Free SEO Tools: SEO Analytics Tools

The following keyword analytics tools are used for SEO purposes to analyze traffic and ROI:

Google Analytics - This is my personal favorite and thanks to Google's new Ajax testing it may be the only way to fully track you traffic in the future. This was initially made for Google adwords users and even allows you to track your ROI (Return of Investment) by keyword. Google Adwords also has its own split testing and conversion tracking software to help you focus your search marketing efforts.

Google Website Optimizer – This software also allows you to split test your landing pages to see exactly how your Google adwords campaigns are converting.

Awstats - This is a pretty popular default log analyzer used on many servers.

Stat Counter - This is an excellent analyzer however it starts off free but expects charges for the more advanced features including the use of extra bandwidth.

Piwik - Another excellent open source web analyzer tool that allows you to see how your visitors get to your site and where they come from.

Webalizer - Another default stat counter used on many servers.

How to make your web design search engine friendly?

Creating a website is not sufficient for a successful online business; it’s only a part of the requirement for a successful online business. You have to also know how to make the website search engine friendly (SEO friendly) so that it gets a good ranking on search engines. So if website ranking is important to your website, you have to remember following tips to ensure that your website is search engine friendly.

1. Use unique Meta tags that identify the content of the respective web pages of your website. Make sure this is generated automatically for your website as it will make a huge difference in the ranking of individual pages and products.

2. The content of the website should be structured well and keyword rich. In addition to it, it should also include bullet points, highlighted words and heading tags to help search engines in crawling them.

3. It is better to place your menu items at the top of the page to make it easy to navigate the page. And if you have various deep level pages in the website, create a site map that is linked to the homepage for search engines to easily find it.

4. Update the website on regular basis to keep the website fresh. This can be done with a content management system or blog. Fresh content on the website boost your keyword combination and improves the chances of visitors finding your website in their searches.

5. Don’t use the same keywords on different pages; it reduces the value of a keyword on a particular page. It also makes it difficult for search engines to decide on which page to show on a particular search.

6. Though Flash gives flashy ads for your website, it should be used carefully as it does not help in improving the page ranking of your website.

7. Make the design of your website as clean as possible; this makes it easier for search engines to access your website. It is better to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for design implementation and to store scripts in external files.

8. Don’t use text in images as search engines can’t read it; Use ALT tags to embed text in images.

9. Your website should have a meaningful directory and file names with keywords in them because search engines pick them up faster.

10. When linking to your home page, ensure the link is linked to the full domain name and not just to the file name. This increases the traffic to your website.