SEO Research Tools

[Hazo]

What SEO tools do you use to gather information on your niche. What things do you look for and how do you interpret and use the data?

[Randy Ray]

Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the best SEO tools on the planet. I don't really use any tools besides those very much, unless you count WhoIS.

[Hazo]

Care to elaborate? What info do you specifically look for and how does that influence your strategy. Do you look at the successful sites and try to replicate certain things?

Do you pinpoint weaknesses, if so, what type?

[Michael Martinez]

SEO tools can help a beginner and hold back an expert. Never use a tool that knows less about SEO than you do. Never use a tool that you cannot eventually outperform.

You should learn to use keyword research tools to find out what people are searching for.

You should learn to use advanced query operators on all the search engines like inanchor, intitle, intext, inurl (these are for Google -- some of the other major search engines offer advanced query operators).

You should be careful not to use one search engine's database to analyze another's. That is, don't go doing link research on Yahoo! thinking you'll find out more about what is happening with Google (you won't -- it doesn't work that way).

Some search engines share more information than others. Yahoo! shows you lots of links; Google shows you fewer links; Microsoft won't show you any links. None of them will show you which links pass value.

If you play with the site query operator, combining it with other query operators, you'll learn to find which pages are fully indexed, which pages are partially indexed, and which pages are not really indexed.

You should ignore Toolbar PageRank but if you're going to play with it then keep a spreadsheet and track the historical PR value changes for as many sites as possible across a 2-year period. You MAY find something useful in that data.

Learn how to use robots.txt, meta tags, and XML/TXT sitemap files.

Learn how to use server-side logs. Study the differences between your server logs and your free analytics tool data (which is usually captured through Javascript).

Compare your advertising network reports to your server logs and analytics tool data.

NEVER, EVER, NOT IN YOUR WILDEST DREAMS depend on only one source of information about anything.

And get comfortable with the advanced features of seo-browser.com, which is probably one of the most valuable but under-rated SEO tools on the Web today.

[Ridge]

Greaqt topic, great posts (Mike and Randy), and super cool tool Michael

[Hazo]

Michael that seo-broswer tool is wicked. Thanks for sharing.

Can anyone elaborate on how to do this?

"You should learn to use advanced query operators on all the search engines like inanchor, intitle, intext, inurl (these are for Google -- some of the other major search engines offer advanced query operators)."

Nick

[Scott]

I definitely need to use more tools, but currently I use the keyword tool from seobook.com and then I also use Yahoo Site Explorer when searching other blogs backlinks.

-Scott

[Michael Martinez]

Michael that seo-broswer tool is wicked. Thanks for sharing.

Can anyone elaborate on how to do this?

"You should learn to use advanced query operators on all the search engines like inanchor, intitle, intext, inurl (these are for Google -- some of the other major search engines offer advanced query operators)."

Nick

The inanchor operator tells the search engine to show only listings that have received the keywords through inbound link anchor text. Hence,

inanchor:"randy ray"

should only return page listings where people have pointed links to those pages using the anchor text of "randy ray".

The intext operator (it is inbody on some search engines) tells the search engine to show only listings that actually include the keywords on the page. Hence,

intext:"randy ray"

should only return results where the expression occurs within the body of the text.

You can combine these query operators and often get interesting results (but sometimes the queries are too complex for the search engines to provide reliable information).

For example, to find out which sites have probably hyperoptimized pages for "poker", you could try a query like:

inurloker intitleoker intextoker inanchoroker

Anything coming back should match at least one of those criteria. You can force greater precision by using plus ( + ) and minus ( - ) operators, thinking of them as forced or required matching and required exclusion.

Hence,

+inurloker +intitleoker +intextoker +inanchoroker

would show you only the most artificially relevant pages (that is, the most highly optimized pages) for the term "poker". Of course, this would still be a very crude indicator and the query might be too complex for the search engine to handle.

In this particular example, you won't get much useful information from the forced query.

Just understand that you have to test the combinations to see which ones are useful in helping you determine how much optimization is going on for a particular keyword.

ON EDIT: I don't see how to turn off the smileys. Click on the example query link to see how you could construct a complex query. Sorry.