Most of the tools you need for checking search engine optimization and positioning are available on the Web or can be
downloaded for free. Two good free tools (non-time limited demos) at present - are:
http://www.webyield.net/webceo.html - WebCEO - Free version gives you advice on what to do to improve your Web page
optimization relative to others, shows you who the competition are etc.
http://www.axandra.com/ - Free IBP tool is more convenient to use than WebCEO if you do not buy it, but it has more
crippled features. The most important feature here is the keyword density analysis. Like WebCEO they check and do
comparisons to your competition, but they will not give you the advice in the free version. Another useful feature is a
search engine spider simulator, which shows you what search engines may "see" at your Web site.
Both tools will also suggest keywords based on your Web page content. There are also tools that record and track the
position of your site and different pages on it for different keywords.
Limitations of SEO Tools
Be aware of limitations in SEO tools:
1. SEO tools do not and cannot incorporate all necessary knowledge about how a search engine ranks sites because some
of the information is proprietary and because the methodology and algorithms change periodically.
2. SEO tools like IBP compare your Web site to the top ten and make recommendations based on the characteristics of
the top ten pages retrieved by a search engine for a particular keyword when searched from your location. However, page
#1 retrieved by Google or Yahoo may have gotten that ranking (and often has) because it is part of a huge Web site like
Wikipedia or BBC or Yahoo. The page design may be terrible. You do not have the resources to compete with those Web
sites in size or number of incoming links or authority, so your design has to be better. Moreover, if there are
relatively few Web sites with that keyword or key phrase, it may be enough to simply mention the word a few times in the
text in order to be the top site.
3. Because of the institution of localization, tools that are based on results retrieved from your local computer and
Internet connection do not necessarily give the best information about what is needed to place number 1 in the United
States.
4. Most SEO optimizers offer functions for tracking link exchange campaigns. These campaigns are conducted by sending
e-mails to hundreds of potential Web partners. Recipients often consider these messages to be spam. In any case,
building links is probably the most important, most time consuming and most frustrating part of popularizing Web pages.
The tools can help a bit, but you will have to do most of the work.
Keyword Popularity – These tools will help you choose keywords that people are searching for:
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php allows you to search
only one keyword at a time, but gives a lot of information.
http://www.google.com/trends
gives valuable historical information about keyword popularity, but it doesn’t give absolute numbers. You can compare
several keywords and variants to get an idea of comparative importance, but generally a comparison with a very popular
word (eg "Sex") will put most regular words at the bottom of the pile.
http://www.technobloggie.com/keyword-tool/index.php gives accurate numerical data
for single keyword popularity, as well as the value of this keyword as a Google Adword if you are doing advertising.
All such tools (there are many others) may disappear from the Web and be replaced by others. All results should be
judged relatively. All results should be compared to the number of sites existing on the Web. "Sex" is a very popular
keyword, but there are hundreds of millions of sites that are retrieved for that keyword, so a new one must compete with
all of them.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ used to be the number
free keyword tool, but it is no longer updated. Yahoo may have a new tool that substitutes for it.
http://www.search Engine Optimizationcompany.ca/tools/keyword-search/index.php
may be a great tool if you can get it to work!
www.wordtracker.com is faster and more complete than any of the above, but it costs money.
How am I doing? Alexa
http://www.alexa.com will tell you a lot about your site or any other site including their estimate of your traffic
share, what countries your traffic is coming from and some of your links:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/ - Originally based only on the
Alexa toolbar, Alexa has recently been revised to include information from other sources and give a much more accurate
picture of Web site popularity. You can see how you are doing and how competitors are doing as well, and evaluate the
efficiency of their approach.
The relation between traffic percentages shown by Alexa and actual visitors to a Web site is not very precise, but it
is good enough to give you an idea of relative success. A share of about .0005% might be equivalent to 10,000-20,000
visitors per week. Rankings may fluctuate in summer and winter depending on the type of Web site.
Google Tools
The Google Tool bar will tell you the pagerank of your Web page. You can download it for free: http://www.toolbar.google.com/
Other tools that do this may not be accurate, but you can try them.
In the Google Search Engine:
site:www.domain_name.com will return all the pages at your Web site listed by Google (with many errors and
omissions and duplicates)
link:www.domain_name.com will return a sample of the sites and pages that Google records as linking to your site.
These are called "backlinks" Yahoo! has a better tool, but Google rankings correlate with Google backlinks - not with
Yahoo!.
Webmaster Central - http://www.google.com/webmasters/ will tell you some of the things Google knows or thinks it
knows about your Web site, but the tools there are not great. It does show you some of the key words that they found
(not clear if it is for a page or the whole site) and errors in crawling (not clear on what page they occur). You have
to claim your Web site in Web master central to use it. Web master central is improving all the time.
Yahoo backlinks
Yahoo gives a much better actual estimate of backlinks to a Web page than Google does. Yahoo numbers do not correlate
as well with Google page rank, but they give you a realistic idea of how many backlinks your page really has and how
many your competition has, and they tell you which links are "same site." They are not very accurate either, but Yahoo
may list 20,000 links where Google lists 800. Yahoo, like Google has commands that retrieve information about Web sites
Yahoo has two facilities for this purpose. In a regular Yahoo search, use this notation:
Linkdomain:url.com
Show all pages that link to any page at url.com.
Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
Show all pages that link to
http://www.url.com/page.html
Linkdomain:url.com keyword
Show all pages with the keyword "keyword" that link to url.com.
Linkdomain:url.com -term
The - sign excludes from the search pages that include term.
Linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
In addition to the - sign as a term remover, you can remove sites from the
results as well, to eliminate same-site links.
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com is a Beta site that performs approximately the functions above and seems to
give fresher data.
Notice: Copyright
All materials are copyright 2008 by Ami Isseroff. All rights reserved. These pages may not be reproduced in any
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