Well, this post is more my favourite seo tools – or more the ones that help me do seo – the tools or services I actually use day-to-day that save me time. Note – I am a bit stuck in my old ways – I dont rely on too many tools but the ones I do I use constantly.
In sort-of-order:
Screaming Frog SEO Spider - I saw some awards thingy recently where Majestic SEO won best SEO tool. Screaming Frog was robbed. I don’t even think the two should have been in the same category. SEO Screaming Frog Spider saves you time and with the info it provides you can make a website rank higher – without doing any dirtly linkbuilding work. No brainer – best seo tool out there (godsend for Mac users!). SEO Powersuite has a similar tool bundled with it. If you’re not running tools like these (or even Xenu) then you’re probably not optimising a site properly. Hat tip to the crawling SEOMoz does…..Integrity For Mac and Website Auditor which comes in SEO Powersuite.
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Excel – I spend most of my time in Excel spreadsheets these days. Google Spreadsheets are cool too…. but with too many limitations for me to make it a daily tool. Excel lets you automate just about everything – and I do these days. There’s nothing more satisfying than taking 30 days work and automating it. You can manage entire sites with an excel spreadsheet – and if you’re not on some level, you’re missing out big time (Hat Tip to CSVpig).
Excel Tools For SEO
If you’re not running your own functions with Excel - Excel Tools For SEO is a great place to start. This is a fantastic toolset – once you start with this stuff you can’t live without it. Great for combining Adwords data with page specific data and looking for opportunities like under-optimised page titles etc. Tip – Get a Google Adwords API.
SEMRUsh (and Google Keyword Tool)
THe Google Keyword tool is still invaluable – even if it is inaccurate, steers you down transactional roads, and is not as useful as it once was. With API in hand – it’s the first place to look when doing SEO. But if I want a LOT of data quickly - I usually get it from SEMRush. Also – try out Ubersuggest for some quick Google autocomplete research.
Dropbox
No wonder Steve Jobs try to buy it. Dropbox is genius – having a folder you can EASILY share with everybody in work or between computers is essential for us these days. Drobbox is FREE and you can get more space by sharing links like these – Try Dropbox.
SEO Powersuite (LinkAssistant.com)
SEO Powersuite is definitely one of the best all in one desktop seo packages availabe for Mac and PC. Check your rankings, your competitors, backlinks and crawl your website. It’s a great tool for beginners. This is a also decent offer for SEO Powersuite*- 75% discount. I use this toolset to have a poke around but my favourite out of the tools is Rank Tracker which (comes on it’s own or with SEO Powersuite) to keep an eye on rankings. If you’ve been meaning to try out this toolset – nows your chance. Offer ends 23rd Dec 2011.
MAJESTIC SEO & LINK RESEARCH TOOLS
If you’re thinking I don’t like Majestic SEO, that’s the wrong impression I gave. I love Majestic SEO – it’s the first place I look when looking at the backlinks of a competing website. It’s been the BEST linkbuilding tool available for as long as I can remember – way before Yahoo Site Explorer was mothballed. Majestic SEO seems to be built into everything these days – but standalone it is still a brilliant link prospecting tool. I do LOVE Link Research Tools from Cemper though – much better for reporting back to clients for instance. Hat tip to Open Site Explorer especially for beginners to seo.
Hidemyass- If you are using Rank Tracker or any other rank tracker software (I would also recommend Advanced Web Ranking) you’ll need a VPN/Proxy. This thing is so easy even I got it working. You can set up one computer running queries and rotating proxies via hidemyass every few minutes and save the results to a dropbox folder and look at it when necessary from another machine. Also good for visiting sites you don’t want tracking you, or incognito scraping (hat tip to Scrapebox BTW).
I don’t use it for soul destroying nefarious purposes like spamming or anything like that but lots probably do.
Clicky - Google Analytics is my usual analytics tool and the only tool for checking lots of data – but I find I log into my Clicky account more than I do GA these days – if all I want is a quick and dirty analysis of a page or keyword. Brilliant tool. See my review of Clicky.
Chrome Extensions - I don’t really like third-party tool bars – but I do have the odd plugin installed. Chrome Notepad is a free tool for Chrome browser – ideal for taking quick notes – and FREE. I also have SEO For Chrome installed – good for a quick glance at things and it highlights nofollow links on the fly which I find useful.
SEObook, SEOmoz & Raven have good online offerings these days – some more aimed at reporting to clients. While I do have accounts for all, neither is something I visit daily. I have found tools from these sites tools to be VERY useful on the ODD occasion though – and I know some people swear by them. I suppose it depends on what you’re employed to do, which should influence which tools you invest in.
Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster tools can provide useful insight to your site, but I only really look into these when I am digging deep, or looking for links I am not getting the benefit from.
NOTE – I’ve used affiliate links for some of the tools. If I really like something I usually get an affiliate account.
What’s your favourite SEO tools you would recommend for 2012?
SEO Software Survey 2011 infographic By Skyrocket SEO - I didn’t take part but it’s a good info graphic.That’s most of my favourite seo tools. I might do communication tools and marketing insight tools next…..
SEO Tools
TweetA review of select seo tools useful for search engine optimization purposes. Featured tool set include: keyword research, traffic, link analysis and search engine ranking tools. Most of the programs or software featured at Hobo offer free trial periods or discounts.
Hobo Best SEO Tools of 2011
Shaun Anderson: in Google SEO. (4 Comments)
Google Suggest Tool For Keyword Research
Shaun Anderson: in Google SEO.
I’ve mentioned before that Google Suggest - the Google search feature that auto suggests searches as you type – is a great tool for keyword research – and the fact that it is (sometimes) updated same day, makes it all the more valuable.
This 100% free tool – Übersuggest - has been a about for a while, now – but it is a great way to use Google Suggest functionality to quickly see what people – that day – are typing in around a key word or key phrase.
Here’s a typical result set for the search …. ‘google suggest‘:
From web search
google suggest
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
SEO Powersuite Discount – 63% OFF
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools. (2 Comments)
One of the seo tools I use regularly is SEO Powersuite* and they have a great discount on at the moment:
Originally SEO PowerSuite Professional costs $399…. but today you can get the pack for as little as $149 – that’s 63% off the original price!
and
Any order is completely risk-free: you are 100% safe with our unconditional 30-day money-back guarantee.
Rank Tracker (bundled in the suite) is probably worth that on it’s own.
Note:
The offer will work until the first 2000 copies are sold, but no longer than August 2nd. So if you’re lucky, for about a week only, you can get the all-round toolkit for less than 40% of its price! The door shuts on August the 2nd or even earlier, so don’t miss your chance
If you are thinking of trying out this seo software – now’s a good time.
*affiliate links
How To Check Your Rankings In Search Engines
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools. (10 Comments)
The most reliable mac/pc tools I’ve found are Rank Tracker & Advanced Web Ranking. Both tools are pretty cheap and they do what they say on the tin. Both have ‘search engine friendly’ rank checking modes…..Rank Tracker is simpler to use in my opinion.
But if you are going to use tools like these to check your rankings, then you’ll most definately need a tool like HIDEMYASS to protect your privacy while you check your rankings – as most search engines don’t really like automated bots like these scraping their content (the irony). Eventually, your IP will trip the limit and search engines will block that IP with Captchas. Which is when HIDEMYASS changes your IP. Where possible, it’s always best to treat the search engines nice, anyway….
The ideal setup is probably to have a ‘workhorse’ computer with AWR or Rank Checker scheduled to check rankings at the same time every day – with HIDEMYASS installed and set to randomly change your IP location every few minutes between servers that are geographically local to you.
I save my rank reports to free web storage website DROP BOX so all my reports are accessible from all my machines.
One machine to run the reports. Many machines to view them.
Don’t get to fixated on all of your rankings – some terms and results pages are bound to jump all over the place – Google is designed that way! And don’t just try to rank for just a few terms. It’s much better to rank for lots of different – and related – terms than have a business based on one keyword at the top of what’s bound to be a competitive term…. so that means just adding lots of related content and getting some links to it.
PS – Affiliate links used in this post.
I reviewed Rank Checker & Advanced Web Ranking previously….
Link Research Tools from Cemper – Highly Recommended SEO Tools
Shaun Anderson: in Google SEO. (4 Comments)
I’ve been playing about with the seo tools from CEMPER, Link Research Tools, for a few months now, and they are amongst the very best link research tools I’ve ever used. In fact, having these tools running in the background is a bit like having an extra member of staff. That’s praise indeed, if you know what I’ve said in the past about a lot of seo tools out there, also, that there’s no affiliate links in this post.
So. These tools are good.
If you are into fancy charts, they are there. If you just want the data for export, you can do that too. I usually just want the data for my own purposes – and the Backlink Profiler Tool is probably my favourite. The Common Backlinks Tool is pretty useful too. I should say the tools are REALLY easy to use as well. Link Research Tools connects with the other well-known seo tools on the market so you can grab a lot of data for lots of pages. The more data, the better.
Pricing is pretty reasonable too. My only real gripe with the tools is I’d like to be able to run more of the tools FASTER – but I think this limit is by design at the moment. I found myself wanting to set up campaigns and run multiple tools with fewer clicks – but I think that ‘speed limit’ is in place by design too. Still, I can live with that.
I use the competitive link analysis provided by tools like these:
- to look for any obvious short cuts to take advantage of – it’s always nice to impress new clients immediately, and get them involved (I should do this more, in fact)
- to see which competitors are really spamming it up and getting away with it
- for ideas about posts for a client site that attracts links
- to see which newsworthy items pick up links from the press for instance
- to identify when the site pushes for traffic via linkbuilding
- to pick out the links from quality, respected sites that I might have problems getting – for discussion with client’s marketing department
- to get an idea the type of sites that will link to a competitor
- to look at the soup of links that a no1, no2 and no3 site especially can get away with and still rank top in Google
- to LEARN how other sites have got where they are.
- to learn the idea i might not have thought of
- to learn a bit about the client’s industry and competitors
- to tell clients the task at hand (yesterday I noticed a competitor of my clients had links from The Wall ST Journal, NYTImes etc etc – it helped me point out to the client his main competior was REMARKABLE, actively engaged in sucessful online marketing ALREADY – a player. Another client noticed from my Competitive Link Analysis once a PR7 that linked to his competitor, was actually a site his GOOD FRIEND OWNED. I wonder what will happen to that link…
Often, I use competitor backlink analysis to gather historic and realtime data to recommend to a client or show them how they SHOULD be marketing their business to achieve online popularity, while I set about making them popular online.
I will point out while these seo tools are GREAT, it’s how you interpret the data, and how you go about making this data relevant to your business, that will see you succeed in your own link building efforts. I don’t agree with every measurement made by these tools, or with every result they provide. You don’t need the same links as your competitors to rank, remember.
If you are a creative marketer, you don’t need any tools to be a ‘link builder’ – I hate that term.
But…. if you want to see how the other guys are doing it, have an easy job where all you need to do is collect the data, or are looking for a bit of backlink-inspiration, or needing a backlink profile you can be proud of – Link Research Tools are just about as good as it gets.
A Pop Up Window Sucks But Doubles Conversion Rates
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools. (3 Comments)
Pop ups suck, everybody seems to agree. I carried out an experiment to see if pop ups work on this site to convert more visitors to subscribers.
I used this wordpress pop-up plugin (aff) on my blog, and I actually tested it out a few months ago when I didn’t blog for a few months and traffic was very stable.
Results:
Testing Pop Up Windows Results
Pop Up Window Total % Change
WK1 On Wk2 Off Mon 46 20 173% Tue 48 23 109% Wed 41 15 173% Thu 48 23 109% Fri 52 17 206% That’s a fair increase in email subscribers accross the board in this small experiment on this site. Using a pop up does seem to have an immediate impact.
I have since tested it on and off for a few months and the results from the small test above have been repeated over and over.
I’ve tested different layouts and different calls to actions without pop-ups, and they work too, to some degree, but they typically take a bit longer to deploy than activating a plugin.
I don’t really like pop-ups as they have been an impediment to web accessibility but it’s stupid to dismiss out-of-hand any technique that works. I’ve also not found a client who, if they had that kind of result, would choose accessibility over sign-ups.
I don’t really use the pop up on days I post on the blog, as in other tests, it really seemed to kill how many people share a post in social media circles.
You can get this wordpress pop-up plugin here.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider – Highly Recommended SEO Tool (Review)
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools. (1 Comment)
I had heard about Screaming Frog SEO Spider a few times over the last few months. It’s a tool for seo and web developers that spiders a site in a similar manner to any search engine spider. As i have been testing out some of the latest seo tools out there, I asked Dan for a copy to review and he kindly agreed.
Screaming Frog is a GREAT tool to audit your website from a technical point of view, and can quickly collect a lot of the important information you need for examination purposes.
As usual, it’s available for PC and Mac. As a Mac user, I’m often confronted with software that slows my mac down a little, so it was a pleasure to see this thing run in the background in a quiet, efficient manner.
Run the spider and it will grab information on your pages, links, page titles, redirects, 404s, header tags, status codes, attribute lengths, anchor text, alt text and numbers of internal backlinks, numbers of external links on each page – and some juicy information for seo like click depth, canonical tags or meta-refresh detection, and more. You can also output this report to CSV to have a closer look at.
As the title says – highly recommended for seo and web designers everywhere. I ran this tool on a small site and on a site with more than 10,000 urls, and it worked no problems. You can get a free version too to test it out.
Run the spider and read up the general advice laid down in our on page seo topic page on this site.
There’s no affiliate links in this post by the way.
Rank Tracker Software Review – Recommended
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools.
As you may know I purchased a copy of SEO Powersuite (AFF*) to have a play about with and for review purposes, and I like it. I reviewed Website Auditor last week, which is bundled with Rank Tracker (AFF*) in SEO Powersuite, and I like that too.
Rank Tracker is pretty simple to set up, and as accurate as it can be, when checking your websites search engine rankings for multiple keywords, on multiple engines.
Use:
- pick a website
- pick your search engines you want to monitor, and
- tell it which keywords you want to track
- find out the number of searches and competition for a particular keyword or phrase
- schedule it to check for keywords at any set time of the day
- schedule reports to print or export to web, pdf or csv etc
It can also check the competition for the keyterms and track your competition if you are interested in that.
You can schedule when it checks your rankings, and you can schedule reports to publish when you want, too.
It tracks everything about your keyword so you can see it’s performance over time. You can get a FREE TRIAL DOWNLOAD (Zip File!) to play about with it too.
It looks ideal for small businesses to track rankings if you prefer a piece of software you run on your pc or mac rather than a hosted solution.
•Affiliate Links
Website Auditor Software: Review (Recommended)
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools. (2 Comments)
Sometime ago I paid for a copy of Website Auditor (Aff*) to have a play about with and I like it.
You can download a free version to trial (ZIP FILE (Aff*)) before you part with any cash, too.
Basically it’s a tool for spidering, checking and evaluating the links and pages on your website. It’s ideal for seo and web developers alike who are tasked with maintaining a website.
I like it to get an idea of the structure of a site – to see how many pages have the least/most links, which pages have external links and finding broken links. it can do a lot more, though.
It’s quite powerful, and can certainly help you audit a site – it’s purpose.
WebSite Auditor will help you easily find and fix the following problems:
- Broken links
- HTML code errors
- Duplicate content
- 404 and other server response code errors
- Not indexed webpages
- Missing or too long titles and meta description
I found Website Auditor pretty easy to get to grip with, and it does have a few powerful features:
- Site architecture and internal linking analysis
- Most linked-to and linked-from webpages
- Google PageRank distribution across all pages
- Link Value that each webpage can pass per link
- When each page was indexed and cached in major search engines
- Not indexed webpages
- Complete website SEO health check
- Domain’s and each webpage’s performance in search engines and social media sites
- Keyword density and prominence in each page element on your site and among top 10 competitors
- Most popular keywords and keyphrases used by your site and top 10 competing sites
It has a cool REPORTS feature that will even let you print a client friendly report if you need it.
I really like this tool. The only downside for me is the actual reporting function. NOT the reporting function itself – that is cool, more the metrics it focuses on.
It suffers from the same shortcomings a lot of seo tools suffer from – reporting focuses on a few metrics and scores them in a way I don’t think is as valuable as it could be to the overall seo process. But then again, effective seo is not as machine-friendly as some seo software companies would hope it to be.
REPORTS formats are editable though so i will remove the factors I wouldn’t waste time on (keyword density, keyword meta tags etc).
All in all a good seo tool for auditing your website structure, I’ll be using it for a while, and test it out more, I think. Available for Apple Mac and PC.
PS – A review of Rank Tracker coming soon too – that’s good as well. You get that with this software as part of the SEO Powersuite (Aff*), which Website Auditor (Aff*) is also bundled with.
Other Marketing Software Reviews by Hobo:
*Affiliate links are clearly labelled (AF) – If you were to purchase a product using these links, we would get a small percentage of the sale. WE HAVE NO RELATIONSHIP WITH THE VENDOR. Affiliate link use is pretty simple on the Hobo blog – if we spend time reviewing a product, we may use aff links in the review post.
Does Google Give You Any Tools To Figure Out How it Works?
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools. (1 Comment)
Q: So Matt, how does Google actually work?
A) “We’re sorry… … but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now. We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.”
Probably not.
Do you spend your time looking at the tools Google provide?
I don’t really spend that much time at all.
I sometimes think Google are trying to get us to forget the way it works by giving all these other things to think about.
I don’t think anybody from Google actually lies to us though – they don’t need to – for instance, their SEO Guide for Beginners is a solid aid to building a good site (without actually telling you anything about getting top rankings).
Lets not forget they give us a list of stuff that can screw with Google’s ranking algo – their guidelines.
Obviously, screw about to much and you can kiss your site farewell.
I just think you have got to read between the lines.
*Image Credit – Unknown
Tip – How To Check Google Rankings In Other Countries
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools. (5 Comments)
The Ad Preview tool from Google also shows organic search results and how they look to users around the world. You can see just how rankings differ from country to country and place to place – worth considering when researching keywords. Geolocation and personalisation really mixes Google rankings up too.
https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool
I forgot all about this tool until I recently saw it mentioned by AlyssaS on Webmasterworld I thought it might be useful for some.
*Hat tip to Paul at WF franchise opportunities for the question which gave me an idea for an easy post
If you have a question that I can answer easy lol, contact us and you might win a mention on our popular newsletter
UPDATED Jan 2012 – WP-Plugin to Track Googlebot & Bingbot Crawls and Keywords
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools.
UPDATED Jan 2012
Marty just updated our simple WordPress plugin which you can install on self-hosted WordPress blogs. It nows also tracks the crawling activity of BingBot, as well as GoogleBot, and it will also tell you which keywords were used to find your site.
We tested it with the most recent version of WordPress – and it’s designed to alert you when Google finds a new site you’ve launched – and to track when Google (and Bing) visits the rest of your pages.
100% FREE Hobo WP Bot Tracker for WP
You don’t even need to subscribe – and it’s a BETA – if it cuts the mustard we’ll add it to WordPress.com – Note – this plugin is NOT designed to work with Wp Super Cache.
Hobo Googlebot Tracker Screenshots
You can see which pages are being crawled, and export them to a csv if you want.
It should do what it says on the tin. It will log when Google visits your site, and show you which pages Googlebot is crawling. This plugin will also (if selected) email you when Google finds your blog or.
To Install
- Download the plugin direct
- Go to PLUGINS > ADD NEW > UPLOAD and upload and ACTIVATE the plugin
- Go to HOBO GOOGLEBOT in SETTINGS, and configure your OPTIONS
Disclaimer – Please Read
This simple plugin is free to do with what you want. It is easy to install and activate, but check out the options page to ensure it is configured properly. For instance, you may want to deactivate the credit link if you don’t want to credit us with a link back to this plugin. When you uninstall this plugin, it will wipe the data it has accrued from the database. We have no plans to port this to Joomla or Drupal as folk asked.
As with all free plugins, use at your own risk – and backup everything before using it. We accept no responsibility if something goes wrong. It works on all the sites we tested it on. It’s released as a beta, so we expect a few wrinkles, and any feedback is very welcome.
HOPE YOU FIND IT USEFUL
We’ll probably upgrade it in a short while with more search engine crawlers etc and you can thank Richard of this payroll services company for asking how to easily track these visits in WP.
Analyse This – Most SEO Tools Are $h*t
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools. (76 Comments)
Most seo tools are crap and a waste of your time. Even the new ones. Especially most of the PAID ones. There… I said it.
There’s a big trend in the seo community to sell tools to seo newbies, but these tools won’t help you rank better if you just aren’t willing to think creatively.
- Competitor Backlink tools – they can give you ideas where and how to get links but frankly, you don’t need the same links as your competitors, you just need, well, credible links from websites you could see linking to your site, or article and link directories
- Keyword density tools – keyword density is not something you should be focusing on at all if you are writing your articles after doing some basic keyword research
- Page relevance tools – whatever they might key off of, it’s probably not what Google is. It’s incredibly important to create a semantic and contextually relevant page but you just need a keyword tool (again, probably pretty innacurate at least when it comes to the numbers)
- Search engine webmaster tools – I use them for identifying if a search engine has any difficulty accessing particular content on a site, but that is about all
The tools I use are Majestic SEO (for historic link reports at the beginning of a project), SEM Rush for keyword research, Advanced Web Ranking for checking rankings on a few sites, Clicky for real time website stats, Google Analytics for quick traffic analysis. I also use a couple of different tools for spidering a site and checking syntax I will blog about later. Oh, and Google cache…. (thanks Sarah
)
That’s about it. If there was a killer tool, I would probably be using it.
Of course, some seo folks entire jobs are analysing and auditing sites and they might disagree with me on this, but then my job is only to change rankings for clients in search engines – and after many years in this industry, I still prefer to use my brain and give my self time to analyse live search engine results pages.
Accessible, relevant content and links from trusted sites or brands (and low quality links still work you know) are what you need to get more visitors from Google. If every seo tool went out of business tomorrow, I wouldn’t care and you shouldn’t either. Analysis paralysis is pretty common, too, so watch out.
You can listen to me or not, but I wouldn’t spend too much time or too much money on seo tools – I’d learn how to blog, learn how to make a page relevant, think about why a REAL site SHOULD link to you, work out a way to get lower quality links without too much work and without buying links (which is against Google’s TOS) if you can.
What I am going to do after this post? I have a new client. I am going to contact 50 PR 6-8 websites and give them a time tested, win-win scenario if they link to the client site (and I don’t mean “hey linking to this site will improve YOUR ranks”). In fact Google uses this exact same promotional exercise.
While those links are helping the client site rank better, I might waste some time playing with some seo tools….. Of course, feel free to disagree with me in the comments I might even publish some and drop a link to your favourite seo tools lol
Bing SEO Compare Bing + Google Rankings
Shaun Anderson: in Bing SEO. (18 Comments)
With the merger of Yahoo & Bing as far as search results are concerned (Bing will provide Yahoo with it’s search results in futue), I think it’s time I took Bing SEO more seriously. Over the next few months I’m going to examine the differences and similarities of the two primary search engines, Google and Bing, with a focus on Bing SEO.
So it’s a farewell to ranking no1 on Yahoo with exactly the type of site Google hates…. and hello to Bing (the search engine owned by Microsoft).
- Compare Bing & Google Rankings - This tool is pretty cool for a start to check the differences between Google and Bing rankings – http://www.bing-vs-google.com/
- I joined the Bing community too – http://www.bing.com/community/
NB – In the US, the change has already happened, and Bing provides Yahoo with results. The switchover has not yet happened in the UK to my knowledge.
*I will share my thoughts in the next few months…..
Find Broken Links On Your Site (Free Tool For Mac SEO + Web Designers)
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools. (5 Comments)
Broken links are a pain in the backside – for one broken links are a waste of link strength, not to mention what a bad user experience they are. Integrity for Mac users is a cool little tool.
Unless you enjoy clicking every single link on your site followed by the back button, then you’ll need to use a website crawler like Integrity!
This is a free desktop tool for mac seo and website designers that spiders your website and picks out broken links. It will also extract URLs from a website to a CSV.
It’s perfect for checking a small site once complete for any broken links or missing images without having to dig through it manually.
4/5 Stars
Jun 22, 2010 by Shaun Anderson
★★★★
Great little FREE tool to check for broken links, and quite a bit more, for mac users. I would have given this a 5 but it seemed to hang on a few much larger sites. It ran very quickly though on my Mac Book Pro – you can’t complain at the price.
Note – Integrtity is Donationware.
Apparently it can generate an XML sitemap suitable for submission to Google too, and check a site for unique page titles. Apart from this, for seo, you can see at a glance links with 301 redirects, or canonical issues, or even old links to dev servers etc.
Another great addition is the ability to actually see at a glance your most linked to pages and how many links EXACTLY they have, and from where.
Not bad at all. A no brainer especially for Apple Mac designers.
If you are a PC user check out an alternative: Xenu Link Sleuth.
Other SEO Tools
Some other seo tools recently reviewed by me;
Recommended: Affiliate Link Cloaker Plugin MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate
Shaun Anderson: in Affiliate SEO.
Did you know a lot of professional seo and affiliate seo hide – or cloak – affiliate links, especially on new sites, with a link cloaker plugin? The benefits of cloaking affiliate links in this way can range from protecting against click fraud to potentially protecting your search engine rankings. Lets face it, you do not want to be classed as an affiliate site by Google.
A few folk have asked me what program I use to mask affiliate links when I promote software, plugins or services.
I use MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plugin (<<<< – this is what a cloaked affiliate link looks like BTW) for WordPress on this Hobo site. I have found I need a very granular level of control with this sort of linking, and this wp plugin does all I need it to do.
MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliateis perfect for adding affiliate links to posts, tracking the number of clicks each link gets, and automatically converting keywords in existing posts on your site into commission generating affiliate keywords. It’s the best link cloaker plugin for WordPress I have played with recently.
A Hobo SEO Tools Review = Affiliate Links in this post.
Recommended: SEM Rush UK (SEO Tool Review/Keyword Research)
Shaun Anderson: in Keyword Research.
I must say I am enjoying using SEM RUSH (Aff), a keyword research tool for, well, professional keyword snoopers. I had previously steered clear of most of these types of seo tools as I had traditionally found them, while useful, very U.S. centric.
SEM Rush - A Quick Review
My interest was renewed when I was told about the new SEMRush UK keyword database (as I am UK based obviously):
Currently indexing top 20 results on 6 million keywords across more than 6,4 million domains. 47768 users. Last update: 29 of May 2010
Well – I like it. This tool lets you see:
- which keywords seem to be popular in your niche,
- related keywords, phrases and terms you might consider weaving into your content and linkbuilding strategies
- gives you an idea (when you aggregate the data) which natural listings in Google are providing competitors unpaid traffic
- lists top ranking sites competing for those keywords
- shows you on average how much a click on this keyword is worth in Google Adwords (although it would be nice to see that in Sterling (£) rather than dollars
- illustrates how competitive this term is (in Adwords at least, by number of competition)
- how many (on average) times the keyword or phrase is typed into the UK version of Google
- you can get a cool firefox plugin as well and export research data to usual formats
- …and more
You can really do some neat stuff if you are a keyword monkey. SEM rush has databases for US, UK, Spain, Germany, France & Spain markets if you need to international.
4/5 Stars
Jun 02, 2010 by Shaun Anderson
★★★★
Well – it’s cool – and simple to use (especially if you have REAL data to correlate, aggregate and compare it, with like a few number ones in search engines).
I’m using it at the moment (or I would hesitate to actually blog about it) so here’s the aff link again – there’s a FREE ACCOUNT OPTION with limited features to give you a feel what it’s all about – Click here to find out more about SEM Rush.
I’ll be sharing more keyword research and seo tools shortly, and will review tools if asked. Note – if I don’t like them, I probably won’t blog about the tool (less it is a scam or total crap and then I just might).
If you are interested in keyword research – you might want to check out our group discussion on SEO Keyword Density.
Internal Pagerank Check Tool & URL Extractor – FREE SEO Tools
Shaun Anderson: in Google Pagerank Update. (2 Comments)
I don’t really try to manipulate Google PR that much – I think Google kicks back too much these days in the short term at any rate – but I do like to see which pages:
- get no visitors
- are not linked to very much
- are crawled less often or
- have no visible toolbar pagerank
- or can’t rank for their titles
… because then I can ask – should these pages be better optimised, and linked to more, combined or just removed from the site altogether, if totally irrelevant?
Recently I wanted to see at-a-glance the internal Pagerank of each page of a website, and it took me a while to actually find an internal PR checker that worked (Google has limits on how many pages you can check at once so most internal pr tools just don’t work anymore).
First you’ll need to grab a list of all your URLS of your site, and this little tool makes that easy – http://www.siteopsys.com/website-url-list-extractor.tool
If you want to see which pages of your site has Pagerank, this tool will show you – http://www.siteopsys.com/bulk-pr-checker.tool. It’s pretty cool and both tools are (for the moment) FREE.
The internal pagerank checker was very accurate in one sweep, and not that accurate in another – you might want to play about with it.
It only took a few minutes to get the Pagerank of a few hundred URLS I submitted.
Project Details: URL *******
Tool Name: Bulk Pagerank Checker
Project Name: Unassigned
No of URLs Queried: 684
Time Initiated: Thu May 06 00:35:30 IST 2010
Time Completed: Thu May 06 00:46:25 IST 2010
Total Time Taken: 655 Seconds
Credits Used: 10 (You can get 100 FREE credits if you register)Up to 10 URLs – Free
11 to 50 URLs – 2 Credits
51 to 100 URLs – 4 Credits
101 to 250 URLs – 6 Credits
251 to 500 URLs – 8 Credits
501 to 1000 URLs – 10 CreditsNOTE – We’re talking Google Toolbar PR – the only clue to a web pages REAL PR we have. I think a page only needs a TINY amount of Pagerank to get into Google’s results, and RANKING is all down to a whole other set of criteria – you probably only need a lot of Pagerank if you have a LOT of pages.
Generally speaking, if you don’t link to a page via internal links very much, you are basically telling Google the page is not that important. If it’s not that important to you, Google won’t consider it that important to it either (if nobody else has bothered linking to the page – you are stuffed).
So, linking within your website from page-to-page, you should link to the pages you value most often – as you can’t just rely on links from external sites, which are harder to get (obviously) than internal links.
What you’ll probably find though, is Google does a good job of working out fairly useless pages, and slipping them into what used to be called supplemental results (a sort of back up set of results for obscure queries).
You could of course use Google Webmaster tools to see which pages are starved of internal links – that will give you an idea of your weaker pages, too, but doesn’t take into account links from external pages that introduce Pagerank to your site.
The more I think about internal links and Pagerank I think it comes down to %s rather than straight numbers – ie, which pages have the higher % of internal links – those are the most important pages on your site. Effectively, just about every site will have a % of pages that Google doesn’t need or want, so it’s probably not worth worrying about most pages without Toolbar PR too much.
And of course, just because a page has no visible Toolbar pagerank – doesn’t mean it’s not got any REAL pagerank.
Anyway, some might find these tools of use. AT LEAST THESE INTERNAL PR CHECKER TOOLS WORK.
5 Advanced SEO Tools Worth Paying For
Ken Lyons: in Guest Blogging. (27 Comments)
Every SEO knows that they if they want a powerful, advanced SEO tool, they’ll need to pony up some cash for it.
Now, there are a number of free SEO tools out there that are very good, but they have limited capabilities, because they’re free.
So if you’re into keyword research, or looking to evaluate potential link prospects or perform competitor analysis at a higher level, you’re going to have to bite the bullet, open your wallet and pay for premium tools.
Trouble is, it’s hard to know which SEO tools are really worth the money.
With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of 5 of the most advanced SEO tools I use in my daily SEO activities – OK, I work for the team behind one of them. These tools, though, are invaluable to my SEO efforts
Rank Tracking
I use Link Assistant’s Rank Tracker to monitor SERP listings for my clients. Now, there are a lot of keyword rank checkers on the market, but in my experience Rank Tracker stands head and shoulders above the rest. I prefer Rank Tracker because it has everything I’m looking for in a rank checking tool: speed, accuracy, ease of use and slick reporting tools.
Some of the features I love in Rank Tracker are:
- Limitless keyword tracking: you can track rankings in over 590 search engines with no keyword or domain limits
- Auto-pilot tracking: set the tracking tool once and run rank checks automatically for set dates and time
- Historical rank tracking: every time you check your rankings, Rank Tracker charts the all ranking changes for each individual keyword and your site’s overall SERP visibility
Cost: $99 for Rank Tracker software
NOTE: Link Assistant also offers a host of other tools that I’ve heard great things about but haven’t had time to test drive. But going by the quality of Rank Tracker, I’m sure these other tools are just as effective.
Competitor Research
When I’m digging up competitive intelligence for a new client or even a new keyword vertical I want to target, I always pop open the SEO Book Competitive Research Tool. For the record, the SEO Book Competitive Research Tool is powered by SEM Rush. But I’m advocating using the tool through SEO Book because, as an SEO Book member, you get access to a slew of other great advanced SEO tools and SEO training as well.
With the Competitive Research Tool, you can conduct site-wide or page specific analysis to “spy†on your competitors and discover:
- Keyword Metrics: Which keywords are competitor sites or a their individual pages ranking for
- Traffic Value: What’s the percentage of traffic that a particular keyword drives to a competitor’s website
- Related Keyword Values: What are the highest traffic and most valuable keywords related to your own target terms
For example, I’m working with a new client who owns a bridal boutique. First thing I did was to run a quick analysis on a competitor website I identified to see which keywords are driving the most traffic.
What’s interesting here is that none of the other keyword competition tools I tried identified the keyword “wedding favours†(UK spelling) as a high value keyword. Many didn’t even return the UK spelling at all. But using the Competitive Research Tool, I’ve learned it’s this site’s top traffic-driving keyword and one I should target.
Cost: $300 per month, which includes access to advanced SEO tools, a great forum community and SEO educational guides.
Link Management, Link Marketing
I’ve demoed numerous link management tools and Buzzstream is far and away the link management software on the market. Buzzstream provides a comprehensive suite of tools for link tracking, monitoring link relationships and for collecting link building intelligence.
Buzzstream also makes link building a whole lot easier with their Buzzmarker feature. This tool automates the process of researching and screening link prospects by scanning an entire website for key metrics, such as:
- Toolbar Page Rank
- Domain age
- Number of inbound links
It also grabs all available contact information, from email addresses, to WHOIS info, to Twitter and Linkedin profiles.
Once you’ve reached out to a prospective link partner, Buzzstream records all your outreach touches with a prospect (be it on email or Twitter) and tracks activity on the prospect’s site to see if a link has been added to your site.
Cost: Buzzstream for link management starts as low as $29 per month for a “Solo Package.†Buzzstream offers a social media monitoring tool too, which is excellent and provides daily link and brand citation alerts.
Link Analysis
Every day, there’s another, new competitive link analysis tool coming on the market. But for my money, Majestic SEO is still the king of backlink intelligence. One of the primary reasons Majestic SEO is #1 is because it boasts the largest link data index in the world. To me, this differentiating feature is critical because if you want to outrank your competitors through link building, you need access to the best, freshest and most comprehensive link intelligence data on the Web. The recent upgrade of the Backlink History Tool lets you chart the historical link discovery patterns of competitor sites to your own.
Majestic SEO is also a great tool to monitor your own site’s link profile. Once you verify site ownership, you can obtain detailed reports on your sites:
- Proprietary backlink data
- Anchor text distribution
- Historical link acquisition data
- Top referring domains
Plus, the tool offers a “daily update†feature that provides a daily journal of new inbound links. What’s more, Majestic SEO captures data on deleted links and link redirects, so you can investigate any drop in SERP position or traffic activity if you feel it’s link-related.
Cost: A monthly subscription to Majestic SEO starts at just £ 9.99, which gives you up to ten standard backlink reports and five advanced reports to analyze hundreds of thousands of links.
Keyord Research & Content Authoring
This one’s mine
· Keyword Research: generate keyword suggestions that are pulled from a deep database of search engine queries
· Personalized Keyword Suggestions: mine your own site data to discover relevant, proven keyword opportunities that people have used to find your site
· Keyword Analytics: instead of guesstimates based on popularity, WordStream for SEO gives you accurate visit and goal data for your keywords on a continuous basis
· Keyword Organization: with sophisticated grouping and organization capabilities, you can segment keyword lists and discover new content opportunities
Another fantastic feature in WordStream for SEO is the Firefox Plugin for blogging, which connects your keyword research with your content creation efforts.
The WordStream for SEO Firefox Plugin works alongside content management platforms (such as WordPress, Blogger and Drupal) to help you generate better, more focused, search engine ready blog posts, product pages and sales copy.
The plugin also keeps a running count of each keyword phrase you use as you type, working to keep your writing “on message†after the initial research stage. WordStream for SEO is also fantastic for content topic discovery. It taps into your site’s historical search query data so you can get fresh content ideas based on proven keywords.
Cost: The WordStream for SEO suite of keyword research and content authoring tools starts at just $49 per month.
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Thanks for the guest post, Ken!
Just about every day I get asked which tools do I use, so over the next couple of weeks I aim to share the best ones (like my recent Clicky real time web traffic stats review).
I’ll be reviewing a few (if not all the tools above in more depth later in the month, and a few others).
Any questions, or indeed tools you like, feel free to share in the comments
PS – Disclosure – This is a guest post, no affiliates, no paid links.
If you develop seo or web dev tools and feel left out, do drop me a line about a guest post, like this useful how-to from Ken which shows interested folks in my feed what’s available out there.
Recommendation – Clicky Review Get FREE Real Time Web Stats Software
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools.
When I find a simple tool I like I usually stick with it forever. But with Hittail totally whacked the last 2 weeks, i was forced to look elsewhere for my real time traffic stats. I am so glad I did.
I’m amazed at the simple things Clicky does so effortlessly. The control panel seems so much more intuitive than for instance Google Analytics. Instantly accessible.
I tried a few real time web stats analytics packages out (I like software with a free trial) and I must say, Clicky is brilliant.
- See who is on your site AT THAT VERY MOMENT
- See where traffic is coming from AND track outbound visitors too
- See your valuable incoming links in action
- See a MORE ACCURATE bounce rate for your pages
- Too much good stuff to mention
…and best of all, Clicky might very well be FREE if you don’t have more than 3,000 page impressions a day – ideal for small businesses.
They even give you an easy affiliate link to promote the software if you like it – which I very much do (so I am using that affiliate link).
Telling you. Try Clicky PRO out FREE. Excellent analytics, and easy to install too.
Thanks, Iain
DIY SEO Software For Small Business | Free Trial At DIYSEO.com
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools.
You get a free trial for 7 days of this software at www.diyseo.com.
I was asked to beta-test DIYSEO, the new seo software solution from Patrick Gavin (who is well known in the industry) designed specifically for those small business operations new to seo, and with a tiny budget.
So I did.
I quite liked it (even though I sent Patrick a long email about how it might develop).
I think it’s a good V1 of software with potential which I expect to see develop into something with might be really useful to some small business owners out there who don’t have a clue about the BASICS of SEO and too lazy to learn it all.
www.diyseo.com is certainly no substitute for having an experienced SEO managing your organic seo campaign. It’s not meant to be a replacement either, but software like this, that has a nifty little update email system which reminds you what you need to do, might very well sit nicely with those who might not be as comfortable with, for instance, Aaron Wall’s more advanced seo training or the SEO Dojo, or from a more geeky book like our free seo ebook, up to the heavy duty ‘Art Of SEO’ book, for instance – and it’s no replacement either for powerful seo tools like Raven SEO Tools but I don’t think it’s meant to be.
It’s designed for small businesses to get you started. You get a free trial for 7 days at www.diyseo.com.
It costs buttons to (effectively) organise some of the the paint-by-numbers aspects of SEO (page titles, local business registrations etc). Not much to lose. If you don’t like it you don’t need to buy it.
PS – I am using the most affiliate links I have ever used in this article. No comments in this post either as it’s more of an advertisement for products I like the look of than ‘discussion’. If you want to discuss, I will open a new thread.
Advanced Web Ranking Review
Shaun Anderson: in SEO Tools. (9 Comments)
This ones a good one – Advanced Web Rankings – CLICK HERE for more info
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I’ve tried a lot of ways to check rankings in search engines (mainly Google, Yahoo and Bing) over the years and generally speaking I’ve been dissappointed with most if not all of them.
So much so, that we’ve resorted for many clients to manually checking them / and or developing our own tools to ensure the results we get are what the customer is seeing too. The problem with this type of rankings check is how much time it consumes in the studio. The problem with a lot of automatic website rank checkers of course is that they could well be software packages that violate Google webmaster guidelines for instance.
It automatically runs a ranking report checking keyword positions in Google, and automatically sends me a keyword rank check report via email with details of each keyword position (and over time, this generates a cool graph of ranking activity).
It’s a pretty comprehensive tool and it certainly seems to perform very well, with a good support forum too to ask any questions (although there seems to be quite a bit of moderation needed in that forum, quite a lot of spam in it at the moment guys)!
A very neat feature if you run one site is the sheer number of search engines you can can track your rankings on too (thousands of them from what I can see) – not that I bother with search engine submission at all these days of course.
The keyword position reports too are quite comprehensive and you can run as many search engine ranking reports and projects (multiple websites and rank checks) as you wish.
It’s fairly intuitive and easy to set up and use after you play about with it, although trialing it I found I’m having a few problems sending email reports (although I think that may be just me and the way I have it sending emails out).
The software also can check your pagerank and alexa rank too (if either of them are important to you) and can keep an eye on competitiors rankings too.
If you want to trial it free for 30 days, you can download it here. It’s available for Mac & PC and is desktop based.
Note – I’m still not that obsessed with individual keyword rankings – I’m much more interested in creating good content on a site and aquiring backlinks as naturally as possible – and then unlocking that domain authority by publishing even more content, but in competitive sectors where the linkerati seem to be thin on the ground, for specific keyword phrases, linkbuilding is still a must of course.
I’ve been testing out the rank check tool AWR Website Ranking on a small personal site (after being advised it does not break Google’s guidelines)
First of all, I would like to put one thing aside. There is no way that Google or any other search engine can ban you for using our software. And this is because for Google, AWR looks like a regular web browser. We send the EXACT data web browsers send. There is no way for Google to find out that you are using a tool like AWR. And even if they knew, they have no way of knowing your website domain. AWR sends queries that only contain the Keywords, NOT the URL. It then searches the URLs in the results Google sent back. This means they have no way of making a connection between the IP address of your computer, where AWR runs from, and your website. If this was possible, then I could fake this information to look like my competitor domain and then get him banned!
…and the results seem pretty cool. That is to say, it does what I need it to do.
Check out our SEO for beginners and our linkbuilding tips tutorial if you’re interested in finding out more.
Do let me know if:
- You obsessively check your rankings in search engines
- What tool you use (if any) to monitor your keyword rank positions
95% Of SEO Tools Are Just Crap Linkbait Toys That Waste Time
Shaun Anderson Hobo: in SEO Tools. (11 Comments)
Do you spend hours looking at your site, your client sites, searching the internet for new resources and tools to give you that ‘missing insight’, reading the latest blogs to see if you’re *finally* going to get a bit of useful information to give you a lead on the competition?
Get on with your work!
There is absolutely no substitute for adding good content to your site, refining your titles, obsessing and messing about with your internal link structures & anchor text. These SEO Tools you hear about (and I have played with a lot!) are usually either broken or return pointless data, which is a pity, because there used to be some good ones.
I honestly don’t have any public seo tools I really care about these days that offer really useful information…. perhaps I am looking in the wrong places.
Edit; Obviously I didn’t take too much time working on the % calculation
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