A lot of times I hear people talking about the tools they use for SEO management. I have never spoken about the tools that I use when managing campaigns but I figured I would give you guys some tools that I use when running my SEO campaigns. There are a few tools that we have custom built but to be quite honest the tools that really count are tools that anybody can get. Here is a list of my 10 favorite tools:
IBP & Arelis
IBP is awesome for a couple of reasons. Number one it makes client reporting a snap and checking a clients ranking can happen with just the push of a button. It also makes it very easy to keep track of the keywords that you are working on. Another thing that I like about IBP is the fact that you can store information in it, this acts as a great database to keep client information.
Thats about all I use IBP for. Personally, I do not use any of the other tools that IBP has to offer. I am not saying that these are not great tools but as like anything in life I have my picks.
SEM Rush
SEM Rush, in my eyes is one of the best tools to start you off on running a competitive analysis. Even though SEM Rush is a monthly subscription (starts at like $20 per month but $50 a month package is the best value) it is very cheap compared to what you get out of it.
SEM Rush offers the ability to check what keywords your competitors are ranking for organically and what place they are in. It also gives you the estimated number of visits your competition is getting off of the said keyword. Another great thing about SEM Rush is that you can also check on what keywords your competition is bidding on in Adwords and how much they are paying per click. What also makes this a useful tool is the fact that all the data that you dig for can be exported into CSV format and opened in excel or any other type of database that you may be using.
SEOMoz Pro Tools
SEOMoz is cool because if you are a Pro member you get access to some very useful tools. One of their main tools would be linkscape. This tool gives you a slew of information on your website. Another great thing about SEOMoz is the fact that if you run into a problem that you can’t figure out the you have the ability to chat with the SEOMoz staff. I believe I used this feature one time and I certainly wasn’t disappointed with the answer that I received from their staff, they were very nice and extremely helpful. They also didn’t give me one of them crappy template written answers that you get in a lot of other places.
Fast Directory Submitter
I’m not a big fan of auto submission programs such as the programs that SPAM social media sites. But I do feel that Fast Directory Submitter is a useful tool and I have grown partial to this program over the last year. One of the big reasons that I started liking this program is due to the fact that it has directly brought traffic to websites that we have worked on through directories that we have submitted to. What I do recommend is to take it extremely slow with this program. Do about 20 directories a day and make sure to enter a ton of varied descriptions for Fast Directory Submitter to rotate. Also after about 100 submissions change you descriptions up completely.
Another thing to note about Fast Directory Submitter is that with a free download you can submit to 200 directories and with a paid upgrade (Just $20) you get to submit to like 3000 directories. I have included the direct download link above. You can also download it HERE
SEO For FireFox
This tool is offered by SEObookk and the best thing about it is it’s free. This tool alone has saved me a ton of work and countless hours of my time. If you have this tool turned on as you search your chosen keywords on Google, you will see a bunch of useful information compiled under the Google organic results. This information will include the following:
- PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
- Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
- Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
- .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
- .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
- .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
- Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
- del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
- Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
- Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
- Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
- dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
- Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
- dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
- WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.
Being as though this tool is free it is completely awesome. I recommend this tool if you want to save a lot of time on research of your competitors.
Important!! Please make sure to turn this tool off when you are not using it unless you feel like typing a captcha every 10 minutes while searching Google. So again please make sure to turn it off when you are not using it.
So this is my list of must have tools. To be quite honest if these tools didn’t exist it would make my job a lot tougher. If you have any tools to add to this list please feel free to leave it in a comment and I will be sure to add it.
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