The Maine SEO Blog

I’m not sure about you, but when I end up on a page like SEOmoz’s Pro + Free SEO Tools, I’m immediately overwhelmed.  There, you are faced with a huge list of search tools, all of which can be helpful in your quest for more search visibility.  The thing is, who has time to use them all?!  So, I decided to look into them further, and break them down depending on the project.

SEO Auditing

These tools will help whether your site is new or old – giving you some insight into what you might be missing!

• Linkscape (free) – the general overview of your site – reports generated showing mozRank, mozTrust, and the number of internal and external links.  In addition, with the paid subscription, you can run a full report – which adds the mozRank of those sites linking to you, the anchor text used when linking, and a few other cool measurements.
• Trifecta (free) – measures the relative popularity/importance of a website, replacing the Page Strength tool.  You can also compare your site/blog to up to 4 other sites.
• Crawl Test (free) – find what pages are crawable, indexed, or might even have issues!
• GeoTargeting Detection (free) – very helpful if your company is localized; this tool shows you where your listings are on the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live) according to location.

Analyzing Keywords

• Term Target (free) – checks for keyword density for a specific term.  Neat bonus: SEOmoz shows you where your terms are located (title, meta-tag, header, etc.)
• Term Extractor (free) – exactly that: pulls the top words for a given page (broken into one-word keywords, 2-, and 3-word phrases.
• Keyword Difficulty (paid) – run a report to show the competition and opportunity for a given keyword or phrase.

Link Building

• Anchor Text Analysis (paid) – advanced view of backlinks including anchor text.
• Juicy Link Finder (paid) – by choosing a specific keyword, this tool will give you some great links – including the age of the site/page and its PageRank.

Just for Fun

• Popular Searches (free) – pulling from a large list of sources (Google, Amazon, Technorati, and so on), this tool shares the top ten most popular searches for any given day.
• SEO Toolbox (free) – a large variety of free tools: strongest pages on domain, who else is hosted on my IP, check inclusion, check backlinks, outbound link checker, check PageRank, find domain age, check HTTP status code, check indexed pages, whois, and IP location.
• Rank Checker (paid) – checks rankings for specific keywords in whichever search engine you choose.

SEOmoz’s tool set is incredibly helpful, and I found looking at the tools this way – based on project – helps make them an important part of every job.  By the way, many of the paid tools are extra cool, so I would highly recommend getting a Pro Membership if you don’t have one already!

Nicki Hicks
Who said cool toys are just for kids?

Google has put its algorithms to good use and given a great gift to SEOs everywhere: introducing Google Insights! The great part is that you don’t necessarily need to be an SEO to appreciate this, so let’s see all the fun things it can do, shall we?

I performed a search for “SEO” under the default location setting of “worldwide” and time range “2004 – present,” and added the “Internet” category. This is the map of where those searches come from globally:

You can see both with the colors on the map as well as the numbers to the left how easy it is to see where the majority of searchers are coming from.  Then I changed my query to view a graph that shows the growth of the search term “SEO” as it is relative to the “Internet” category over the past four years (this graph still shows the global results):

SEO is going up..Up…UP!! (As is the “Internet”!)  You can also compare a given search term over a given period of time with Insights. The following graph shows how the search volume for “SEO” has increased between 2004 and 2007 (this time we’re looking specifically at the United States):

It seems there are tons of possibilities with this new program. In a nutshell, you can cross reference any of the following with one another: search term, location, time range, and category – essentially making it possible to look through search history (since 2004, that is) pretty easily.

Nicki Hicks
“Insightful” SEO