Index Rank from Solo SEO

IndexRank is a tool that gives you quick access to seeing how many pages Google has indexed over various periods of time. You can provide multiple URLs, which is helpful for comparing your site against the competition — or, in my case, several of your own domains:

Website Health Check from SEO Book

This tool does a variety of things, but the most valuable to me is the quick list of missing or duplicate title tags, description tags, etc., across whatever domain you provide. Here’s what it looks like after you run the tool:

Both of these have been added to my growing bookmarks folder of SEO tools.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Two New SEO Tools to Bookmark

Web Browser

It all begins with Firefox. Use Internet Explorer as much as you want when dilly-dallying at the office or home, but your SEO toolbox must include Firefox. Most of the tools below only work in this browser.

Firefox Plugins/Add-ons

Once you’ve download Firefox, you now have access to a great, big candy store of add-ons (or plugins) that extend Firefox’s capabilities. Here are the ones you’ll need for your Beginner’s SEO Toolbox:

WebDeveloper by Chris Pederick
This add-on will install a toolbar that’ll turn your Firefox into Barry Bonds circa 2001. You’ll have all kinds of new ways to analyze a Web page. I often use this to see which images are missing alt tags, or to see a page with javascript and/or CSS turned off. Here’s what it looks like:

User Agent Switcher by Chris Pederick
I thought about not including this on a beginner’s toolbox list, but it’s easy to use and very helpful. User Agent Switcher lets you surf the Web with another identity. The most common use I have for it is to switch my browser’s user agent from Firefox to Googlebot, which allows me to see a Web page the way Googlebot does. It’s very helpful for looking at your own site, but especially for looking at competitors.

The default toolbar download is a bit sparse, so you’ll also need this Firefox User Agent Switcher list. Download the XML import file, then import it and you’re all set. But be careful, because you can cause yourself problems if you pretend to be Googlebot too much. Use this lightly and wisely.

SEO for Firefox by Aaron Wall
How would you like to run a Google or Yahoo search, and right there in the SERPs be able to see all the important data about each site listed? That’s what this add-on does. You’ll have quick access to PageRank, Google Cache Date, Age of Domain, Yahoo link count, and a lot more. Here’s what it looks like in the SERPs:

SearchStatus
This add-on gives you quick access to a page’s Alexa Rank and PageRank right down in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. It also provides quick access to a lot of other data about the page you’re visiting.

Greasemonkey
Another one I wasn’t sure about including on a beginner’s list, but if I can figure out how it works, anyone can. You’ll come across various Greasemonkey scripts which may add helpful functionality to your web browser; these scripts require Greasemonkey to be installed.

Bookmarklets

I’m a big fan of bookmarklets; I have a whole folder for them in my bookmarklets. The two that are most helpful for SEO purposes are below. In each case, just drag the link up to your browser bookmark bar and it’ll be added (assuming I’ve done this right).

Yahoo Site Explorer Bookmarklet

DomainTools Bookmarklet

Other Tools

Xenu Link Sleuth
This is a PC-only software program. I don’t get to use it much since I work from home (on a Mac) as much as I work at the office (on a PC). What it does is crawl a Web site and spit back a list of URLs, Page Titles for each URL, inbound & outbound links for each URL, file types, and more.

Conclusion

There are additional add-ons and SEO tools I use, but for the vast majority of clients I’ve ever worked with, the list above is more than enough. In additition to the above, here are a couple other recent SEO toolbox-style posts that may be helpful:

• 8 Must Have FireFox Addons For SEO
• Top 7 Firefox Extensions For Web Site Owners

If any readers think I’ve missed a tool or add-on that’s appropriate for new/beginner SEOs, let me know in the comments!

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

A Beginner’s SEO Toolbox

Domain Popularity Tool from LinkVendor. This is essentially a backlink checker, and when they say “domain popularity”, that’s what they mean — it doesn’t check links to a deep directory or URL, just to the domain. Here’s what it looks like:

Ignoring the domain-only limitation, it adds some additional info. about each backlink, including the IP* of the inbound link, its PageRank, and if you’re willing to be patient, the anchor text of the link. (Hat tip to Cr8asite via SE Roundtable.)

* Particularly convenient is the ability to sort the list of results by IP. This can be very helpful when doing competitive intelligence to see if your competition is getting its links from a bunch of sites sitting on the same IP.

Tool No. 2 worth mentioning is Keyword Curious from Scott Horne, aka Web Professor. This is a simple-but-effective keyword research tool which allows you to run searches on either a phrase-match or a broad-match basis, and then lets you choose the keywords you like and save them into different “keyword baskets.” Here’s what it looks like:

As with all of the keyword research tools, the real benefit isn’t in studying exact keyword counts; the benefit is in gaining ideas for new words and phrases you may not have thought of previously. And so Keyword Curious makes a nice addition to your keyword research toolbelt.

Update: I sent Scott a couple questions about Keyword Curious last night via email. He replied via email, and then added even more information on his blog today about the data sources and other related topics. Thanks, Scott!

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Two New SEO Tools I’ve Bookmarked

Similicio.us

There’s a reason the name looks familiar: When you enter a URL into Similicio.us, it will spit out a list of similar sites based on an analysis of the bookmarking habits of delicio.us users. Nice concept, and based on a few quick searches, it returns appropriate sites. Using my U2 site as a starting point, Similicio.us returned the band’s official site plus a handful of other high-quality fan sites. Using this site as a starting point brings up a list of other search/marketing sites that you’d probably want a link from if you also wanted a link from me.

The main drawback to using the site in this way is an obvious one: If the site you use as a starting point hasn’t been bookmarked enough on del.icio.us, you’re out of luck.

Still, I’ll be using Similicio.us in the future to help find related sites.

Jim Boykin’s Common Backlinks tool and Aaron Wall’s Yahoo Hubfinder are two other great resources for finding possible link building targets.

Your turn: What other ways do you find inbound link targets?

Technorati Tags: seo, linkbuilding

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

New Tool for Your Link Building Efforts

And via Li comes news that Trellian, makers of Keyword Discovery (my preferred weapon of choice these days), have also created a free version: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Good stuff!

Technorati Tags: seo, keyword research, seo tools

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Two New Free Keyword Tools

The things you find via StumbleUpon….

I don’t “stumble” very often, but I do get a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, which was the #1 referrer into this blog in 2006. Just tonight, though, while playing around a bit, I stumbled upon

CrossEngine.com

CrossEngine is one of those all-in-one search sites, where you can run the same search across a variety of sites, but without having to visit each site separately. Only this one is better, because it’s the most comprehensive such aggregate search site I’ve ever seen.

There are 11 tabs across the top of CrossEngine.com, beginning with the “Quick Start” tab. That one covers the main search engines, plus eBay, Technorati, and a few others. Other tabs include:

• Standard
• Images
• Videos
• News
• Blogs
• Shop
• Reference
• Formats
• Social
• Tech

Every possible site I could think of is included under one of the tabs, and each tab has some sites I’ve never heard of before.

What’s it good for? Aside from being a cool SEO/webmaster tool, this might also be an easy way to do some reputation management — searching on your own name or your company name quickly across several search sites.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Just Discovered: CrossEngine.com

MarketingVox recaps a BusinessWeek article that talks about Big Brands pushing small business out of the paid search market: “…brand giants like Best Buy and Zale are diverting more and more of their marketing to search ads, driving up prices and stealing customers from smaller businesses that have in the past bought the bulk of the ads.”

Timely, then, that I recently did this interview with PPC guru Andrew Goodman discussing exactly this topic. And before that, my interview with Lee Odden also covered a lot of ground for small businesses looking for new ways to market online.

As I continue to help my wife do some marketing for her new real estate blog via MyBlogLog, these should come in handy: SoloSEO’s Missing MyBogLog Tools. Very, very cool.

And in some non-news, Google no longer includes links to Yahoo Maps and Mapquest.

Yawn.

Why should they? Yahoo and Mapquest should be grateful for the free link they’ve had all this time. And the outcry from other bloggers is funny. I’m sure they all advise their clients to include prominent links to their biggest competitors right on the home page. “Welcome to our web site. Did you want to visit Competitor A or Competitor B, instead?” Please.

UPDATE: Looks like Simon agrees with me on this one. “It’s just them being a business.” Exactly.

Technorati Tags: sem, ppc, mybloglog, soloseo, google, google maps

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

11:00 pm SEO News (and Non-news)

You already know AskCity.com has launched, and now here’s a lot more detail as John Battelle interviews Ask CEO Jim Lanzone about the new project. Good information, including an abbreviated list of the sites AskCity crawls to get user reviews.

The Google-Intuit deal was just the beginning, it seems. Peter Krasilovsky writes from the Kelsey Group conference about Google’s (further) plans to bring small- and medium-sized businesses into the world of online marketing. Some very interesting things in there, esp. the stuff about real-time local inventory. Wouldn’t that be a killer app?

So, you like those nifty SEO tools, do you? You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better collection than what We Build Pages offers, and Jim Boykin recently announced some updates to their tool set.

And when you’re done there… you’ll also want to read Michael Gray’s tips on using the WBP tool set in your SEO projects.

All dressed up and looking great is how I’d describe the new SearchEngineJournal.com design.

If you’re thinking about buying links, you might want to spend some time reading the Beginners Guide to Buying Links for SEO from TextLinkBrokers.com. Good stuff there.

That’s a good start on catching up, but I’m sure there’ll be lots more for the regular Friday night roundup.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Tuesday Morning Link-o-rama

Some more good PDF optimization help comes from Duff Johnson at the Adobe Acrobat User Community: Make your PDFs work well with Google (and other search engines). This is a good, and more technical complement to my recent post about Optimizing PDFs for SEO.

Don’t skip this one, even if I did forget to post about it when it was first published: Nick Usborne shares Four tips for writing a home page.

If you’re a designer, read this. If you’re not, tell your designer to read it. Again, not hot off the presses, but great nonetheless: Cameron Moll’s Beginner’s guide from a seasoned CSS designer.

This is hysterical, but it might be a bit too “Inside Baseball” for some SBS readers. Graywolf explains how How PubCon is like Star Wars. Inside knowledge of the SEO industry and personalities is helpful, though not required for maximum laugh factor.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Friday Night Link-o-rama

MSN is announcing a new LinkFromDomain search operator, which lets you see all the links pointing OUT from any domain. Example: LinkFromDomain:smallbusinesssem.com

This can be a helpful tool for small business owners/webmasters who want to see what sites the competition is linking to. Also helpful is combining the new operator with the LinkDomain operator, which shows you a domain’s reciprocal links. Example: LinkFromDomain:smallbusinesssem.com LinkDomain:smallbusinesssem.com (In my case, it’s not active link trading - it’s just the common back and forth linking that happens between blogs and sites of similar nature.)

Technorati Tags: msn, msn search, live search, seo, microsoft

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

A “very exciting” search macro