You asked for it, you got it! dataSpheric Search Engine Links!

Updated 01/06/05

So many people ask us to share our Search Engine Optimization links and tools that we finally got tired of it. We're posting them here for you to use forever. Why are we doing this? Why take the chance that you'll do your own search engine optimization? Well, if you do then you have a LOT of time on your hands. It takes a long, long time to do SEO properly. It's not easy. Not only that, if you are doing it yourself you probably don't have any money anyway. Enough said.

But wait, you say, what if I am your competitor, aren't you afraid of giving me a competitive advantage? No, we're not afraid of giving other web designers and developers a competitive advantage. The kind of work we do relies upon teams of highly specialized experts. Nobody knows everything, it's just too broad a field for that. If you are just starting out or are a "one man band" shop, chances are the kinds of customers you service aren't the kind of customers we get. In short, you are no competition. Help yourself to this information, we hope it helps you and your customers out.

If you really want to know why we're doing this, it's because of our open source philosophy. Many of the nice folks who put up these tools did so for free. We're just doing our part to give back to the community. We don't stop here either! Check out our Services Page for lots of helpful, on topic information on Web Project Management, Software Development, Database Integration, Web Site Design and Internet Marketing. These are tools we've developed over years and you get them all for free.

This is the best, most comprehensive list of Search Engine Optimization Links on the planet (so far as we're aware). If you know of a better one, let us know and we'll link to it!

SEO Links

Keywords and key strings

Keyword research is the beginning of all search engine marketing. It allows us to identify traffic patterns in terms of search string popularity in search engines. Using refined lists of such keystrings, we construct our entire content plan for search engine marketing or SEO.

1. DP's keyword suggestion tool is our favorite besides Overture's which you need to pay them money to get the benefit from. And it still doesn't replace DP's tool.

Submission

Submission is a bit of a grey area right now. Since Google is in such a fundamental position with other search engines, we're starting to feel that to come up on Google's crawl is the basic essential. We've also seen that a single link on a popular site will get your site indexed sometimes within 24 hours. For those on a very tight budget (like zero) this is our suggestion at this time.

Another trick is to post to a popular, on-topic newsgroup and include your website address in your signature line but BEWARE. If you post to an off-topic newsgroup or simply offer a commercial message in your post, you may be accused of SPAMMING. Properly used, however, this method, on a popular newsgroup on Usenet will get you indexed withing 24 hours.

Overall, the importance of submission can be overrated due to the interwoven nature of present search engine practices. We see three basic doors right now, Google, Yahoo and Teoma. We're still not sure what the new MSN beta is doing. In fact, with other techniques, we've begun to see submission as a fill—in—the—gaps technique after we've been indexed. Submission can still be done manually and for free in most cases, we don't publish links because they change so frequently. Just go to each engine and find their submission information.

1. AskJeeves Teoma Site Submit. Formerly the third ranked engine for SEO targetting, Teoma is becomming more important and they play by their own rules. We've been experimenting with their submission services and so far are reasonably satisfied.
2. Lycos Pay-for submission can help and we've had good results for the dollar from Lycos.
3. Overture It used to be if you were on a tight budget, Overture was your best bet. This differs from submission however, this gets you into the real of PPC or pay-per-click. While it will still get you indexed within 24 hours and distribute you through their network of subsidiary engines, we're not thrilled with the reindexing anymore. Google's program has been getting good reviews on this as well lately, we've begun playing with it, nothing conclusive as of now.

Google:

Google is being used for some very interesting and sometimes disturbing purposes these days. Keep an eye on your server logs for Google engine hits from such places as Russia (google.ru), Latvia (google.lv) and other hacker-friendly places.

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool
2. Google Local Help
3. GoogleGuy Says —Google Ranking Info
4. Google Information for Webmasters
5. GoogleRankings.com —Check Google search engine ranking
6. Google Dance Tool
7. John Bokama's site has some higher-powered developer's SEO tools written in Perl
8. Don't forget the Google Toolbar!

Yahoo:

1. Yahoo! Web Rank Checking Tool
2. Yahoo! Small Business Marketing Tools
3. Yahoo! Help -

MSN:

Becuase MSN is still in beta testing of it's long awaited new search engine, we have no specific recommendations regarding optimizing for them. At present, the best way into MSN seems to be Google. For this reason, we make Teoma our third priority engine at this time.

Keeping up to date:

1. WebProWorld —The World's Forum for eBusiness
2. SearchEngines.com —search engine rankings and search engine optimization tips.
3. Search Engine Watch —Tips About Internet Search Engines and Search Engine Submission

Rank:

If you are new to search engine optimization, do yourself a favor and don't check your rankings more than weekly untill you see results. You'll just drive yourself crazy.

1. A pretty good Search Engine Ranking tool
2. Our favorite Search Engine Position Checker. WTK also has killer tools for almost everything you really need. We love this toolset! Second only to Bruce Clay!
3. Alexa Web Search. An objective ranking metric.
4. DMOZ request. Not too many of us know the power of the open-source directory, but we at dataSpheric pride ourselves on open-source everything. We know about this tool but we haven't yet used it. DMOZ is human—administered directory and certain people have control of certain topics. They are also volunteers. For many topics, these people are overwhelmed and can be rather touchy. For this reason, we haven't yet tried this method.

Saturation (pages indexed in various engines):

Here's where submission to search engines can come in handy these days. After you get indexed and ranked, you might notice that some of your favorite pages aren't appearing. This can be due to various factors, but selectively submitting single of a few target pages can get them crawled. With patience.

1. The SearchMechanics saturation tool went down some time ago. This spot is being reserved in the hope that they will come back up. Best of luck to Search Mechanics, hope everything's ok!
2. This makes the Market Leap tool our favorite saturation tool for now.

Link popularity:

Link popularity has become perhaps the most important force in search engine optimization and search engine marketing (for a description of the difference, click here.) A lot of people are coming up with cheap, shady tricks to obtain links and ranking. I'd suggest that the success of such tricks are always short lived. dataSpheric recommends that you obtain quality, authoritative links from sites which have rellevant content which is helpful to your users.

1. The Widexl tool. This is the "humble pie" site.
2. Once again, a WTK tool. This one allows you to backtrace links. That's handy!

General Tools:

1. Keyword Suggestion Tool (Wordtracker Suggestion Tool and Overture Bid Tool Combined)
2. Link Popularity Check
3. User SEO depth
4. Another cool SEO links page to keep an eye on.
5. bruceclay.com —The master of Search Engine Optimization, Ranking, Submission, Placement, Web Site Promotion. Thanks Bruce!

For Webmasters

1. THE VALIDATOR. THE TEST OF ALL WEBSITE CODE.
2. Xenu is a neat free tool to verify your links. Also handy for site maps.
3. Copyscape —Website Plagiarism Search. Someone stealing your content? Get 'em!
4. Web Page Speed Checker
5. The Web Robots Pages. A lot of people seem to be under illusions about robots meta tags these days. Can anyone provide a single engine that actually pays attention to these "revisit" and "reindex" tags? In the dataSpheric book, rellevant robots meta parameters (or text) include index, noindex, follow, nofollow.
6. dataSpheric home and small business computer security gives you the basic rundown on essential computer security.

The dataSpheric links directory powered by linkSpheric, our link management directory engine.

Got a link to add? Email us atSales@dataSpheric.com

Want to link to this page?

Add this code to your HTML (or XHTML hopefully):