Web masters and website owners for years have been fighting for one simple thing – better ranking in search engine searches! The reason is simple and clearly understood. The better the ranking, the higher the traffic to the website and the popularity increases. The reason for the site is fulfilled and the return on investment increases. The process of getting better rankings is known as search engine optimization, or SEO. There are various search engine optimization methods and tools and with the development of technology, the tools are getting better and better considering the stringent requirements of popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. This article tries to give a brief overview of the various search engine optimization tools that become useful for webmasters and search engine optimization companies. The overview will contain a brief description of the tools together with their advantages and disadvantages, noting their areas of development.
TOOLS RELATED TO KEYWORDS:
Keyword Analyzer: Goran Nagy and Chris Lee co-developed these keyword research tools and with regular new updates, this software has developed quickly and performed well in the ever-changing landscape of the World Wide Web. Basically, based on Overture’s keyword research tool, it has the ability to analyze data pulled from WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. There are certain pros and cons of the Keyword Analyzer and they are:
Advantages:
o It has a wonderful digging tool.
o Able to import data from Keyword Discovery and WordTracker.
o Use terms related to Google.
o It is extremely search engine friendly.
o Right click add functionality.
o Additional complementary tools are provided.
Cons:
o It has minor interface flaws. Clicking on the menu creates a new tab automatically.
o Different keyword lists cannot be combined.
o Primarily uses Overture data which is not 100% accurate
Keyword Analyzer is best suited for PPC advertisers, AdSense publishers, niche miners, and to some extent SEO people.
McDar’s Keyword Analysis Tool:
McDar’s Keyword Analysis Tool has come to the forefront of search engine optimization as a whole new tool. It does not focus on pre-optimization analysis of keywords, but actually focuses on post-optimization analysis of keywords. In other words, it analyzes the keywords when the page has already been optimized! And guess what? You can study the competition for a particular keyword!
Once on-page optimization of a page for keywords or phrases is done and the optimized page is activated and searched for by Google spiders, you need to enter the following information into the McDar
Keyword Analysis Tool:
o Enter the URL of the page to optimize into McDar’s keyword analysis tool.
o Enter the keyword based on which the web page will be analyzed.
After the above two steps are completed, the McDar Keyword Analysis Tool analyzes the following, which can be thought of as the professionals of the tool:
o Number of pages listed in Google.
o Total number of backlinks available for that page in Google.
o Total number of backlinks available for that page on Yahoo.
o Page Rank using the ‘allinanchor’ (The keyword or phrase entered).
o The general ranking of pages of the website.
When the analysis is done, the results can be used for optimization based on an informed decision.
Cons:
The main drawback of the tool is that the tool looks at a small set of SEO factors!
WordZe tool:
Keywords and phrases are still one of the most important factors for a website to be optimized and rank better. The WordZe tool helps source some of the most impressive keywords on the market. WordZe does a study of the keywords and based on the reports, data trends and keyword variations, the performance of the keyword is judged. WordZe’s design is refreshing and provides a wide range of tools that are capable of providing powerful and reliable keywords.
Advantages:
o WordZe has a very easy to use interface.
o WordZe provides reliable and powerful keyword data. The word classification tool provides a unique data set.
o The functioning of WordZe is quite modern and fluid.
o WordZe charges monthly. The monthly membership fee is $35.
Cons:
o WordZe’s word classification search tool has a big limitation. It is too restrictive by nature.
Despite the restriction, WordZe is one of the most powerful tools on the market and users can be very satisfied with the overall performance.
DOMAIN RELATED TOOLS:
Domain Statistics Tool: As the name suggests, the domain stats tool helps webmasters to get all the information about the competitors website domain. The statistical data extracted by the domain statistics tool includes domain age, Dmoz listings, Yahoo WebRank, backlink count, Alexa traffic rank, number of pages indexed by various search engines like MSN, Yahoo, Google, etc. These results become very useful and help explain why some of the competitors are doing well in search engine searches and what things need to be done to make your website perform well.
Domain Age Tool: Domain age generally refers to two things. The age of the website in question and the time the domain has been registered. This is actually necessary to verify the longevity of the website and the authenticity as well. People will trust the old website more than the new ones. The Domain Age tool shows the approximate age of the website on the World Wide Web. This allows you to take a look at the early stages of the website and you can optimize your website accordingly.
The downside is that it can only indicate that the competing website is gaining an advantage in search engine results due to the age of the domain. However, this is good because you can come up with other SEO strategies and techniques to increase your page ranking.
Reciprocal Link Checker: Reciprocal Link Checker makes use of advanced techniques to check link status and create the reports in txt or html file. It is actually responsible for two things:
o Checking the popularity of the website and
o General visibility of the website.
The Reciprocal Link Checker’s responsibility is to watch the status of backlinks and manage the website’s inbound links. Reciprocal Link Checker manages the various reciprocal links on the website automatically and increases the page rank.
Advantages:
o It is a powerful utility to promote the positioning of the website page.
o Monitor and check the status of the backlinks.
o It has a highly interactive and easy to use graphical interface.
o Improves the quality of the link and also its popularity.
o It is profitable, reliable and fast.
Cons:
o Reciprocal Link Checker can take a hit in case of pay per click activity due to fraudulent clicks and thus increase the cost!
LINK RELATED TOOLS:
MajesticSEO: Majestic SEO is one of the most advanced backlink analysis services and allows comprehensive backlink reporting. The tool provides reports on the following:
o Domain Overview – Provides a Top Anchors report, a Top Referring Domains report, and a Home Page report.
o Provides a table showing the domains that link to the site.
o Check the links to the www and non-www versions for any website.
o Allows the display of source indicators for more specific reports.
o Provides the feature to export to CSV
There are many other features or advantages of the tool, but mentioning all of them is beyond the scope of this article.
There are certain disadvantages too. They can be summarized as:
o Must have some ‘online data sorting and filtering’ option. Although data can be exported to Excel and sorted, online sorting helps and makes life easier.
o Some of the data appears to be out of date.
These disadvantages aside, Majestic SEO is a very useful and comprehensive tool that can be useful for webmasters.
Link Collector: Link Harvester is one of the most innovative in its class. It helps you to further analyze the results than any other tool. Another added advantage is that it works faster than any other tool. The tool makes use of Yahoo! API and therefore users do not have to worry about violating search engines terms and conditions.
Advantages:
o Fast enough to find all sites that link to a web page or domain.
o Find out the number of indexed pages.
o Find out the total number of homepage links, inbound links and deep link ratio.
o Provides information about the IP address of block C.
o It’s free and fast.
o The tool is known to provide links to the source of WhoIs and the Wayback Machine next to each domain.
Cons:
o The tool lacks a page scraper feature to collect the link text and this is because any additional features make the tool slower.
o The tool uses a single engine for data binding.
Minuses aside, the tool on average is one of the best in its class.
Hub Finder: Hub Finder is another useful free tool for analyzing links for SEO purposes.
The Hub Finder comes with the following features or advantages:
o Capture the ranking of the page in Google or Yahoo.
o Allows to highlight each individual authority in the results and allows to see the (potential) links of the central pages.
o Allows CSV output of the result.
o Users can set the search depth.
o Allows comparison of backlinks on the top ten ranking sites.
o Provides a list of the total number of hub pages in the total number of crawled sites.
o Quickly discover the total number of thematic HubPages.
There is an obvious downside to the Hub Finder. The disadvantage is:
o The existence of scrapper websites in certain fields can clump the output of the Hub Finder.
There are many other advantages and some disadvantages to Hub Finder, but taking you through each of them is beyond the scope of this article.
Search engine optimization is not something very small and easy. It takes a lot of effort to find a good ranking on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). There are a plethora of tools available on the market. Some of them are free and some are commercial. The choice is up to you. Remember, it’s your site, it’s your investment!