Search Engine Optimization Bible, Second Edition

Chapter 23. Plugging In to Seo

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding plug-ins

• Choosing the right plug-ins

There is no debate about one aspect of SEO: You must have it. Most of the traffic to your web site will come from search engines, and the effort that you put into SEO will be reflected by your search engine rankings. The problem is that it's hard to know what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong with your SEO efforts.

It's a bit of a guessing game even with the best tools made for monitoring SEO success. However, there are a few tools that you can use to help you monitor some elements of SEO. These tools, called plug-ins, can't tell you everything there is to know about your SEO, but they will give you some numbers that help you to understand where you're succeeding and where you need to concentrate your efforts. Some SEO plug-ins also give you details about other web sites, so you can learn what works for them as well.

How does that help you? Understanding what elements work on your web site helps you focus on the elements that aren't working; and understanding what elements work on other web sites gives you something to compare against your own efforts. For example, if your web site has been in search rankings the same amount of time as Web Site B, but Web Site B is ranked in the first five search engine results while yours is ranked below number 10, then you can learn something useful by looking at what Web Site B is doing. Maybe it has more social-bookmarking links than you ...