SEO Tools

Below is a mix of some of the most popular and comprehensive search marketing tools that both Best Rank and other 3rd party websites offer.  Each tool is organized into logical sections to make things easier to understand:

Check your website's keyword rank

The following tools will help you determine at which position(s) your web site ranks in the major search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing) results pages for a given keyword phrase.

  • FireFox Rank Checker - good for a quick keyword ranking check, data is also exportable
  • Advanced Web Ranking - a java based application that costs $99/year, has the ability to track keyword rankings over time and export data into XML format.

Keyword Research Tools

Find out what your customers are searching for using these keyword research tools: what keywords they use and how often they search.  You can even see at what times they search based on seasonal trends

  • Google's Keyword external tool has fairly accurate search volume numbers and can be seeded with a website URL to generate reports from (if you wanted to look at a competitor's keywords).
  • Our very own Organic SEO Click Distribution Calculator tells you how much traffic (and revenue, optionally) a particular keyword might send to your website at a given position (1-10) on Google's results pages.  This tool is great to see how much you *could* make if you were to get to X position.
  • Quintura shows you symantically related keywords that you wouldn't otherwise think of.
  • Google Trends lets you see keyword trend data over time, a great tool for understanding if a keyword is a good candidate for organic or PPC search campaigns.
  • Keyword Discovery and Word Tracker are two excellent paid programs that also offer free tools for keyword research.  Both services are good for mining long tail keyword phrases.
  • Google's Sktool looks at your existing web page's keywords and cross references that data with search volume numbers to show you relevant keywords that you are not already using, good for expanding that page or creating similar pages on your site.

Competitive Analysis Tools

Knowing what your competition targets is important.  If you're just starting your online marketing campaign or if you find that you're current paid or organic listings aren't driving enough relevant traffic, you can always take a look at what your competition is doing in terms of their ads.

  • SEO Digger offers a snap shot of a domain's distribution of top Google keyword rankings.  This is great if you want to know which keywords a website already ranks for.
  • Compete.com gives you a relative traffic comparison of up to three websites, nice if you want a rough estimate of how much traffic a website really gets.  Google also has a similar website trends tool.
  • Domaintools.com shows you a domain's statistics including site age, web server OS, who owns it, etc.
  • Quantcast offers insights into a website's demographics, a cool tool for figuring out if the site in question contains your target audience in case you wanted to advertise via a few links.
  • Google's insights for search shows you what geological regions search the most for your keyword.
  • The Yahoo! vs Google visual comparison tool draws pretty lines showing the two engines ranking the same content in different positions - good for finding topical, authoritative pages and interesting to see how the two engines differ in their ranking algorithms.

Link analysis Tools

Check out your site's back link profile and compare to your competition.  Search engines rank your website based on your site's in-bound link profile because links are difficult to fake and represent recomendations or other sites "talking" about you - the more you are talked about the mroe relevant you become and thus the higher you rank.

  • Check and analyze your website's back link count
  • Analysis of Back Link Anchor text
    • Open Site Explorer is built from SEOMoz's Linkscape data (their own web index), is a web based, comprehensive and easy to use tool with tons of good data points
    • Aaron Wall's Back Link Analyzer is a free windows based tool that runs pretty fast.
    • Opti-spider is an older link analysis tool, around $130 dollars but still a good one.
    • SEO Elite is another windows based tool that offers a bit more features than the above two but is the most expensive.
    • Majestic SEO has a really nice bulk backlink checking tool and offers a comprehensive set of paid link analysis tools
  • Use hub finder, or use the free version, to find sites that link to competing sites in your space.  These hub sites are (1) likely to link to you if you make the effort and (2) links from them are well worth the effort since they're topical authorities and search engines generally value links coming from topical experts.
  • Check your outbound links, because who your site links to actually matters since it's the one a search engine knows that you have control over with respect to linking.
  • Funnel Web Profiler 2.0 can be used for looking at your site's internal link graph, to see your website's architecture from a bird's eye view.
  • Opti-spider and the Supplemental Results Detector Tool both go over internal link structure and help you solve problems with pagerank distribution and link text to title tag matching.

Link Acquisition tools

  • Link search gives you a list of search engine queries that are targeted to return sites giving you the opportunity to leave comments, add your website link and or purchase (no followed) links relevant to your industry.

PPC Tools

Purchase important keyword impressions and track the results of your tests to understand how well they convert, which helps you focus your organic SEO strategy on the most lucrative keywords. Try these free PPC management tools.

  • Google's Traffic Estimator shows an estimated value for each click for a given keyword on their Adwords program.
  • Google Adwords preview lets you run a mock Google search without counting as an ad impression, good for testing how your ads or how your competitors' ads show up for various searches.

Web Server Tools

Trouble shoot or just make sure that your web server is configured to be search engine friendly

  • Check web page status codes - to find out if a web page is being redirected and what kind of redirect it is
  • Xenu Link Sleuth is good for checking broken links and improper redirects that might be happening on your site.
  • Google Webmaster Tools has a host of cool features from error page reporting to broken links to most popular inbound organic search queries to inbound links, etc.

Analytics and feedback tools

  • Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that reports on website usage including organic and paid keyword traffic, most popular content, visitor profiles, etc.  Just install a snippet of javascript code on the pages of your website that you want to track and you're tracking in no time.  
  • Mint Analytics is a paid web analytics tool similar to google analytics except that you install this web app on your server and you get data (feedback) in real time.  Mint analytics can be great for social media, time sensitive campaigns that need precise execution.

 

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