Webmasters and website owners have been fighting for years for one simple thing: better ranking in search engine searches! The reason is simple and clear to understand. The better the ranking, the higher the traffic on the website and the popularity increases. The motive of the page is fulfilled and the return on investment increases. The process of getting better rankings is called search engine optimization or SEO. There are various search engine optimization methods and tools and as technology develops, the tools are getting better and better, taking into account the strict requirements of popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. This article attempts to provide a brief overview of the various search engine optimization tools that come in handy for webmasters and search engine optimization companies. The overview provides a brief description of the tools with their pros and cons indicating their areas of development.
TOOLS RELATED TO KEYWORDS:
Keyword analyzer: Goran Nagy and Chris Lee co-developed this keyword research tool and with regular updates, this software has evolved quickly and performed well in the ever-changing landscape of the World Wide Web. It is essentially based on the keyword research tool Overture and can analyze the data extracted from WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. There are certain pros and cons of keyword analyzer and they are:
Advantages:
o It has a wonderful excavation tool.
o Can import Keyword Discovery and WordTracker data.
o Uses terms related to Google.
o It is very search engine friendly.
o Right-click addition functionality.
o Bonus add-on tools are provided.
Disadvantages:
o Has minor interface bugs. Clicking on the menu will automatically create a new tab.
o Different keyword lists cannot be combined.
o Mainly uses the Overture data, which lacks 100% accuracy
Keyword Analyzer is best suited for PPC advertisers, AdSense publishers, niche miners, and to some extent SEO people.
McDar Keyword Analysis Tool:
McDar Keyword Analysis Tool has risen to the forefront of search engine optimization as a whole new breed of tool. It doesn’t focus on analyzing the keywords before optimization, it actually focuses on analyzing the keywords after optimization. In other words, it analyzes the keywords when the page has already been optimized! And guess what? It can study the competition for a specific keyword!
Once the on-page optimization of a page for keywords or phrases is complete and the optimized page goes live and is crawled by Google spiders, you will need to enter the following information into McDar
Keyword Analysis Tool:
o Enter the URL of the page to be optimized in the McDar Keyword Analysis Tool.
o Enter the keyword by which the website should be analyzed.
Once the above two steps are completed, the McDar Keyword Analysis tool will analyze what can be considered as the following professionals of the tool:
o Number of pages listed in Google.
o Total number of backlinks available for this page in Google.
o Total number of backlinks available for this page in Yahoo.
o Page Rank using the “allinanchor” (the entered keyword or phrase).
o The overall page ranking for the website.
When the analysis is complete, the results can be used for optimization based on an informed decision.
Disadvantages:
The main disadvantage of the tool is that the tool takes few SEO factors into account!
WordZe tool:
Keywords and phrases remain one of the most important factors for a website to be optimized and achieve a better ranking. The WordZe tool helps get some of the most impressive keywords out there. WordZe conducts a study of the keywords and uses the keyword’s reports, data trends and variations to assess the keyword’s performance. WordZe’s design is refreshing, offering a wide range of tools capable of providing powerful and reliable keywords.
Advantages:
o The WordZe has a very user-friendly interface.
o WordZe provides reliable and powerful keyword data. The word rank tool provides a unique data set.
o WordZe’s performance is quite modern and smooth.
o WordZe is billed monthly. The monthly membership fee is $35.
Disadvantages:
o WordZe’s word rank research tool has one major limitation. It is inherently too restrictive.
Despite the limitation, WordZe is one of the strongest tools out there and users can be very happy with the overall performance.
TOOLS RELATED TO DOMAIN:
Domain Statistics Tool: As the name suggests, Domain Stats Tool helps webmasters to get all the information about the competitor’s website domain. The statistical data extracted by Domain Stats Tool includes domains age, Dmoz Lists, Yahoo WebRank, Backlinks Count, Alexa Traffic Rank, Number of pages indexed by the various search engines like MSN, Yahoo, Google etc. be indexed. These results come in very handy and help explain why some of the competitors are doing well in the search engine searches and what needs to be done to make your site do well!
Domain Age Tool: Domain age usually relates to two things. The age of the website in question and the length of time the domain was registered. This is actually required to verify the longevity of the website and also the authenticity. People will trust the older site more than the new ones. The Domain Age Tool shows the approximate age of the website on the World Wide Web. This allows you to take a look at the early stages of the site and optimize your site accordingly.
The downside is that it can only indicate that the competitor’s website is gaining traction in the search engine results due to the age of the domain. However, this is good because you can develop other strategies and SEO techniques to improve your page ranking.
Reciprocal Link Checker: Reciprocal Link Checker uses advanced techniques to check the status of links and generate the reports in TXT or HTML file. It is actually responsible for two things:
o Checking the popularity of the site and
o Overall website visibility.
The Reciprocal Link Checker’s responsibility is to monitor the backlink status and manage inbound links of the website. Reciprocal Link Checker automatically manages the various reciprocal links on the website and increases Page Rank.
Advantages:
o It is a powerful utility for boosting website page ranking.
o It monitors and checks the status of the backlinks.
o It has a very interactive and user-friendly graphical interface.
o It improves the connection quality and also its popularity.
o It is inexpensive, reliable and fast.
Disadvantages:
o Reciprocal Link Checker can hit in the case of Pay Per Click activities due to the fraudulent clicks and thus increase the cost!
TOOLS RELATED LINKS:
Majestic SEO: Majestic SEO is one of the most advanced backlink analysis services and allows comprehensive backlink reporting. The tool provides reports on:
o Domain Overview: Provides Top Anchor reports, Top Reference Domains reports and Top Page reports.
o It provides a table showing domains that link to the site.
o It checks the links to both the www and non-www versions for each website.
o Allows viewing source flags for more specific reports.
o It offers the function of export to CSV
There are many other features or benefits of the tool, but mentioning all of them is beyond the scope of this article.
There are also certain disadvantages. They can be summarized as follows:
o Must have an option to sort and filter the data online. Although the data can be exported to Excel and sorted, online sorting helps and makes life easier.
o Some of the data seems to be out of date.
Apart from these disadvantages, Majestic SEO is a very handy and comprehensive tool that can be useful for webmasters
Link harvester: Link Harvester is one of the most innovative of its kind. It helps you get a deeper insight into the results than any other tool. Another added benefit is that it works faster than any other tool. The tool uses Yahoo! API and with it, users don’t have to worry about violating search engine terms and conditions.
Advantages:
o Fast enough to find every single site that links to a webpage or domain.
o It determines the number of indexed pages.
o It calculates the total number of homepage links, inbound links and deep link ratio.
o It provides information about the IP address of the C block.
o It’s free and fast.
o The tool is known for providing links to WhoIs sources and Wayback engines next to every single domain.
Disadvantages:
o The tool lacks the feature of scraping pages to collect link text and this is because each additional feature makes the tool slow.
o The tool uses only one engine for data linking.
Disadvantages aside, the tool is, on average, one of the best in its class!
HubFinder: Hub Finder is another free and useful link analysis tool for SEO purposes.
The Hub Finder offers the following features or benefits:
o It tracks page ranking in Google or Yahoo.
o It allows highlighting each single authority in the results and showing the (potential) links of the hub pages.
o Allows CSV output of the result.
o Users can set the search depth.
o Allows comparison of backlinks in top ten ranking sites.
o Provides a list of the total number of hub pages in the total number of crawled sites.
o Quickly find out the total number of current HubPages.
There is one obvious downside to the Hub Finder. The disadvantage is:
o The presence of the Scrapper websites in certain areas may cluster the Hub Finder output.
There are many other advantages and some disadvantages of Hub Finder, but it is beyond the scope of the article to walk you through each of them.
Search engine optimization is not something very small and simple. It takes a lot of effort to rank well in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). There is an abundance of tools on the market. Some of them are free and some of them are commercial. It’s your choice. Remember, it’s your website, it’s your investment!
