Type a URL and a few keywords or phrases into this Web-based tool, and it will zip off, analyze the content of your URL and similar websites in your category and then email a suggested list of keywords to you for search engine optimization purposes. The keywords or phrases that you enter help the tool understand the theme of your page so it doesn't go running off in the wrong direction. Like your local optical retailer, in about an hour your list will be ready. While it is not a 100% complete list of words you should use, it is a good way to jumpstart your brain and explore angles and ideas for keyword optimization that you might not have considered otherwise. And hey, the price is right.
Bruce Clay has been giving away SEO advice for years, and as a result his site is rich with expert advice on the entire process of optimization, from how to build a site that is optimized from the start to promotion tactics for a site that needs a search engine boost. You'll also find free and fee-based tools such as keyword density analyzers and competition ranking reports. No SEO maven should be without his industry-beloved Search Engine Relationship Chart, which is a free PDF suitable for color printing (just the thing for that bare spot on your wall) that tracks the myriad, murky and ever-changing relationships between search engines and directories.
Some of the "Fantomaster's" tools and tips are frowned upon by search engines. However, Ralph Tegtmeier (AKA Fantomaster) is, probably, one of the most technically adept, professional search engine optimizers around. His new Fantomas ShadowMaker software is described as "heavy duty industrial-strength cloaking - generating 100% relevant and unique content..." This can be scary stuff in the hands of the wrong person. But, in the same way as the Surgeon General infers smoking CAN kill you - not WILL kill you... you're grown-ups, you know the risks - you decide. Excellent gratis newsletter here too, by the way.
It's Google’s technology playground! This is where Google posts ideas that "aren’t quite ready for prime time" and asks for your feedback. Google News Alerts and the Google Glossary are graduates of the Google Labs, while (at the time of this writing) a Google Deskbar and Google's search by location feature are in the lab testing phase. If you're a search engine fan, you owe it to yourself to see what's cookin' in the Lab.
Even if the role of search engine optimizer is just one of many of your Internet marketing hats, you can still reference and even belong to Google Webmaster Central. This is your one-stop shop for from-the-source information about how Google crawls and indexes websites. Google even provides tools that will enable you to diagnose crawling issues, study statistics on how your site is doing in Google's index and tell Google exactly how you'd like your site to be crawled and indexed. To access the information, you need to verify that you are the site owner, which means that you need to either add a special metatag to your site's index file (which Google will look for), or you need to upload an HTML file to your site with a specific file name (which Google will supply for you). It's all very SEO confidential, but if you are serious about taking your Google optimization to the next level this is an excellent way to do so. Tip: Don't try to impress anybody by talking about this at a cocktail party.
This whitepaper discusses the factors behind the decline in traditional marketing and shows the reasons why marketing professionals are investing in interactive marketing efforts.
This is a visual search engine with a twist. It pulls from the Google database to deliver a list of sites related to whatever keyword you search for. These sites can then be viewed as a visual map of related entities, but here's the kicker - you get to choose the sites that you would like to see visually mapped from your list of search results. So if you would like to search for a specific keyword and find sites within your link neighborhood, ie., sites that should be linking to you, simply select those sites from the results page and build your map. For example, search for the phrase "Internet marketing" and you can choose to start your visual link neighborhood map with key sites such as ClickZ, WilsonWeb and MarketingTerms.com. Simply click "View" to get your visual map and see all the sites in that particular link neighborhood. You can add to your map as desired and you can save your map for future reference.
This tool reveals in real time the most promising yet least utilized keywords that drive traffic to your site organically (ie., from organic search results as opposed to PPC advertising). It is based on the "long tail" economic concept, which states that the collective demand for less-popular items can exceed the demand for all the most popular items added together. Therefore, by zeroing in on the specific keyword phrases that drive organic traffic to your site and taking advantage of this knowledge by doing more within your site via content and SEO to support those specific keyword phrases, the more highly qualified organic traffic you will drive to your site.
That means you potentially spend less money on pay-per-click advertising. To put HitTail in action you cut and paste some code into your site. At the time of writing, some HitTail services were complimentary; others were available with a paid subscription.
Not all inbound links to your website are created equal. Did you know that the more inbound links your site has from .edu and .gov domains and certain human-edited website directories, the better your search engine standings will be? The quality of the sites linking into your site is, not surprisingly, called your "Inbound Link Quality (ILQ)". Search engines have been assessing that factor for quite some time. For example, they give your site more credence if major authority hub sites in your topic category link in to your site. In the case of this tool, the theory is that links coming in to your site from educational or governmental sites or from human-edited Web directories such as the Yahoo! directory or DMOZ.org cannot be purchased and used to manipulate the search engine system. This tool shows the number of inbound .edu, .gov and website directory links your site (or any URL entered) has and assigns an ILQ score for that URL based upon a proprietary weighted system (each .edu inbound link gets 45 points, each .gov inbound link gets 67 points, etc.).
KartOO is a metasearch engine that shows search results as a visual, interactive map based on the relationship between key websites and ideas. Simply enter your search keywords and in return you'll receive a two-dimensional "map" of the results with connecting lines representing the "quality" of a match. Move your cursor over a site to get its description, and then click on it if you want to open the page. Listings on the left side of your map allow you to expand or delete topics.
The public KartOO search engine is an example of the company's enterprise software solutions, which "identify and elegantly display complex relationships between topics and company sites".
Think of this site as a right-brained keyword density analysis tool. Enter any URL, and this tool will show you a visual collage of the keywords found in that site. Some of the keywords are in larger fonts and some of the keywords are in smaller fonts. The keywords in larger fonts have a higher "keyword density", meaning that they occur more frequently in that website. Ideally, your preferred keywords should be the largest words in your site's keyword cloud. For example, a check of the keyword cloud for the website of Web Digest For Marketers (WDFM) shows the words "marketing", "Internet", "online" and "tools" in enormous fonts, whereas other less prevalent (yet still important) keywords such as "Larry" and "Chase" appear in slightly smaller fonts. ;)
This free tool measures the marketing effectiveness of your website. Based on traffic, SEO, social popularity and technical factors receive a score and improvement advice.