall performance of your site. This is one of the most useful features of free search engine optimization tools, as they allow you to see which areas of the site need specific attention in order to be improved.
Yahoo Site Explorer – This is one of the free search engine optimization applications that does a link analysis. It shows some good links that your site can create with some other websites in the same niche, as well as ranking the importance of those links. Because creating quality links is very important to achieving a high search engine ranking for your website, this one of the free search engine optimization tools can definitely give you something useful.
Google Analytics – This one of the free search engine optimization applications completes an analysis of your website after you have placed a snippet of code on your site as stated in the instructions. It provides you with details of visitors coming to your site, such as where they come from, which website or search engine query has referred them, how long they have stayed on your website, as well as a multitude of other factors which could be extremely useful to you.
By using this one of the free search engine optimization applications, you will get the necessary data to develop, modify and adapt search engine optimization strategies.
Google Webmaster Tools – This is a very valuable one of the free search engine optimization apps, as it will show you things that you as a webmaster may not immediately see on your website, but what visitors and most important of all, search engines will see. If some of these factors are not immediately fixed on your site, your website’s score could be affected in a negative way.
Examples of things that Google Webmaster Tools will be able to spot quickly are broken links on your page, no site map as well as poor overall structure of your website.
This is one of the best free search engine optimization tools as it will show you ways that you can make your site more friendly to and more visible to popular search engines, like putting in a robots.txt file which will be used to tell the search engines which pages, directories and images they should crawl or not crawl. Since search engine robots do use quite some bandwidth when they crawl an entire large website, using Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to save some bandwidth by only making SE robots crawl the pages that they are supposed to.

The Best Free Tools

These free search engine optimization tools that were mentioned above are simply some examples of all the tools that are available to webmasters everywhere who are seeking to improve their ranking on search engines without having to spend a lot of money on hiring a professional SEO company to do the work for them.

Remember that while these tools are an excellent place to start and are very useful, there are plenty of other free tools available online as well. You can do a simple Google query to find those, or hang around some webmaster forums and see what other people are using to improve the overall SEO performance of their website.

You also need to realize that using free search engine optimization techniques or tools will not make your site skyrocket to Number One position on Google overnight, as SEO is a process that takes time. But these free search engine optimization tools will definitely make the tasks easier and save you money both in the short and long term.

Submitting to the Best Article Directories for Backlinks

Do you want to submit your articles to the best article directories for backlinks? In that case, you are making an excellent decision as a webmaster. You will need to write quality articles and then best article directories for backlinks, which will help you with your ranking on the popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

There are plenty of article directories that you can find online, so one of the biggest challenges will be to find out which ones are the best article directories for backlinks? These directories will be able to give you top quality backlinks to help you reach the top of search engine results.

The best article directories for backlinks will show a number of qualities which will make them stand out from other ones, so you need to choose the ones that are truly the best. Here, you will see what makes the top article directories advantageous and why you should submit your articles in priority to these directories.

What to Look For in Article Directories

The page rank of the directories – This is a score that is given by Google. Search engines determine whether the article directory provides enough useful content to site visitors. A high ranking will be given to a top quality directory. The page rank will vary between 0 and 10 and 10 is the highest. So if you submit your articles to a directory that has a page rank of 10, you will get higher quality backlinks that will be more important in the eyes of Google.
The number of pages in the article directory – The higher the number of pages on the directory, the more the PR for each individual page will be diluted. So while you may get quality backlinks, your article will be more difficult to find by a person that is doing a query on Google.
The quantity of inbound directory links – The higher the number of inbound links that a directory has, the better it will be ranked. If the directory that you will be submitting to has millions of inbound links, than this is a sign that it is a popular and respected site. Thus, backlinsk that are given by it will be viewed more favorably by search engines such as Google.

By looking at the preceding factors, you will be able to see just how valuable different article directories are in terms of helping you build backlinks. Remember that the higher the directories are ranked by Google, the better they are, so the top ranked ones are the best article directories for backlinks.

Use them to Your Full Advantage

When you submit an article to a directory, you will notice that they will first get some traffic from the directory itself, due to the fact that the best article directories for backlinks already have some traffic coming from people who are looking for articles to be informed on a certain topic or subject. After that, the Google bot will crawl the directory, index the article (thus giving you the possibility of receiving search engine traffic to your article too) and will also create a one way backlink to your own website.

Another way to leverage the power of the best article directories for backlinks is to submit your articles with submission software that sends them to various directories at the same time. The more directories your article will be submitted in, the more backlinks and traffic you will get, but take care to focus primarly on the best article directories for backlinks in order to achieve better results for your backlinking campaign.

Using High PR Article Directories to Submit Your Content

If you are in search of high PR article directories, then you will simply not have any trouble finding them. Just by doing a quick Google search will reveal a first page full of high quality article directories that you can submit your content to. But if you want to be successful online, it is not necessary for you to submit your articles to all of the directories that you find.

When you deal with high PR article directories, their high page rank means that you will be getting excellent value when submitting your articles and as such, just submitting your articles to a few of these directories will yield excellent results for you. Rather than constantly hunting for new directories to upload your articles to, you should seek out a few of the top ones and submit your articles there consistently. By giving quality articles to high PR article directories you will get the results that you are after, without wasting any time or money.

Why is Page Rank so Important?

Page rank is not simply a gimmick that tells you how “popular” or “trendy” a site is. It is actually a method used by Google, which gives a score from 0 to 10 to rate links coming from a certain website.

The exact scoring method for determining the page rank of a web site is something that only Google knows, as it is part of their overall algorithm that determines how websites are ranked in search results. Other search engines also use a similar system that determines how a site will rank in their index, as well as how valuable links given by these sites will be.

But remember, that a high PR is not the only thing that you should look for in an article directory. You should also look at some other elements, such as how fast they post your articles and the overall quality of the articles in the directory.

Checking the Page Rank

There are various tools available which can help you check page rank and thus find some high PR article directories. Many different free tools are available for webmasters and internet marketers, but the Google Toolbar is very easy to use, works with various browsers and can be put to use seconds after downloading it.
The Value Given by Using High PR Article Directories

There are many ways in which submitting your articles to some high PR article directories can be beneficial to you. Here are some of them:

Rapid Indexing – A higher quality directory will be visited more often by search engines. When you submit an article that has a link back to your site in the resource box to high PR article directories, your link will be seen by search engines a lot faster.

More Valuable Backlinks – Not all backlinks given by websites are the same. When you submit your article to high PR article directories with a link back to your site, you will get a link from a reputable directory which will be far more valuable in terms of search engine optimization than a link from some relatively unknown directory that no one uses.

Increased Visibility – Another excellent advantage that you get when you use high PR article directories is that these directories are ranked quite high in search engines and thus receive a lot of traffic. Since these high PR article directories are very popular, if you write an excellent informative article, it is possible that it will be seen by millions of people who are looking for the information contained in it. As these directories cover various topics, they are also visited by webmasters who are looking for articles that they can publish on their own site.

As article directories require that anyone that re prints their content keeps the article, including the resource box intact, this means that your article and your link can go viral and can be seen by millions of people who are browsing the web. While there is no guarantee that this will happen, it is always a possibility when you submit your content to reputable high PR article directories.

These are some of the benefits that you will get when you submit content to high PR article directories. Remember that these directories are completely free to use, so make the most out of them.

If you use article marketing to promote your website, you can automate the whole process by using software which will submit your article automatically to a number of directories. Simply by dealing with 5 to 10 high PR article directories, you can get excellent results in the way or backlinks and traffic.

The Benefits of Twitter for Business Marketing

There are plenty of businesses these days that are realizing the benefits of Twitter for business marketing. A few years ago, achieving a great deal of success on the internet could have been accomplished by simply promoting your website on search engines and doing the proper SEO.

Now that these days, social media has significantly increased in popularity and is making quite an impact on people, it is commonly said by online marketing experts that if a business does not put together a presence on social networks, that business will simply get left behind and overtaken by competitors. For this reason, you need to immediately become familiar with the benefits of Twitter for business marketing. Remember, the future success of your business will depend on it.

There are millions of different individuals that log in to their social networking accounts on a daily basis, so this explains why these sites provide an excellent meeting place for businesses and their prospective customers. You can present your products, as well as provide some information related to your niche in order to establish yourself as an authority. For example, if your business sells car parts, you can post links to car repair articles on your Twitter account. Becoming known as an authority in your niche is one of the best benefits of Twitter for business marketing.

Twitter is slightly different from the majority of other social networking sites, as conversations on it are limited to short messages called “Tweets”. These tweets have a limit of 140 characters, which makes Twitter a micro-blogging platform. In order to see some benefits of Twitter for business, you will need to be rather concise and specific in your messages to your audience.

Various Benefits of Twitter

What you need to know if you want to realize the benefits of Twitter for business is that Twitter is not an advertising platform for you to market on, but rather a social media site where people go to in order to connect with other users and get updated on things that are important for them. They do not go there to be marketed to or sold products. After all, if someone wanted to see advertisements, there are plenty of those everywhere. Everyone who uses Twitter for business purposes needs to be aware of this fact and develop a marketing strategy accordingly.

Here are some of the principal benefits of Twitter for business, which you can leverage on.

Updates Related to Your Industry – One of the greatest benefits of using Twitter is that you can get updated from others that are involved in your industry. As such, if you are in the IT industry for example, you can follow other IT professionals to get news on the latest developments in the computer industry.
Great Source of Big Traffic – The Twitter platform is an excellent source of traffic that can be sent to your website. In order to generate traffic back to your site, you will however need to provide some useful content for your followers. Instead of constantly trying to sell them something or bragging about how your products are the best (people tend to hate that, by the way and will rapidly drop you if you do so), give them some updates about your company or about your industry as a whole. They will then enjoy your Tweets a lot more and would thus be a lot more likely to click on any links that you put in them. While massive traffic is one of the greatest benefits of Twitter for business, it is extremely important that you develop a good strategy to leverage that traffic.
Ability to Create Awareness of Your Brand – When you use Twitter, you can not only promote your own brand online, but also find out what others have been saying about it. If someone is spreading false information about your products or is dissatisfied with your business, you can use Twitter to respond to their concerns and give them an opportunity to get in touch with you in order to fix any problems that they are having. Remember that running a stable and successful business is not all about selling, selling, selling, selling. You also need to stand behind your products and genuinely care about your customers. One of the benefits of Twitter for business is allowing you to interact with your customers that way.
Social Networking – While Twitter is very popular, it is still not as popular like other social networks, for example Facebook. As such, it is possible that not too many people that would be in your target audience would be frequenting Twitter. However, this doesn’t mean that Twitter is useless to you if your current user base doesn’t use it for now. Instead, you can use Twitter to network with other online entrepreneurs, industry leaders and other people that you can exchange valuable and useful information with. This is also one of the nicest benefits of Twitter for business, as you can network with others and thus learn how to run your business better.

Final Thoughts

The benefits of Twitter for business that were presented above need to be used by any online entrepreneur due to the fact that there are millions of people who use this social media platform on a daily basis. Twitter is an excellent place where you can share content from your company with others and connect to various other people from around the nation to around the world while you do so.

Don’t let your competitors surpass you! You should definitely include Twitter in your overall online marketing strategy, if you haven’t done so already. You will definitely not regret doing so. Remember the benefits of Twitter for business that were outlined above and how you can tie these in to the success of your business when you are putting together and taking action on your social media marketing strategy.