SEO Tools and Techniques

Below is a mix of some of the most popular and comprehensive Link 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 our customers drive value from their efforts:

Link Analysis Tools

Check out your site’s back link profile and compare to your competition. Search engines rank your website based on your site’s in-bound link profile because links are difficult to fake and represent recommendations or other sites “talking” about you - the more you are talked about the more relevant you become and thus the higher you rank.

Check and analyze your website’s back link count.

Analysis of Back Link Anchor text

• Open Site Explorer is a web based, comprehensive and easy to use tool with tons of good data points that is built from SEOMoz’s Linkscape data (their own web index),
• Aaron Wall’s Back Link Analyzer is a free windows based tool that runs pretty fast.
• Opti-spider is an older link analysis tool.
• SEO Elite is another windows based tool that offers a bit more features than the above two but is the most expensive.
• Majestic SEO has a really nice bulk backlink checking tool and offers a comprehensive set of paid link analysis tools
• Use hub finder, or use the free version, to find sites that link to competing sites in your space. These hub sites are likely to link to you if you make the effort and links from them are well worth the effort since they’re topical authorities and search engines generally value links coming from topical experts.

Link Acquisition tools

Link search gives you a list of search engine queries that are targeted to return sites giving you the opportunity to leave comments, add your website link and or purchase links relevant to your industry.

PPC Tools

Purchase important keywords impressions and track the results of your tests to understand how well they convert, which helps you focus your natural SEO strategy on the most lucrative keywords. These are free PPC management tools.

• Google’s Traffic Estimator shows an estimated value for each click for a given keyword on their Adwords program.
• Google Adwords preview lets you run a mock Google search without counting as an ad impression, good for testing how your ads or how your competitors’ ads show up for various searches.

Web Server Tools

Trouble shoot or just make sure that your web server is configured to be search engine friendly.

Monitor web page status codes - to find out if a web page is being redirected and what kind of redirect it is

• Xenu Link Sleuth is good for checking broken links and improper redirects that might be happening on your site.
• Google Webmaster Tools has a host of cool features from error page reporting to broken links to most popular inbound organic search queries to inbound links, etc.

Analytics and feedback tools

• Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that reports on website usage including organic and paid keyword traffic, most popular content, visitor profiles, etc. Just install a snippet of javascript code on the pages of your website that you want to track and you’re tracking in no time.
• Mint Analytics is a paid web analytics tool similar to google analytics except that you install this web app on your server and you get data (feedback) in real time. Mint analytics can be great for social media, time sensitive campaigns that need precise execution.

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