Monitor and Increase Your Search Engine Visibility with the DIY
SEO Tools
by AbayomiPaul
Published on this site: May 24th , 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
In this three part article, you’ll find many tools that any
webmaster can use to monitor your site’s search engine position,
and use to increase the visibility of your site in major search
engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
URL Trends
http://www.urltrends.com/
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. But one great thing missed about this tool are that you can
subscribe to changes to the results via RSS -hands off monitoring
of your site.
Fagan Finder’s URL Info
http://www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/
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.
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
http://www.spannerworks.com/spidersimulator.0.html
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 this page 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. They also have a tool that will analyze your
keyword density.
GoRank.com’s Top Ten Comparison
http://www.gorank.com/seotools/
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 at http://www.google.com/api
as you’ll need it to create your free account.
Search Guild’s Keyword Difficulty Checker
http://searchguild.com/difficulty/
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.
In the next article in this series, you can read more about tools
specific to Yahoo and Google that will help you track your rankings
and study your site.
You can find hundreds of pages of tips and news on traffic
generation, search engines, blogs and RSS every day at www.freetraffictip.com
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