Since SEO is so important, it’s in your best interest to have a set of tools you can use to easily check-up on how your website is doing, and then make changes and tweaks accordingly. Luckily for you, I happen to have a set of tools I regularly use to check on my websites SEO health, and I’m going to share them all with you.

1) SEOmoz – Term Extractor

This tool will help you figure out the density of your keywords on any given page. It even divides them up into one, two, and three word phrases. This makes it very easy to make sure your pages are all optimized for the correct keywords, and to see where you can improve. It also gives you a very detailed report for each word, which tells you what type of HTML tags it appears in (header tags, anchor tags, etc) as well as how important a particular keyword is compared to other keywords on the page.

2) AboutUs – Visibility Audit

This tool is similar to the Term Extractor above, however it also gives you specific information about your meta tags and your h1 header tags. It also analyzes the first 250 words on your page for keyword density. These elements are important because they often act as the very first preview of your website, both for human visitors and search engines. In order to use this tool, enter your web address into the search box on the AboutUs website, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the Visibility Audit button. Once the audit is complete, simply reload the page. Also while you’re there, I recommend updating the wiki page for your website, if you haven’t already.

3) Broken Link Checker

Broken links may not seem like a big deal, but if they get out of hand they could be turning people off of your website. Not only will you be losing real, human visitors, but you’ll also be making it more difficult for search engine crawlers to navigate around your website. This causes your pages to be indexed and updated more slowly, which makes your website appear lower in search results. This tool will show you what links are broken, and where they occur. That way you can quickly remove the link, or fix it. I especially like this tool because it seems to spread its search into any sub-domains you have.

4) Pingdom – Website Load Time Test

We’ve all been to a website that loads slowly, and if you’re like me, you’ve even left a website that loaded too slowly. A fast loading website is important for your human visitors experience, and ensuring they can quickly find the information they need. It’s also just as important in search rankings, with many search engine now penalizing slow loading websites. How fast or slow your website loads depends on many factors (number of images, number of scripts, etc.). So it’s up to you to make sure you’re doing everything you can to make elements load quickly. This tool gives you a detailed break down of each separate element that loads when someone visits your webpage, along with just how long it took for it to load, and how big the file size is.

Do you have another SEO tool you’d like to see on the list? Let me know in a comment, and I may just add it to the post!

My favorite service for optimizing my CSS files is Clean CSS. There’s really not much to it at all, and once you know how to do it, and what options to pick, you can get it done in a couple minutes at most.

When you first go to the website, you’ll see a large text area on the left where you can paste your entire CSS code, or you can put the URL of the CSS file into the smaller text box below it (i.e. http://www.yoursite.com/style.css).

Then, there are several options to the right that will affect how your CSS file looks, and subsequently how big of a file it is. Below is a screen shot of the options I recommend using. The biggest file size change will come when you change the options in the Compression (code layout) drop down. The best way to see what each of the options in the drop down changes, is to try them and see just how compressed you can stand your file being.

Here’s what each of the selected options does:

• Compress colors will change hex color codes from something like #FFFFFF to #FFF
• Compress font-weight will change any font-weight: bold definitions to font-weight: 700 (which looks the same, but uses one less character)
• Remove unnecessary backslashes will, to the best of my knowledge, take out any extra backslashes inside of any comments you have in your CSS file
• Remove last ; will take out all of the semi-colons that appear after the last definition for each tag you have defined.
• Save comments will keep any CSS comments you have from being removed.

Unfortunately I was unable to get the Output to File option to work, so once you’ve hit the Process CSS button, you’ll need to copy the new CSS code that shows up below the options area, and just paste it into your own CSS file in place of whatever was there before.

That’s all you need to do! This may only save a few bytes, but over the life of your website it will add up, and the more traffic you get, the bigger difference even the little things make. Also note that Clean CSS isn’t a validation website like the W3C CSS Validation service, so I recommend that you use both when optimizing your CSS files.

What happened was largely out of our control, at least in terms of preventing it and fixing it quickly. Our host company ran into MySQL and database problems over the weekend, and unfortunately the tech guy who was supposed to be there over the weekend was not. Then of course I caused some problems of my own trying to fix the issue myself (since I assumed it was something I did), and I actually ended up breaking all of my own databases. So after some end-of-the-world type panicking by me, our host fixed their database issues, and I was able to restore all of my backups. So now it’s like nothing happened.

I appreciate everyone’s patience over the weekend while our websites were down, as well as all the help that was offered.

A few days ago I received an email telling me that AboutUs.org had reached a decision about its policies, and that it would enable DoFollow links on community created pages once again. This move to re-enable DoFollow links will currently only affect pages that were updated by community members, and not pages that were updated through AboutUs.org’s paid serivce. More details can be found in their blog post, Followed Links Return to AboutUs.org

I’m personally quite happy that DoFollow links are back in some form, since it adds another layer of usefulness to a service that was widely useful even if it wasn’t directly affecting your backlink count or pagerank. If you want to know some more about AboutUs.org, what they do, and how to use their service, you can take a look at my original blog post about them, or just browse around their website (it’s really really easy).

Today we added http://www.balancedundergrowth.info to our portfolio. Balanced Undergrowth is a class specific blog for the popular game World of Warcraft. The purpose of the blog is to give the author and his readers a place to discuss aspects of the game as they relate to the Druid class. The design of the blog is meant to reflect the style of the game as well as the specific class the blog is about. The header uses recognizable aspects from the in game models to make the name of the blog look more unique and stand out more than just having the words there. The colors used through out the rest of the blog were pulled from the header, and are were also chosen because they reflect the class while maintaining a more neutral tone that’s easy on the eyes.

Also related to World of Warcraft, we completed another forum signature for a player of the game. The signature is intended for use on different gaming forums. The design was chosen because it best reflects the class depicted in it (Death Knight). The model was taken from in game, and the rest of the elements were designed around the colors of the model.

Finally, we completed another eBook cover for the Beau to Beau publishing company. Which you can view in our portfolio under “Graphic Design, Other Design Work.” This cover is based off the same theme as the previous cover (they’re part of the same series). Only this time some stars were added in to give it a more unique look, and to go along with the theme at the title of the book. The image of the boy also needed to be heavily manipulated to remove the background as well as to complete parts of him that were cut off in the original image (such as his right arm). Take a look at their website to see the cover along with the title they added: http://www.beautobeau.com/

You can view a larger versions of all of these projects in our portfolio.

In addition to the above portfolio updates, we’ve have also been hard at work making changes and additions to our existing websites. Most of the changes were small. So instead of explaining each one, I’ll simply list them below and you can explore them as you feel you need to.

• Added a privacy policy that affects all of our websites
• Updated the front page of our Freelance Design website to include a better overview of our services
• Added a Graphic Design service page to our Freelance Design Service website
• Updated the graphics on our Twitter Page and Facebook page

We’re also still working on the e-commerce store, unfortunately due to the scope of the project we don’t have an ETA on when it will be done. I’m sure there will be smaller things along the way before then, but that’s our next big goal. We appreciate all of the continued support!