Search Engine Optimization Tools
A lot of Search Engine Optimization consists of analyzing factors of your own and the optimization of your opponents. In order to care out these researches in an meaningful amount of time, there are special online and offline search engine optimization tools. Most of them are for free, same of them can be purchased.
Different Types of Search Engine Optimization Tools
In order to give an overview of the most important search engine optimization tools I would like to describe one of each type.
The different available Tools can be categorized in different parts of use. There are tools available for different aspects of search engine optimization.
Ranking Analysis
There are very many different tools to analyse rankings for given search phrases on Google or Yahoo. One of the best online tools is www.ranking-check.de which provides an easy possibility to check 1 or 2 keywords online if you are in a hurry.
Nevertheless I would tend to analysing the general income and visitor amount rather than special keywords.
Website Analysis
There are many different on the page factors which influence the ranking of a website in the different search engines. Some important facts are they Keyword Density and the content on the website.
There are many different tools available for Website analysis, i would recommend
- http://www.keyworddensity.com for keyword density
- http://validator.w3.org for valid html
- http://www.site-check.cc
/online-tool/index.html for analysing title,description and analysing internal link structures
I am using all of the above mentioned tools to analyse my own websites, and it helps providing websites which can also be enjoyed by visitors and not only by search engine spiders.
Keyword Research
It is important for every webmaster to know the keywords and keyword combinations which their users are searching for, and I want to refer to PPC Master, a software which I am using for this purpose.
PPC Master Keyword Research Tool
The PPC Master Keyword Research tool is offered at a price of 34,95 €, and is installed offline on a computer.
PPC Master uses the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool, the Google Sandbox Keyword Suggestion Tool and the Search Engine Results pages to find out the rankings, the number of Adwords, the number of searches and alternative Keywords for any given keyword or keyword combination and website.
Example of an analysis with PPC Master
Keyword: Search Engine Optimization, Website: http://www.seo-guy.com
| Keywords | Google Results | Searches | Adwords | Ranking |
Alternative Keywords can be exported into a .txt file, as an example, the results for the keyword combination “Search Engine Optimization”
| search engine optimization company |
The results are taken from either Overture or Google Adwords Sandbox. The variety of alternative keywords is larger, this are just some of the resulting keywords as an example.
The use of PPC Master/ Keyword Research in Search Engine Optimization
With the given informations about alternative keywords, adwords and number of searches, you could react in the following ways :
- You could use synonyms for terms and locate your service through adding city names and areas, or the special type of service.
- If your are buying paid per click ads on search engines, e.g. AdWords, you could try to use more focused keywords, which are sometimes cheaper and could result in better conversion rates for your business
- You could optimize your revenues when using Google Adsense or any other affiliate program through optimizing for the new terms. As an real life example, lets say a shop only sells apples, but the customer would like to buy cheese in addition, it would only by a wise idea to also sell cheese to these customers
In general, the use of PPC Master or other keyword research tools can be recommendend for every webmaster trying to increase the performance and ranking of his website. My own experience with this tool can be understood as a proof of this statement.
I found a lot of synonms for words to use on my website, which increased the number of daily unique visitors by about 100-200 and saved me a lot of time researching this information.
Link Structure Analysis
As mentioned in the Off-the-Page factors section, links are an important aspect of every search engine optimization.
In order to trade links with other webmasters and check the strength of your own website you should analyse your linkpartners.
The more links are pointing at their webpages from different places, the more valuable this link can be for your website.
One of the best online tools at the moment is http://www.domain-pop.com which analyses the number of links from different Domains and IPs.
The information about the backlinks comes from the Yahoo! search engine, and the list about the domains, different pageranks and number of IPs can be very valuable.
It often has prevented to trade with webpages looking got without many links, and I could improve the strength of my own webpages, many of which now have >100 links from different IPs, which is quite a lot compared to some of my concurrenting webpages.
Fazit Search Engine Optimization Tools
In general I am in favor of using search engine tools in order to save time in analysing the competition and your own webpages.
Nevertheless I found out that one can get obsessed with analysing link structures and rankings for different keywords every day, which can steal your time for the optimization and the important time for producing new content for your webpages.