Want to know who is bidding on specific keywords or search terms at Google? This tool will tell you -- and show you. For example, enter the term "internet marketing newsletter" and you will get a list of the top ten advertising companies, the text of their ads and links to their advertisements' landing pages. You will also get a list of the top 10 organic search results for the term. And, should you wish to explore further, it offers a list of related search terms and phrases for you to explore. You can also browse by company for a complete recap of their advertisements -- keywords, text and links -- or by keyword.
Where's the "hub" in your topic niche? This tool will help you find the most powerful sites in your category (in search engine terms) so that you can make sure you are well-linked to them and thus improve your own search engine rankings. Simply enter a search term plus your URL and up to 10 of your competitors' URLs and you will receive a graph and a long list of sites that link to two or more of the URLs provided. Figure out who links to your competitors and does not link to you, and your linking strategy is in place. For example, a comparison of wdfm.com and wilsonweb.com revealed much in common, but wilsonweb.com has incoming links from refdesk.com, marketingtom.com and prmachine.blogspot.com and wdfm.com does not. A few emails are on our to-do list. Amazingly, this service charges nothing for the extraordinary value received. Bookmark it.
RankPulse has been tracking the Google search-rankings of 1,000 keywords since January 2004. It provides an overall glimpse into the daily fluctuations of Google results. Think of it as live market research where you can track the rise and fall of keyword trends. For example, the keyword "internet marketing" is relatively stable at the time of writing, and clickz.com ranks number one in Google for that keyword out of 17,900,000 competitors. You might have interest in one or more of the 1,000 tracked keywords, so check them out first. We've discovered that there are "stable" keywords that have not fluctuated much over time, and there are "volatile" keywords that rise and fall in popularity. You can explore how sites leverage these keywords and so much more through the multiple, no-cost visualization tools provided at this site.
This tool helps you understand exactly what a search engine spider sees when it comes by to crawl your website pages. Type in any URL and you will receive a neatly organized breakdown of the page's content, including all tags, all textual content of the page and lists of the internal and external links the spider will follow. The search engines differ in terms of which content they use and how they evaluate it, however, this is your page content in the eyes of a spider, pure and simple -- and it can always be improved. Check it out.
You can save time and money on SEO if you understand the relationships between search engines, and this visualization tool helps you to do just that. It shows you who supplies what to whom in terms of primary search results, secondary search results, directory search results and paid search results. Just click on any search engine to discover who the real players are. For example, DMOZ supplies directory results to 8 search engines, including Google, Netscape, Alexa, Lycos and Altavista, so submit your site to DMOZ and you've killed 8 birds with one stone, so to speak. Wondering if you need a search marketing strategy for Netscape, Alexa, HotBot or Dogpile? Don't bother, they all rely on results received from other search engines. Essential information for any search marketer.
This very cool tool visually illustrates the websites related to/linking to any URL, according to Google's database. Enter the URL you want to research and watch your link neighborhood map appear. It shows the sites that are linked to your starting URL, with colors indicating the strength of the relationships and info flags detailing the sources. Double click on any other site and watch more related links being fetched from Google. There are lots of advanced commands to play with should you have the time and the inclination. It's like "six degrees of separation", Web-style, and we promise you it's addictive.
UrlTrends provides a visual "Trend Report" on the SEO rankings of your website, and, if you opt for no-cost registration, it will track your rankings over time and enable you to compare them to the rankings of several competitors. For example, according to UrlTrends, the URL wdfm.com had (at the time of writing) an Alexa ranking of 48,802, an estimated 23,368 unique incoming links from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Alexa combined and it ranked #13 on Google for the search term "online direct marketing" (out of 20,000,000 competing sites). With registration, you will be notified by RSS or email whenever there is a search engine ranking change to any of your tracked URLs.