3 SEO Tools Worthy of Your Time
Published April 16th, 2008 in SEOIn recent weeks I’ve come across three SEO tools that I’ve found to be very useful. Here is a look at each of these (free) tools.
Rank Checker
Aaron Wall of SEO Book recently released a powerful new Firefox add-on called Rank Checker. If you’re working on moving your site up in the SERPs, you’ll obviously want to know where you stand and to be actively tracking your progress.
As a Firefox add-on this tool is both free and very convenient to use. With Rank Checker you can input the URL that you want to track and a list of keywords that you are targeting (or just researching). You’ll then be able to choose which search engines to check (including all of the international versions of Google). The tool will then go out and get the data and bring it back to you in one convenient place.
There are plenty of other ranking checkers out there, but this one is different for a few reasons. First, it’s a Firefox add-on that can be used easily from within the browser. Also, it has a number of customizable options, including the international versions of Google, other search engine options, and the time delay between queries. Additionally, you can save preset lists of keywords so that you don’t have to enter all of your keywords every time you want to use the tool. This is a great feature if you are working on multiple websites and each one has its own unique keywords to track. What makes this tool even more powerful is that it can be automated to run the reports on its own at set time intervals.
After you have run the Rank Checker you can easily export the results as a CSV file to use in Excel or another program. Aaron created a quick 5 minute video at the download page to explain the tool and how to use it. After spending just a few minutes to download the add-on and watch the video you’ll be able to use this tool with no problem. That’s what I like best about Rank Checker, it’s powerful but very simple to use.
SEO Quake
SEO Quake is another Firefox add-on that you’ll probably want to download. With SEO Quake you can optimize your site by gaining tons of information about other pages that are ranking well. After downloading and installing the add-on, run a Google search for the primary search phrase that you are targeting. Under each of the listings you’ll see addition information provided by SEO Quake, such as the PR and Alexa ranking of the page, plus the number of pages indexed from that URL and the number of inbound links (you can customize a lot of this data to meet your needs).
If you are looking to gain new inbound links to your site, you can find one of your competitors that has a high number of inbound links (you’ll probably want to use the data coming from Yahoo for this) and click on that number, which will open up the page displaying all of those inbound links. This will give you a list of sites that may be interested in also linking to you.
SEO Quake also has plenty of options, including the ability to save data in a CSV file. One thing to be aware of is that SEO Quake will slow down your load time when you’re surfing, but you can easily de-activate it when it is not in use.
Read more about SEO Quake here.
Open Source Link Analysis Tool
Patrick Altoft of BlogStorm has created an open source link analysis tool that does some of the same functions as SEO Quake. Patrick’s tool is not a Firefox extension, so if you are not a Firefox user this may be a good choice. One of the reasons Patrick chose to release this as an open source project is to allow for others to develop and customize it further, so keep your eyes open for continued improvement.
Here is Patrick’s description of what the tool does:
* Uses Yahoo Site Explorer to find all pages on a site
* Pulls in link data for every page on the site & orders results by pages with the most links
* Allows you to drill down 2 levels deep into the link data for pages linking to the target site
* Accepts Google sitemaps imports
* Accepts single URL imports
* Lets you check the rankings for any page on any search engine
What’s Your Experience?
Have you used any of these SEO tools yet? If so, what is your opinion?
57 Responses to “3 SEO Tools Worthy of Your Time”
Great list of tools, thanks for sharing them. I also use the “search status” add on for firefox, which gives you the PR, Alexa, and Compete. I didn’t realize how much I use that one until I removed it by accident.
Thanks Scott. I’ll have to try that one.
I use all the first two tools so I can say that they are pretty damn useful. I would add http://www.websitegrader.com/ to it as well. I found it very interesting and it lets you compare how well your site does against your competitors.
Thanks Vinh. I’ll check that one out too.
I currently use Rank Checker, and I love it ! Thanks for the Web Grader tool info, I didn’t know it…
Personally I use KW Elite and SEO Elite but they are pretty complex to use and not that cheap. So the free tools you have listed above should really help people out.
Thanks for the Rank Checker link. I’ve been looking for a competent, free tool that will do exactly that. Awesome!
I was using Rank Checker tool already but I found this open source link analysis tool really handy as the way it works. Hence downloading it for working on my official sites
Thanks for your advice, but about SEO quake’s negative reviews?
“This add-on is dangerous! Google may block you, as written at http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=86640&topic=&useful=1&expand_useful=1&#helpful”
and
“Google may block you when you perform too much querries to it. So, please set – “load parameters by request” or change your ip, use proxys and clear your coockies. or disable seoquake when you surfing on web for fun, not for work.”
Did any of you experience problems?
Teddy,
Thanks for the warning. I have experiences no problems, but I only use it temporarily and then I disable it right away. It slows down surfing when you’re not using, so there’s really no reason to leave it on.
I could also recommend the SearchStatus plugin. with it you can always see the google and alexa ranks of the page you are viewing, plus you can check whether the links on the page are follow or non follow. Nothing the plugins you mentioned can’t do, but it is more handy = saves time
Good list. Well done. But there is a more detailed list at digitalpoint.Thanks.
Really a good post and thanks for the lists of new plug-ins.
I believe we need all the help we can get these days to grow our businesses and save time, thanks for the heads up about these products.
Pugsley
I agree..these Internet Marketing products are great and useful..^^ but I also agree with April that SEO Elite is also a great tool to use..^^..although a bit expensive but still worth the money..^^
Thanks for these great marketing tools!
I agree with Vinh. I have been using http://www.websitegrader.com/ for quite some time. They constantly make improvements and give suggestions into just about all aspects of SEO.
Sorry for two in a row but i Just noticed the comments here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036
They warn about SEOQuake being SpyWare
Thanks Dave. I hadn’t seen that before. I know it slows down surfing, but I didn’t know anything about SpyWare.
To Dave:
These comments is a spam from enemys of our new service – adsspy.com …
so, they want to denigrate SeoQuake, because everyone of SeoQuake users now can easily research Made-For-Adsense sites and block them in Adwords campain etc…
All source of SeoQuake code is open and it has been tested by Mozilla.org and Softpedia and our users many times.
And you can test it yourself if needed.
Very informative and useful, now I can easily learn this and adapt this in my blogging..
Great! Thanks for this Rank checker link, its very useful for me
Here is a list of free SEO tools that I find extremely useful:
WhoLinksToMe.com
TestEverything
BackLinkWatch
BackLinkSpot
provided by Lform | Website Design
Nice list, I also would recommend KGen for Firexfox, it retrieves every word of a page and lets you know how many times they appear on it and their weight in the page (a word in the title of a page has a stronger weight than a word in a paragraph).
You can read more about it and about some more add-ons for Firefox on: 46 Firefox Plugins For Power User, Web Designer, Web Developer And SEO Experts
http://afrison.com/firefox-plugin-power-user-web-developer-seo-expert-add-on/634/
Thank you for the SEO quake link — one of the first things I do when doing SEO is check the competitor’s link profile. This will make the job much easier.
Thank you for that link. I only use one addon before.
Thanks. Never tried that before.
Good round-up!
Of course, I also use my company’s SEO tool often – http://seogroup.com/evaluation/
It saves your reports forever, so you don’t have to constantly submit your site.
What do you think of WEB CEO as s tool? I have heard multiple opinions on this system, but we seem to like it.
Sean,
I used Web CEO a year or two ago (the free version) and I thought it had some pretty useful tools and reports. I don’t spend a whole lot of time on SEO, but for someone who does I would think it’s worth using. I’m not sure what the SEO experts would say. I only used a few basic tools like ranking checkers and I forget what some of the others were.
I use SEOBook and also a member there. I once downloaded WebCEO, dont remeber where b ut I think it is very powerful tool to help you with your optimization. I just dont have the money yet to buy it.
Nice list.But SEOQUAKE is somewhat outdated
to: mike
We updated SeoQuake today
Do you have any ideas how to make it better?
just let me know.
I have used SEO Quake and love it. You can get a quick overall look of the popularity of a site along with links to other places like Domain Tools and SEO Digger that is very useful. Rank Checker doesn’t seem to pull a lot of information from Google for a lot of keyword phrases.
Check out http://linkdiagnosis.com/ – they not only show all links to your site, but track the pagerank of every link, whether or not they are nofollow links, and calculate the strength of the incoming links based on the number of other links on the page.
Good work! nice one! very good
I have used SEO Quake and love it. You can get a quick overall look of the popularity of a site along with links to other places like Domain Tools and SEO Digger that is very useful. Rank Checker doesn’t seem to pull a lot of information from Google for a lot of keyword phrases.
It’s very nice that you ive writing the subjects about seo.Your explanations are enough. Thanks for seo(wp)
1) http://linkdiagnosis.com/
The web tool is useful, but extremely slow. I’m using backlinkwatch instead. It also provides do follow/no follow info. I seem to get data from backlink watch quicker.
On the flip side, Linkdiagnosis has a download, which probably would provide MORE data than backlink watch. I think my being on a Mac prevents me from getting the advantage of the download tool
2) SEO Digger is mostly dead. I think the competitive knowledge that SpyFu provides for organic and paid search may just be better. Although I wish I knew something that replaced SEO Digger. I believe the SEO Moz tools + the Raven SEO tools, who I’ve done outsourcing work for, both provide such a tool (automated rank checker for multiple keyterms–even with the rank checker plug-in you have to pick the terms which is difficult). I don’t know of a free tool which has replaced the SEO Digger tool.
I just ran across this by Aaron Wall:
http://www.seobook.com/seo-book-competitive-research-tool
It seems like it performs what SEODigger used to do. It requires $100 for one month of access I believe.
I’m using SEO Quake and very happy about its features
I dont know if it is consider, I was using Rank Checker tool already but I found this open source link analysis tool really handy as the way it works, Google may block you when you perform too much querries to it, Good list, Thanks for these great marketing tools
yes, we have many tools like meta checker, domain tools, Google analytic s which save lots of time and by these tools we can analyze the website and follow SEO tactics.
yes, we have many tools like meta checker, domain tools, Google analytic s which save lots of time and by these tools we can analyze the website and follow SEO tactics.
Thanks, good article! Maybe someone needs backlinkchecker? Try http://www.BackLinkStat.com.
Another SEO tool you might want to check out is Essio Studio (http://www.essiostudio.com) which allows for automatic daily rank checking and search volume checking. They offer free accounts for personal use as well as paid accounts if you perform SEO on large numbers of websites.
Let’s try that again… Essio Studio
Yeah these three are important tools, very useful for new webmasters
I have been using SEO book’s Rank checker. It is an excellent tool.
Well… I’ve never used those you mentioned. Thanks for teh tip mate!
What I use is:
1. Googlerankings.com
2. Google analytics
3. Google sitemaps
4. My custom scripts
Hey great post here and lot’s of good comments. I personally couldn’t live without my SEO Quake toolbar. Additionally, you should check out the SEO Moz Toolbar, even with a free trial you can get the mozrank of a web site — even if the site doesn’t have a high PR but it has a good mozrank it’s worth your time to get the back link.
I also retweeted this post @highlyrelevant — thanks for the hard work!
Thanks for suggesting nice SEO tools. I would be helpful for newbie like me. I have book marked this page for future ref.
What an awesome list of goodies!!! I’m using Google web master tool & backlinkwatch tools very happy about its features, thanks for posting them!
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