My SEM Toolbox

Jim Boykin was up first to discuss some of the news he is fond of and the tools his company has built. He goes over the Cool SEO Tool, and various data that is offered with use of this tool. Jim makes a good point to find synonyms in Google he says to use the search ‘-marketing ~marketing” and it will return words that Google considers similar. Good for finding alternative keywords he says. He next puts up and goes over Aaron Wall’s tools. He is describing a linking relational map, on who links to who and so on. The next tool he uses is called http://www.dead-links.com to find broken links. You start by typing in an a url and it will spider each of your webpages looking for errors in your internal and external links. He recommends using this tool especially for older sites. Jim ends saying he recommend using the Digitalpoint ranking tool to track historical rankings.

Bill Hartzer was up second, and he starts with some funny example about his tie. He asks which side of his tie with unravel fastest. The result, it’s a tie. Bill goes over his company and next into tools that he uses. He puts up a list such as Optilink. He says he has used Optilink for a number of years. It will return for your incoming and outgoing links including pagerank. Bill goes over the various uses of Optilink. The next tool he goes over is Clicktracks. I high recommend this tool as well. Great for visual analysis reporting of what visitors are doing. It reveals why visitors do what they do and goes beyond simple web analytics. Bill talks about Link Harvestor, another tool from Aaron Wall. CombineWords.com is another good tool, which helps combine various keywords into many different combinations. URLTrends is another tool that works well giving a ton of data.

Bruce Clay is up third and explains he is going to talk about using search engines as tools. He says we spend as much time using the search engine as anything else. The best ranking check is to actually go and check it manually. He says they don’t even use their tools to run ranking monitors on a daily basis. Bruce next talks about Mindset from Yahoo and thinks it’s a really excellent tool. Mindset is the tool offered from Yahoo that allows you to use a slider from left (shopping) to right (research). The tool is helpful for finding out how the search engine considers your website, is it a research or shopping site. He says its great to discovering what the competition is all about and how the search engine sees your site. He recommends using information words on specific research pages and be careful to use the right words. Bruce next talks about using Google to do searches with quotes such as “searchnenginewatch.com” which will give you the full population of pages out there. He also recommends using “intitle:” searches as it will give you sites which include the specific word in the title.

Todd Malicot is up next and says he is a toolholic. He favorite type of tools are those called information bootstrapper tools such as domain/server level, competitive, keyword, backlink, off-page, header & page-level, including spidering and indexability.

Domain/Server Level Information
http://www.whois.sc
http://www.ip-report.com
http://www.netcraft.com
http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=59 – tell if a particular site is doing user agent cloaking.
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org (use a proxy switcher)
http://www.openproxies.com (get free proxies)
http://www.copernic.com

Backlinks
http://www.linkharvestor.com
http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/

Keyword Information
http://www.kwmap.net
http://labs.google.com/sets
http://www.gorank.com/seotools/

Header/Page Level Information
http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.php

Spidering / Indexability
Xenu Broken Link Checker
http://www.grittechologies.com
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

SES NYC Tag: sesny2006