Sharon Hurley Hall has been a friend for years. She is one of the best ‘self taught’ SEOs I’ve ever met. Not only can she market her websites – without understanding the methodologies behind bibliometrics and Latent Semantic Indexing – but her name is a ‘keyword string’ related to ‘get paid to write’ in both Google Search and Google AdWords. That is why I thought of her blog when I found this new tool.

Sharon is always teaching writers how to promote their websites with a clarity and simplicity that I find difficult. However, very few tools can be used by the average website owner to track their search engine results. Even the free SEO software packages can take weeks to learn how to use, and months to understand the significance of the data produced.

I found www.cuterank.net this morning and immediately thought of Sharon and her readers. It is a free little script, perfect for anyone with only a few websites and blogs. It lets you track your ‘rank’ in any of Google’s search engines.

Have you ever run a ranking report that stated you were at the top of Google – but you couldn’t find your website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Position). This little tool lets you pick any Google search engine and find your rank specifically – or find your ranking on a large selection of websites.

IT also tells you if you are in the top 100. This is very important. If you have a keyword in the top 100 – then you have done the ‘hard part’ of SEO. Once in the Top 100, just continue creating blog posts with a keyword density between 2 -4%, but a Keyword Weight of 70% or higher. Density is the number of times a keyword appears. Weight is the value of each keyword.

This is easier than it sounds. The average blog post has 400 words including title, links, menu, and footer.

First: Never use more than 4 keywords on a page. In fact, using only 2 keywords makes it easier to achieve a high Keyword Weight.

The keyword should always appear in the URL, Page Title, Meta Tags, and Description. Next, include the keyword in the Article Title. Your URL, Page Title, and Article Title do not need to repeat themselves.

Second: Add the keyword to the first 50 words of the page, the last 50 words. Hyperlink one of these to a relevant page on your blog.

This is all the average blog needs to generate a Keyword Weight over 70%. This is the first step to reaching the top 100 Keyword Positions.

Keep Track of the keywords and run them through www.cuterank.net . There is no upgrades, no members section. You do not need to buy a better version to see all your results.

Suzanne James is a professional search engine marketer. Find out more at Axiom9.

Editor’s Note: When I agreed to publish this guest post, I had no idea I was going to be heaped with praise – thanks, Suz.

Disclosure: I have received no compensation for publishing this review post.

On the surface, Squidoo.com may look like a free way to create a minisite and share information with others. In its simplest form, that is exactly what it is. But there are a lot of other ways you can benefit from having a Squidoo lens.

First Page on Google

One of the big perks is that Squidoo lenses tend to do well on Google, especially if you optimize for a certain keyword. For example, I have a lens that is optimized for the keyword “make money writing”. It spends a lot of time on the first page now and the rest of the time is spent on the second page.

In order to get your lens on the first page you need to do several things. Here is a short list:

• Do some keyword research and make sure they are in the URL.
• Put the keyword in the main page title and then scatter it throughout the page.
• Make sure you have 4 modules at the minimum. The more modules you have, the better.
• Update it often. In the beginning, you will need to update it every day. Small changes count, such as deleting a sentence.
• Promote your lens whenever you can.

Newsletter Subscribers

You can use your lens to get newsletter subscribers. You can put your subscriber box in one of the text modules. This requires that you use an “iframe” command. You can find some information online on how to do that. Or, click on my link at the end of this post and I’ll send you some information.

Affiliate Marketing

I promote affiliate programs on my lenses. In the month of June, I made around $40. Yes, you can make money through the modules on Squidoo, but you can make a lot more if you sign up for the affiliate programs yourself and add them to your lens.

Show That you are an Expert

Another thing that a lens does is that it shows you are an expert at a particular subject. If you want to develop a reputation that you know a lot about something, you can research it and create a lens. This is a tool that you can use for self promotion.

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Katherine Huether is a freelance writer who loves creating Squidoo lenses. To view a list of her lenses visit http://www.squidoo.com/kathography

A little submissiveness goes a long way, especially when you’re talking about website promotion. Once you’ve finished all the on-page optimization of your site, by doing keyword research, keyword placement and creating a sitemap, it’s time to get the word out to Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. Haven has a tip on search engine submission, which has the submission addresses for Google, Yahoo and MSN. As Haven points out, you only need to submit the main – or index – page of your site; if you’ve got a good sitemap, the search engines will do the rest – eventually.

Beyond Google, Yahoo and MSN

It can take a while for your site to show up on the ‘Big 3′ (Google is a particularly tough nut to crack), so there are a few strategies you can use to improve your chances. Google, Yahoo and MSN also crawl other search engines, so submitting to some of the lesser known ones (which are likely to list you faster) will help to get you on their list. A resource I found really useful was WebCEO, free software that automates website management and tracking. It includes keyword and page optimisation tools and a very good submission tool. (See Gracepub’s review)

What else can I do to promote my website?

Glad you asked. You can also submit your website to relevant directories, and I know of another free resource that will help you to do it. The SEO friendly directory list catalogues directories by interest and country and includes PageRank information for each directory listed. That means you can decide which directories are worth bothering with. I started with the 9s and 8s and worked my way down to the 3s and subnmitted my site to so many directories that I’ve forgotten which ones they are. Be warned, this will take time, as in many cases you’ll have to submit your site manually. But if you’re listed by external websites, Google, Yahoo and MSN will start to like you.

How can I make the most of this site promotion strategy?

Resubmit your site every six months to keep the listing fresh and practice deep submission – submitting links to individual pages that you think are important. (Samishra has a good post on this.) This works for blogs, too. I have submitted the URLs for most of my posts and they show up on Google (if you click on ‘show omitted results’).

One final tip: you might want to set up a disposable email address just for site submission, because you will get a LOT of email. You’ll also find that you’ve been subscribed to lots of site promotion newsletters, most of which are a waste of time, IMHO. I set up a new one on my domain and once I’ve confirmed my directory listing, I can then ignore everything else that comes to that address.

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In Keyword Placement, I talked about using keywords in metatags and content to optimize your website. Now we’re going to extend the strategy a bit further. Remember that you can highlight keywords within the text on your page. To make your site more search-engine friendly some of these keywords into links going further into your site. This will tell Google, Yahoo and MSN and other search engines which have found your home page that there’s something else to look at.

Why do I need links to optimize my website?

Google, Yahoo and MSN and other search engines like pages with lots of links. Inbound links are best (those are links from other sites to your page) – and will improve your PageRank quickly, but cross-linking of pages within your site is also good. Cross-linking shows that different pages of your website are relevant to each other – and relevance is a big factor in improving PageRank. If you know what you want to do with your site, this will be an easy step to take.

Why do I need a sitemap?

A sitemap is one of the best ways of letting the search engines find the rest of your site. You should have a link to it off your home page and it should contain links to all the pages you want the search engines to find. A sitemap makes it easy for search engines and users to find everything on your site.

If you have a big site, this can take a while, but luckily there are lots of free tools that will do it for you.

Freefind provides a sitemap and free (ad-sponsored) search box for your site. Their free service will create a sitemap page, which you can customise to suit your web template. They will also search your site at specified intervals and update the sitemap. If you use the search box, they will also provide statistics about what visitors to your website searched for. The ads are quite unobtrusive, but if you don’t want them you can upgrade to the paid service.

You can also create a special Google Sitemap (here’s why) and upload it to your server. Two free online services are:

• Sitemapspal
• Online Sitemap Creator

You can also download Google’s own Sitemap Generator.

How else can search engines find my site?

Some search engines look for a special file called a robots.txt file. This stays on your server and tells it which search engines can search your site and which can’t. The reason to have one is so that you can block any search engine bots that bring spam in their wake. (This is only a basic level of protection, which relies on spam bots respecting the boundaries you have set.) However, you can also specify which folders search engines are allowed to spider just in case you’re storing anything confidential on your server.

You can create a robots.txt file here then upload it to your server. It also provides an example of a robots.txt file.

How can I use this on my blog?

Even if you don’t host your own blog, you can use some of these techniques to improve its position in the search engines. You can certainly highlight certain keywords and link them to other posts you have made – and you can do an index post, which links to all your posts (or to all posts in a certain category). Haven has a good example here. If your webhost is providing your blog software, then you can also use a robots.txt file.

On-site links, a sitemap and a robots.txt file are all useful tools in search engine optimization, but there’s still more you can do to get your site noticed. In part four, I’ll look at strategies and tools for search engine submission.

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