SEO Tools – Track Efficiently and Save Your Time

SEO Quake

SEO Quake is another Firefox add-on that you’ll probably want to download. With SEO Quake you can optimize your site by gaining tons of information about other pages that are ranking well.

After downloading and installing the add-on, run a Google search for the primary search phrase that you are targeting. Under each of the listings you’ll see addition information provided by SEO Quake, such as the PR and Alexa ranking of the page, plus the number of pages indexed from that URL and the number of inbound links (you can customize a lot of this data to meet your needs).

If you are looking to gain new inbound links to your site, you can find one of your competitors that has a high number of inbound links (you’ll probably want to use the data coming from Yahoo for this) and click on that number, which will open up the page displaying all of those inbound links. This will give you a list of sites that may be interested in also linking to you.

SEO Quake also has plenty of options, including the ability to save data in a CSV file. One thing to be aware of is that SEO Quake will slow down your load time when you’re surfing, but you can easily de-activate it when it is not in use.

Download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036

SEO for Firefox

As Most of you are aware, SEO for Firefox is one of the hottest things in SEO at this moment. Using this time saving tool, you can get any amount of information gleamed from the data made from the SEO toolbar, it’s a highly recommended Firefox extension for anyone in search marketing (and according to the site, over 50,000 people are using it).

Here are some examples of the data SEO for Friefox provides and why their attributes are important include:

• The PR section – This section is important, for each page of the site (mainly dependent on the URL in the destination URL underneath the Google snippet for description text) — The PR of the page is important but not as important as the number of links to the page in question and their quality. Important attribute, but only good for when used for purchasing link ads on the pages in the SERPs.
• The Google Cache Date – The new PR, the more a page is cached and the more recent the cache date emphasizes the level of authority for the page – If you can get your Google cache date increased, this will result in even more of an authority in the SERPs. Keep on with the submissions and adding to of content on your site.
• The Age – A HIGHLY integral part to any domain name’s popularity. The older the domain name and the higher the PR, the more power the site / page will influence SERP results. Age is an important factor and sometimes cannot be seen by the SEO for Firefox toolbar, if you can’t get the information on age, feel free to use the WhoIS at the end of the data sets.
• Del.icio.us links – The more Del.icio.us links you get, the more social bookmarking cred you have, there should also be a section for how many Diggs a post has as well as other social bookmarking data areas, but that’s likely in the making from Aaron Wall.
• The Y! links for links, .edu, .gov and Page Links are of high importance. Yahoo! is the best at picking up links, which means that Yahoo! should be one of your main indicators of link popularity. The .edus and .govs increase the PR to your site which of course is based on the overall number of links to your site (site-wide links to each of the pages within your site and to your homepage). The Y! page links are important for evaluating what it takes to be in the top of search for those terms used. If a site is Cancer.gov per se, you should focus on its overall link popularity as well as it’s page links. If you can increase your full amount of links, the authority of those links and build deep links to your inner pages, you can easily rank highly for the search terms targeted based on the link popularity data.
• The Technorati links don’t entirely matter, Technorati doesn’t pick up at that much link love data – This needs to possibly be optimized in the future for future SEO needs. The future of SEO will definitely be based upon the folksonomical tagging, AI and simple AI (more content will be introduced in the future on this topic).
• Alexa and Compete.com rankings are great for finding the traffic stats on the top ranked sites. I especially love the use of Compete.com’s Uniques. Although these stats aren’t completely accurate, they are a good estimation towards the traffic number of the top sites for your targeted search terms (Remember, this data is based on site-wide information)
• Cached – represents the number of pages a site has indexed in the search engines. The more pages of unique, authoritative content, the more value and PR a site will gain and retain. Build your pages, make the content amazing and your cached number of pages will be through the roof. Cached pages is a BIG factor for SEO as well as those attributes listed above.
• DMOZ, BlogLines and Y! Directory Listings – DMOZ matters in that a DMOZ link is HIGHLY authoritative and high in PR. Y! Directory listings are incredibly important and provide a tremendous opportunity for high PR boosting. The bloglines section isn’t as important but may become of high importance in the future.
• The WhoIS information – The guts of the domain name talking of the OS the site is on, the owner information as well as other content related to the age and details behind the domain name in question – There are the hardware, software details as well as registrar details, blacklist details, etc. There’s a LOT of information to be found through whois.domaintools.com.
• The MSN link credit – Not worth much, focus on boosting your other areas and your Y! links, MSN will eventually catch up.

Download: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

Link Analysis Tool – The ultimate open source SEO tool

Patrick Altoft of BlogStorm has created an open source link analysis tool that does some of the same functions as SEO Quake.

Link Analysis Tool is not a Firefox extension, so if you are not a Firefox user this may be a good choice. One of the reasons Patrick chose to release this as an open source project is to allow for others to develop and customize it further, so keep your eyes open for continued improvement.

Features:

• Uses Yahoo Site Explorer to find all pages on a site
• Pulls in link data for every page on the site & orders results by pages with the most links
• Allows you to drill down 2 levels deep into the link data for pages linking to the target site
• Accepts Google sitemaps imports
• Accepts single URL imports
• Lets you check the rankings for any page on any search engine

Download: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/plugins/linkanalysis.zip