By using a few toolbars, widgets, or other add-ons, you can enhance your understanding of a website's SEO health. The Web Developer Extension from Chris Pederick is a great tool that can help Web developers, designers, and SEO enthusiasts.

In my article entitled, "A don't-leave-home-without SEO tool," I talk about some of the ways this tool can enhance your understanding of a site's SEO health, and how useful it is beyond SEO. At a quick glance, the tool allows you to check your JavaScript, view Alt text, meta descriptions, and link information, linearize the page to re-order content in the order the search engines read it, and much, much more! From screen captures to an in-depth explanation, I hope you'll try out this useful tool.

One of the areas that I'm starting to see a rapid growth in, is local search. It's important that business owners start taking advantage of this growth in popularity, so that they claim a stake in this soon-to-be competitive market. Believe it or not, there are a number of free tools where you can list your business locally through the major search engines. I talk about those tools and the importance of taking advantage of them in my article on CNET: Searchlight my SEO blog. One example of the tools I discuss is Google's local.google.com. By following a few, easy instructions, you are well on your way into the local listings.

Do you know what site links are? Site links are the additional links to a site that occasionally appear below the listing. I had written about The Planet, in a blog post on CNet. Their additional results in the Google SERPs are a great example of site links, and help increase the chances that a searcher will recognize what they're looking for and click through. These "gifts from Google" are a powerful way to appear more authoritative. For most websites, this is an exciting opportunity and a sign that Google is progressively building new-and-improved features into its Webmaster Tools. To learn more about site links, visit the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Read the full article Posted by Stephan Spencer on 11/12/2007 | Permalink