Step Wise SEO

Poking and peeking into other people’s business is part of Web culture and one of the more entertaining aspects of an SEO campaign.

When you open up a browser and look there is a great deal more information available about a site, ranging from data on who owns the domain to the scripts used on the page.

Here are a few tools and techniques that we have found most useful:

• The Google Toolbar
• Viewing page source
• Alexa data

The following sections include the details you need to make these methods your own.

The Google Toolbar
This is a very popular tool with searchers and SEOs alike! If you already have it, you know how useful it is. If not, get ready for a treat.

The Google Toolbar, which can be downloaded from http://toolbar.google.com/, is a free add-on to your browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox) that contains several features to enhance your web surfing experience.

The toolbar feature that we’re most interested in utilizing for our SEO efforts is a little green bar labeled PageRank.

This bar displays the Google PageRank value for the web page being viewed. The PageRank value certainly has its limitations.

However, viewing it in the toolbar can give you a quick and easy estimate of how important Google thinks a certain page is.

You can also use the “backwards links” feature to determine how many pages are pointing to a specific URL, but you should be aware that Google doesn’t show all of the links that point to a page; some are omitted.

If you would rather not install the Google Toolbar, you can see PageRank information, and lots of other fascinating tidbits of data, at www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/.

Go to http://toolbar.google.com and download and install the Google Toolbar.

Viewing Page Source
Anyone who’s put together a website already knows how to view page source. But if you don’t ever touch your site’s code, this may be a new experience for you.

Viewing page source is a simple way to see the inside workings of your competitors’ (or anyone else’s) website.

Source is shorthand for source code, which is the HTML content that tells the browser what to show on the screen.

In the source code, you can see all of the invisible text elements, such as meta tags and ALT tags. You can also view the HTML title tag and other behind-the-scenes information on your competitor’s page.

It’s easy to view source in major browsers. Here’s how:

• In Internet Explorer, select View > Source from the Explorer menu.
• In Safari, select View > View Source from the Safari menu.
• In Firefox, select View > Page Source from the Firefox menu.

Practice viewing page source by opening up your own website and viewing the source code on a few pages.

Alexa Data
The Alexa database, located at www.alexa.com, provides interesting tidbits of info about websites:

a screen shot of the home page, traffic data, inbound links, site owner contact information, related links, and even a link to old versions of the website on the Internet Archive (aka the Wayback Machine).

Most addictive of all, Alexa estimates your website’s traffic rank among all sites on the Web.

Many in the SEO community have serious doubts about the accuracy of Alexa’s numbers and believe that Alexa’s stars are easy to manipulate, so take them with a grain of salt.

But if you are looking for quick answers to general questions about a website (Is this some crazy spammer or a legit business?), Alexa might be a good place to start.

To see a website’s details, search for the full URL in Alexa’s search box. If you fall in love with Alexa, you can even download an Alexa toolbar to add to your browser, similar to the Google Toolbar.

Go to www.alexa.com and search for your own website URL. See what comes up!