What is a good, free tool for SEO research?
With so many tools for analyzing competing sites, the SEO Toolbar will help you jump-start your SEO efforts. However, if you don’t understand the tools, then you obviously cannot utilize them the right way. Learn about these great tools here.
If you follow EverSpark Interactive here on the blog or on our Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter pages, you know that we are coming out with an informational E-Book soon. This E-Book will be a guide that lets you in on tons of great SEO tips and secrets. It will help you better understand Search Engine Optimization and teach you ways to improve your site’s rankings. The following post will give you insight into what you can expect to find in our E-Book, so read, learn, and enjoy!
We love Aaron Wall’s SEO Toolbar. It provides so much important information – and you can download a version of it for free!
The Toolbar gives you a birds-eye view of the analytics behind any website you look at. This information can help you can reverse engineer to improve your own site’s SEO. To gain access to this useful tool, just use Firefox and go to www.seobook.com.
What do we mean by reverse engineer?
You can export the information you gain from the Toolbar to Excel and look at all the information side by side. This way, you can begin to understand other websites’ SEO strategies, successes, and failures. Further, you can look at a particular keyword and see the competitors for that term who rank in the top 3 positions on the search engines. This helps you to reverse engineer what is happening within the Organic SEO strategy of others. For example, there will be a higher number of links going to harder-to-rank keywords. This can help you realize that, if you are trying to compete for a keyword that is very competitive, you need more quality links coming into your page in order to crush the competition.
Why do you want more links coming into your website? And why must they be quality links? So that you can be viewed as an authority in your niche, which will help you rank higher in the SERPs.
The Toolbar
Now for the good stuff: Let’s talk about all of the tools that the SEO Toolbar has to offer.
The site info button (the white ‘i’ in the blue circle) provides so much great information about your site’s “off-page” factors, a term which refers to how other sites are referring to yours (basically, these are your inbound links). Here is what you see when you click on your site info button:
As you can see, this button tells you the following about the page you are looking at: page rank, domain age, caching, the number of links coming into the site, the number of pages the site has, the site’s DMOZ directory and Yahoo references, traffic volume and value, Alexa rank, and various social media references.
Next to the Site Info button is the Page Rank checker. This tool tells you the site’s page rank so you can see how you match up against your competition when it comes to how you are viewed by Google. Page Rank is the value, from zero (worst, the page is not an authority) to ten (best, a rare PR). A strong Page Rank sits right around 5.
Next on the Toolbar, we have two red Y!’s from the Yahoo Link Domain. These both represent links. The first from the left indicates a rough total of the number of links pointing back to this domain. The second from the left indicates the total number of links pointing back to the particular page that you are looking at.
So far, we have given you a lot of information to digest. Take some time to learn it, play around with the Toolbar a little bit, and come back tomorrow to learn more about the SEO Toolbar!