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SEO Tools That Will Help You Succeed - Part 2 Ross Dunn CEO, StepForth Web Marketing - Jan 28, 2009

A key role in search engine optimization is determining why a site or page may not be ranking. This is especially true when it seems there is no obvious reason, even after repeated optimization attempts. Part 1 of SEO tools focused on tools to optimize a site. Part 2 looks at tools and techniques that help you detect why a page may not be ranking well. This detective process to find ranking problems has four steps -- each with a preferred tool.

Step 1: Check Google Webmaster Tools

First, check your Google Webmaster Tools account (that I mentioned in part 1) to make certain that any alerts or issues with your site have been dealt with (www.google.com/webmasters/tools/).

Step 2: Server Header Checker Tool

Next, check the invisible data that a website's server communicates to a search engine when it visits the page in question. Insert the page's address (URL) into a Server Header Checker (news.stepforth.com/seo-tools/http-header-checker.php) to reveal header details. In most cases, everything is fine if you see the resulting information begin with "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" -- which means the page loaded successfully without issue. If it begins with any other message, then discuss the results with your webmaster to make sure the page is functioning normally.

Step 3: Review Google's Text Cache

Next, we'll examine the text that Google sees. First, find your webpage on Google by searching for a unique, 5- or 6-word phrase on that page, surrounding the search words with quotation marks. If your page doesn't appear in search results, it probably hasn't been spidered, which means (1) your page is either blocked, or (2) is unknown to Google.

Once you see your page in Google search results, click on the "Cached" link that appears near the right end of the last line of search results. Once the page comes up, click on the "Text-only version" link you'll see near the top of the cached page.

You will be presented with a text-only representation of what Google sees when it indexes your page. This view is extremely valuable because text is the primary content for search optimization. If you find that the keywords you wish to rank for are not well represented in the text, then you'll need to perform additional on-page optimization. In addition, the text-only view can indicate if the text in your navigation is readable or not. If not, you may want to change the navigation system so that the keywords within it can be read by search engines.

Step 4: XENU

Lastly, use XENU (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) free site spidering software. It does a good job of finding broken links and it can tell you if any part of your website is not being spidered. If a particular section of your site has been inadvertently blocked to Google, you should be able to identify it after carefully inspecting XENU's final report.

If you still have unanswered questions, try consulting some of the incredibly talented and helpful contributors to the Webmaster World Forums (www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_promotion/). Careful use of these SEO tools will help you be an effective detective to identify and fix ranking and indexing problems.

Ross Dunn is CEO of StepForth Web Marketing, a firm that has provided search engine optimization services since 1997. His company can help your website get much higher rankings for keywords that deliver results.