Easing the Burdens of SEO
By Bill Hartzer
©2005 All rights reserved
If you're an online marketer with a limited budget, then you're in luck. I've compiled a list of online or
downloadable SEO tools that I recommend and use on a regular basis. Each of these tools has to do with the organic
or "natural" search engine rankings of websites.
Savvy online marketers use a combination of these tools to analyze and generally "figure out" why one particular web
page is ranking better than another web page.
Aaron Wall's link popularity/backlink analyzer
Aaron Walls' tool is fairly new to the game and he apparently has spent a lot of money developing this tool. This SEO tool allows you to analyze all of the links that are pointing to one particular website. Once you download and
run it, you are given several reports; one of the reports allows you to see the anchor text of the links that are
pointing to that site. Anchor text is the actual clickable link text that describes a link. Search engines relay
anchor text information in order to "figure out" what a web page is about; they use that as an important part of
their algorithm. This tool requires that you install it on your PC. Aaron also has a list of more free SEO tools on his site.
We Build Pages' free SEO tools
I'm amazed by the number of tools that the We Build Pages folks have available in their arsenal. There are several
good free online SEO tools and analyzers. The Neat-o Backlink Tool, like Aaron Wall's tool mentioned above, "checks
your backlinks (only showing one backlink per URL that links to you) and shows the link text used to link to you."
This tool is an online tool and doesn't require that you download it.
The C Class Backlink Analyzer Tool, also by We Build Pages, is a tool that checks the IP addresses of links to a
site. This is important because not all links are created equal; it's better to have fewer links from a lot of
websites than a whole bunch of links from only one or two websites.
A third tool by We Build Pages, the Top 10 Analysis Tool, will give you the "big picture" of the rankings for a
search term. "Type in a search phrase and this tool will check the top 10 sites in Google and will then show you
things such as how many pages are indexed for each site, backlinks, all-in-anchor rankings, keyword density and
much more." Run this tool to see how competitive a search term is and what might be required to rank well for
that search term.
URL Trends
This online tool gives you a "big picture" and an overall analysis of a website. URLTrends allows you to view
trend reports of a website's current and previous Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and incoming links for the URL.
It also tells you the site's DMOZ status (if it's listed in DMOZ.org).
Server header check
There are many tools that allow you to perform a server header check. This is important especially if you're
dealing with redirects or setting up a redirect from one page to another. By running a server header check
on a URL, you can easily see what error code or redirect code the server is returning when the URL is loaded.
For example, if you're setting up a 301 Permanent Redirect from one domain to another, checking the domain
using a server header check tool is a must. Several good server header check tools exist:
http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.php
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/servercheck.cgi
http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp
http://www.serverheader.com/
Find more online SEO tools
There are several websites that list even more online SEO tools worth exploring. SEO Company maintains a
great list of SEO Tools worth checking out at http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html, and even has a
few of his own online tools, including a Page Rank Checker, a tool to check Internal Page Rank, a tool to
check Link Popularity, a tool to check Indexed Pages, a DMOZ Listing Checker and a SERP Checker. More free
online SEO tool lists are available at the following sites, as well:
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/
http://seo.zunch.com/free_seo_tools.htm
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/
http://www.globalpromoter.com/seo-tools/
Privacy issues
Many search marketers have expressed concerns about privacy issues when it comes to using online tools.
When you use an online form and enter a URL or any other data, you're potentially giving that data to the
website providing that online tool. So, be sure to check the site's privacy policy before you use the tool, or
only use the online tools to check your competitors' search engine rankings.
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