In 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?
April 16th, 2008
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.
April 16th, 2008
Thanks Scott. I’ll have to try that one.
April 16th, 2008
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.
April 16th, 2008
Thanks Vinh. I’ll check that one out too.
April 17th, 2008
I currently use Rank Checker, and I love it ! Thanks for the Web Grader tool info, I didn’t know it…
April 17th, 2008
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.
April 17th, 2008
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April 18th, 2008
Thanks for the Rank Checker link. I’ve been looking for a competent, free tool that will do exactly that. Awesome!
April 18th, 2008
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April 20th, 2008
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
April 20th, 2008
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April 20th, 2008
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?
April 20th, 2008
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.
April 21st, 2008
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
April 21st, 2008
Good list. Well done. But there is a more detailed list at digitalpoint.Thanks.
April 21st, 2008
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
May 5th, 2008
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..^^
May 7th, 2008
Thanks for these great marketing tools!
May 7th, 2008
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May 9th, 2008
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.
May 9th, 2008
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
May 9th, 2008
Thanks Dave. I hadn’t seen that before. I know it slows down surfing, but I didn’t know anything about SpyWare.
May 9th, 2008
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May 12th, 2008
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.
May 18th, 2008
Very informative and useful, now I can easily learn this and adapt this in my blogging..
May 21st, 2008
Great! Thanks for this Rank checker link, its very useful for me
May 30th, 2008
Here is a list of free SEO tools that I find extremely useful:
WhoLinksToMe.com
TestEverything
BackLinkWatch
BackLinkSpot
provided by Lform | Website Design
June 2nd, 2008
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/
June 5th, 2008
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.
June 10th, 2008
Thank you for that link. I only use one addon before.
June 26th, 2008
Thanks. Never tried that before.
June 26th, 2008
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.
July 23rd, 2008
What do you think of WEB CEO as s tool? I have heard multiple opinions on this system, but we seem to like it.
July 23rd, 2008
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.
August 13th, 2008
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.
August 20th, 2008
Nice list.But SEOQUAKE is somewhat outdated
August 21st, 2008
to: mike
We updated SeoQuake today
Do you have any ideas how to make it better?
just let me know.
August 21st, 2008
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.
August 27th, 2008
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.
September 9th, 2008
Good work! nice one! very good
September 9th, 2008
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.
December 16th, 2008
It’s very nice that you ive writing the subjects about seo.Your explanations are enough. Thanks for seo(wp)
March 3rd, 2009
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.
March 3rd, 2009
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.
March 22nd, 2009
I’m using SEO Quake and very happy about its features
April 12th, 2009
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
May 12th, 2009
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.
May 12th, 2009
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.
June 11th, 2009
Thanks, good article! Maybe someone needs backlinkchecker? Try http://www.BackLinkStat.com.
June 25th, 2009
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.
June 25th, 2009
Let’s try that again… Essio Studio