Moderator: Joe Laratro President, Tandem Interactive
We are live blogging this session from Salon A @ the Las Vegas Convention Center, PubCon 2008. Good afternoon. Basic research tools, killer paid reports, (knowing how to read them) and off the beaten path secret-sauce game-changing ideas are always on the mind of every good webmaster. From staples to, well ...actual secrets, this panel was a "no lame-sauce" give it up.
Todd Malicoat asks: "what's in a competitive webmaster's toolbox?"
Browser tools:
- User Agent Switcher For Firefox.
- SearchStatus Firefox Plugin, great for showing backlinks and what is indexed. Check age of domain and backlinks
- Type "Header Checkers" into Google, recommends Espion, check for 301s and status and other information.
- Live headers is another
- Siteuptime is a nice free system to test every 5-10 minutes to see if your site is up or down.
- DomainTools bookmarklet, really has a nice tool set, both paid and free. This includes historical WHOis, which can be valuable. It will also tell you the IP address and nameservers. Run an MSN IP Query and see who else is hosted on the shared server. An average ping time query gives speed indications.
- Keyword information: WordTracker, Trellian, SEOBook KW tool for "pages and pages" of current information aggregated. "Really slick
Competitive Information
- SEOBOOK SEO for Firefox. Make sure you don't get the office band by limiting the number of queries. Very nice for competitive intelligence right within the search results. Check out the age of the site and Yahoo inbound links.
- SpyFu, though a little flaky of late, is the best of the tools. Tell what AdWords keywords the competitor is bidding on including cost metrics. Sort different ways.
- Compete.com is a subscription service. See who's winning the search results data. The tool measures enragement as well and is charged on a "credits" structure.
Rank Checker Tools
- Caphyon Advanced Web Ranking runs really nice automated reports to send your boss.
BackLink Checkers
- Link Harvester is a free tool with some good data.
- Hub Finder tells you links that your competitors have in common.
- Internet Marketing Ninjas tools that are very good. Strongest Sub page Tool shows where the link equity in a site. Rand thinks that this tool is the best. It shows both internal and internal link juice on a page by page level. Gain insight to redistribute link equity.
- SoloSEO Toolset is a $29.00 per month project management software.
Spidering Tools
- Xenu's broken link report is a very popular tool tells 404 and other errors.
- Productivity Tools
- Roboform, $40.00 for 2 copies, logs into every single tool from whatever tool you're on. It saves hours and hours.
- JingProjectScreenCapture , kind of a free version of Cantasia.
- CopyScape helps detect scrapers and copyright violations.
- DupeCop assigns a "percentage of Unique" in testing content.
Rand Fishkin CEO, SEOMoz is speaking on 6 Tools That Rock
- SEOAutomatic Tool for on page on site analysis. Easy to run and quite good for beginners to expert. Identify critical problems in tags, images, robots and give advice. It looks a lot like the old WebPosition Page Critic approach where "expert" advice is offered. Internal links, robots, etc...
- DaveN's Keyword Density Tool shows keyword analysis, geolocation and link ratio, which surfs as GoogleBot to "see as Google sees." It shows keyword header information.
- Blogpulse is a blogosphere search tool showing top blog posts, top videos and search results (URL or keyword) that reveal information from hundreds of thousands of feeds. The information is very fresh. View a "trend graph" to see the genesis of conversations by way of authority users.. This is someone I want to target from my campaigns. [Marty note: this seems priceless.] Rand expects that tools like this will be come more and more important.
- Linkfromdomain command @ Live shows shows outbound links from any site. This reveals a site's proclivity to provide certain sorts of outbound links.
- SEOmoz Historical PageRank Lookup is a free tool that shows PageRank History, which is valuable information to see the positive and negative progress of a site. Find out if Google has been devaluing a site you're considering "acquiring" links about.
- LinkScape is the flagship SEOmoz tool: mozRank (mR) is the PageRank-type result on both page and domain level, from their own independent crawl. It measures internal/external links and considers what external are Do/NoFollow. Compare top ranking pages, domains, anchor text distribution, and links that matter. It also shows 301s and 302s, what pages and when they're ranking based on the strength of the 301s. There is also an advanced link intelligence report
Andy Beal is a fill-in and does not have a .ppt Here are the tools he recommends:
- SEOresearchLabs.com offers very comprehensive keyword research for a very reasonable price. If you're an SEO firm, the cost is $90.00.
- Google "SEO Link Analysis" and the #1 tool offering anchor text and backlinks
- TouchGraph.com is a really cool visual way of looking at hubs and authorities. It's good for competitive analysis
- Don't underestimate the value of Google Webmaster Central. Verify your site and use it.
- Backlinkwatch.com calculates the URL of where links are coming from, anchor text, PageRank, other outbound links from the page and whether it's followed or not.
- Semcheck.com sets for site maps, ULR structure, header errors, unique page titles, automates it, outputs with branding and costs $12.00 per report.
Marty Weintraub is President of aimClear an Internet Focused Advertising Agency in Minnesota.
