The Top 5 Free Link Analysis Tools

Link building is one of the most important SEO campaign exercises. At the same time it’s also one of the most tedious and time-consuming activities. This is why it’s absolutely crucial to know how to measure and analyse all inbound links to your page and domain. Below is the selection of 5 best ( and free ) link analysis tools out there right now.

Link Analysis Tool 1 – Link Diagnosis
http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

This is an essential tool for every SEO link building campaign, monitoring inbound links and researching bloggers outreach. It requires installation of additional Firefox plugin and the script runs a while but once that’s done then key features include:

List of all pages linking to your site and their respective link anchor text
Quality of external links (good, bad, dofollow, nofollow, etc.)
Breakdown showing all most linked to pages and the number of pages linking to those pages
CSV export feature

Link Analysis Tool 2 – Majestic SEO
http://www.majesticseo.com/

Good link analysis tool showing instant results which include:

Graph comparing the link discovery over time for up to 5 chosen domains
Number of sub-domains created on the analysed domain
Number of indexed URLs
Number of backlinks and domains linking back to your site
Breakdown of link types (images, nofollows, redirects, iframes, deleted)

Link Analysis Tool 3 – Open Site Explorer
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Open Site Explorer would be probably the best link analysis tool if only the free version wasn’t restricted to only few first results. Nevertheless, it’s a brilliant, well designed, quick and clever link research tool. Some of the features include:

Total number of links
Page and domain authority score
List of pages and domains linking to your site and their page/domain authority
CSV export functionality
Top linked to pages on your site
Anchor text distribution
Graph showing the split between followed and nofollowed links and between internal and external links

Link Analysis Tool 4 – SEO Book Link Harvester
http://tools.seobook.com/link-harvester/

Link Harvester is a useful link analysis tool which returns:

Unique linking domains
Their IP addresses & unique c block addresses of the links
Number of inbound links to the domain and homepage
Link Analysis Tool 5 – Bad Neighbourhood
http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

This text link checker tool does look dated but it does what it’s supposed to, which is identifying inbound links which can actually hurt your website rankings instead of helping you to rank better. This tool will scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.

You can read more about Pod1’s SEO Services London and general ecommerce design offered by Pod1.

Read More

Top Visual Keyword Research Tools

Hi friend.. :)

As the SEO industry grows the number of keyword research tools grows along with it too. There are tens, if not hundreds, of keyword research tools and extensions utilising search engine APIs to present the user with all possible synonyms and relevant keywords.

One of the recent trends in keywords research tools development includes making the results more pleasant for the eye. They still use the same Google, Yahoo or other search engine’s API, but they can present the query output in a nice and logical way, particularly useful for those who prefer to see a visual representation of the data. Here are some of the best ones out there right now.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 1 – Keyword Eye
http://www.keywordeye.co.uk

Very visual and useful keyword research tool showing the results in a tag cloud where keywords with higher number of monthly searches are displayed bigger and in different colours.

The monthly search volume is shown when you hover over the keyword. You can also add the keyword to the right hand side panel and then export all keywords to csv, excel or text file.

The keyword research tool also includes a 3D view of the results tag cloud.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 2 – Thesaurus
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

Although Thesaurus is not the first keyword research tool you would think of, it has a nice feature called Visual Thesaurus which is an interactive tool that allows you to discover the connections between words in a visually captivating display. Word maps let you search for just the right word and then explore related concepts, revealing the way words and meanings relate to each other. It’s a word-lover’s delight, with more than 145,000 words and 115,000 meanings organized in an innovative and intuitive design.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 3 – Google Wonder Wheel
Just search Google for anything and switch the standard view to Wonder wheel view on the left.

Useful visual keyword research tool which allows you to see relevant search results to your query in a unique semantically relevant and graphically design way.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 4 – Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends

Google Trends is not a keyword research tool as such, but it provides extremely useful visual representation of the number of Google searches for the particular keyword during the chosen period of time. We found it very useful when planning the SEO strategy, especially for retail and travel ecommerce clients – you can easily spot when people search for holidays, resort destinations or specific gifts.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 5 – Google Sets
http://labs.google.com/sets

Google Sets is an experimental keyword tool at Google labs that creates sets of items based on a couple of seed keywords. You simply enter one or several words and the tool generates a list of related terms.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 6 – Microsoft adCenter Labs Keyword Research
http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Forecast/default.aspx

This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords. Enter keywords separated by semi-colons and click the submit button.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 7 – SEO Keyword Tag Cloud Generator
http://www.scotiasystems.com/keyword-tag-cloud/keywordcloud.php

This tool can be used to analyse keyword placement and frequency on any website. It displays a 3D tag cloud for each of the ‘SEO-sensitive’ areas of the page, e.g. different tag cloud for meta keywords, image titles, page titles, headings, etc.

You can read more about Pod1’s SEO Services London and general ecommerce design offered by Pod1.

Read More

Google Caffeine Rush ???

What has been the effect of Google’s Caffeine update?

Google’s much anticipated new search indexing system update (Google Caffeine) has sparked a wildfire of comments on webmasters and SEO forums. Google claims that Caffeine allows them to increase the speed of its search results by 50%. They can achieve this near real-time result by not having to build up a queue of crawled websites waiting to be put into the live index but by adding every crawled page to the index instantaneously. It seems obvious that Google wants to get faster in indexing and presenting the content with Caffeine. They don’t want to be left behind considering the growth in real-time search and where Yahoo and Bing are going with their developments.

Although Google played down the significance of the Caffeine update on the search ranking algorithm, there are several things SEO experts should re-consider.

The page load speed became an important ranking factor since Google puts more emphasis on speed. Pages including ‘heavy-on-bandwidth’ elements will see a drop in rankings.

Brand engagement in social media and blogging has never been more important than it is now. Caffeine means that Google can display the high quality, fresh and engaging content within minutes of being published.

Across the whole range of Pod1 ecommerce design clients, we noticed only slight changes in the rankings where blog sections became more prominent in Google results. We are also seeing more traffic coming to some of the bigger brands websites from the ‘Related Searches’ links at the bottom of Google results page. This would confirm one of many Caffeine theories that Google is favoring the “authority web sites” even more than before.

You can read more about Pod1’s SEO Services London and general ecommerce design offered by Pod1.

Read More