Know It All Marketing

SEO success requires a variety of tools to help us analyze and build top results consistently time after time. Our job is made significantly easier through the correct selection and use of the proper tools.

What kind of tools are most appropriate and most effective to the professional SEO? Virtually anything on the Internet can be used in such a way as to provide some value to us. However, what we want to focus on for this article is a discussion of the applications designed to achieve one specific goal to improve the results of your website.

For example, if your objective is to analyze the number of views for your YouTube video, you would use an analytics tool, designed for that one specific task. Of course, YouTube is itself a tool, but it can be used for a large variety of purposes that will take up far too much time to cover in this article!

Now let’s look at a sister application - the Google Toolbar which is loaded with functionality such as popup blocking, bookmarking, and more, but it’s most important function to the SEO is the ‘PageRank’ feature. The PageRank display provides a rough estimate of the number of inbound links on any given page. Of course it takes into consideration much more than just the inbound links, but that is one of the many key factors.

If you find yourself wondering where exactly your webpages are among the ranks of major search engines, this tool will tell you what you want to know. You can leave it running for a night and find your results in the morning. Webposition tracks the exact rank of your pages on each search engine.

A core SEO axiom “Keywords tell the search engines WHAT your page is about; inbound links tell the search engines your page is IMPORTANT.” If you don’t know it already, ‘keywords’are the cornerstone of SEO. Target the wrong keywords - and everything else you do will be in vain. Fortunately there are a variety of tools available to help you find the best keywords for your niche. One of the most popular - and useful ones is the Google Keyword Tool.

Here?s another free keyword tool, this time from Yahoo. While useful for determining how competitive a keyword can be, it has its own weaknesses. It does not distinguish between singular and plural keywords, so you can?t determine which of these has a higher search volume. It also seems to be hit hard by congestion due to high usage of both searchers and advertisers alike.

The defacto statndard of professional SEOs for nearly a decade has been Wordtracker. What sets it apart from virtually all other tools is its default “phrase match” paradigm. Although most people do not enclose their searches in double quotes, doing so when researching keywords can lead to more accurate predictions. Wordtracker is now available in both a paid and free version; however, keep in mind - you get what you pay for; pun intended.

Keywordtopia is a paid keyword service that makes use of all the major keyword research tools from Google, Yahoo, Overture, WordTracker, Ask.com, and so on. It also offers some additional features, like arranging/adding/editing your keywords into Ad Groups for you as you build your keyword list.

The Google Traffic Estimator is one of the tools found under Google Adwords, this small tool allows you to do a quick estimate of bid prices and ad clicks for new keywords, without having to add them to your account or sign up for Google Adwords. You can even select the language and countries you want to focus on.

Some more unique tools are now available from Windows LIve. If you’re targeting a particular demographic group and want to know what search terms they use, ‘Demographics Prediction should be your tool of choice. You can input either a web address (URL) or keyword and flter your results based on data such as gender, age, marital status, or a variety of other demographic data to hone in on your niche market.

Search Funnel, also from Windows Live, this helps you to determine the sequence of keywords searchers usually use. This is to find out how users narrow down or refine their query, by looking at what they would search for next after the first search term.