SEO tools can help automate some of the processes that need to be followed for each of the sites you are optimizing for search engines.

Some of the primary tasks related to the same are:

• Complete analysis of websites
• Keywords research
• Internal and external links
• Inbound links
• Quality of content

There are a lot of tools available to accomplish most of the above without breaking a sweat. Here is the list of tools I use, some of them are free and some of them are paid. Some of the tools need to register account and log in to get details about website.

Stats Crop: Stats Crop is a useful tool which is available for free and gives full analysis of website including alexa traffic, website load time, daily pageviews, daily visitors, backlinks, header status, domain age, IP address and server location at one place altogether. All details you will get in a few seconds.

Rage Pank: One of the websites which is providing tool for SEO like keyword research tool, manual spam blocker, and redirect checker. But most important among these, I think, is redirect checker which gives information about the redirect of urls and error code associated with the same.

Go Status: This site needs a signup to use this free tool to get web analytics data of website. This did not look very reliable for very small or relatively new websites. It does however give detailed analysis of data for bigger and relatively older websites.

Alexa: Alexa is a useful tool available for free to get web traffic data, visitors, backlinks. They do also provide a widget with “Alexa rank” which is based on their own algorithm.

Google Webmaster: Google webmaster tool is the single most important tool which is absolutely free for website owners or webmasters organized by Google provides inbound links, outbound links, content analysis, search queries, site configuration feature, url parameter handling to webmasters. Just only need to setup account for website and put tracking code in your html page of website.

Google Analytics: Most important tool of Google is totally free providing website traffic data including unique visitors, landing page, source, medium, Goal conversion rate, social media impacts, campaigns traffic and e commerce tracking for website. You have to first put tracking code on your html page of website and then you can access all analytics features.

SeoMoz: Website owners can use tool to get web analytics data like duplicate content pages, error pages and their return codes, crawling status, meta tag analysis, redirection errors all kind of stuff you can get from this tool. But tool is not free but paid to get valuable information from this tool.

Majestic SEO: Tool is available for free and provides all historical data about links of a website, keywords and competitors. Only signup for this tool and log in to this website and this will provide all the historical data and for detailed view of web analytics you have to put code on your website provided by this tool. Sitemap Generator: Online sitemap generator tool which saves your time to manually create sitemap for website. Only need to put your url of website and it will create automatically with downloading functionality.

Keyword Spy: Tool is free for users to get highly targeted keywords including organic and PPC keywords and their rankings for their domain, competitors and ads data. Tool is best suitable for large scale websites and not very useful for small or new websites.

Word Tracker: Tool is available for free for 7 days and after that you have to paid for this if you want to keep it up. Very good tool to find keywords for websites provide complete analysis about keywords and competition for keyword.

Google Keyword Tool: Most relevant tool for keyword research of Google adwords which is absolutely free and providing data about keywords related to your query, competition, global and local searches for specific keyword and specific location.

W3C: World Wide Web Consortium is an international community providing functionality about html errors for web pages, broken links, css validation warnings and errors and is absolutely free and trusted to analyze the websites.

This is not a complete list, however, these are the ones that I use regularly and as and when I find any more interesting tools I will keep adding to the list.

Okay so the dreaded Penguin is raising its head again.  

 Google announced launch of Penguin 2.0 update on 22 May 2013, this is 4th revision related to Penguin update. As per Google's Matt Cutts "About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice.". 2.3% may sound like a small number but webmasters agree that this is a huge change and is going to affect many search results. And also this time Matt has specifically mentioned that this is going to impact other languages as well.

Not only Google is updating its algo to fight spam, it is also asking users to report spam sites.

 So this is the 4th update in about an years time. Only the first release on April 24 2012 had more impact (~3.1% of queries), the subsequent 2, on May 26, 2012 and October 5, 2012 were 0.1% and 0.3% respectively.

So all in all, google is going to take care of the SEO related spam and let's hope it will be able to give us the quality content that we all desire from a good Search engine that google has been. View the video earlier released by google

We have created a Joomla plugin that will help you easily link Google plus profile with Joomla Blogs or articles. All you have to do is install the plugin from Joomla plugin page and follow the basic steps as mentioned on the page. Some of the important steps are:

1. First of all you will need a Google+ profile. If you don’t have one this is a good time to create one!

2. Then while you are setting up Contact profile in Joomla, ensure that you enter correct Google+ profile url in Web URL field as displayed in below image

3. Do add link of your site under “Contributor to” section of Google+ profile (under edit profile) as displayed in below image

4. After you have done all this, and enabled the plugin. You can immediately test whether integration with Google+ and Google Search is working or not by going to  http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets Enter the url of your page and if the result shows image of the author as displayed below, then the integration is working just fine. 

Now it is just a matter of time before your image starts appearing on Google search. Some times you may need to add a new Article / blog to your site so that google can crawl the site for the search index to get updated and new results to start showing up.

If you are using the URLs such as http://domainname/index.php?pid=12&uid=821 they do serve the purpose of opening the correct page however they do not provide any information to the user as to what page they are going to see and what they should expect on this page. Also, as we all know the URLs are also very useful for search engine optimizations, so unless the URL conveys complete information it is not of much use.

So in the above case let’s assume that pid represents the page (for example user’s profile page) that needs to be opened and uid represents the user’s id whose information will be displayed on this page, if we change the URL to something like http://domainname/userprofile/firstname-lastname

(Be aware google treats dash and underscore differently in the URL and dashes are better) then it conveys a lot of meaning to the end user and also is meaningful for search engines. However one point to note above is that a URL needs to be unique and in the above URL there is no element that makes it unique. So we need to insert another element that is unique in the above url. Generally each of the resource has an id associated with it, so that can be used to make a unique url something like http://domainname/userprofile/821/firstname-lastname

Now to achieve this change in URL all you have to do is map pid=12 with userprofile using htaccess rules and use the unique id to render the page. Also, you would want to create a utility function that will generate the user profile URLs. Within this function you can encapsulate the logic of URL creation, whether it is as simple as concatenating two fields or using a new table column as slug.

If you have a URL such as http://domainname/page/info1-info2 dashes (-) are then translated by google as spaces so the above “info1-info2” becomes “info1  info2” however if you are using “info1_info2” it translates to “info1info2”.

So if you are deciding on the URL scheme it is better to use dash rather than underscores however as per Matt in this video it is not worth the effort to change the existing urls which have underscores to dashes.