Head Resist

When looking for free webmaster tools, my advice to you is to be sure that you are using tools from a reputable site or, more importantly, if you are downloading software be very careful that the download does not contain adware and spyware or viruses for that matter!

On that note let us start off with the free software that you can use to protect your computer, because if that is not running well you will not be able to run you online business successfully. Windows Defender from Microsoft is great at scanning your computer for unwanted software. The free version of AVG Anti-Virus as well as Ad-Aware SE and Spybot are great at keeping your computer free of viruses and other undesirables!

The free version of ZoneAlarm has many great attributes. Just a word of warning if you are running AVG anti-virus, ZoneAlarm will not detect that you have anti-virus protection, so do not be alarmed, it is just that ZoneAlarm has not been programmed to look for AVG.

The one program I did purchase was ProcessGuard, which amongst other things protects my computer from keyboard loggers, protects the physical memory, blocks global hooks, blocks rootkit/driver/service installation and registry DLL injection. These programs all run harmoniously on my computer and so far I have managed to keep out all the dangerous and unwanted intruders.

Now on to the more exciting free webmaster tools, that will greatly assist you in the running of your online business.

Google Alerts can really add excitement to your day. If you set up a Google alert for the name of your affiliate program/s, Google will advise you by email when a new page appears on Google with these search terms and you can view the page and see if it is an opportunity to recruit an affiliate. Sometimes the new page can be a forum post asking for opinions on the affiliate program. This gives you the opportunity to add your opinion with your affiliate link of course in the signature file.

You can also set up a Google alert for your own name. This throws up some really exciting results as you can see when someone has clicked on your profile in an Article Directory or clicked on your articles as well as where people have clicked to find out what other articles you have written. This is definitely worth trying as I am sure you will be both surprised and amazed at what comes up!

Google Webmaster Tools, previously known as Google Sitemaps is so useful in that you are able to let Google know when you have updated your site. The sitemap enables Google to crawl your site better and ensures that the most current pages of your site are indexed quickly. You can just create a sitemap upload it to the same directory as your .index files and in the Google Webmaster Tools under Add a Sitemap you just type in or paste the url of your new sitemap. Google also give you reports on their latest crawl of your site and notifies you of errors, as well as give you details and positioning of your keywords. There is also other really useful information available.

Google Analytics is an amazing free service where you can see exactly where your visitors came from both geographically and through which entry page, what

keywords they used, where they exited your site, etc. You will have to give this one a try for yourself as there is just so much useful information for the webmaster which enables you to fine tune your marketing and promotion strategies.

StatCounter offers a free version which I use on my site and I keep it invisible, as I believe it to be more professional, but this free service also provides incredibly detailed information about your visitors, which is extremely useful. It also records your page loads, unique visitors, first time visitors and returning visitors. It is easy to install and with this powerful little tool you can check to see that visitors to your site are increasing daily.

Online Link Popularity Tools and Back Link checkers are easily available online and enable you to monitor your link popularity and back links on a regular basis. Writing and publishing articles regularly is a great way to see your back links increase on a daily basis.

These are only a handful of the free tools that I do use to assist me with my online home business. There are many more really useful tools provided by Google as well as other reputable sites, it is just a matter of finding what suits you and your business.

As traffic is the key to generating income from the web, these tools that I have mentioned assist me in closely monitoring where my traffic is coming from and what keywords are being used.

Search engine optimization is such a huge subject it is difficult to distil it down to a few rules, but there are certainly some key factors which are simply essential, and without which none of the rest matters very much.  The following search engine optimization rules are almost a step by step guide to follow while you create your website.  It is important to have an understanding of these rules before you build your site, or you may well end up having to re-do much of it later.  Websites created without reference to these rules are likely to receive little or no visitors and websites without visitors are websites that generate no income.

Get Your Meta-Tags Right

Meta-tags are the unseen but vital pieces of text in the ‘head’ section of each of your web pages.  The title tag is by far the most important, and you have to put your primary keyword at the beginning of your title tag.  Repeat it again at the end or include a second keyword, but don’t stuff it.  The title tag is the wording which appears as the main heading in the list of search results when you do a search on Google or other search engine.  It tells the search engines and potential visitors what your site is about.

The description meta-tag is less vital than the title, but it is still important to get it right.  It is the brief description of your site that visitors will see beneath the title in search results, so repeat your keyword and write something that will encourage viewers to click on your site.

Content Is King

This means that there are no substitutes for a good quality website which offers useful information.  Search engines are looking for useful and interesting sites with original content, so rather than put your energies into trying to fiddle a shortcut to that, just give them what they want in the first place.  This is the only way to be sure you will be ranked well and continue to be ranked well in the long term.

Choose The Right Keywords

This is so important.  Your keywords will be used on your web pages and will tell the search engines what your pages are about.  If you choose keywords that no-one is searching for, you will get no visitors.  If you choose keywords that people are searching for, but which millions of other well established sites are also using, again you will get no visitors.

You can’t identify the best keywords by guessing, you need to use a tool that will tell you not just how many sites are competing for those words, but also how many searches are being done for those words.  The best tools will help generate lots of keywords that you could not have thought of yourself, and refine and organise your keywords to give you the terms likely to bring the highest volume of targeted traffic to your site.

Build Links To Your Website

One of the main criteria search engines use to judge a site’s importance is the number and quality of other sites which are linking to it.  This measure of importance is used to decide where your site will be shown in the search results.  The way Google works is to look for all the sites which are relevant to the term being searched for, and then present them to the viewer in order of importance.  So being seen as important is crucial in showing up high enough in the results to be found by potential visitors.

There are various ways to get inbound links to your site.  One of the most common ways to get links to your site is to exchange links with other websites.  Search engines seem to value more highly links from sites which have content closely related in subject to your own.  For that reason, the best sites to exchange with are those with the same kind of theme as yours.

For people in business this can sometimes throw up the problem of not wanting to deal with sites seen as direct competitors, but it should still be possible to find sites which are related to the general subject area without being in competition.  The best way to approach this is to add a link to the site you wish to exchange links with, then contact the webmaster to say you have linked and ask if they would be willing to link back.

Work at following these main search engine optimization rules and you will go a long way towards developing a site that will rank high enough in search results to be found by lots of visitors.