Return on Intention

Yesterday (July 2, 2009) I saw Chris Kenworthy give a presentation on SEO (search engine optimization) at Webuquerque. It was a great presentation and Chris really knows what hes talking about, but it prompted me to share a few tools that anyone can use to take care of the low hanging fruit of on-site SEO themselves.

1. Website Grader – This is a tool form hubspot that will go through your site and identify the seo problems you have. If you’re missing meta tags or headers the website grader will tell  you so you what to focus on.
2. W3C Validator – This tool is not really intended for SEO, but rather to validate your markup (the code that makes your site show up). This tool, like Website Grader only requires you to put in a url and it will chech it out and return a report. This can be helpful for on-site SEO, because if your site has bad markup, then the search engines might have a hard time reading it.

These tools will not get you the results that an SEO, or better yet an SEM (search engine marketing) professional can get you, but it will take care of the easy stuff you can do yourself to increase your search rankings.