by Lily S

Created on: December 10, 2008

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), is all about optimising your website or blog so that when someone searches certain phrases connected to your business, your website shows up on the first page of the search results in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.

It's possible to do very effective search engine optimisation using free online tools. Here's a selection of the best ones:

1. Google Insights for Search This is a free tool provided by Google and it allows you to test phrases and keywords out for popularity. Simply type in the keywords, and Google will return a graph showing the popularity of the phrases, which countries are searching for the phrases and break-out related phrases. Once you have found popular keywords for your particular niche, work them naturally into the text of articles on your website

2. Google Analytics Another free tool from Google. This one tracks all activity on your website. Simply register with Google, and place the code they give you in your blog template or site source code. Google then tracks all activity on your site telling you how much traffic you get, where it comes from, which pages are the most popular and so on.

Most people use Google Analytics simply to monitor traffic, but it can also be used as a tool to enhance SEO. One of the most important metrics Analytics calculates is the Bounce Rate. The Bounce Rate is defined by Analytics as the percentage of single page visits - in other words, the visits where the reader left your site from the entrance page. The lower the bounce rate, the longer the reader is staying on your site and the more pages of your site they are visiting. There is a double importance to ensuring that readers stay on your site. First of all, the longer they stay, the more likely it is that they will buy something or click on an ad. Secondly, a lower bounce rate can help you rank better in search engine results. The reason is that when someone does a search, and the clicks on a result item, Google monitors whether the user then back-spaces to the search result page to try another site. If people are clicking on your page and then back-spacing, Google concludes that your content is not really what the user wanted, and you go down in the rankings. If people click on your site and stay, Google concludes that they have satisfactorily delivered the correct content for the search phrase, and your page rises in the results ranking.

So how do you lower your bounce rate? Analytics will show you

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