Most people know that SEO is important, but not many know how to get started. In this episode of our Got a Minute? video series, I am going to walk through the SEO and SEM tools I use every day to monitor Apartments.com. Hopefully some of these work for you, but there are lots of tools available, so you can find something that fits your needs. If you have any questions after watching the video, please leave them in the comments section below.
Transcript
Hello everybody, my name is Amado and I am the SEO Manager here at Apartments.com. Welcome to Got a Minute? Today I want to walk you through some of the SEO tools I use day-in and day-out. Hopefully this is something you can use in your day to day as well.
I want to start off with SEO monitoring tools. First of all, Google Web Master Tools and Google Analytics are absolutely free. They only require a small amount of code to be inserted into your website and then you are off and running. They provide a wealth of knowledge from the perspective of search engines. SEOmoz is a wonderful resource and provides a bunch of tools that can get a little bit technical, but offer a lot of information from the data you may be getting from Web Master Tools and Google Analytics, and helps make sense of all those numbers. They also have a blog that offers lots of tips and tricks to optimize your website. SEMrush focuses a little more on the keywords side. If you are running a campaign for your Google paid AdWords, this gives you insight into how you are doing compared to your competitors.
Moving onto keywords. Wordstream.com and KeywordDiscovery.com are essentially the same type of tool. They provide synonyms to keywords that may be important to your domain. For example; if you were to plug in something like “Apartment building” you will get back a synonym that search engines find relevant along the lines of “Apartment community.” This is a great resource for figuring out how to attack other keywords for you website. Same thing goes for Google Keyword Tool, the difference is this provides search volume information based off of Google.
Last but not least is ranking. SEO book is a website that provides a plugin for Chrome and Fire Fox browsers. It allows you to search a keyword for your domain and it tells you, in real time, where you are ranking on Google, Bing and Yahoo.
These are the tools I use every day, they work for me. There are tons of tools out there and available. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments section below. Thank you!
That was a great post. I have tried so many SEO tools for my site, but none seem to put me on the first page of search engines. Is this something a person with little knowledge of websites can accomplish by using the sites in this post?
Apartments.com advertiser/customer for 9+ years
Hi Joe,
Thank you so much for watching the video. Your story is all too common, unfortunately. Many times tools and people promise page 1 ranking but do not deliver long term value. On their own the tools mentioned in the post do not help your site rank on page 1. Instead, they provide insight on what you can do to get the highest placement for a given keyword. These tools are strategic in nature; they help you isolate keywords that are core to your website/business and provide actionable recommendations.
Let me also mention that I am not affiliated with any of these tools and do not receive anything for promoting them, they are simply resources that I trust. In your case, I would recommend SEOmoz as a starting point. They have a great support team and their blog is recognized as one of the best in the industry for helping turn non-savvy people into website go-to people. If you are not interested in the tools they offer, which come with a cost, I still recommend subscribing to the blog. I’ll be honest, if you have limited resources to make changes to your site, I would suggest you not look into a tool with a monthly fee but focus on things like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools which are completely free and give you a tremendous amount of insight into how Google ranks and how customers find your site.
I hope this helps as a starting point for you. If you have any questions at all please do not hesitate to ask. Thank you again for watching and I look forward to providing many more helpful tips for you to utilize.
Thank you so much for the (hopefully) valuable tips. I haven’t tried any Keyword tools yet though it really makes sense to improve them with the here recommended sites.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge Amado!
Hi Amado,
How does one implement these useful keywords? Are these to embed directly into the content on your front page? I find myself having all these keywords, and I have no idea what to do with them.
Thanks for the video! A lot of really great sites you showed us!
Hello Hilary,
You are very welcome! I’m glad that the information is being well received and hopefully helping you rank better.
You are correct in your approach about embedding them into your content, however, you do not want to house them all on one page if they are not similar in context. I guess it would be helpful to understand some examples of keywords that you are working with to provide the best advice, but to keep things very general, you want to distribute your keyword throughout your page content in a natural fashion. If you read the paragraph and you find yourself feeling that a certain word is being stressed way to much, this is an example of keyword stuffing and can have a negative impact on your site. You also want to use that keyword in the title section of the page, which is the text that appears in the at the top of your browser. Last, you want to use the keyword to link to other pages, this is known as ‘anchor text’ and is very useful to understanding what will be on the other side of a link if I click it.
These 3 things are the best uses of keywords that you discovered during your keyword research. Hope this helps, but if you still have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly and I’ll be happy to help further.
Thanks again for watching!