Tools like Submit-It

[hberenson]

We originally optimized our site using Submit-It. The good thing about Submit-It is that it takes a pretty objective approach towards forcing you to choose and optimize for a small number of keywords that it believes youhave better odds of being well ranked with. The downside is that (a) it's recommendations tend to (not surprisingly) work a lot better for MSN Search than for Google and (b) it leads you to emphasize keywords which are not necessarily the most descriptive of what your website is about. Note, I don't mean misleading keywords. Just ones that would naturally be of lower interest.

Of course, we'd really like to have better search results in Google. And we'd really like to avoid things like our page Title emphasizing one of the more minor aspects of our offering over the major aspects. So, is there some comprehensive tool like Submit-It which is (a) well regarded in terms of tuning for Google searches and (b) better balances the benefit of using less competitive keywords with the need to keep the site well targetted at the desired audience?

And one related question. We really only have 3 pages that we care about being well indexed. Would it just be better to pay someone for a few hours of work to help optimize those pages? How would we find someone worth spending the money on?

Thanks!
Hal Berenson
PredictableIT, LLC
http://www.predictableit.com

[amit]

Hi Hal,

Use the below tools to decide which keywords to optimize for.
http://www.webconfs.com/website-keyword-suggestions.php
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Keyword selection is the MOST important parts of SEO. Its very important you get your keywords right.

The KEY to ranking in Google is QUALITY backlinks. You need to build quality backlinks for your 3 pages with the correct anchor text. The anchor text should ideally be the keyword you are trying to optimize for.

Try the Backlink Builder tool to get some backlinks to your website.
do NOT resort to any kind of link exchanges. Get your links added to only QUALITY websites.
You could probably use http://www.seobench.com/google-pr-vs-yahoo-wr/
to determine the quality of a website.

[ScottFish]

Amit is correct - finding well themed sites that match your own theme will be more beneficial than 100s of back links from off topic sites.

When looking to build back links, my most important factors that I look for are:

Theme of site in relation to mine
Backlinks to the site (are they spam or real)
PageRank (only some times, page rank will grow over time, I'd rather have a PR1 link that will grow to a PR4 - than no link at all).

- Scott Fish

[hberenson]

Getting the keywords right seems to be the interesting debate. What does "right" mean? Getting them to be descriptive of the site and the audience you are trying to reach,, or focusing them more narrowly on searches where there is less competition for those keywords? Submit-It clearly wants you to do the latter, and for highly analytical people this approach makes a lot of sense. But my gut is telling me its the wrong approach. The tools Amit mentions tell me what potential keywords I should use, but provide no qualitative guidance. What makes a keyword "right"?

On the backlink front I've been working on it. Getting quality backlinks is definitely a slow and tedious process.

[amit]

Originally Posted by hberenson

The tools Amit mentions tell me what potential keywords I should use, but provide no qualitative guidance. What makes a keyword "right"?

The Keyword Playground and Keyword suggestion tool does provide the number of people searching for the keyword, the > the number of of searches , the higher would be its Quality.

Based on your suggestion, i think we need to strike a balance between the quality and competition of keywords...

I think i'll enhance the tool to also display the number of search results in Google for each suggested keyword.

Figures like ratio = (no of search results)/(no. of searches month) would help choose keywords better. We could probably expand on the above formula...
What are your suggestions on the same?

Originally Posted by hberenson

On the backlink front I've been working on it. Getting quality backlinks is definitely a slow and tedious process.

:-) SEO is suppose to be a slow and tedious process..