Jul 01 2008
A few good SEO Tools
There are a few tools I think are great for research when optimizing your site. If your knew to the seo world and need to find a starting point visit the Website Grader. This tool will rate your site on a scale between 0-100. After you enter your url and click “generate report”, it will start out by rating your on-page seo including meta data, image summary and readability level. This tool will also discuss off-site seo in the report with information about your domain such as age and time to expiration. Number of Google indexed pages as well as Google page-rank and last crawl dates will also be shown. Nearing the end of the report it will show number of inbound links, a couple major directories you site has been found on, blog ranking if you have one and where your standing with social media, digg and delicious to be specific.
For web developers new to seo its a great tool because it just doesn’t generate a report, it discusses the importance of each topic and how, “if you do this” it can help your rankings. Anybody new to seo can get a good headstart by generating a report and then reading through it for advice on where to start.
Bruce Clay, a well know name in SEO, and developer of the Seo Tool Set, has taken upon himself to provide some great tools for the community. In the “seo tools” link above you’ll come to a page with a decent amount of tools for research. His first tool is one which checks the server to make sure your site can be easily crawled. It checks for redirects, robot disallows and a few other items that may be keeping you from getting crawled. This page also has tools for checking keyword traffic, your on-site keyword density, competition research and ranked page report. The last tool on the list is one of my favorites which is the Link Analysis Report. Basically it will list 30 of the strongest urls that link to your website. This is a great tool for finding what pages are pushing you, and the competition, high in the rankings.
Another tool I use is the free keyword tool provided by wordtracker.com. What it will do is when you input a keyword(s), it will list a list of related keywords, with with the amount daily searches each keyword receives. If your writing articles daily about a whole bunch of different stuff, visit this tool to see what related keyword phrase will receive the most traffic. After doing so you now can kind of implement it into the title of the post to help grab that traffic. Even though there are no guarantees to the accuracy of tools like this, to me this one seems to be the most accurate. You can also use the google traffic analyzer found here for comparison.
