Product Reviews

Getting traffic to your website is a difficult job that 1&1 Internet's SimpleSEO tries to make easier. It does this by helping you optimise your site for search engines to improve its ranking. With a higher ranking, your website is more likely to appear first next time someone does a relevant search.

First, SimpleSEO lets you submit up to 10 URLs a month to the most popular search engines, which starts getting your site listed. This is the easy bit and comes free with all 1&1-hosted accounts. Next, SimpleSEO helps you optimise your pages.

A simple walkthrough tells you how to name and describe your website. Next, it deals with

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keywords, which describe your site's content and help search engines categorise it. If you're not sure which words are most accurate, the keyword analyser can scan your webpages and make a list of the most common words. The code generator then builds the meta tags (see FAQ, page 46) and shows you where to put them in your HTML pages.

For those unfamiliar with adding the results to pages, the code generator builds the HTML for you and shows you where to insert it in your files. An automatic tool that does this for you would have been better, though.

These tools are wrapped in a clean, friendly interface, which makes it easy even for novice designers. However, keywords and search engine submissions won't guarantee that your site will jump up the ratings. Google, for example, uses its PageRank algorithm, which takes into account how many other sites link to yours and the page content, among other things, making keywords less important.

If your website is relatively small, you may as well save money and do the job manually - you'll find plenty of good tutorials if you search Google. For larger business sites, SimpleSEO is a fast way of optimising your site for search engines, but it's no guarantee of success.