EggRage.co.uk

It’s all very well making regular changes to your site and constantly updating it to improve your search engine performance, but what do you use to track your progress? Other than benchmarking your actual rankings the answer for many people is ‘nothing’. There are however, a whole host of tools that you can use to stay valiantly on top of your site’s performance and effectiveness.

What The Hell Am I On About?

Well there’s more to SEO tracking than just you actual rankings (arguably). There’s link popularity (how many inbound links you have) and the construction of your code, as well as what directories you’re included in, DMoz for example. As well as those things you need to stay on top of exactly where your links are coming from, and whether or not anyone else is copying your content, which could (potentially) lead to a duplicate content issue.

Here’s What You Can Do

I’ve compiled a list of 5 ‘essential tools’ to help you stay on top of things such as the above.

Website Grader

In my opinion one of the number one best tools out there at the moment for diagnosing your site’s SEO effectiveness, websitegrader.com takes into account a great deal of factors including which directories your site is listed in, what it’s PageRank is, how many inbound links it has, what it’s traffic ranks are, and many many others in order to come up with a final score out of 100 for your site that generally proves to be pretty accurate in terms of how well your site is “SEO’d”.

Link Diagnosis

LinkDiagnosis.com is a tool which I have mentioned in the past, and for good reason too. I use this tool very regularly to analyse both the quantity and the quality of inbound links to my site(s). It produces a number of data charts and graphs that show the distribution of PageRank across your inbound links and gives various metrics and comparisons that can really help you asses which links are giving you the most benefit. In addition this is a great little tool for spying on where competitors are getting their links from.. and then stealing them ;)

Bad Neighborhood Link Checker

Another one which I’ve mentioned previously, this tool is (in a way) the opposite of Link Diagnosis. Rather than analysing your inbound links and which are helping you most, it analyses all your external links and flags potentially harmful sites that you’re linking to. It looks out for things like blog-spam (high keyphrase or link density) and use of adult or pharmaceutical phrases within the page copy. If you want to avoid a PageRank penalty this a good place to start. Remember, if a site get’s penalised and you link to it, then you could be too!

Marketleap

A real golden oldie, Marketleap has been around for years and still provides excellent essential data to its users. Marketleap gives you counts for both search engine saturation and link popularity, but the real winner for me is that it tracks your progress over time and produce and updated graph every time that you run a report so that you can actively track and record your number of inbound links and indexed pages over time.

CopyScape

This is the daddy when it comes to hunting down thieves. All you have to do at CopyScape is put in your URL (or any) and hit search, which enables the flux capacitor and a number of other highly secretive devices and sets into motion one of the greatest contraptions in the history of man. (not really)

CopyScape scans the web for other websites which contain your text, the search results are ordered in descending order by the number of identical words found on the page. This is both sneaky and brilliant because it doesnt just find direct rip offs, it also finds any people who have tried to copy your text and then edit it slightly. It’s tricky to explain, but give it a whirl and you’ll see what I mean in an instant.

But There’s More

So many more, but these are the most effective that I’ve found, and incidentally the ones which I use most often. What great SEO tools have you found recently? Any which should really have been included here? Drop me a line in the comments!

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