When we chose to have a fitness marketing blog, it was decided then and there that we would hold nothing back. This blog isn’t just about getting business for First Page Fitness: It is about educating the health and fitness industry. It is about teaching those who do not have the budget to hire an SEO or Internet Marketing firm how to do it themselves.

Tools we use on an almost daily basis:

Keyword Frequency (Sort by frequency and ignore stop words)
http://www.markhorrell.com/tools/density.asp

XML Sitemap Generator for Google Sitemaps:
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

CopyScape for finding out if you have duplicate content, or if someone is copying your content:
http://www.copyscape.com/

Anchor Text Analyzer (sometimes doesn’t work very well. We also use the allinanchor: search)
http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/

Nichebot - I use this for quick keyword research. It is not as good as some costly program, but as a free service it can’t be beat.
http://www.nichebot.com/

Check Server Headers to find out what kind of server a site is hosted on, and which redirects are in use.
http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp

Google Translate can be used as a proxy server (allows you to surf the web from a Google IP) which can be useful in determining whether your competition is cloaking for Google.
http://www.google.com/translate_t

The SEOMoz Page Strength tool isn’t something we use regularly - yet - but it is a fun tool that opens up new ideas for evaluating websites.
http://www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php

View bids on the Overture / Yahoo Ad Network
http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/

Find out the IP address of a domain
http://www.hcidata.info/host2ip.cgi

Find out what other sites are hosted on the same IP
http://www.seologs.com/ip-domains.html

Find out if someone is using your forms to inject html for link popularity
http://www.seoegghead.com/tools/scan-for-html-injection.php

The news feeds we subscribe to:

Inside Adwords (official Google AdWords)
http://adwords.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Matt Cutts Search Engine Engineer (Google)
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/feed/

Google Research Blog for Tech Geeks (official Google)
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/atom.xml

SEOMoz (Randfish’s blog)
http://www.seomoz.org/seomoz.xml

WebGuerrilla
(Greg Bosner’s blog - This link will be removed if he doesn’t start posting useful content again.)
http://www.webguerrilla.com/feed/

Yahoo Search Blog (official Yahoo)
http://www.ysearchblog.com/index.xml

JenSense Blog (Making Money with Affiliate Ads like Overture)
http://www.jensense.com/index.xml

Search Engine Roundtable
http://feeds.seroundtable.com/SearchEngineRoundtableFull.xml

We subscribe to many other blogs, including:
Shoemoney, Stuntduble, Thing of Sorts, Threadwatch, SEO Book (although they mostly just repeat what you will read on these other blogs), Jim Boykin, SEO Black Hat (for educational purposes), and SEO Scoop.

The more you know about SEO, the more you realize how much there is to know. This is why it is difficult for someone who does search engine optimization on a daily basis to explain SEO succinctly. But I’ll give it a shot…

SEO, in simplest terms, is the ever-changing process of refining certain factors of a website, both internally (such as the code and copy) and externally (such as incoming links) with the goal of achieving higher search engine rankings for specific keywords.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is part of search engine marketing (SEM) as a whole, which also includes paying for advertisements or click-throughs (when someone visits your site from another). What sets SEO apart of SEM is that, aside from the cost of making the changes in the first place, it is totally free. SEO works to get natural, unpaid or “organic” search results; the ten or so listings you see when searching on Google, MSN, Yahoo or other search engines. Rather than paying each time someone views or clicks on the advertisement, thousands of people can see your page in the results for their search, and visit your site without costing you a dime.

The problem is nobody has the time or patience to go beyond the first few pages of listings to find what they’re looking for. With thousands or even millions of web pages competing for the same search term, the top ten get up to 95% of the traffic, while the rest sit on the sidelines wondering why nobody comes to visit their dark little corner of cyber space. That’s where SEO comes in. A search engine optimizer’s job is to get the pages on your website ranked as highly as possible for a predetermined set of key words.

Figuring out which key words to target is another story entirely, and is covered in on the keyword research page.

In a nut-shell, that’s search engine optimization. However, the more you know about SEO, the more you realize how much more there is to know…