General SEO Tools

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)

• 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

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.

                             Best wishes for you

SEO Keyword Selection

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)

• 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 term

(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.