Here are reviews of a few great search engine optimization tools put together by guest author Tinu Abayomi-Paul.
SEO Tools for Webmasters
- URL Trends. Most of the coverage I've seen focuses on the ability of UrlTrends to allow you to "View Any URLs Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Popular Search Terms and Incoming Links". And that's a great thing, to be able to see all of that from one place. Also, one great thing about this tool is the ability to subscribe to changes to the results via RSS - making hands off monitoring of your site a possibility.
- Fagan Finder’s URL Info. This online gadget is like the Swiss Army knife of site information, giving you one-page access to dozens of pertinent check-ups. But monitoring relevant search engine information like your backlinks, or the cached pages in a search engine are just the tip of the iceberg in Fagan Finder. For instance, you can use "URL Info" to check that your HTML code is validated, translate your page, and if you’re a blogger, discover where your site is mentioned in the blogosphere.
- Spannerwork’s Spider Simulator. Ever wondered what your site looks like to the search engine spiders that crawl the web, looking for information to include in their databases? Go to the Spider Simulator to see what information is seen by the spider and what it skips over. Spannerworks.com can also help you figure out how to troubleshoot content that seems like it should show up to a spider but doesn’t, with its HTTP viewer. In addition, they have a tool that will analyze your keyword density.
- GoRank.com’s Top Ten Comparison. If you’ve been banging your head against the wall in an attempt to figure out why you haven’t hit the top ten results in Google, GoRank.com has a page that can give you important clues to help you figure it out. One of my favorites, the Top Ten comparison report, will scrub the raw data of the top ranking results for a given keyword. In studying the results, you may find it easier to understand where your own optimization efforts are going wrong. Don’t forget to stop by Google for your API key as you’ll need it to create your free account.
- Search Guild's Keyword Difficulty Checker. This one’s an old favorite of mine. When you find what you may think is an ideal keyword, before you start tweaking your pages, it’s a good idea to run it through this tester. Using the Google API, it analyzes whether or not a given phrase will be worth your efforts. You’ll already have to be well-versed in how to find good keywords to plug into the tool, but once you have that nailed, it’s pretty reliable in telling you whether it’s worth your time to target that phrase. If you use flash on your site, check out the flash viewer on their utilities page as well.
