Search Engine Optimization

SEO Toolbar – my favorite of em all. Data includes info such as Yahoo links, Yahoo page links, Yahoo .edu links, Yahoo .gov links, delicious links and more, for each page / site that you are browsing. The tool uses Yahoo API in order to pull data.  Apart from Yahoo, it also shows link count from majestic SEO, domain age, cache data, DMOZ listing, Yahoo Directory listing, and more. Be careful when it comes to judging rankability with Yahoo links, since the dimensions with Google vary greatly. Yahoo is dying and will be swallowed by Microsoft soon, so their search algorithms are going down the drain. Take everything with a big grain of salt. SEO Toolbar also includes rank checker and SEO for Firefox which I review below.

SEO For Firefox – this is Randy’s favorite tool, the account manager at SEO Internet Marketing Inc. He is in love with SEO for Firefox because he can explain SEO process to the clients in the language they understand while actually showing some SEO techniques. So what does SEO for firefox has in store? Enable the tool, and you will see a bunch of data under search result. The data will include info such as links, domain age, DMOZ listings etc. Data similar to that of SEO Toolbar, but under actual search results. Some people prefer it that I way. I personally distrust the info since as mentioned before, Yahoo links and Google links are two different creatures and you can’t judge one based on the other. Sure, yahoo link data is great for competitive link hunt, but not for judging why the site ranks on Google.

Rank Checker – plug in the keywords and check rankings. I find it is always off, so I don’t use it as much. It is useful when you have a pool of keywords that need to be checked. Rank checker can give you general idea where the site is in terms rankings, so you don’t have to check through 7 pages for each keyword to find your site.

Google Analytics – my favorite of them all, because the price is right and features match paid versions. Big downside – Google tracks your website and as a result knows a ton of information about it. I’d much rather keep this information from Google, but that is the price.

Google Webmaster Tools – one of the important features of Webmaster Tools is the link tracking. Google does not share link information with link:domain command, but does show it website owners. Top search queries is another useful feature as you can see past week rankings for different keywords. I still prefer the manual check though.

Google Alerts – useful for tracking new link opportunities. All Google search operators work with Alerts, such as intitle, inurl, etc.

Xenu Link Sleuth – this is an extremely useful internal link analysis tool. It can tell you how many internal pages cross link, how many internal link a page has, the anchor text of internal links, as well as page titles. It also reports broken links. This is the mother of all internal link analysis.

Majestic SEO – I cannot leave out majestic SEO if we are on the topic of links. It currently has over a trillion URL in the database and growing. It is the second organization after Google to report a trillion links on the web. Link analysis includes anchor text of the links, domain links, page links, banners, no follow, and much more. The amount of data may overwhelm you especially if you are dealing with a large website, that has over a several hundred thousand links.