After Paul did a great job explaining how search queries can help in link building ,

I do prefer FireFox over other browsers. This can be a matter of a habit but I don't know any other browser that can be customized in such a plenty of ways. A profile in FireFox is the collection of extensions, bookmarks, settings, passwords, and user preferences that are saved for you in a separate set of files.

After my recent huge post on SEO tools was published, I promised to add the section for free online internal analytics services; but before that I decided to discuss different aspects of the topic starting with effective tracking of your backlinks and referrals .

This is another geo-targeting case study I decided to discuss at SEJ. Say you have one product and you plan to target two same-language countries: USA and UK. Which options do you have?

All tools listed below fall under the following criteria : they are all useful for SEOs; they are all web-based ) no desk-top ones or FireFox extensions so far(; they are all free. If you know of any online SEO tools that were not mentioned here, please comment and I will update the post. I will do my best to continuously update the article to delete the tools that are no more available and add new ones.

Like plural/ singular word forms , hyphenated terms also often pose a difficult SEO issues for us to solve - which version to use and optimize for: two-word, one-word or hyphenated one? That question would be much easier to answer if Google demonstrated any definitive behavior when treating hyphenated terms; instead when using a hyphen in a search term, you will most likely see the mixture of hyphenated, single-word and two-word spelling variations.

An interesting discussion over at SearchEngineWatch Forum covers the way)s( of treating out-of-stock product pages that cannot be of any use to a visitor but still carry a lot of weight )in the form of inlinks, rankings and traffic(. So what can be done to make them worthwhile for a human visitor and at the same time take the full advantage of their SEO power?

One SEO related question which is often asked throughout webmaster forums is how much domain registration age is important for SEO. The points behind this question include: well-established sites have old domain names, so by reverse logics, an old domain should mean that the site is well established; spammers register and drop domains quickly, thus logically spamming sites usually have newly registered domain names. Generally,

Robots.txt has become a widely used method of controlling your site crawling. Thus it has become one of the first things I check when diagnosing on-site issues. While nowadays almost every webmaster knows its basics,

The ability to access almost any search engine right from your browser is awesome: you have all engines in one place; you can switch from engine to engine with one mouse click; you save time and space: easy-to-use drop down menu to choose the engine you need; you can enjoy quick and easy installation )besides,

I have previously covered numerous ways to explore your competitors' backlinks via various web-based and desktop tools and even with the help of FireFox Extensions . Still all of these tools rely on Yahoo or Yahoo Site Explorer to retrieve the link profile data. This time I am going to look into 2 alternative search engines allowing to explore backlinks of a site. Neither of them is any better than Yahoo,

Human preferences still remain the main factor to measure any website's usefulness and popularity. Today we have a number of trusted third-party sources to explore and compare traffic of any site. 1. Alexa.com - the most popular way to measure website traffic from outside. Despite the fact, most people think it is inaccurate, the info provided by Alexa is widely used to make judgments about the site popularity. Alexa traffic is measured in percentage, i.e.

Sometimes you don't know what exactly you are looking for. That's when wildcard search may come in handy. Wildcard search can be used as placeholder for any sequence of characters or words. It is a seldom discussed search operator that can help a lot with SEO analysis and research.

Sometimes the issue with your site is right there but you can't find it. You check code, backlinks and website architecture but can't find the answer. What most webmasters fail to do is to try visiting the page with the user-agent being Googlebot. 1. User-agent switcher - a FireFox extension also available for Flock and Seamonkey that sends the server different information about which user-agent is requesting a file. It should be enhanced with the list of user-agent list .

Reciprocal linking is one of the most disputable SEO questions. The problem is that it is two-fold in nature. First, reciprocal links are natural being the essence of the Internet like linking overall. )So undoubtedly, we can't do without them.( Secondly, it is the easiest way to manipulate your rankings by engaging in numerous link exchanges. Google also gives contradicting definitions of the term: It can provide visitors with links to other sites of a similar topic.

Many webmasters come across one common dilemma: is it worth focusing efforts on one huge brilliant copy or is it wiser to split it into several related copies . Like with many topics we discuss here, there is no definitive answer to that.

I've decided to make up a short all-in-one guide to summarize what we know about SEO for URLs. And if you have something to add, please do. So he we go: Length of the URL : no more than 3-5 words in your URL. According to Google's Matt Cutts if there are more than 5 words' [Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

Very often with large dynamic sites webmasters just can't do without pagination. Apart from usability here they come across another serious issue: duplicate content . The thing is that all pages normally have identical titles and meta description and while some SEOs think it's not an issue at all )as search engines "don't see identical titles as duplicate content"(, I do believe that this may at least result in inadequate site crawling rate and depth.

We keep hearing about website internal duplicate content issues but many of us are sincerely unaware of the fact that that's what our own website also suffers from. Why? most of the websites are made with the help of third-party site creators that create duplicate URLs to same content and we don't know about that; sometimes webmasters just lack SEO knowledge. For example, they might be unaware of the fact that URLs are case sensitive and www.yoursite.com/page1 and www.

It's getting even harder to make of a good short relevant domain name. Hence the web-based tools allowing you to find one are numerous. This time I will review mostly the ones that check the domain name availability dynamically and also provide you with some tips to advance your search.