Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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at a website, you’re seeing just the content that developers intended for you to see. But

there is a great deal more information available about a site, ranging from data on who

owns the domain to the scripts used on the page. Here are a few tools and techniques

that we have found most useful:

• The Google Toolbar

• Viewing page source

• Alexa data

The following sections include the details you need to make these methods

your own.

The Google Toolbar

This is a very popular tool with searchers and SEOs alike! If you already have it, you

know how useful it is. If not, get ready for a treat.

The Google Toolbar, which can be downloaded from

http://toolbar.google.com/

is a free add-on to your browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox) that contains several

features to enhance your web surfing experience (see Figure 6.7).

Figure 6.7

The Google Toolbar

The toolbar feature that we’re most interested in utilizing for our SEO efforts is a

little green bar labeled PageRank. This bar displays the Google PageRank value for the

web page being viewed. As you learned in Chapter 4, the PageRank value certainly has

its limitations. However, viewing it in the toolbar can give you a quick and easy estimate

of how important Google thinks a certain page is. You can also use the “backwards

links” feature to determine how many pages are pointing to a specific URL, but you

should be aware that Google doesn’t show all of the links that point to a page; some

are omitted.

If you would rather not install the Google Toolbar, you can see PageRank infor-

mation, and lots of other fascinating tidbits of data, at

www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/

Now:

Go to

http://toolbar.google.com and

download and install the Google Toolbar.

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