SEO Tool Chest - Special Tools 1

In the past few weeks, I have been reviewing cool search engine optimization type tools in my SEO Tool Chest, today I am going to show you a few non-glamorous "special" tools that you need to have as well.

http header checkers are not very exciting, but they can reveal some important information about how a URI responds. As you may know, search engines are picky about redirects. "301 Moved Permanently" redirects are fine in most cases, but the more widely used 302 temporary redirect can cause you lots of problems with the search engines and with what is known as 302 page hijacking (more on that in a separate post). So for this reason it is important to know what a server reports back on a URI or web address (http status codes).

One of my favorite ones is Server Header Checker, it's my old stand by (it's fast, dependable and easy to read the results). Web-Sniffer is also good, but not quite as easy to read.

There are numerous free tools to check your http headers on the internet, just find one that you are comfortable with. If you see a potential problem, be sure to check it in more than one tool for a second opinion, I have seen results differ between tools occasionally.

I once had a client's site that wasn't getting spidered by Google and Yahoo! (even with a Yahoo! Directory listing) and I couldn't figure out why. While I was looking at the character encoding, it was suggested that I check the http header response. I checked the domain with one of these tools and I found an ugly mess. Because of the shopping cart the client's host was using, they had a double 302 redirect. One from domain to www.domain and one from www.domain to the index page. Once I got that situation resolved to using one 301 from domain to www and having the default page name changed to match what I was using, the site started getting spidered and ranking. Since then, whenever I suspect a problem, one of the first things I look at is the http headers. As I said, it's not glamorous, but it really can make a major difference to your site's visibility in the search engines.

A great collection of DNS/Domain related tools can be found at DNSstuff.com. They have everything you need when dealing with DNS and domain names. The DNS Report shows you how your hosts DNS setup is performing and flags potential problems (not some of their warning messages are common among hosts). While these tools aren't as much fun to use as some of the ranking and link tools, these will show you potential problems that can prevent your site from ranking or being attractive to a link partner.

Links to all these tools can be found on in my SEO Tool Chest.

As always, feel free to comment below or email me by clicking on my name.

martin

SEO Tool Chest - Keyword Research and Selection 1

Keyword research and selection is one of the fundamental steps in reaching your target audience. You must find keywords that people are really searching for and not just words you think they should be using.

WordTracker is the industry leading tool for keyword research and since most of you are probably already familiar with it, I am going to review it later.

For this post I want to introduce you to a couple of other great tools you must have in your SEO Tool Chest to help you find those great niche keywords.

Nichebot is a great free tool that helps you research and select keywords. This tool taps into WordTracker, Google and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture - YSM) data to present you with suggestions and data to assist you in finding those profitable niche keywords.

John Alexander, the renowned WordTracker Magic guru and co-founder of Search Engine Workshops, recently introduced me to TheDowser, Keyword Research and Management Software. When John tells me to check out a product, I always listen.

This product is amazing in it's flexibility. It does all the usual things, but takes all the tasks you had to do individually and puts them into one package. The filters feature is so powerful, you have to try it yourself to appreciate it's power.

TheDowser is offered as a free download and an Professional version upgrade. Make sure you view the video tutorials to see how all the features work together to make you research so much easier.

I downloaded the free version and upgraded to the Professional version the next day. This is really an amazingly powerful tool. I will write a follow up review later, once I really master this great tool.

As always, please comment below or email me by clicking on my name. Until next time, remember to keep using all the great resources in the SEO Tool Chest!

martin

PageRank Updates and Some Free Directories Take A Hit

I just finished updated the Free Directory Listings reviews to reflect the July 14, 2005 Google Toolbar PageRank Update.

There was quite a shake up with some of the free directories. Of the 50 free directories I have reviewed, 12 lost PageRank and 8 gained. I have started to add the PageRank history to the reviews so you can see which way the sites are heading.

It appears the somewhat spammy Truly Open Directory might be on it's way out. They have been at PageRank 0 for the last two updates and right now the site is only showing the internal directory listing (no home page) dated 07/15/05. This directory has long been a target of spammers and Google might be punishing them for links to "bad neighborhoods". I'll keep an eye on this and other changes to keep you up to date.

I'll be reviewing some more directories in the coming weeks. Be sure to let me know if you have any feedback that should be added to my reviews.

As always, you may comment below or email me by clicking on my name below.

martin

SEO Tool Chest - Page Analysis Tools 2

Continuing with my SEO Tool Chest series, here's one of my favorite search engine simulators. Poodle Predictor does all the usual things plus many more.

Put your URL in the "Poodle Search" form field and click on "Poodle Search". This brings up a overview page that shows you your page's listing description from Google SERPs and the listing description from the first 10 links from your page.

Click on "diagnostic view" under the main listing and this gives you the simulated view of your page, as a spider will see it. It has color coding for all the important tags and offers you warnings of major problems. The diagnostic view gives you a visual representation of the order your content is spidered (beware of table layouts).

With this view, you can see if you have high code or image weight. Just look for large blocks of white space. You can also look at the "Source Code View" which shows you the same representation with the code visible. This is really dramatic when viewing a table based page or one with navigation first.

Clicking on any of your links loads the destination page into the "Poodle Predictor" and you can start all over again.

This is really a good way to take a quick glance at a page. Look for lots of colors (good use of tags - except red = warnings), not much white space (good code to content ratio) and content first, and you know that page is a good candidate for the search engines.

Check back regularly for additions to my SEO Tool Chest.

martin

SEO Tool Chest - Page Analysis Tools 1

Now we have a handle on our inbound linking analysis, now it's time to look at our web pages themselves. This brings us to the next compartment in my SEO Tool Chest: Page Analysis Tools, which features tools for analyzing on page factors.

Keyword Density & Prominence Analyzer from ranks.nl is one of my favorite free tools. On the surface it is a great keyword density tool, but once you use it, you will find it's so much more. It allows you to do general analysis or to focus in on a specific keyword phrase. It shows you all the important on page factors, such as title, headings, link text, etc., plus their count and density.

In the main Keyword Density section it shows the usual percentages, but also shows prominence and letters denoting where that keyword phrase is used, screenshot #1 (such as hover over the "L" (link text) and see all the link anchor text on this page). This screenshot #2 shows the same view without the hover which gives you an "at a glance" view of your handling of important keyword phrases (key to letters = T (title), D (meta description), K (meta keywords), H (headings), L (linktext), B (bold), A (alt tag)(oops, missed those last two).

The free version is sometimes overloaded, so try back later. They do have a subscription access plan called "Ranks Friends" for $49.00 per year, you get added functionality and I think, better access (not advertised as a feature) since I have never timed out since I upgraded. In the upgraded version you get these additional features, plus access to other cool tool:

• The maximum filesize of html pages becomes 120k instead of 40k
• Spidering of dynamic urls is allowed (.cgi .pl .php)
• Spidering of url with question marks is allowed
• Option to calculate density based on stemmed words
• Option to remove Google advertisements from pages
• Option to export reports to .xls (Excel / Open Office) format.

The export option is worth the price of admission!

Look for new additions to my Free Directory Listings Reviews area and more cools tools from my SEO Tool Chest.

martin

SEO Tool Chest - Link Tools 2

My SEO Tool Chest is overflowing with all the tools I have acquired over time, so for this series of posts I'm trying to follow some sort of logical pattern. Let me know if I succeed or fail.

When I am looking at inbound back links (IBLs) to a site, I usually use SeoElite, because it provides just about everything I want to know. Also, I can export the results to a CSV file, import into Excel and analyze them. It shows me the IP Address, the anchor text, PageRank™, WhoIs, contact email and much, much more.

If you are on a budget, you can get most of this information free from my SEO Tool Chest.

As I mentioned in my last post, you can get some great general data from MarketLeap's Link Popularity Check, then move on for IP block analysis with LinkHarvester.

Now you are ready to look at the link anchor text with the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis tool. This tool gets it's results from Yahoo!, which is known to be the most complete source for IBL data. (sometimes this site is slow to initially load and you might need to hit refresh once) This is a handy tool and relatively quick. The downside is you can not export the data without using a site scrapper program.

Stay tuned for the next installment from SEO Tool Chest by subscribing to bloglet in the sidebar.

As usual you comments are welcome below or via email by clicking on my name below.

martin

SEO Tool Chest - Link Tools 1

"I love it when Martin opens his SEO tool chest!" That's what one of the people said at a recent chat session at the Workshop Resource Center, while we were analyzing a site. It seems that I keep finding these "Cool Tools" to help with a variety of SEO tasks, so I thought I would start a series of posts featuring various tools. Thus, the SEO Tool Chest is born! ;-)

Since I have become a favorite destination for some visitors who use my Free Directory Listings reviews to help build their site's link popularity, I have been really looking at linking a lot lately. Now I have to say that link building is not one of my favorite things to do. I would much rather try to create quality content and let nature take it's course. While creating quality content is probably still the most important single ingredient in a website, it will not work on it's own. You have to have links for people and the search engines to find you. That brings us to learning how to analyze a multitude of linking factors.

SeoElite is probably the single best link analysis tool in my tool chest. It will provide you with almost everything you want to know about links to a site. It does quite a bit more than just that, but for the focus of this post that is more than enough to gain it a featured spot in my SEO Tool Chest.

But what if you do not want to spend the money, are you out of luck? No, we have several tools that will help with your linking.

MarketLeap's Link Popularity Check is one of the most popular. This tool allows you to check your "link popularity" across multiple engines in a single, simple interface. But don't let the simple part keep you from some great additional features.

You can compare the URL you are checking to three other sites/pages. You can compare your site with that of your competitors. You can also check to see if your inbound back links (IBL) are consolidated by checking www.domain.com vs. domain.com. They have recently added a "Trend/History Report" feature that shows your link pop over time (requires that you run a report more than once). Look around and you will see a few other cool features.

Once you know your raw or gross link popularity score, there is still much to learn. Link Harvester is an incredibly powerful tool that will let you see where all the links come from in convenient groups and show common Class C IP Address blocks. Link Harvester also links to the Internet Archives, WhoIs Source, and Google cache near each link to provide you with even more details. You can export your data in a CSV file and import it into Excel for additional analysis.

This tool uses data from Yahoo! which is usually the most complete source on IBLs. Since the tool is free and uses a Yahoo! API, if you are a heavy user you can get your own API key and host the tool on your own site (I'm going to look into doing that soon).

Updated: I have added a mirror copy of the LinkHarvester tool here: SEO Tool Chest - LinkHarvester. I had to move to a DOM XML enabled server to host this tool, fortunately my great host, Lunarpages had one and moved my site for free! Thanks to SEOBook for this great open source tool.

That's enough for this post, but I have many more cool tools in my SEO Tool Chest, so I will post them here regularly and provide additional information in the SEO Tool Chest section (under development - a continual work in progress).

I want to thank Robin Nobles for making me realize that people are interested in "Cool Tools". I just assumed that everybody was using these great cool tools (Duh!).

As always, please comment below or click on my name to email me.

martin

Search Marketer Missing

Updated: 07/01/05 17:50 EDT: Ian Turner has been found in Atlanta!! Details can be found here.

No, this isn't a headline to try and sell SEM services.

A search marketer named Ian Turner has gone missing after last week's WebMasterWorld PubCon in New Orleans.

The SEM/SEO community is trying to get the word out in order to gather any and all information. The best place to get up to minute news and contact/media instructions is at threadwatch.org/ian (discussion thread is at threadwatch.org)

I never met Ian, but I think it is great that many people from all parts of the internet are posting this information.

My thoughts and prayers go out to his wife Ali and their children.

martin