Ann Smarty’s posts on Search Engine Journal are always worth a read, and this one is a great list of useful online tools for SEO.

Online SEO Tools - the Ultimate Collection
All tools listed below fall under the following criteria:

1. they are all useful for SEOs;
2. they are all web-based (no desk-top ones or FireFox extensions so far);
3. they are all free.

Read the rest of this article.
From Search Engine Journal.

As a website owner, you want as many people as possible to come to your site. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of helping to ensure that whenever someone uses a search engine to look for something you offer, your site is highly placed and attracts visitors.

More about search engine optimization

An online friend, Nikki Pilkington, was complaining on her Twitter feed yesterday about web designers who act obstructively:

fed up with web designers sabotaging my SEO by refusing FTP access and to upload vital files and changes

I’ve come across this too, when I’ve attempted in my own modest way to help with onsite SEO efforts. Why do it? I understand the desire to retain clients but not at gunpoint. If you act like this you will ensure your client (and the SEO consultant they’ve engaged) tell everyone they meet not to use your services as you don’t care about their needs, only your revenue stream.

I tried once before to raise consciousness of this issue, but it wants saying again. Those of us who don’t treat our customers this way should shout it loud and often.

There’s an interesting article by Brian Chappell in the latest Search Marketing Standard about Drupal and SEO. (Unfortunately you can’t read it online, so you’ll have to take my word for it!)

If you are thinking about onsite optimization for a Drupal web site, there’s one module you really must install, SEO Checklist. Although it doesn’t do very much in itself (it really is just a checklist, with some added smarts in that it does check which other modules you have installed against its list of recommendations), it provides an essential baseline.

My experience has been that those who commission and build Drupal sites are not always focussed on SEO, so the science is not quite as advanced as it is with WordPress, for example. There’s a prejudice in some parts of the industry against SEO which I suspect may also be partly responsible for the slight lag in this regard. Still, articles such as the one I mentioned above may help to shift the balance as SEO practitioners become more aware of the many fantastic possibilities that Drupal can offer.

Squidoo gives you the power to write simple web pages on any subject of your choosing. It’s free - and you can even earn money from it for yourself or for charity.

Why would you want to do this? Well, increasing your online presence is generally good for business. You can add links back to your own site to your “lens” (Squidoo-speak for a page) which - providing they are relevant to the subject of the page - can help raise the credibility of your site in search engines.

Not only that, if you write something interesting and worthwhile, you may gain a wider audience for your ideas and opinions. That can’t be bad, can it?

As a taster, here’s a page I’ve just started about Drupal development.