SEO Tools and Techniques

Search engine optimization(SEO) is the practice of maximizing the volume or quality of traffic to a web site (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (“SEM”) which may deal with paid inclusion. Below is a mix of some of the most popular and comprehensive Competitive Analysis Tools that are on offer. There are a myriad of tools and the below reflects a categorized summary of the key tools we use when assisting customers drive value from their efforts:

Competitive Analysis Tools

Knowing what your competition targets is important. If you’re just starting your online marketing campaign or if you find that you’re current paid or organic listings aren’t driving enough relevant traffic, you can always take a look at what your competition is doing in terms of their ads.

• SEO Digger offers a snap shot of a domain’s distribution of top Google keyword rankings. This is great if you want to know which keywords a website already ranks for.
• Compete.com gives you a relative traffic comparison of up to three websites, nice if you want a rough estimate of how much traffic a website really gets. Google also has a similar website trends tool.
• Domaintools.com shows you a domain’s statistics including site age, web server OS, who owns it, etc.
• Quantcast offers insights into a website’s demographics, a cool tool for figuring out if the site in question contains your target audience in case you wanted to advertise via a few links.
• Google’s insights for search shows you what geological regions search the most for your keyword.
• The Yahoo! vs Google visual comparison tool draws pretty lines showing the two engines ranking the same content in different positions which is good for finding topical, authoritative pages and interesting to see how the two engines differ in their ranking algorithms.

Check your website’s keyword rank

The following tools will help you determine at which position(s) your web site ranks in the major search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing) results pages for a given keyword phrase.

• Fire Fox Rank Checker - good for a quick keyword ranking check, data is also exportable
• Advanced Web Ranking - a java based application that has the ability to track keyword rankings over time and export data into XML format.

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