Web Analysis / Marketing Tool (SEM, SEO) for a small sized company with a budget of $500?

To be quite frank with you, what you are asking for a lot here. SEO/SEM strategies are things that take years to build up. There are definitely some best practice approaches though that you should be able to apply here. These will also give you the foundation you need to get the basics down and start learning and testing more advanced strategies and tactics.

I’m going to give my friends at SEOmoz.org and plug here. I would go there and check out there premium content. If you are serious about SEO/SEM I would pay to join and read up on their SEO/SEM best practices guide. They give you everything you would need to know.

Sorry I can’t give you more specific answers here, but each website is different and different strategies need be customized and used appropriately. It’s the basics that tend to be applied across the board and it’s these basics that should be learned.

Good Luck with things.

Scott

A few hundered dollars will be hard to do, since most of the really good tools out there will eat up your budget. For some BI check out a product called “ranking manager” and check out “compete.com” . KeywordDiscovery is a good tool, but costs a lot. A good way to learn about keywords is to run a small PPC campaign and use direct words “ohio vacations” instead of ohio vacations which will display ads even if someone searches “vacations out of ohio”. This will give you an idea of what terms are searched most on google, as the impression count will show you how many searches there were.

Good luck…lots of reading is a head of you.

The following article will prove helpful to you in streamlining your SEO metatags in order to attract more Net traffic by higher search engine placement.

The most effective way to advertise on the Internet is
to first set up a website and publish its domain name
on major search directories such as Google.com,
Yahoo.com [at?...... and
MSN.com since 85% of Internet shoppers rely on these
search directories to provide them with goods and
services. In a sense, these search directories are a
very large Internet Yellow Pages.

Nevertheless, should your website or opening webpage
fail to contain "generic" keywords, then anyone using
such "generic" queries will not be able to discover
your website. Your domain name [URL] of your website,
in a sense, will be invisible, undiscoverable.

You may want to consider some simple algorithms which,
when observed and committed in designing of a website
with placement of various critical metatags that can
surely achieve a high search engine presence and
increase Internet traffic to your website. These
metatag strategies work well with published webpages
at Google and Yahoo.

Design: Should you create an extensive Flash-based
website, make sure to fill-in the property entries
such as the Title, Description and Keywords. Failing
to do so, leaves no hard HTML or ALT resource that can
be readily indexed by search robots. Also consider the
Internet audience and their incoming setup. For
example, if they are on analog/dialup, Flash webpages
take too long to load up and therefore analog users
will likely lose interest and discontinue entering the
Flash site. On the other hand, anyone on hi-speed DSL
lines, will welcome Flash pages which load quickly. So
before designing a pure Flash websitge, ask the simple
question, “Who’s my end user – is he on dialup or
DSL?” And if you had to choose between these two users
for maximum marketability, then select analog users
since 80% of most resident users are still analog
Internet subscribers and pure HTML designed webpages
is best for them.

A non-Flash-based website which relies on hard text,
is far easier to be indexed by search robots. Limit
the use of stylized text saved as .gifs since as a
graphic, they are not indexable by search robots.

Avoid use of frames since any number of search robots
are unable to properly classify textual material.

Placement of Metatags:

A ranking or search order does take place with Google
and Yahoo and it begins with the “Title” metag which
should consist of no more than 60 characters separated
by commas. The “Title” should describe in generic terms, the goods and services, followed by a location from which the resource is located, i.e., city, state. The placement of a domain name which is not generic within the “Title” is not appropriate, unless your
domain name is a major recognizable brand name.

The second metatag is the “Description” which is
usually up to 41 words to form a complete paragraph which
best describes one’s goods and services. It is not merely a list.

And the very last category – “Keywords” are also
somewhat limited to 15 words which can be plural
and compound in nature. Again, avoid multiple entries
which could be mistaken as “spamdexed entries” which
is defined as the loading, and submission of
repetitive words into a particular metatag category.
“Spamdexing” when discovered on a webpage and reported
to Google’s spamreport.com can result in the
elimination of your website from their search
directory.

Here’s an example of a very highly-placed website on
Google.com: Begin with the very “generic” search query
“sandwiches downtown los angeles,” taking note to not
abbreviate Los Angeles to “LA” and of course, leave
out the parentheses (“). It will bring up some 2.4
million+ search results. Check out where “Nazos.net”
is ranked. It’s on the SECOND FRONT [ranked 15]!
Again, Nazos.net’s high web presence was achieved by
proper web design and placement of relevant metatags
according to Google’s publication guidelines.

Good luck!

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