Search engine optimization is very important if you want to increase your search engine rankings and to receive more visitors from search engines. And it’s very important for those of you who want to monetize your blogs/sites.

I want to present you a great collection of SEO tools which I use a lot and I find them very useful. You can use these tools for free and you can also integrate them in your site using a simple integration code provided for each tool. Well, I don’t use quite all of them, but some.

1. Google Page Rank

Many advertisers look for a blog’s PR when they want to advertise on it, despite the fact that you can have a lot of visitors without having any PR. You know that these days was a Google Page Rank update, so you can check your new PR using the Google Page Rank tool, which shows you your PR on multiple Google Data Centers. You can see below how this tool will look when you insert the script in your blog.

2. Google Inbound Links

An important factor for calculating your Google PR is the number of inbound links. You can increase your PR by increasing the number of your inbound links. Inbound links are also very important for increasing your Google rankings for specific keywords. You can check your number of inbound links in multiple datacenters with the tool below:

3. Keyword Research

This is a very important tool which helps you to choose relevant and popular terms related to your selected key term. If you want to start a niche blog or if you want to optimize your blog or your articles for specific keywords, then this tool is a must for you. It displays the number of daily searches for a specific keyword, the number of existing results (in Google) as well as the keyword performance (the higher, the better).

If you want to search more than one keyword, you can use the Bulk keyword research tool:

4. Google Keyword Rankings

This tool checks your site rankings for a single keyword on multiple Google Data Centers. It analyses only the first 30 results from Google (the first 3 search result pages).

5. Content Ratio

Content ratio or Code to text ratio represents the percentage of actual text in a web page and it is used by search engines and spiders to calculate the relevancy of a web page. A higher content ratio gives you a better chance of getting a good page ranking for your page. The tool also shows you few options to increase the content ratio.

6. Site SEO Strength

This tool shows you the most important SEO factors for a given URL, to help you evaluate a website for SEO performance.

Well, these are the tools I use very often, but you will find a lot of other tools which you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization.

If there are any other tools you use, please leave here a comment and tell us what and why do you use it.

Even if you want to sell a link or if you want to buy one, this tool is very useful. You can find the price for a link on the home page or a link placed site wide. You can also find the price for a regular text link or for a link placed in a blog post (a link in a blog post has a higher value and impact on Search Engines). If you want to buy a link on another blog, you can choose how related is that blog to yours: totally unrelated, partially related or exactly the same topic.

But what I like the most is the legend given by this tool, where you can find out some of the reason of this price.
I used this tool to find out how much is a link worth on my blog’s home page. Well, a regular text link on my homepage is $11 and a link in a blog post is $14. Why? You can see in the legend below:

If you click on the red numbers, you will see where these numbers come from.

Let’s see: my blog is visible, Yahoo encounter a lot of backlinks, which is very good, but I have also 3 bad points. On Page Rank and Alexa Ranking I can make some improvements to increase them, but what can I do with the outbound links? Because I need them all on the first page And it seems that this can categorize my first page like a spammy one which, of course, it is not.

As you can see there are more SEO tools in one, so if you want to know how much is a link worth, you will find out more information about your site or about the site from where you want to buy the link. And this can save you some time.

How did you establish how much a link is worth on your page? Did you use some tools or you just establish the price “by ear”?

1. Use Meta Tags wisely

Meta tags are a very important part of your site. They are read by the search engines and contain a summary of what the web page content. The most important Meta tags are: title, description and keywords.
Let’s see how Meta tags should look:

You can analyze your Meta tags with this tool: Meta Tag Analyzer.

2. Allow search engine robots to index your site

You can do this in two ways:
I – By using Robots Meta tag:

Index, Follow – The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the index page and will continue to the rest of the pages. This is the default behavior: you don’t have to include this tag.

Index, NoFollow – The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the index page and will NOT continue to the rest of the pages.

NoIndex, Follow – The search engine robots will skip the index page, but will crawl the rest of the pages.

NoIndex, NoFollow – None of your pages will be crawled by the robot and your website will not be indexed by the search engines.

II – By using robots.txt
You must have a file called robots.txt which contains some line like:

3. Use ALT and TITLE attributes

While ALT attribute is used to describe a few elements, like image, area, input and applet, the TITLE attribute can be used to describe almost any HTML element. Both of them will increase your site’s usability and your page’s keyword density score and relevancy for your targeted keywords.

You can analyze your keywords density with this tool.

ALT (alternative) text displays before the image is loaded, i.e., in the major browsers and instead of the image in text-based browsers like Lynx. ALT is a required element for images and area and optional for input and applet. Use ALT to give a proper description of an image. Though, you can use alt=”" for images that are not relevant, like a bullet, for example.
TITLE attributes offers advisory information about the element for which it is set. Many search engine ranking algorithms read the text in TITLE attributes as regular page content.

4. Use headings

Headings are used to provide hierarchical information about your web page. There are 6 levels of headings: h1 is most important heading and h6 is the least important. Use heading tags only for headings. Don’t use them just to make something bold. Of course, you can change the headings style to suit your site design. You can see an example on how it looks:

5. Formatting keywords

It’s a good thing to formatting keywords in your content body, not only for your visitors, but also for search engines. Most of the webmasters use bold <b> or italics <i> tags to strength the keywords. These are formatting tags. But you can obtain the same visual effects using structural tags, like <strong> and <em> , which is better seen by search engines, who consider that these keywords are relevant indeed.

6. Reduce your code as much as possible

You can do this by putting all (or at least the most) your css code in an external file and by putting all (or at least the most) your scripts code in an external file. You can call external file in your head section, like this:

Yesterday, while I’m trying to explain to someone how important is that title, description and keywords must be different from every page. And not just anyway, but they must begin different. I.e., for title, not “company name – product name xx” for all products, but “product name xx – company name”. Same for description and keywords. I want to explain her that in first case, with fixed part at first for title, description and keywords, most indexed pages goes to the supplemental results. And I want to give her an example and show in Google how they appear. And surprise! No supplemental results! Even if she has over 100 pages with same title, description and keywords. Hmmm!

Later, I found this news on Google’s Official Blog: Supplemental goes mainstream.
The article appears on 31 July 2007. This means that supplemental results don’t exist anymore from 1,5 month?

However, from what I read in article, supplemental index doesn’t disappear. Just the label “supplemental results” for supplemental. So, there are still many differences in ranking pages from main index and supplemental index, but now, we aren’t able to see those differences.