URL Trends
Most of
the coverage I've seen focuses on the ability of
UrlTrends to allow you to "View Any URLs Google PageRank,
Alexa Rank, Popular Search Terms and Incoming Links".
And
that's a great thing, to be able to see all of that from
one place. But one great thing missed about this tool
are that you can subscribe to changes to the results via
RSS -hands off monitoring of your site.
Fagan
Finder's URL Info
This
online gadget is like the Swiss Army knife of site
information, giving you one-page access to dozens of
pertinent check-ups. But monitoring relevant search
engine information like your backlinks, or the cached
pages in a search engine are just the tip of the
iceberg.
You can
use URL Info to check that your HTML code is validated,
translate your page, and if you're a blogger, discover
where your site is mentioned in the blogosphere.
Spannerwork's Spider Simulator
Ever
wondered what your site looks like to the search engine
spiders that crawl the web, looking for information to
include in their databases? Go to this page to see what
information is seen by the spider and what it skips
over.
Spannerworks.com can also help you figure out how to
troubleshoot content that seems like it should show up
to a spider but doesn't, with its HTTP viewer. They also
have a tool that will analyze your keyword density.
GoRank.com's
Top Ten Comparison
If
you've been banging your head against the wall in an
attempt to figure out why you haven't hit the top ten
results in Google, GoRank.com has a page that can give
you important clues to help you figure it out. One of my
favorites, the Top Ten comparison report, will scrub the
raw data of the top ranking results for a given keyword.
In
studying the results, you may find it easier to
understand where your own optimization efforts are going
wrong. Don't forget to stop by Google for your API key
at
http://www.google.com/api as you'll need it to
create your free account.
Search
Guild's Keyword Difficulty Checker
This
one's an old favorite of mine. When you find what you
may think is an ideal keyword, before you start tweaking
your pages, it's a good idea to run it through this
tester. Using the Google API, it analyzes whether or not
a given phrase will be worth your efforts.
You'll
already have to be well-versed in how to find good
keywords to plug into the tool, but once you have that
nailed, it's pretty reliable in telling you whether it's
worth your time to target that phrase. If you use flash
on your site, check out the flash viewer on their
utilities page as well.
The
following tools are for monitoring your search results
in the three major search engines. It isn't an
all-inclusive list, but rather a highlight of some of
the tools you can use. (I'll point you to one of the
master lists when we get into more general tools in part
three.)
Using Your Google Site Information Page
I've
covered this in an earlier article, but just in case you
missed it, we'll go over it again briefly here. (If you
need more help following along, you can listen to one of
my recent podcasts for a convenient audio walkthrough.)
Open up
your browser and go to Google's home page. Type in
info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So if your site was
ExactSeek.com you'd type info:exactseek.com. You
can also use site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find
out which pages have been indexed by Google's search
engine spider.
This
search will tell you pages that Google considers similar
to yours. It will also show sites that it considered
linked to you, and show sites that carry your full url,
hyperlinked or not. It's not 100% accurate as far as
telling you all the sites that are linked back to yours,
but what you can learn from this is which backlinks
matter.
From
here you can also see the last day Google spidered your
home page.
To see
this in action, click on the first group of information
links, "Show Google's cache of yoursitename.com" If you
look next to the word "cached" on the first line, the
date is expressed also.
Sometimes it seems that the cached time for
yoursitename.com and www.yoursitename.com are different,
so be sure and check both.
Finding Information About Your Site In Yahoo
This
document will tell you how to find out what sites are
linking to you, give you the results for how many pages
of your site are in Yahoo, and more. Once you get to the
results page, you'll be able to view your cached pages,
etc.
Discovering Your Site's Status on MSN
As the
page in the help section states, you can use
site:www.yoursitehere.com to find out if a document
at your site has been indexed. The results page will
also give you the date of last caching.
Google Rankings
You'll
need a free Google API key for this one, and this site
has the direct link telling you where to get one. You'll
have to enter this key in order to query the site for
information on Google.
With
Google Rankings, you'll be able to see where you rank
within the top 40-1000 results in Google for a given
keyword. I recently noticed that it also displays
results for MSN and Yahoo, with links to each search
engine.
They
also have some other tools that will track your keywords
over time, as well as one they call the "Ultimate SEO
Tool" that will measure your site's keyword density.
Google Backlinks Checker
LilEngine.com's Backlink Checker will measure the number
of links you have pointing back to your site against
competing sites. Handy if you just want a quick
comparison of how many links you have versus others,
though how much getting more links back will help
varies, depending on other factors.
Yahoo
Search Rankings
From
the same folks who brought you Google Rankings, using
Yahoo Search Rankings, you'll be able to see where you
rank within the top 1000 results in Yahoo for a given
keyword. If you just want to see your Yahoo rankings,
it's quite helpful.
You can
find more Yahoo tools that use the Yahoo Web API at
their
developer's site.
In the
next part of the article, we'll take a closer look at
other tools that give you more specific information
about the links pointing back to your site, keyword
research, and more.
