SEO Tools
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on September 24, 2009
Okay, so Bing doesn’t have the best webmaster tools available, but they are worth noting.
You can access Bing’s tools here; and you’ll need a Live.com or Hotmail account.
Similar to Google’s and Yahoo!’s webmaster tools you’ll need to submit and verify your account with a verification file or meta tag. Once you have your account verified you’ll see many of the same tools available as with the other search engines.
Some of those tools are:
- Summary of the indexed pages (page score, language, region, last crawled, blocked)
- Profile Information (sitemap url, email address, verification method)
- Crawl Issues
- Backlink checker and brief information regarding the pages linking to yours
- Outbound Links and brief information regarding the pages you’re linking to
- Keywords Tool which is supposed to show your ranking for a particular keyword but doesn’t
- Sitemaps to submit your sitemap
Okay that’s great Wes; there’s a lot of same tools available from each of the the major search engines, but what was it you found? What I found interesting was that Bing thinks many of the US targeted websites I submitted are targeting the United Kingdom (GB). Hmmm that’s a little disturbing, don’t you think?
So why does Bing think this?
Apparently its because of this tag here:(hard-coded on Joomla websites)
html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en-gb” lang=”en-gb”
Notice: lang=”en-gb”?
Bing shows these sites’ region as GB, and here is their description:
“Shows a two-digit code that represents the region your website’s content is targeted at, based on the ISO 3166 country code standard.”
So the question is:
- Have some of these sites’ organic ranking been less than they could have been?
- What about Bing, Google, and Yahoo! local rankings?
- Do any of the other organic search engines use this tag to help determine the region you are targeting?
Well I’m not sure yet, but I’ll definitely do some testing. I’m not too worried because these site are ranking fine in their local markets, but really, what website couldn’t be doing a little bit better.
Does Bing think you’re targeting the wrong region? What are your thoughts on this tag in regards to SEO?
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 30, 2009
Yes, it seems this is the year of the SEO Toolbar. Many of the major SEO experts have released them recently, and I have found some features very advantageous. That’s why I continue to share them here with you.
Bruce Clay’s SEMToolBar was released back in May, and even though I haven’t had much time to test all of the features, I figured I’d write a quick post to let you know about it so you could.
In a recent interview I heard Bruce Clay speak about his new toolbar which he referred to as an SEM toolbar rather than an SEO tool bar, insisting it is more for search engine marketers than search engine optimizers. I personally think it would be better to encompass both specialties since many companies can’t afford to have separate divisions or persons specializing in each, but that’s just my opinion. I imagine the majority of Bruce Clay’s clientele are very high-end clients who can afford SEO’s and SEM’s independently, so I guess it makes sense he’d build his tools with them in mind.
At first glance this toolbar appears to have a lot of great features, and if I had more time to test it out I’d probably notice a few more. But for right now I’ll continue to use the SEO Toolbar from SEOBook.com as my toolbar of choice since it has many of the same features and some additional ones I like to use.
However, there are some features on Bruce Clay’s toolbar worth noting immediately, such as the Keyword Search Statistics feature which displays above the Google search results. It displays Advertising Statistics, Categories, Demographics, and Monthly Trends for the keyword or key phrase that is being queried.
This feature isn’t currently offered by any of the other toolbars I use, and if I didn’t already have so many Firefox add-on’s installed i’d keep this one installed for this feature alone.
Another great thing for many folks is that there is also a version available for Internet Explorer. The MozBar from SEOmoz and the one from SEOBook are only available for Mozilla Firefox.
If you want to try them all out for yourself you can find the download links on my SEO toolbars page.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 3, 2009
This is a follow up to a previous post regarding an easy way to check nofollow links. On their blog today, SEOmoz announced their new SEO Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox – the mozBar. This toolbar also allows you to quickly identify nofollow links.
While I think the Show Nofollows feature is great, overall toolbar lacks a lot to be desired in regards to it’s free features. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t install it unless you plan on upgrading to their PRO Membership. However It does offer a couple of neat features like the ability to quickly identify Nofollow links, as well as analyzing the major SEO components of a web page. Which may be reason enough to install it.
If you are looking for free SEO Toolbars, it is still my recommendation you use the one from SEObook.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on July 24, 2009
If you plan on doing SEO, then you need to know about the nofollow HTML attribute. If you’re not familiar with nofollow, you can read Google’s explanation.
If you’re like me, then you may find yourself frustrated by the nofollow attribute. I hate looking at web page source code every time I check out potential link partners, or identifying where I placed nofollow links on my own websites. Well if you’re tired of digging through all that source code too, then I have the tool for you!
The free SEO Toolbar by Aaron Wall, and the guys over at SEOBook.com is a must-have for SEO professionals. While this toolbar has many great features, I’ll keep this post to discussing the nofollow link highlighter tool.
This toolbar only works in Mozilla Firefox, but if you’re an SEO expert and you aren’t using the Mozilla Firefox browser already, then this is yet another great reason to make the switch.
Once you install the toolbar, you can find the nofollow link highlighter tool on the far right side as shown below.
It’s a little hard to see, but if you click the little red “square and arrow” looking button, while on a web page, you’ll get something like this:
Notice how easy it is to identify the nofollow links which are highlighted in red? The one thing this tool does not show you is image links with the nofollow attribute, so keep that in mind.
Here are just a few great reasons to use this tool:
- quickly check out potential link partners
- quickly identify where you placed nofollow links on your client websites
- quickly identify where you placed nofollow links on your own website
- easily identify where your competitors are using nofollow links
Anyone know of a tool to quickly identify image links with the nofollow attribute?
