I also wanted to introduce you to a couple of tools i’ll be using to aid me in this SEO case study. The first tool is a FireFox add-on called SEO For FireFox, this tool once installed will sit at the bottom of the browser window just waiting to be used;). Here is a short video to tell you all about it…

This add-on is packed with features that I will need to take a look at how the competition is looking in the search engine listings, it provides all of the following information..

• PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

SEO Tool #2

This next tool is again a FireFox add-on, I apologize if you are using IE!. This tool is called The Web Developer toolbar ,this can give us a look under the hood at the code of your competing sites, I used this when I was designing sites a long time ago, but now im starting to use it for SEO ninja stuff!!.

The Web Developer toolbar is also packed with cool features, but I will only really be using a few of the tools for what we need to do.

Both of these tools are FREE to download and use, SEO For FireFox will be used to for more of the external SEO stats like links and other good stuff, and the Web Developer Toolbar will be used to go inside the site’s I am trying to rank higher than to pick them apart.

Follow Along

If you are going to follow along with me while I try to improve my blog’s SEO, you might want to take a look at the first  SEO Case Study post to see what I’ve done already.

I’m basically using what I already know, and Dan Thies’s search engine optimization ebook SEO Fast Start to hopefully boost my rankings in the search engines.

My aim is to learn as much as I can about SEO, and to develop some kind of method that I can apply to every post in order to give it the biggest chance of becoming ranked well in the search engines, and most of all I want to do this right way, no black hat tricks in here!;)

So feel free to join me;).