With your shopping cart software ready and waiting to accept orders and your bank account more than happy to accept any money coming its way, its time to increase web site traffic and convert some customers to sales.

Checking your Search Engine Positioning

First of all, what is your web sites current status? With this free service from Site Cook, you can:

• check the status of a site in selected search engines;
• see how many pages of a site are indexed;
• find the best ranked page on selected search phrases; and
• check individual pages for keyword density.

No registration necessary. Results are in about 10 seconds. Go to SITECOOK

What about Google? When did they last index your pages?

If you are really wanting to Increase Web site traffic, being indexed with Google is all important. For those of you who would like to know exactly when your pages were last updated in Google's database, just do the following.

1. Go to google.com
2. Type site:yourdomain.com.au into the Google search box
3. On the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) click the link next to the results that reads … Cached
4. That page will then show you Google's cached copy of the page as well as information about when Google retrieved the information from your web server

Google Webaster Tools will also give you a lot of information about your site. If you are using ezimerchant, simply Connect to Google Webmaster Tools (under the Connect menu) to automatically verify your site.

Useful Website optimisation tools

To help you in preparing your site to be listed on search engines and increase web site traffic, we have detailed below services for generating meta tags and keywords, and for checking link popularity and search engine ranking. Remember, select your keywords and phrases with great care. Include your keyword phrases in the TITLE-tag, the main headline (H1 or H2), the first (and the last) paragraph of normal sized text, in selected image ALT-tags and throughout the web page (not too many times, though). Try to move the readable text as far up in the HTML-code as possible.

Keyword Tools

There are numerous tools for checking and analysing keywords. We have detailed both software solutions and online tools.

• Good Keywords (Software) 
• Google Keyword Suggestions 
• Thesaurus.com 
• Lexical Freenet Thesaurus 
• Better Whois for domain names 
• Keyword Density Analyzer

Position tools

Getting a good page position requires a lot of work and is the result of your efforts in identifying your primary keywords and phrases and then optimising your site to achieve the best results from your chosen search engines. Achieving great results is often a matter of trial and error and usually a lot of work. Even when you do get results you have to keep at it and keep checking, because things change and your rankings can easily slip. Which means you go back to work. So it' s important you have the right tools to monitor your position.

Software (Mostly paid services)

• Internet Business Promoter (IBP) Free trial and paid software - Highly recommended 
• Web Position Free trial and paid service 
• Agent Web Ranking Free trial and paid service 
• Page Promoter Free trial and paid service

Sites and online tools (Free)

• Site Cook 
• Rocket Rank

Link Popularity

Getting quality inbound links is important. The tools and services listed here will help you build and check your site's link popularity. See our Link Popularity article for more information.

Sites and online tools

• Linkpopularity.com
• Eric Ward.com Paid service