| Home | Download | Email This Page |  |
|
|
 |  |  |
|
SEO Tools SEO MANUAL
SEO Tools Much of the craft to SEO is knowing how to use time effectively. SEO is an extremely time intensive process. These are the tools I use to save time with SEO. None of these links are affiliate links. I get paid nothing to recommend these tools to you. SEO Glossary If you do not understand what core vocabulary words mean it is hard to extract meaning from higher level conversations. Due to reader requests I created a free SEO glossary. http://www.seobook.com/glossary/ SEO Forums The ability to gain near real time answers to your SEO questions makes SEO forums extremely valuable. A good forum has a good sense of community, but different SEO forums have different goals. Generally I support the idea that good SEO is generally making good ideas that would be easy to spread and / or gaining high quality links. The forums that allow open discussion of and support effective SEO ideas are my favorite. You will learn a bunch of your SEO knowledge from personal experience, but forums will also help speed along the learning cycle. • Free: Review of and links to most of the major SEO forums (and many smaller ones too). Most SEO forums are free. (http://www.seobook.com/archives/000161.shtml) SEO Conferences If you analyze the search results well enough you can figure out quite a bit of information. Forums occasionally offer great tips as well. I can’t recommend enough attending conferences though. Conferences allow you to meet people and talk to them in person, which helps build trust, and some Chapter 1 M
2 people may be willing to explain things in private that they would not talk about in public. The two biggest conferences are Search Engine Strategies and WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon. Both are great. Search Engine Strategies tends to be geared more toward corporate marketing and Pubcon tends to be geared more toward independent webmasters. Many of the same big names in the SEO field attend both conferences. If you have the opportunity to attend some of the smaller bar only conferences you can learn a bunch there too. I love SEO Roadshow, but some of the smaller gatherings like that are invite only, and you may only get an invite to them after people know you online or meet you at one of the more mainstream conferences. • Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/) • Brett Tabke’s WebmasterWorld Pubcon (http://www.pubcon.com/) • Conference Calendar (http://www.seobook.com/conferences/) SEO Interviews I am interviewing many of the most respected names in the search space. Included in this PDF are interviews of great marketers and Google’s leading engineer in charge of search quality. (http://www.seobook.com/seo-interviews.pdf) Social Bookmarking, Tags, & Buzz Tools Tools that help you find rapidly spreading ideas. If you track what ideas are spreading it may become easier to learn how to create ideas that spread. As the web becomes more social SEO will continue to shift away from matching algorithms to creating and marketing remarkable ideas. • Free: Del.icio.us popular list (http://del.icio.us/popular/) • Free: Digg (http://digg.com/) • Free: Netscape (http://www.netscape.com/) • Free: Reddit (http://reddit.com/) • Free: StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/) top stories @ (http://buzz.stumbleupon.com/) • Free: Memeorandum (http://tech.memeorandum.com/) • Free: Yahoo! Buzz (http://buzz.yahoo.com/)
3 • Free: Newsmap (http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm) • Free: Technorati Charts (http://technorati.com/chart/fad) • Free: Topix blogged news (http://www.topix.net/blogs) • I posted numerous other examples and ideas here (http://www.seobook.com/archives/001465.shtml) When marketing sites on social news websites it is crucial that you use headlines which are focused more on invoking an emotional response than just matching your target keywords. Read Copy Blogger for tips on how to use compelling page titles and headlines http://www.copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/. Competitive Analysis Tools Tools that help you view the competitive landscape of a particular market. • Search results – what TYPES of websites are ranking for your target keywords? What competitive advantages have each of them developed? How can you leverage their idea or ideas from other popular sites to push your own brand? • SEO for Firefox – This free tool layers link profile data, site age data, and data about citations from social news sites over the top of Google’s or Yahoo!’s search results to give you a more complete profile of the competitive landscape. SEO for Firefox requires using Firefox web browser. http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html Here is an example of the types of information it shows. Note how it also links off to the related data sources to allow you to further analyze the data source. • Top 10 Analysis Tool – shows data similar to SEO for Firefox, but puts all the data on one page. http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/ • Alexa – Shows traffic trends. Please note this is HEAVILY biased toward internet marketing and webmaster related websites. It often ranks SeoBook.com in the top 1,000 sites on the web, and there is just no way my site gets anywhere near that much traffic. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.seoboo k.com
4 • Compete – Similar to Alexa, but not as biased toward internet marketing related websites http://snapshot.compete.com/seobook.com/ Compete.com also offers a search analytics tool http://searchanalytics.compete.com/ which allows you to view keywords that competing businesses rank for. • Quantcast – Similar to compete, but shows more in depth demographic information http://quantcast.com/ • Google Trends – Are competing brands and markets they are dominating growing in mindshare and search volume? http://www.google.com/trends?q=seo+book • Blog search and news search engines – are bloggers and traditional news outlets discussing competitors? If so, why? Keyword Selection Doing SEO effectively starts with finding the right words, phrases, and ideas to target. My general philosophy with most of these tools is they are good to get an idea of what to go after, but most of them do not provide deep enough search data, and so many searches are unique that you won’t end up discovering them until they end up sending visitors to your site. The best way to find deep search data is to bid broad match on Google AdWords, track the referrals, find the good terms, and block bad terms. Use this data to refine and improve your keyword list. The only keyword research tool I have purchased so far and felt it was worth the subscription price is WordTracker, but I actually like the free tool that I created a bit more than WordTracker. Google’s free keyword research tool is probably the best tool on the market, but if you use my tool it will provide cross referencing links to all of Google’s tools and the other most useful tools on the market. I also typically do not advocate changing content over and over again trying to find a magical keyword density. In reality there is no such thing. Keep creating new content regularly and don’t keep changing your old content over and over again. • Free: SEO Book keyword suggestion tool – driven largely off of Overture’s keyword suggestion tool, my keyword research tool makes it easy to cross compare the results from most other keyword research tools on the market. (http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/) • Free: Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool – Shows 12 month seasonal traffic patterns, bid competition, related terms and is exceptionally easy to export keyword lists from. (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
5 • Free: Google AdWords traffic estimator – estimates the traffic you would receive from AdWords given a specific bid. Also estimates the bid price necessary to rank #1 on AdWords for 85% of queries (https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox) • Free: Google Trends – shows estimated trending data for keyword search globally or by market. Data goes back multiple years and allows you to compare multiple keyword phrases on the same graph. (http://www.google.com/trends) • Free: Digital Point keyword suggestion tool – free web based tool which compares Wordtracker and Overture search frequencies. (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/) • Free: MSN Search Result Clustering (http://rwsm.directtaps.net/p5/clustermain.aspx) • Various Prices: WordTracker – web based leased product which has many more features than the other tools. WordTracker traffic is generally more representative of actual traffic than Overture’s tool since many fewer automated bots scour its data collection network than Overture’s. (http://www.wordtracker.com) free version (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/) • Various prices: Keyword Discovery - database of keyword data. Contains historical data. Some of their partners made them sign a non disclosure agreement. The database may not be as clean as the WordTracker database, but it contains a bit more data. (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/) free version (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html) Keyword discovery also provides free limited depth usage and has a free keyword directory (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/keyword-directory.html) • Various prices: Keyword Intelligence – database of keyword data from various HitWise partner sources. I was not exceptionally impressed with this offering. (http://www.keywordintelligence.com/) • Free: Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool – offers search frequency for the prior month throughout the Overture network. Please note that many bid checkers and other automated bots cause this number to skew high. (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) • Free: Google Search Suggestion Tool – auto-completes search queries to help you find more related search terms
6 (http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en) I also have an online Google Suggest scraper at (http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-information/) • Free: Google Sets – shows groups of related keywords. (http://labs.google.com/sets) • Free: Good Keywords – free downloadable software which can be used for preliminary keyword research. (http://www.goodkeywords.com) • Free: Ontology tool – finds related keywords using the Google ~ search. (http://www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/) • Free: Quintura – web based and downloadable latent semantic indexing tool (http://quintura.com/) • Free: Keyword Typo Generator (http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi) • Free: Lexical FreeNet -- helps find ideas and terms related to a given word or words. (http://www.lexfn.com/) • Free: Tag Cloud – free Folksonomy tool (http://www.tagcloud.com/) • Free: MSN AdLab – offers a wide variety of free keyword research tools including things like keyword funnels and a keyword mutation tool. (http://adlab.msn.com/) • Free: SEODigger – shows keywords that competing sites rank for. (http://www.seodigger.com/) • Free & Paid: SpyFu – shows words that competing sites rank for or are buying on AdWords (http://www.spyfu.com/) • Paid: KeyCompete – paid tool showing what AdWords keywords competing sites are buying (http://www.keycompete.com/) • Free: Competitors websites and related search suggestions from various search engines such as Vivisimo, Snap, Gigablast, and Ask. General SEO Tools There are many various tools which help make the job of SEO quicker. These are some of my more commonly used tools. All the tools in this section are free. • FireFox browser – browser allows tabbed browsing, which saves a ton of time when I am looking at about a half dozen sites at the same time. (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox)
7 • Firefox Bookmarks and Extensions – extensions and bookmarks I use to customize Firefox to make SEO easier. (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/bookmarklets.html) • Internet Explorer (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx) • Internet Archive – shows the history of websites. (http://www.archive.org/) • Digital Point keyword ranking, backlink, and PageRank checker – I use this tool to view my position for various websites in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. It also helps me hypothesize some of the ways they may have changed their algorithms. (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords) • Xenu Link Sleuth – finds broken links on your site, and helps you build a sitemap. (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) • Sitemaps Protocol – official xml sitemap protocol supported by the major search engines. Please note that these xml sitemaps are different than your internal sitemaps. (http://www.sitemaps.org/) • Free Meta Tag Generator – helps you create the code for your page title and meta tags (http://tools.seobook.com/meta-medic/) • The Google Toolbar – good for highlighting keyword proximity and usage and doing many things like giving you a quick glimpse of a cached copy of a page. (http://toolbar.google.com/) If you are doing lots of exceptionally aggressive promotional techniques it may be unwise to install any toolbar distributed by a major search engine since it will help them track and cross reference your sites. • Google Toolbar buttons - if you use the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer you can create custom buttons to act as an RSS reader or link to various useful tools, like a site’s WhoIs history. I created a number of buttons here (http://tools.seobook.com/buttons/) • Show IP – FireFox extension shows what IP Google results are coming from (http://l4x.org/site/node/1078) • GoLexa – SEO Swiss Army Knife tool (http://www.golexa.com/) • Office application. Things like spreadsheets make life much easier as an SEO. I use MicroSoft Office sometimes (http://office.microsoft.com/) and sometimes I use OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/). Either will probably work for most jobs. OpenOffice can create PDF documents
8 for free. The newest beta version of Internet Explorer also can produce PDF documents from web pages. • Myriad Search – meta search service which makes it easy to compare the top search results from the major search engines (http://www.myriadsearch.com/) • Espion – Free download application which makes it easy to change your user agent to check for user agent based cloaking. (http://tools.webguerrilla.com/new-browser-app/) • Content generation & scripting: http://www.elance.com is an online auction where people bid on your projects. You can find real bad deals and real gems there. http://www.constant-content.com is a content bank full of content for sale. The US government and the BBC are also offering free RSS feeds. Some people also use sites like http://craigslist.org/ to look for affordable writers. Link Checking Functions Here are some ways to check backlink profiles using major search engines • Yahoo! links – search for link:seobook.com to find links to that specific page via Yahoo! Site Explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ Site Explorer also allows you to filter out internal backlinks to be able to get a better view of external inbound links • Yahoo! Site links – shows links pointing to any page on a site. Uses the same structure as above, but use linkdomain: instead of link: • Yahoo! .edu links – links from .edu and .gov type websites may be trusted more than typical links. You can view the .edu links pointing at SeoBook.com using this link http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:www.seobook.com%20% 2Bsite:.edu%20-site:.com%20-site:www.seobook.com • Google backlink check – use link:seobook.com, but please note that Google only shows a small sample of the links they know of. • Google similar pages check - related:http://www.seobook.com/ shows sites which Google thinks are related to SEO Book. • Google Blogseach Backlinks – Google’s Blogsearch will show you recent links from blogs to any page on a particular site. On http://blogsearch.google.com/ use link:seobook.com
9 • Technorati – shows blog links similarly to how Google Blogsearch does. Search at http://www.technorati.com for www.seobook.com • Microsoft offers similar link functions as Yahoo!. Like Yahoo!, Microsoft tends to show a larger and more comprehensive sample of linkage data than Google. • MSN reciprocal link checking feature. Microsoft allows you to see which sites a domain links at using LinkFromDomain:seobook.com By searching for links that are both to and from a domain you can see which links are reciprocal links in nature and help further identify the local topical community http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=linkfromdomain%3Aseobook.co m+linkdomain%3Aseobook.com Link Building Tools Link building is perhaps the most time consuming part of the SEO process. As the web becomes more social link building is moving away from analysis and replication of competing channels to creating ideas that will spread on social news websites and blogs. Please note that Google’s algorithms have moved away from heavily weighting anchor text and have instead placed more and more weight on domain related authority, so getting quality links is becoming far more important than just getting links that have your keywords in them. • Free: Hub Finder – tool looks for co occurring backlinks. This tends to show scraper sites, and useful hub pages. You can limit the search depth to show more of the hub pages and less scraper pages. (http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/) • Free: Link Harvester – gives lots of details about unique linking domains, .edu backlinks, and IP addresses of backlinks. (http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php) • Free: Jim Boykin’s cool SEO tool – shows top ranked sites, domain age, and a few other related pieces of information. (http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/) • Free: Rusty Brick’s link analysis tool. Works with the Google API and offers C block IP and anchor text reporting. Since it works with the Google API it is somewhat slow, but it is free. (http://www.rustybrick.com/link_analysis.php) • Free:: Class C IP checker tool checks for duplicate class C IP addresses from a list of domains. Links from sites which are on the same C block IP
10 address may not carry as much weight as sites from different C block IP addresses. (http://www.ip-report.com/) • Free: Unique Linking Domain Checker – returns links to all unique linking websites that link at your site. (http://www.555webtemplates.com/backlinks-tool.asp) • Free: Unique C Block Backlinks Checker – allows you to quickly survey how competitive a market is by seeing how many C blocks are linking at competing websites. (http://www.webuildpages.com/cclass/) • Free: Back Link Analyzer – operates similar to Optilink and SEO Elite, but is free. If you like BLA then you probably have no need for Optilink or SEO Elite since the feature sets prettymuch overlap. (http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/) • $224: Optilink link analysis software. Optilink automates sorting competitotrs backlinks and displays the anchor text in links. (http://www.optitext.com/) • $167: SEO Elite – similar to Optilink, but also checks reciprocal link partners. (http://seoelite.com/) • Free: Backlink Watch – similar to the above 3 tools, but web based and free. (http://www.backlinkwatch.com/) • Free: Tattler – similar to Optilink and SEO Elite, but lighting quick and free. Only works with Yahoo!, but it is really fast. (http://tools.webguerrilla.com/i-deleted-the-download-page/) • Free: PRWeb – free press releases. I often recommend purchasing one of their premium services though. (http://www.prweb.com) • Free: List of places to submit articles (http://www.seobook.com/archives/000099.shtml) some article banks are also listed in the directorylist.xls sheet mentioned below under the articles tab. • Free: DNS Stuff has a variety of webmaster tools including WhoIs, etc. (http://www.dnsstuff.com/) • Free: Server header check (http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/servercheck.cgi) • Free: (Directories) http://www.directoryarchives.com is a directory of directories, and here is a free Excel sheet
11 http://www.seobook.com/directorylist.xls for managing some of your directory submissions. • Free: Google TouchGraph makes it easy to visualize relationships between related websites. (http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html) • Free Trial: Roboform saves your data and makes it easy to enter payment and site listing information. Useful for massive directory registration, though you still need to ensure you mix your linkage data. It may also be in your best interest to space out some of your registrations to show more natural appearing linkage growth. http://www.roboform.com/ • Free: InFormEnter Firefox extension. Acts somewhat similarly to Roboform (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefo x&category=Editing%20and%20Forms&numpg=10&id=673) • $50 per month: LinkExplore helps you collect contact and linking details to trade links with people who have site details in the LinkExplore database. The LinkExplore database has over 10,000 entries and you can search by keyword and category. LinkExplore also allows you to collect data from the search engines similarly to how SEO Elite and OptiLink work. One of the benefits of LinkExplore over some of the other link analysis tools is that their database already has a number of people in it who are likely to want to trade links with similar related resources, but typically most sites in such databases are not of a high quality level. I find the Link Explore member newsletter annoying and somewhat offensive though. (http://www.linkexplore.com/) • Arelis: link exchange software. It allows you to seek out link partners, their contact information, and email them. I would customize any email I sent out so as to avoid being accused of email spamming. Arelis also tracks your status with link exchange communications. Arelis also allows you to upload HTML pages with your link partners links on them, but I would not recommend using that feature on quality sites, or ensure I removed any footprints left by software which is designed specifically for link exchanges. When you exchange links it is a good idea to also link to related internal pages and quality resources that may not be linking back at your site. (http://www.axandra-link-popularity-tool.com/)
12 • $175: Zeus is a link exchange manager / directory software similar to Arelis. Both offer a free trial. I have not fully tested Zeus, but I would not put pages with link exchange software footprints on my site. (http://www.cyber-robotics.com) Aggressive SEO Tools (More risky) • Some of these tools may risk getting your site banned. • Free: Cooperative Ad Network … this essentially amounts to a huge link farm, but it is blended in with many sites that are well integrated into the web. Some search algorithms can look for temporal effects and deweight rapidly rotating links. I currently am not using this ad network on any of my sites, and probably would not use it on any site that I wanted to do well longterm. It seems as though some older established sites can get away with using this sort of stuff more than newly established sites, but they also are risking losing more. (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/) • Free: Link Vault – acts similar to the Coop Ad Network, except it provides static non-rotating links. (http://www.link-vault.com) • Articlebot – creates multiple copies of semantically sound copy from a single original article. I have not yet used Article Bot but have heard good reviews, although some think the software is a bit complex to learn. (http://www.articlebot.com/) On ThreadWatch someone noted that they thought this tool might be sending some of its data back to someone involved with creating the tool. Any time you use an automated content generator that phones home you may be doing niche discovery for someone else. • Traffic Equalizer – scrapes search results and creates pages from them. By default it likely leaves some footprints. (http://www.trafficequalizer.com/) • RSS Equalizer – creates static pages out of RSS feeds. Similar thoughts as T.E. above. (http://www.rssequalizer.com/) • Fantomaster – high end cloaking software. I have not yet used cloaking software, but Fantomaster has a reputation for being the best in the business. (http://fantomaster.com/) • KloakIt – low cost cloaking software. (http://www.kloakit.com/)
13 Pay Per Click Tools Customer Tracking / Bid Tracking / Management • ClickTracks - log file analyzer...awesome (http://www.clicktracks.com) • ConversionRuler – simple pay per click tracking (http://www.conversionruler.com) • KeywordMax – web based software (http://www.keywordmax.com/) • IndexTools – web based software (http://www.indextools.com/) • BidRank - downloadable software (http://www.bidrank.com) • Atlas OnePoint - web based software (http://www.atlasonepoint.com) • Google Analytics – free analytics software, but if you send it you are sending your traffic and conversion information to Google (http://www.google.com/analytics/) • WebSideStory (http://www.websidestory.com) Competitive Analysis Software Some tools collect the ad distribution rate and rank details of competitors by randomly pinging Google. I have not extensively used these products, but I do think they are interesting. Two of these products are: • AdArchiver is a rather inexpensive competitive analysis tool. (http://www.adarchiver.com) • AdGooroo is a way more expensive, but it graphs the data and gives you tips on how to adjust bidding. (http://www.adgooroo.com/) • SEMPhonic spiders similar sites to find related keyword sets. Still a beta test product (http://www.semphonic.com) • Google AdWords API (http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/) Fraud Prevention & Monitoring Software • Vericlix – the only free click fraud prevention software (http://www.vericlix.com/) • Who’s Clicking Who (http://www.whosclickingwho.com/) • Click Auditor (http://www.keywordmax.com/click_auditor.html)
14 • Track which pages your AdSense ads appear on (http://www.apogee-webconsulting. com/tools/track_google_content_ads.html) Keyword Suggestion Tools Listed above in the keyword research section. Keyword list creator • Free: Keyword list generator – makes it easy to generate a variety of keyword combinations from a list of terms and modifiers. The other tools mentioned below have similar feature sets. (http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-list/) • ThePermutator - $50 downloadable software, similar to my free keyword list generator (http://www.thepermutator.com) Other Websites: • ZoneEdit – allows you to redirect keyword rich domain names to other locations. (http://www.zoneedit.com) • Split Tester (http://www.splittester.com/) Large Pay Per Click Search Engines • Google AdWords (https://adwords.google.com/select/main) – ads appear on Google, AOL, Ask, and many other search & content websites • Yahoo! Search Marketing (http://www.overture.com) – also known as Overture, ads appear on Yahoo!, Alltheweb, AltaVista and many other search & content websites. • Microsoft AdCenter (https://adcenter.msn.com/) – currently their ads mainly appear on MSN Search. AdWords Tools • Google AdWords Editor – helps automate creating tight ad groups based on larger keyword lists. http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/ • Google Website Optimizer – free multivariant testing platform offered by |