For those of you managing your own SEO efforts, or if you’re simply interested in seeing what keywords your blog or website rank for, or how many links are pointing inbound to your site, there’s a couple of free SEO tools that make it quite simple (if you use the FireFox browser).

1) Rank Checker — This tool allows you to insert multiple keywords and then check their ratings against any given domain across all three major search engines. You can also export the results in a .csv file for use in Excel. The beauty is, you don’t have to worry about your rankings being skewed due to “self-searching”, plus it works pretty quick.

So, if you’ve ever wondered where your website ranks for certain keywords (don’t forget to test misspellings), now you’ll be able to figure it out without googling each and every keyword.

2) SEO for FireFox — So much valuable information here! You can easily see a website’s PageRank, age, the number of Yahoo! links pointing at the domain, not to mention .edu and .gov links, as well as data pulled in from Del.icio.us, Technorati, Bloglines, and Alexa. This tool works whenever you do searches in Google, so you can actually see all of the data for multiple websites.

Speaking of finding out the number of in-coming links to your website, you can also do this yourself by using Yahoo’s Site Explorer — go to yahoo.com and type in the search box: site:www.yourdomain.com to find a complete listing. Take advantage of this great tool soon, because rumor has it that it will not be around much longer.

Tell me what you think of these tools:-) Love to hear your comments.

Last month (has it been a whole month already?!) I wrote a blog post about how the number of keywords in an AdGroup can affect your cost-per-click when using Google Adwords. The reason is due to targeting — the more targeted your ads are to your products or services, the better your ads will fare, the less money you’ll end up paying in the end.

In the post, I touched briefly on the importance of deep-linking within the context of your written ad, or linking to pages within your website that are not your home page or category pages, but a specific product page.

Deep-linking is an important strategy for those of you managing your own Adwords campaigns, so let’s take a deeper look at deep-linking.

If you were to search for “Pittsburgh pay per click”, you will see that I have bid on that keyword. You will also see a link below the ad: www.ClicksInternetMarketing.com. This appears to be a link to my home page, but when you click on the ad, you are taken to a deeper link, http://www.clicksinternetmarketing.com/ppc-services. This is the page that gives information about the pay per click services I offer, specifically.

People like landing on a page they were looking for, and Google knows this, so they like it, too. You are more likely to have conversions (actions taken by visitors – phone calls, request a quote, downloads, sales, etc.) if visitors are first taken to the information they were seeking — the product or service page — and do not have to click from your home page and look for another page, etc.

These pages are also called “landing pages” — sometimes landing pages are not just simply the product/service page, but a web page specifically designed for an ad. Essentially every page on your website is a landing page.

The bottom line here? Swim deep. I’m no fisher(wo)man, but I can tell you that it will effect your bottom-line, or cost-per-click. By deep-linking, you then have to TARGET your ads to that page — your keywords will reflect only the information on the specific product page, your ad copy will be written only for that particular product, etc. Therefore, users who see your ad will be more likely to click on it (increasing your click-through-rate). AND, visitors who click on your ad are much more likely go to your website and actually DO something (browse around, click on other pages, convert).

How many of you are using deep-linking or simply sending visitors to your home page?