My Favorite SEO Tools
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
Here’s a short, sweet list of some of my favorite SEO tools:
Yahoo Clues Yahoo clues is sort of insights for search’ish and Alexa clicksteam’ish but a bit sexier because of the size of their index and depth of intel offered. Open up the tool, run a search, scroll down. The Money is in the little section waaay down titled as ‘search flow’ This section gives you the most likely, according to yahoo’s internal search data, previous and next search terms.
Why it’s hot:
It is based on yahoo’s index which makes it cooler then Alexa and you can search phrase combination and rerun the thing to give you previous/next data for those phrases.
How I use it:
I’d never recommend using just one tool for anything, so I call Google Insights for Search, Alexa Clickstream, and Yahoo Clues search flow my ‘unholy tripariate of new keyword opportunities. Whenever I’m doing any kind of reporting or just analysis generally, I always look for new words that are gaining speed that the competition hasn’t caught on to yet. This is easy because many sites do real keyword research once and call it a day. I exploit that fact in client competitors and get at all the words they’re missing using these three little tools ::maniacal laugh::
Search Engine Reports Rank Checker this is my ‘sweeter then the rest‘ bulk rank checker
Why it’s hot:
Not only does it give you ranking data for phrases in bulk for Google and Bing but it gives you the title tag meta description, url, and cache data.
How to use it:
Take your keyword research, find a competitor, pop the list in, run it!…now how is your competitor comparing to you for that huge list for phrases??
ez-seo on page tool : Crazy amounts of on page data in one place
Why it’s hot:
This tool really breaks the onpage down. You have no idea how many times I’ve seen people paying all this money to get their pages ranked for this or that phrase and their title tag is aweful. Scan for those kinds of simple issues easily with this tool and give your client lots of nifty number to look at. Just like SEO’s love graphs, managers <3 numbers.
How I use it:
I stick it into reports for the ooohh ahhh effect.
Web Design Tools
instant eyedropper Basically you download this free tool and it will identify and pate into clipboard the html color code of and pixil on the screen with one click.
Why it’s hot:
Awesome when you’re trying to replicate a certain webpage or style this is the super lazy mans way.
How I Use it:
This is really handy when I”m trying to replicate stuff or do design wireframes or any kind of templating really.
Lorem Ipsum is dummy text used by the printing and typesetting industry since about the 1500′s brought to the web age. Basically when you’re designing wireframes or planning a site design, this dummy text ‘fills’ in the layout. (By the way, thank you to colleague who showed me this, it’s awesome!)
Why it’s hot:
This tool is hot because you can choose the amount of words, paragraphs, bytes, or list based on the number you want and Ipsum spits it out exactly as such.
How I use it:
This is handy in several ways. You can use it to fill in layouts like you’re supposed to. You can also use it to plan the ‘look’ of content you want to out source or have your writer look on. After all, when it comes to content writing stuff seeing really puts content needs into context.
Affiliate Tools
With these, I’m not gonna go into why they’re hot or how I use them but they’re definitely neat. If you’re a for real affiliate, once you see them, you’ll know 
domain crawler basically replace the numbers in the url with someones adsense publish code and find out what other domain names are associated with that publisher code.
sitonomy run a URL through here and this tool will give you the title tag, meta description, stat tools (google analytics, omniture etc), server software, server IP, and it will give you info on THEIR affiliate tracking code (adsense, commission junction, click bank etc.)
