Improving the quality and ranking of a website often depends upon a high quality SEO plugin.  These plugins can provide you with a comprehensive analysis of a website that can aide in increasing the success of the website and generate traffic and popularity in most any niche. Listed below are reviews of the top five SEO plugins for Firefox that will help improve the quality of any website.

SEO for Firefox is the number one plugin available in terms of quality and usability.  It contains a wide variety of features and can be downloaded absolutely free of charge.  This site is popular with over 130,000 users worldwide utilising this service.  It has many useful features including a complete view of the competition directly within the search results.  Overall, this product is the most useful with the widest range of features to use.  In all, you can receive a £200 value application for free simply by signing up for an account.  (more…)

There are a number of steps in the search engine process that are important to understand, if one hopes to successfully push their site up in the SERPs (search engine results pages). From the moment a site goes live, these are the steps that take place, to make that site (or one or more of its pages) available to users via search engines.

• Crawling the Web

In this phase, pages are discovered and quickly scanned by automatic prorams, called bots or spiders, that find pages via the hyperlink structure of the web, and “crawl” them, in order to get a rough outline of what the site is about. This process is going on continuously, in an effort to capture the estimated 20 billion pages that exist on the web.

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If asked where to begin with SEO, I would have a one word answer: Keywords!

Whether creating a new site or optimising an existing site, keyword research is always my first step. Part of that process is, indeed, asking the questions “Why am I best?” or “What sets this site or its product apart from the rest?” Knowing what the market is looking for, in terms of search, will strongly influence everything else I do.

So if asked where I begin this process, I would start with:

1. Keyword Research – The List

Make a list of all the keywords you think someone might type into a search engine that should logically bring them to your site or one like yours. Brainstorm with colleagues, friends and family members. Better yet (assuming you have a website and traffic) ask customers what words they searched to find you or if you don’t have a website yet, ask customers what they think they would use. Look at competitors’ sites to see what terms you may have missed.

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Search engine optimisation can be an overly complex task, especially for the novice webmaster. With so many factors to consider, it can be quite difficult to optimise even a single web page properly. Every aspect of the page needs to be structured properly, from keyword density to meta tags and everything in between. Doing all of this manually can take a lot of time, even after you know how it’s done. Luckily there is WordPress, a content management system that simplifies nearly every aspect of site management, including search engine optimisation. The following information should help you use WordPress to simplify all mundane SEO tasks.

Important WordPress Plugins for SEO

Every WordPress user knows that open-source plugins are ultimately what makes this particular CMS so powerful. The following plugins can boost your search engine ranking with almost no effort on your behalf.

• Platinum SEO Pack

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Ask ten different SEO specialists to list the steps of search engine optimisation, and you’re likely to get ten different answers. Most, however, will agree on the basics, even if they disagree on the number of steps, their sequence or what to call them. Here, I am listing what I consider to be the essential steps, in the most logical sequence.

1. Initial Analysis
You need to know your starting point before you can plan a journey… so first, you must determine a baseline. Aspects to consider here include market potential and type, and the current validity of your page in terms of code, the WAI Guidelines. Consideration must also be given to the competition, both present and future. When you have determined your starting point and your desired destination, you’re ready to begin.

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There are many excellent ways to build traffic to your site. Search engines are one of the best, you don’t have to pay per click and they guarantee the person was looking for the information that is on your site. For new web site owners Search Engine Optimisation can seem overwhelming. Even seasoned webmasters and bloggers can find SEO rather difficult.

Whether you are using WordPress as a platform for your site or blog, it isn’t too difficult to make your site search engine friendly with the use of plugins. Although WordPress alone is excellent in this capacity, there are a ton of things that you can do with this script to aid in better site rankings. Of course altering the code is a possibility, but it isn’t needed. Ther (more…)

The amount of freeware available on the Internet today can seem overwhelming. Gone are the days when you have to spend lots of money to do simple online tasks. You can simply download the software you need, and start using it to achieve your goals. Firebug is such a tool, offered free to users, it provides a platform to debug problem code and scripting that may be preventing users from staying on your website.

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to touch on what this little do-it-yourself website debugging tool can do for the average user. Firebug works in real-time with your FireFox browser. It allows you to: View HTML, PHP, CSS, and Javascript, fix any problems with the script or code, view the changes as they will appear to visitors, then upload the changes to your host – all from your browser window! (more…)

The smaller images are on your webpages, the faster your site will load which will provide your users with a much better experience, especially those on slower connections and even dial-up access. This will also benefit you as you will be using less disk space to store the images, as well as less bandwidth to transmit them each time a user requests them, so it is beneficial all round!

If you have not optimised your images before or are not sure about this, I’ll give a quick example to show the benefits.

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Lately there has been a lot going on in the search engine world, there are some new big players in town, namely Cuil and Wolfram|Alpha, Microsoft’s high profile rebrand and update of Live Search to Bing! as well as old staples Google and Yahoo!. There are even more that you might not have heard of yet in DuckDuckGO (I’m not entirely sure what they were thinking with their choice of name) and Worio all vying for the search spotlight.

Each one seems to have something going for it, (more…)

Building on my last post about SEO Friendly 301 Redirects I’d like to explain a bit more about when these should be used, and how you can use them to overhaul a poor site structure without losing your pagerank or link strength.

The basic explanation to these is that a 301 redirect is known as a permanent redirect, this means that the 301 code is served in the http headers to your browser by the web server, letting it know that the page that was previously at this address has moved permanently to a new address. (more…)