SEO Tools
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 25, 2010
I recently wrote and in-depth review of Market Samurai, the niche content promotion and keyword analysis tool. If you’ve been using Market Samurai already and would like to add your own reveiw, I would love to get your opinion too. Or, if you simply want to share your thoughts on my review feel free to do so, I appreciate any feedback I get, positive or negative.
Summary of Market Samurai
Market Samurai is a niche keyword analysis and content promotion tool that can save you a ton of time researching and promoting your content or products through the search engines and pay-per-click advertising. It also opened my eyes to few new ways to get traffic, which is pretty good for someone who does this all day every day.
If you do any amount of work online and you’re not using software to save you time, then I definitely recommend you read my review and consider downloading a free trial. Considering there are several other Internet marketing tools available online, Market Samurai may not be the best tool for your needs, but it is a very fast and near complete software program that you should at least take a look at. And, it could absolutely be the best tool suited for you.
Getting the Best Deal
I’ve also added a page to track the latest Market Samurai promo codes, discounts, coupons and specials. So, if you decide to check it out in the future, be sure to check out that page to know you’re are getting latest Market Samurai deal.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on April 8, 2010
I’ve been meaning to write this post for almost a year now, but I just keep coming up with other things to write about.
For those of you who do SEO on a daily basis, you probably already know how much easier an SEO toolbar can make your job. But if you’re not using one, then I definitely recommend you try this one out. For the longest time I worried about how much time I’d lose every day if I couldn’t use the toolbar from SEOBook. That was until I remembered about SEOquake’s Toolbar.
Thank goodness the SeoQauke toolbar is very much like the tool bar from SEOBook. I really like most of the features on both of these. There are a couple of default features on the SeoQuake toolbar not found on SEOBook’s that are interesting, such as how many pages are indexed by Bing and the number of internal and external links are on a page. I can’t say either on of those is really all that important, though. In replace of those, SEOBook has a few other features that I’ve grown to love, like the DMOZ and Yahoo! listing checker, Compete uniques, SEO X-Ray, and a better nofollow link checker. Other than that, everything else is almost identical when viewing a web page.
SeoQuake also has an SEO toolbar for the Google chrome web browser.
SeoQuake definitely ranks a close second, just below SEOBook’s in my list of the best free SEO Toolbars. Next is SEOmoz’s MOZbar, and Bruce Clay’s SEO Toolbar. I haven’t tested SEOmoz’s toolbar in a long-time nor have I used Bruce Clay’s recently either. Both of those may be great toolbars for your needs, since they do offer numerous other metrics not included in my top two. But last I checked, they lacked most of the free features I found most useful for my business. I have never tested their paid versions.
What’s your favorite SEO toolbar?
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
You can also try our free tool to check NoFollow links. With our tool you don’t have to download any software or anything. Just input the URL you would like to check and it will show you all of the web page’s links, identifying which ones are nofollowed.
