[question]
Can you please list the URLs for the free tools I can use to discover the answers to those 9 questions every online publisher should ask themselves?
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[answer]
Sure! Here goes:
- How big is my website? Using the Yahoo Site Explorer tool, keep track of how many pages of content your site is being indexed on. The more the merrier!
- How many links does my website have? Using the same Yahoo Site Explorer tool, keep track of how many inbound links your site is receiving from other website publishers.
- How big is my audience? Many of you use internal metrics to measure your unique visitor count – you should also keep track of what free tools like Compete.com are reporting and understand how visitors are counted.
- Which keywords do my audience use to find my website? Most internal metrics tools will tell you the keywords your audience is using to find your site. Compete.com also has a Search Analytics tool. Analyze your top terms and explore how you could be taking better advantage of that traffic, perhaps by putting stronger conversion architecture on those pages.
- How popular are those keyword phrases? Using the free Google Keyword Tool, query how many people are searching for any particular keyword phrase per month.
- How many other websites use those keyword phrases? “Google” the term in “quotation marks” and see how many competing web pages are using that term in an exact order. This tells you how many web pages are competing for that phrase.
- How many times does that keyword phrase appear on the winning pages? Using a keyword density tool like KeywordDensity.com (for a specific search) or Motoricerca’s Keyword Density Analyzer (for a much broader search) you can analyze the keyword density on the winning pages.
- Where does my website rank on that keyword phrase? Using a free tool like RankingCheck.com, or a paid tool like Advanced Web Ranking, see where your website ranks in Google on any given keyword phrase.
- How fast does my homepage load? Using a free tool such as the Web Page Analyzer from WebsiteOptimization.com to test your website load time.
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