Archive Page 4

Google SEO Tools and Beta Projects

Google has a number of useful SEO tools and beta projects they are working on. You can find them here:

  • AdWords Keyword Tool - Excellent tool that shows keywords related to an entered keyword, web page, or web site.
  • AdWords Traffic Estimator - Used to estimate the how much traffic an AdWords ad would drive and what the bid price needs to be to rank #1 in the sponsored ad section on Google searches. The esitmate is based on holding the #1 spot 85% of the time.
  • Google Suggest - Cute little tool found in Google Labs that auto completes search queries based on the most common searches starting with the characters or words you have entered.
  • Google Trends - This tool is still in beta and needs some work but it shows multi-year search trends.
  • Google Sets - Quickly becoming a useful tool that creates semantically related keyword sets based on keyword(s) you enter.
  • Google Zeitgeist - If your looking to find out what fades are being searched for try this tool.

Custom SEO Tools

At the time… the never ending battle to create search engine optimization tools and analyze web sites was super hot. We started building search engine optimization tools in 2004. We don’t really promote these tools but have continued to develop them for the last couple of years. (These tools help you analyze the basics of a web site and please note we are a couple versions ahead of what is on the site to say the least. Contact me if you are interested is seeing the new stuff.)

PromoteMyLink: This was our first crack at creating rebrandable SEO tools that other webmasters and SEM professionals could use. It was built on a subscription service model and launched in 2004. The basic SEO tools on the website include a content extractor, keyword density tools, link popularity tool, link checker, meta tag generator, meta tag extractor. We also ran these tools on specified businesses to create a competitor analysis report.

OptimizationCentral.com: Well… the next logical step from building Search Engine Optimization tools for ourselves was to provide them as service to webmasters and Internet Marketers. So, we built a set of web services in Coldfusion that could be access from ASP, ASP.net, Coldfusion, PHP, and JSP. Optimization Central uses the PHP web services client to access the “seotools” written in Java and wrapped by and deployed as Coldfusion web services. It was launched in 2005 and we are currently refining everything.

These SEO tools are intended for:

• Advertising Agencies
• Search Engine Marketers
• Web Design Companies
• Web Hosting Companies
• Campaign Management Tool Providers

Current SEO Tools:

• Content Extractor - Extract the content of any web page removing the markup tags. This is very useful for harvesting content.

• Keyword Density - This tool will analyze the content on a web page and help you determine what keywords and phrases are found on it. The tool will compare one, two, and three-word combinations against the total amount of words on the page.

• Link Popularity - Link popularity is one way search engines determine how important your web site is. This utility will let you find out how many incoming links are pointing to a web site.

• Link Checker - Our link checker will read your web page and determine if there are any broken links. Works as a great error-checker.

• Link Extractor - Our link extractor will read your web page and extract all the links on the page for you.

• Meta Tag Generator - This tool will automatically create your web site Meta Tags. Just enter some basic information and presto!

• Meta Tag Extractor - Retrieve the Meta Tags for any web page. This tool is very useful for determining what keywords a competitor is using for achieving a higher page rank.

• Keyword Suggestion Tool - Knowing your target market and what terms people search for on the web will help you determine what keywords to use on your web site. This tool helps you find out what terms people are using.
Current Analysis Reports:

• SEO Report - Generates an in-depth easy-to-read site analysis. The report includes current Meta information, link popularity, Google PageRank, and a keyword density report. You can customize all content.

• Competitive Analysis Report - Compare a web site based on its keywords against the top-ranked web sites listed in the search engines. You can customize all content.

• Web Ranking Report - Displays a web site’s current rank and includes other top sites for a given set of keyword search phrases. Now you can use this tool to track a web site’s search ranking. You can customize all content.

Explore Fresno

ExploreFresno.com is a portal type website for Fresno and the Central Valley of California. We orginally built the web site in 2003 as a marketing platform to approach businesses for our web design and Internet marketing services. (before the online boom of directories.)

It was intially built to provided basic information about the Fresno area. Information such as local business listings, events, schools, travel info, local attractions, etc. The site was set up so businesses could add their contact information and get listed in the business directory. Users can go to the website and add calendar events that get added to the local events calendar. We eventually setup ExploreFresno so we could host one page web sites (business profiles) for our customers as well.

Future plans for the site include either Yahoo or Google API integrations with their local search solutions such as Google or Yahoo maps. Maintenance, site navigation improvement and URL cleanup based on a large growing amount of data. RSS news feeds for up-to-date information. Expansion of content and products based on user feedback, web analytics, and stuff we just want to add.

With local search coming to the forefront of the SEM community we are seeing an increase of traffic. The site currently averages over 30,000 unique visitors with close to 500-600,000 page views. Besides initially submitting the site to Yahoo, dmoz, and Google very little optimization and link building has been done. Most links to the site have come from people and businesses looking for a quality resource on the Fresno area. (I thank those who have built scrapers to….)

Take a look at the site Explore Fresno. If you want to buy it because you see the value in owning a site like this drop me a line.

OfficePools4U.com

OfficePools4u.com is a fun little web app that we built in 2003 to manage Footbal Office Pools (This was before CBS and Yahoo decided to crush the market and offer similar software.)

The website allows subscribers to create an account, and invite their friends to join their office pool for free. Once the season begins, the subscribers can log into the website and choose their picks or get football information and statistics while we manage everything else. Sports scores, pool winners, pool losers, and current standings for each office pool are tracked.

It was a fun application to build at the time. We never wanted to pay to integrate into real time stats so entering the scores is still manual. It is written in Coldfusion with MS SQL Sever.

If you want to buy the domain or OfficePools4u.com software let me know.

Yahoo! SEO Tools and Beta Projects

Yahoo! has a number of useful SEO tools and beta projects they are working on. You can find them here:

  • Overture Keyword Selector Tool - shows prior month search volumes across Yahoo! and their search network.
  • Overture View Bids Tool - displays the top ads and bid prices by keyword in the Yahoo! Search Marketing ad network.
  • Yahoo! Site Explorer - shows which pages Yahoo! has indexed from a site and which pages they know of that link at pages on your site.
  • Yahoo! Mindset - shows you how Yahoo! can bias search results more toward informational or commercial search results.
  • Yahoo! Advanced Search Page - makes it easy to look for backlinks.
    Try link:http://www.site.com/page.html searches (links to an individual page)
    Try linkdomain:www.site.com/ searches (links to any page on a particular domain)
  • Yahoo! Buzz - shows current popular searches