Google Chrome Review

Google are at it again: they've gone ahead and designed their own web browser.

Google Chrome has just been released in beta format.

Why is it called "Chrome?" Perhaps because the borders, window frames and such like in your normal web browser is called "chrome." Google's new browser eliminates much of the chrome, thus making the screen look bigger, and much less cluttered.

I'd love to tell you lots more about it, but Google wants to tell you all about it using YouTube videos. Forget about reading the written word, the Google generation only wants to watch vids.

Alternatively, you can read the comic book version describing it.


For goodness sakes, grow up. I'm old, and boring, and I just wish Google would cut to the chase.

In any event, I have had a play with Chrome, and it is still rough around the edges. Whilst I won't be switching from Firefox quite yet, it is very good.

Chrome was quick to install, quick to import all my bookmarks.

I thought it would be nice to include a screen grab of what Chrome looks like, but Chrome doesn't support all my lovely Firefox plug-ins including my favourite image management utility nor any of my SEO tools. No doubt that will get fixed soon.

Chrome has been designed to be "a better web experience", with a clean and uncluttered screen, faster and with users suffering from less crashing.

Perhaps the best feature is that has just one box, called the Omnibox, into which you can type web addresses, search phrases, anything. A simple, great idea.

And the new visual interface to show your web history and popular sites you have visited.

It's worth keeping an eye on, and I'll let you know when I migrate from Firefox to Chrome.

Improvements to Google Keyword Tool

Google have added a very useful piece of information to their free Keyword Research Tool: it now displays an approximate number of searches for each phrase from the previous month search data.


Google's official announcement confirms that it displays the approximate number of searches taking place Google and the wider search network during the previous month, as well as an average monthly search volume of the last 12 months.

Looking carefully at these numbers, they do look very approximate, but it is certainly better than those silly little green fuel gauge icons that they used to display.

Google delivers keyword results and statistics based on your IP address, which means that for most of my readers the numbers are going to be for searching activity in the UK.

Be sure to use the "Show/Hide Columns" option to suppress the Adwords advertising figures if they are not of interest.

Check your website rankings

Where does your website rank in the search engines? On the first page? On the second page? In the top 20 pages?


SEO Book's Rank Checker is a free utility that allows you to type in your key phrases, and then quickly reports where you rank in Google.co.uk, as well as Yahoo! and Live.

If you're interested in where you rank internationally, RankChecker will let you know your web rankings in most of the search engines worldwide.

And if you save your settings, and then RankChecker will run the report for you automatically on a weekly basis, or whatever frequency you prefer.

It is only available as a Firefox extension, which means you need to get Firefox, and then download the extension.

Comprehensive instructions are available on the download page, so I won't repeat them here.

Do remember, however, to:

• change the Google default to co.uk if appropriate
• tick the box to Don't Use Google personalised results, which skews the results to your personal searching prefernces, which probably favours your own website
• set the delay to be a second or two between searches
• save your search settings to use them again later
• turn on the automatic search reporting for your weekly report.
  

Find Your Top Ranking Keywords

Where does your website rank for your key phrases in Google?

What phrases are you ranking well for, whether you know it or not?

And what phrases are your competitors ranking well for?

SEODigger is a free utility that shows you those keywords that trigger your site in the top 20 results for a Google search. SEO Digger maintains a database of keywords and search results that can help to assess and plan your search engine optimisation activities.

The free, unregistered version analyses a single page of your website and provides you with a list of high performing key phrase, the key phrase position in Google, and some rough and ready WordTracker and Overture data showing you the search popularity of the phrase.

It is worth taking the extra step of signing up for the free registered version because it will give you rankings of all the pages on your domain, rather than just a single page.

Taking my own business as example, I can see the key phrases in Google SERPs (search engine results page) order, in other words the phrases I'm ranking position 1, position 2, and so forth:

However, if I click on the WT column to sort the data on the popularity of phrases as measured by the WordTracker data, I can see where I'm ranking for those valuable phrases that people are actually searching for:


And what is very interesting to note (and is confirmed by my Google Analytics data) is that it's the blog postings that is helping with the rankings, in this case the article I wrote about The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.

As always, these services do come with a bit of a health warning

• the data will not be current - it is a snap shot of the search results when the database was last compiled. My searches today was delivering data last retrieved in February. Nevertheless, it provides a useful benchmark.
  
• the database does not include all search phrases. You can add your search phrases to SEODigger for inclusion in the index.
• the WordTracker and Overture data is, at best, unreliable.

This article is one of a series of postings about SEO tools that you might find useful.

I have a list of new services I'll be reviewing for you over the next few weeks, and suggestions are welcome.

In the meantime, why not take a look at some of my previous reviews:

iWebTool Collection of free SEO tools
Quirk SearchStatus toolbar
Free Web Tools
SEOBook Keyword Research Tool
Website Grader Review
Backlinks Checkers
Good Keywords Tools, especially KeyWordPad

Removing Pages from the Google Index

How can you remove old web pages from the Google index?

I have a client who was advised by some cowboy search engine optimisation company to create lots of web pages stuffed full of spammy repetitive keywords.

He now knows this is a bad thing, and has deleted the pages from his site.

But the old pages still appear in the Google index. He's been told there is nothing he can do about it.

Google will automatically remove dead pages from the search results as part of the indexing process. Pages with 404 messages (not found) or 410 (gone) will eventually be disappear from the index and the search engine results.

But this can take time.

The quick solution is to use Google's Webmaster's Remove URL's tool. It can be used to remove any content that you don't want appearing in the search results. Google says the removal request typically takes 3-5 business days to process.

The Google Webmaster toolkit is full of useful utilities for optimising your site, and learning about your site performance in Google.

Keep in mind that it might be best to simply update the offending page and let the spider re-index the new content.

You might also want to keep the content on your site, and just block Google from indexing it using appropriate meta tags and the robots.txt file.

The URL removal tool does just that: it removes the page entirely.

And remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Humans don't like spam, and neither does Google.

Website Grader

Just how good is your website?

Website Grader is a free tool which evaluates your website on 5 broad search engine marketing factors, giving you a succinct score out of 100.

It's quite a nifty little tool. And of course I like it because my site scored a respectable 93%.

It takes into consideration approximately 20 sets of factors, grouped into 5 broad categories:

1. On Page factors, such as Title tags, meta tags, Alt tags, and readability
2. Off Page factors such a Page Rank, frequency of spiders crawling, Alexa rank, and inbound linking
3. Blogosphere including Technorati rank
4. Social Mediasphere which means social bookmarking on Digg and Del.icio.us
5. Conversion to sales, checking to see if you have forms and an RSS feed

It can provide you with a useful overview of your search marketing efforts in one easy to read report.

And thanks to Pete over at Hoop Media for the suggestion.

Backlink Checkers Review

Building high quality, relevant links to your website is a tough job, and I'm often asked for tips to make the task easier.

My advice: Spy on your competition.

There are free tools out there like Yahoo! Site Explorer which allows you to discover the links coming into your competitors' successful websites.

However, many free services provide you with just the quantity of links, with no indication of quality. They do not provide you with the information you need to evaluate the value of a link:

• Google Page Rank
• Whether the specific page is indexed by Google
• The age of the website (older generally being better)
  
• Whether the inbound linking pages have duplicate IP addresses
• The relevancy of the linking page to your business
  
• Anchor text of the link
• How many other outbound links there are on the page
• The use "No Follow" which means the link has no value to your site

I strongly recommend using a commercial link analysis tool like SEO Elite or Axandra iBusiness Promoter.

SEO Elite costs US$167 and Axandra costs 250 euros (and yes, these are affiliate links, and thank you in advance for helping me to buy new shoes for my children.)

SEO Elite provides a quick and simple interface that allows you to get the detailed information you need to analyse inbound links. Axandra offers more functionality,




There are other free tools out there that you might also like to take a look at, but I find these aren't available in such a reliable and effective way:

Link Diagnosis
iWebTool Backlink Checker

How good are speech readers?

Listen to the automatic text-to-speech conversion of this blog posting here (1 Mb MP3 file)

One of the things I love about Britain is Radio 4. It's great to listen to the news, listen to commentary, or listen to stories.

Sometimes it would be nice if somebody would read aloud to me all the stuff I have to read on my computer screen. I have to read a lot to stay abreast of Internet Marketing developments.

Speech readers used to be pretty rubbish, and I was wondering just how much they have improved in recent years

And so I've just tried NaturalReader, a free text to speech software application. It "reads" pages from Internet Explorer, Word documents, Outlook, PDF's, and lots more.

I was very impressed, to say the least.

There is a free version, but I splashed out for the paid-for version(40 dollars) and got a much more natural sounding voice from a dude called "Paul."

The software has the additional benefit of being able to convert your own text files into sound (MP3/WAV) files.

I did a little experiment converting this blog posting into an audio file: Listen to the text to speech conversion of this blog posting here (1 Mb MP3 file)

Clearly, it is an automated voice, but it is one I could listen to. The software was idiot proof to install, simple to use, and intuitive.

And many thanks to Andy from Local Conservatory for bringing NaturalReader to my attention.

How to Create a Free Website

Professionally designed websites are a must for small businesses, but there are times when a simple, quick, and free little website would do the trick.

Read on for my review of free web creation tools...

It may be that you need you want to create a site for a new product, a new service, you want to optimise for a particular key phrase, or perhaps you want to dabble with affiliate marketing. These little websites are called microsites.

I've done a bit of an experiment with the free web building tools to see just how effective they are. And my definition of "free" is more accurately called "cheap" - because I want to have my own domain name attached to the website, if possible, so there will be some costs involved.

The Clear Winner: WordPress

WordPress is free web building software that also allows you to create standard web pages, although it is best known as blogging software.

In the matter of 4 hours and spending a grand total of £22.78 I built the new website Susan Hallam.

I'm not sure how you factor in the cost of my 25 years experience, but I'm discounting that for the moment.

I'm using the site to discuss this experiment, so read about my free web design experiences here.

WordPress ticked all the boxes I required:

• Search engine friendliness
• Easy to use
• Free design templates
• Extra functionality like contact forms
• Web statistics to measure if it is working or not
• Flexibility in terms of content and layout
• My own domain name
• Doesn't look "free"
• Help when I need it

The Losers

My first loser is BT TradeSpace. It fails for most of my criteria:

• it is clearly branded BT Tradespace, and looks like a freebie website
• no use of my own domain name
• very restrictive design limitations
• very limited page content
• it doesn't look very search engine friendly

My second loser is Google Page Creator. This is a free service offered to folk with a GoogleMail account. Again, I found the same limitations as BT TradeSpace as a web design tool in terms of limitation of design and content and use of domain names.

One particular strength of Google Page Creator, however, is the ability to design your pages and then upload them to the free 100MB of hosting space. If you're looking for a place to store stuff on the web, then this might be useful to you.

Next week I'll be evaluating two more services: Microsoft Office Live
and Yahoo Site Builder

If you want me to try out any other free services, then just let me know.

Amazon Kindle: American (not UK) Product Launch

There are the very rare occasions when I wish I were back with the natives on the Other Side of the Pond - and this is one of them.

Amazon have launched the Kindle in the USA - it's their electronic paper ebook reader. And I'd love to get my hands on one to try an evaluation.

It's a wireless device that let's you download books, magazines, blogs and documents. And no computer is ever required, no synchronising, nothing. It works all by itself. Amazon are describing it more a "service" than a product.

The reader itself is not back lit, which means there is not glare, and it has been designed to have the same readability and appearance of paper.

What's really cool is that it uses the same high speed network as mobile phones, so no ISP or hotspot required. Amazon call it Whispernet. Where you get mobile signal, you get data. And the data network is offered for free when you buy the reader.

It's not all roses however, there is a lot of serious criticism:

It's not cheap: coming in at $399 means it is not for mere mortals.

You have to pay for content that you can normally get free such as subscriptions to blogs at US$2 per month, or online newspapers.

It doesn't support PDFs which is odd, given that is a format well suited for reading big documents.

It protects the documents you buy using Digital Rights Management, limiting how you use and share the information you buy.

At this stage they are only for sale in the USA. My Mom and Dad might be confused as to why Santa is giving them a Kindle for Christmas, but I'm hoping they'll let me play with it when I next come to visit!

Read more:

• Newsweek's "The Future of Reading" with an overview of the Kindle
• BoingBoing "Amazon Kindle eBook Review"
• Amazon's Kind Product Page

Free Web Tools

Free web tools are always a popular topic - whether you are planning a new site, or just tweaking your existing site.

Here's a round up of some of my favourite free web tools:

Keyword research tools help you to discover the best phrases for both SEO and PPC campaigns. I have previously reviewed and recommend SEO Book's Keyword Research Tool.

Research your competition using the Google Toolbar and Alexa Toolbar. For those Firefox users amongst us, I strongly recommend SearchStatus toolbar. And don't forget to research your competitors in DMOZ to see what categories they have indexed themselves in.

Promote your branding or logo with a favicon, that little icon that appears when I bookmark your site, or when your address appears in a browser. Try using Dynamic Drive's Favicon Generator.

What colours are safe to use in a web browser? Your Pantone colour might not display safely, so use Lynda's Browser Safe Colour palette when planning your website design.

Do you have a sitemap? You can use the free XML Sitemap Generator to scan through all the pages of your website, and create either an HTML or XML sitemap, no charge.

Is your website bloated and overweight? How long does it take your website to load? Websiteoptimization.com's free speed test will analyse your site, and tell you how specific ways to improve your site.

Have you done a check of the quality of your website code? Or better yet, check the quality of the web designers quoting for your shiny new website? W3C's quality assurance tools will validate your HTML, look for broken web links, as well as check out your cascading style sheets (CSS).

How well do you write? Check out how hard it is to read your web copy using this Readability Testing Tool. And whilst you're at it, check out whether you are using your keyphrases in your copy using a keyword density analyser.

iwebtools has a great collection of tools, including a spider simulator, Page Rank predictor, bank link checker and loads more

And last but no means least, take full advantage of Google's free tools:

• Google Analytics provide high quality, free statistics
• Google's Webmaster Central is a toolbox full of statistics and diagnostics
  
• Google Alerts is a great way to spy on your competition, or manage your own reputation
• Google Checkout is offering free credit card processing til 2008
• Google Mashups lets you plot your own data on a Google map
• Get all those essential Google toys in the Google Pack: toolbars, Google Earth, Picassa....
  

I'm sure you have other free utilities, let me know!

Keyword Research Tools

I've been trying out SEO Book's updated Keyword Research Tool, and as they say, it's a cracker.

Try it out right here, right now:

Keyword Suggestions for:


UK USA Australia Austria Denmark Finland France Germany Italy Netherlands Norway Scotland Spain Sweden Switzerland


You risk drowning in the sheer volume of information it gives you; there's an amazing amount of data contained on a single screenful. If you love data, you'll love this tool.

• Yahoo, MSN and Google traffic estimates
• Google Adwords Traffic Estimator
• Bid prices
  
• Google Suggest
• Google Synonyms
• Tag searches
• Links through to Local search tools, Answers, Classifieds, and many more tools
  

Admittedly, it is a rough estimate for Google traffic (simply doubling Yahoo's traffic) but it certainly helps with the order of magnitude.

Alternatively, Google AdWord's Traffic Estimator gives open access to keyword research, without accessing an AdWords account. To be frank, I think it this service is a bit lame, but it's better than nothing. Tip: be sure to put your phrase in brackets, for example [SEO Training] to get an exact match.


And finally, check out my previous keyword research tool postings

Google Analytics vs WebTrends

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I'm measuring my web traffic using 2 different services - and getting dramatically different reports. Google Analytics vs WebTrends: which should I believe?

The variance in the reporting is substantial, and each gives quite a different slant on reporting how well my web site is performing:

• Google Analytics reported twice the number searchers clicking through for the keyphrase "internet marketing training"
• WebTrends reported 12% more unique visitors
• Google Analytics says my visitors are primarily from UK, Ireland and Sweden
• WebTrends says my visitors are from UK, USA and unspecified European places

I would always advise clients not to naval-gaze on their web statistics, but instead to use them as trend indicators. And as marketing guru Jim Sterne is fond of saying, if your yardstick measures 39 inches instead of 36 inches, it's still great to have a measurement tool. (nb - long live imperial measures)

But why are contradictory trends reported even at a macro level by these two systems?

The answer, of course, is that each system is using different ways of handling cookies (deleting and non-acceptance), different ways of defining the word "daily", and indeed the use of different technologies like JavaScript. It's really for me to get a better handle on both packages and get a deeper understanding of what the statistics are saying to me.

If you want to learn more Stone Temple Consulting's 2007 Web Analytics ShootOut gives a very useful overview.

I also think it is time for a reality check, and a reminder that it still isn't possible to measure the effectiveness of other marketing campaigns like direct mail, radio ads or any of those quaint ways of marketing (!)

I will stick with running both web analytics packages, and together they will serve to validate each other's results and help me to test the quality of the data.

Why am I using both Google Analytics and WebTrends? To help advise clients:

1. Google Analytics is free, whereas Webtrends is a service you rent, costing typically £20 per month plus setup fees
   
2. Your data is confidential with WebTrends, whereas I'm sure Google are peeking at my data

AfterVote: Social Search Engine

Aftervote is a customisable Social Search Engine that is also a great little SEO research tool. Aftervote takes results from Google, MSN and Yahoo, and combines the data into one big search mashup.

And it incorporates the all important Web 2.0 element: vote for the sites you do like, or blacklist whole sites if you don't want them appearing in your own personal search engine results.

Add onto that dynamic widgets that display PageRank, Alexa Rank, links from del.icio.us, technorati, and digg, and you've got an excellent SEO analysis tool.

Be sure to customise your Aftervote experience using the My Settings tab



For the geeks amongst us, it make nice use of Ajax

It's worth spending some time exploring all the functionality AfterVote has to offer, particularly in terms of customising your searching experience.

The OTHER search engines

Google may command a whopping 78% market share of searches in the UK, but there many other search engines that are superior to Google for specific searching tasks.

Charles Knight has produced a guide to the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines and I tried out some of his recommendations.

ChaCha is a search engine that has a real person waiting there to help you out (I guess they used to be called librarians...) I gave my personal guide Marna the task of finding out driving license requirements in Ireland. The ChaCha gave the search results, and then Marna very helpfully hand-selected two results which were perfect for my needs. Wonderful!





If you haven't played with Ms Dewey then you've missed a treat. She's tough and sassy and a unique search partner.

My favourite meta search engine is Ixquick - it searches across multiple search engines simultaneously and shows you the relative rankings for your team in each engine.

Charles Knight will be updating his list of search engines regularly, so well worth keeping an eye on those developments.

Old Blog Content

One of the problems with blogging is that your best content might be buried away in the archives of old articles. Oldies but goodies, but nobody can find them.

But your web statistics will show you your most popular postings. It's been a year since the launch of the new website, and I've had a chance to review my most popular postings.

I'm going to add them as a side bar to my blog in my forthcoming update, but in the meantime:

Susan Hallam's Top 10 Blog Postings

1. Writing for the Web: web readability tests
2. Internet marketing trends: local search
3. Internet usage in the UK
4. Search engine "findability" index
   
5. Top tips for your Title tag
   
6. Social bookmarking and search engine optimisation
   
7. Pay Per Call: Touch Nottingham
   
8. Internet marketing myths: Googlebowling
   
9. Internet marketing toolbox: iWebTool
   
10. Personalising PPC campaigns using Microsoft AdCentre
    
    

Keeping up to date with SEO

What's worth reading if you want to keep up with the latest developments in search engine optimisation?

Well, why not let other SEO fans suggest what they're reading?

Google's personalised home page has a new feature that allows you to define "Tabs" for subjects you're interested in . Google will automatically populate it with popular content from other people's Tabs. It's another step forward in terms of social networking.

So, I created a Tab called "SEO" and the personalised home page gave me these recommended readings:



(... have you also noticed you can now "skin" your desktop with interactive images. In this case, the sun rises and sets according to the time of day...)

The big guns in SEO are all there in my new Tab: Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan, SEOMoz.

But if you own favourite isn't there, you can "add stuff" to your Tab. Google tracks as new stuff gets added, and as new content becomes more popular it will become part of the standard "I feel lucky" setting.

Take a look at OutOfMyGord's posting if you want to read more.

New UK Keyword Reseach Tool

Wordtracker have announced the launch of a UK version of their popular keyword research database. The new service will be launched at the SES conference in London on 13-15 Feb.

Keyword research is an essential first step in developing your plan to improve your website's rankings in the search engines.

The lack of UK specific data has been a significant weakness for Wordtracker, and this development means they should be able to capture a significant part of the UK keyword research market.

Wordtracker costs from UK 4.20 per day up to 140.00 for an annual subscription.

Other keyword research tools for the UK specific research:

Keyword Discovery which costs US70 per month, or US600 per year
Yahoo Search Marketing's Keyword Assistant which is free

Internet marketing toolbox: SiteScore

Continuous improvement is an essential part of your web marketing strategy.

How could you improve your web design? How can you improve the user experience?

I've just discovered a quick and easy automated website review service. It gives feedback covering:

• marketing
  
• design
• accessibility
• experience

and a review of where you rank for what it perceives to be your key phrases.

I only get a measly 8.4 out of 10, and I think they're trying to sell their own web marketing services. It's a very useful little tool, but could I suggest you take it all with a large pinch of salt!

Tools used to manage this website

I was asked which tools I use to manage this website. I've pulled together a list of the software that keeps my website ticking.

My choices won't suit everybody, and in hindsight I might have chosen differently. But these services are all working and sometimes it is just too difficult to change horses.

This website was designed as a demonstrator of how to easy it is to keep your content fresh and up to date. I use Senior Internet's content management system for the Events, Library and Client sections of the site.

I didn't realise how much money I've invested in Adobe products: Dreamweaver and Contribute are used to create and update standard web pages. Images on the site are edited with Photoshop Elements, and PDFs are created using Flashpaper.

The blog section is kept up to date with Blogger, and readers' subscriptions to my blog news is automated with Feedblitz.

I monitor activity on the site using WebTrends website statistics software. Incoming links to the site with monitored with SEO Elite, and overall performance in the search engines is tracked with WebPosition and WebCEO.

Customer data is managed in the office using Goldmine, and I use Goldmine to send out small email marketing campaigns. Larger email marketing campaigns go out using Vertical Response or Intellicontact or Mailchimp.

Any thoughts on my choices?

Writing for the Web: Readability Tests

I talk a lot about search engine spiders, and how they index the text on your website.

But what about us humans?

How easy is it to read the text on your website? How easy is it to understand?

A "readability test" is an automated analysis of the copy on your website. The test looks at relative difficulty of reading your text:

• the number of words in each sentence
• the number of syllables in each word
• the complexity of sentence structure & grammar
  

The test provides you with the reading age or years of schooling. If you want to reach a broad audience, then you need to be writing at a level equivalent to 8 years of schooling.

Use these readability tests to determine your Fog Index, your Reading Ease Index, or how many years of schooling a reader needs to understand your copy.

Juicy Studio: Readability Test will test your online web pages

Document Readability Test lets you cut and paste your text for testing, and makes recommendations for improvements.

What about this page? You need 10 years of schooling to read it easily, and it fails the recommended Reading Ease test.

Let me know if you understood it, and whether you found it easy to read!

Internet Marketing Toolbox: iWebTool

iWebTools is another collection of SEO tools: search engine position checker, a backlink checker, spider simulator, etc

But what it also has are 2 unusual tools: a Page Rank prediction tool, and a Visual PageRank checker.

Today I asked it to predict the page rank for my Internet marketing in Nottingham website, and it predicts my PR will increase from 4 to 5. I searched for an explanation of how it came up with this prediction, but I couldn't find out how it came up with this (good) news.

Hope it's right in it's prediction - I'll keep you posted.

Marketing Toolbox: Good Keywords Tool

Good Keywords is a free software download which helps you to identify keyphrases to use in your SEO strategy. It includes a keyphrase generator, keyword density analyser. It pulls in data from Google, MSN, Overture, Alexa, as well as other search engines.

An excellent utility for you to use when researching your keyphrases.

Marketing Toolbox: Keyword Density Analyser

I get asked alot of questions about Search Engine Optimisation, but one of the most popular is "exactly what is keyword (or keyphrase) density?"

It's not a complicated concept - just take the total of number of words on your webpage (say 250) and figure out how many times your keyword is repeated within that 250 word total. Let's say your keyword appears 10 times; divide 10 by 250 and you get your keyword density of .04 or 4%.

There's much debate about optimum keyword density, but you should be aiming to have somewhere between 3% and 7% keyword density to improve your rankings on the search engines.

Although the concept is not complicated, where keywords appear in your webpage is a more sophisticated issue. Sure, your keywords should appear in your text, but they also need to be in your page Title, in your meta tags, in your links, in your alt tags...

Ranks.nl free keyword density analyser tool gives a density analysis of your page: single words, phrases, and looks across many of the places keywords should be.

Use this tool as part of your search engine optmisation strategy, and you should start to see some results!

Marketing Toolbox: How quickly does your home page load?

You have just a few critical seconds to convince visitors lookingi at your website that their time is well spent. In the Internet age it's got to be quick, or you lose the punters.

At a recent East Midlands Ebusiness club meeting I asked the delegates what they disliked most about certain web sites, and the universal response is "slow loading pages".

In my first Toolbox article, I'd like to tell you about a Webpage Analyzer: a free website speed test tool that calculates your page size, page composition, and that all important download time.

The download table shows you how quickly your page appears on a standard dial up line, as well as various broadband speeds.

It also makes recommendations how your page could be improved to cut download time.

It may not make comfortable reading, but simple changes to your site could cut down the time it takes your site to load, and keep those all important eyeballs.

Web Marketing Tools for Firefox

I've made the switch to Firefox, but to my dismay found I had lost the web marketing tools I used in Explorer: the Google and Alexa toolbars. Never fear, Firefox has it's own version of these tools, and many others, known as "extensions."

The Alexa/Google toolbar is called Search Status and it provides Google page rank, linking information, and Alexa's competitive intelligence related links.

One hint - once you install the extension, go to Tools | Extensions where you can set the Options where the SearchStatus toolbar appears on your screen. I've set mine to the right of the URL container, and it looks great.