Free For Your Site

Knowing which words are more popular on the web is important when writing content for your site. This importance is realized by developers and bloggers as well. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to weigh words against each other? GoogleDuel does exactly that, and without any complications.

GoogleDuel allows you to choose two words and weigh them against each other based on popularity. Need to decide between phobia and fear? Just input the words and the results will show you which of the two occurs on more pages. Knowing which words are popular allows you to make informative choices on how and what to write for your site. This would increase chances of search engine hits, creating more traffic. It must be noted that the results generated are not pin-point accurate, but rather estimates. Using the same word on different duels might yield different hit results for that same word. Also, the site only has a maximum capacity of 1000 cumulative searches per day. This is more than enough for most writers. Once the limit is reached, you’ll need a developer’s key to continue searching. With GoogleDuel, you’ll never need to toss a coin over words again.

GoogleDuel works on most browsers.

Go to GoogleDuel

Good news for keyword research fanatics – John Alexander is offering a free download of his ebook, Wordtracker Magic as a promotional giveaway before the launch of the 2008 version. You have to subscribe to the mailing list to get the ebook, but the mailing list itself offers free SEO tips everyday.

Wordtracker Magic is no-nonsense and straightforward. He explains basic keyword research concepts and their application to Wordtracker. Far from a simple how-to guide, Wordtracker Magic contains discussions on trends, the site visitor’s mindset, and effective brainstorming. An entire chapter is also devoted to the tool’s KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) system and how to interpret its results. Of course, the ebook also covers a variety of keyword research tips and techniques supplemented by screenshots and clear instructions.

Alexander’s approach is easy-to-understand for Wordtracker newbies, but the ebook’s audience is not limited to that. If you’re an experienced WordTracker user, you might be surprised to find out a lot of tips and techniques you didn’t know about. The instructions in the ebook may be specific to Wordtracker users, but several of Alexander’s ideas are applicable regardless of the keyword research tool you use.

Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view the ebook. The free download offer is up to October 31, 2007 only.

Go to Wordtracker Magic ebook

Thinking of starting a new blog or online business? Do you know what’s hot and what’s not? Before spending a dime, it’s always a good idea to study the market first. To help you out, there’s a web tool called What’s the Buzz?

In a nutshell, What’s the Buzz? is a keyword research tool. How does it differ from other similar tools? Well, it’s simple but feature-packed. The interface is composed of a text box. Fill it up with the keyword you wish to study, and press enter. It churns out a long results page with statistics of that keyword and a list of related sites. It’s a simple enough tool, making it usable for keyword research novices.

What’s the Buzz? displays the both the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart and the Google Trends chart. These show how popular the keyword has been blogged about for a certain timeframe. It also searches for blog posts in Technorati that have been tagged with or contains the keyword, and finds social bookmarks in del.icio.us associated with it.

Never underestimate the power of statistics. It can certainly help you in making smart choices, say on what to pick between competing brands or services. The Internet is an incredibly fast-paced playground. It always pays to know what everyone is buzzing about.

What’s the Buzz? can run on most internet browsers.

Go to What’s the Buzz?

Webmasters live and breathe SEO. However, it can be tiring to study a site by flipping through various tools to know more about its Page Rank, keyword density, and all that good stuff we obsess about. Well, some guys back at Russia thought so, too, and they were nice enough to make a tool called SEO Quake.

SEO Quake is an extension for your web browser. It can be integrated as a toolbar which sits conveniently on top of whatever website you’re browsing, while giving you a wealth of information about it. For example, SEO Quake can automatically display its Google Page Rank and the number of indexed pages, along with its Yahoo and MSN counterparts. It can show you the site’s current Alexa ranking, its age, and social bookmarking site indexes, like Del.icio.us, Technorati and Digg. You can even do a whois lookup, get the site’s IP address and study the site’s keyword density. If you’re curious about its backlinks, SEO Quake will give you a full list, complete with the Page Rank of each. Impressed? You should be.

Another great thing about SEO Quake is its design. It doesn’t take up a lot of space so the clutter is minimized. The interface is easy to use. Everything is laid out neatly in a table with rows of clearly labeled checkboxes. It would have been nice, though, if the documentation was more informative. The English version of the FAQ page was tricky to get to.

SEO Quake is compatible with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox 2.0, as well as Firefox Beta 3.

Go to SEO Quake

Getting indexed by the major search engines is a must if you want to generate a lot of traffic. But sometimes, it takes weeks or even months before your site gets crawled by search bots, even if you’ve done your homework by submitting the URL to every directory you know.

Eli of Blue Hat SEO, one of the most famous bloggers on SEO tactics, developed a tool to end this tiresome waiting game. He calls it QUIT, or Quick Index Tool. It promises to get your site indexed in less than 24 hours – impressive, to say the least. The full recipe for this CGI script is in tight wraps, but he spills the juice on some of the things that make QUIT work. First, it submits your site to social bookmarking sites, several times using different accounts, making your popularity soar. Second, it lures the Googlebot to your site by making it seem like you have new content that needs to get indexed. Third, QUIT pings all the blog directories to alert them of your new blog. The rest of the formula, he’s keeping to himself.

Give it a go. It’s simple and you won’t even have to install anything. Just go to Blue Hat SEO and fill out a short form with the details of your site like URL, page title, keywords, site category, a short description, and an excerpt from your site. Hit the button and relax. When you wake up the next day, go to Google and find yourself smiling.

QUIT can run on most web browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera.

Go to QUIT

My WordTracker subscription was going to expire soon, so I took the opportunity to try Nichebot.com, which they claim is more powerful than WordTracker. I played with Nichebot a good amount for the two-week trial period, here are the results.

Nichebot uses a credit system for certain functions (vs. unmetered use for WordTracker.) I started with $15.00 in credits and now am down to $6.90. I performed eight or nine searches; I felt like I was eating up credits pretty fast and wasn’t sure if I was using them in the best manner. Depending on what you’re doing, things cost partial to 3 credits, and you get charged separately for each variation (i.e. bagel, bagels).

Nichebot recommends a five-step system, which is time-consuming and confusing. There are “quick-digging” tools, which are free, including WordTracker and WT’s thesaurus. However, while it is free to search WordTracker via Nichebot, it only turns up the counts; if you want the competition data and KEI that’s a premium search. However, you can click on a word or phrase in the list and “dig deeper” for free, which gives you a list of phrases associated with the phrase you clicked on. The main purpose of using Nichebot’s is “to find as many keywords from multiple sources to cover as much territory for the maximum traffic for your Web site.” You go from a broad search and just keep refining, merging, narrowing in.

NicheBot Pros

• Gathers data from more sources than WT (Keyword Discovery, LSI and Google.) Lots of explanatory videos and screenshots.
• Lets you know how many credits you’re about to use.
• Nice system of organizing projects into folders. You can “merge” searches (i.e. bagel and bagels) and “clean” your list to eliminate unwanted words from your list.
• There are multiple ways to view results. For example, Google Keyword Cruncher or LSI shows search volume, competition and ratio on a 1-5 graph, but you can also look at it organically, or (for a fee) get Pay Per Click data on a search you’ve already performed. It will show you on a graph which keywords and phrases are good deals for advertisers and which are good deals for publishers.
• Can search for misspellings.
• You can find the addresses of the sites with the most backlinks to a particular keyword or phrase.
• It can find thematically related keywords.
• It can check for keyword density on your sites, to see if it’s bothering Google.

NicheBot Cons

• Not particularly intuitive.
• Time investment of figuring out the search process. All these different choices like LSI (Google’s own keyword suggestions), Keyword Cruncher, etc.
• Because of the pay structure, does not really lend itself to brainstorming or stream-of-consciousness style searching.
• Hard to keep track of the pricing structure. I accidentally ran the same search twice, in a row, as if I had clicked twice, and it still debited.
• Some of the same results anomalies as WordTracker
• Suggests keywords are labeled “Jackpot” if they have no competition, even if they have no competition because they’re anomalies
• You have to have a Google API key (which Google isn’t giving out anymore) if you want to use some of the functions; otherwise it will return Yahoo data
• When I tried to export the data, it looked all funky (spreadsheet and notepad both left out fields)
• It seems like everything is a separate step. You get the list of keywords, then you have to click everything you want to get competition/KEI data for and run another search.
• When you run some advanced searches, it puts it in a queue and it could take 5-20 minutes to get the results back.

Conclusion: WordTracker is so much easier, but the possibilities are greater with Nichebot. I do miss WT, because of the nature and volume of the searches I was doing (random stuff) but Nichebot is a good prompt to rein in the focus and follow each project through to the end before making a decision on whether to launch a site. It takes a lot of the guesswork out. But the getting there is somewhat painful.

Also, the credit-based system makes me nervous. My favorite tool was the Keyword Discovery 9-in-1 (especially the backlinks). It can go up to 10,000 keywords deep and the more you pay the deeper you can get. I also like LSI, because it finds related keywords Google likes, and it was interesting being able to see the top sites for each keyword. (However, sometimes it doesn’t show any sites when I know there are some.) Nichebot looks like it takes time and discipline.

To be fair, I’ve been using WordTracker for three years, and have been using NicheBot for only two weeks. Nichebot may provide more information, but it has a steep learning curve and much harder to learn than WordTracker. I will be switching back to WordTracker.

You read many SEO guides and apply their tips to your sites, but it takes along time before you see whether your SEO campaign is effective. How do you know that a search engine can really index your site for the right keywords? That’s where Keyword Crawler comes in. This application crawls your entire site, attempting to determine your top keywords from your content. This gives web masters a better idea on how search engines see their site.

The program interface is minimalist – all you have to do is enter your site URL into a text box and click “Explore”. Depending on your settings and the size of your site, the search can take from a few seconds to several minutes. The final output is a comprehensive keyword list and a generated META tag that contains those keywords. Keyword Crawler doesn’t just list your web site’s top keywords, it also lists the internal links going to specific pages. A broken link feature even provides a list of dead links found on the page or site that was crawled. Lastly, to make your site more search-engine accessible and user-friendly, Keyword Crawler will also generate a sitemap for your site.

Overall, this application is easy to use, even for new web masters. However, using the sitemap generator requires some XML knowledge.

Keyword Crawler is a Windows app and requires Win98 or later.

Go to Keyword Crawler

Search engine crawlers have improved their efficiency over the years. The result is that search results are now more targeted and updated. However, they’re still far from perfect. If you want Google to index your site the best way possible, don’t rely on crawlers. After all, who knows your site better than you yourself?

Google Sitemap Generator takes away the guesswork and helps you optimize the way Google sees your web site. It is a Python script that lets you automatically generate an XML sitemap for your site, using URL lists, web server directories, or form access logs. Just make sure you don’t include folders or files you don’t want the search engines to see. Conversely, don’t include pages with broken links. It’s important to update your sitemap files especially if you have deleted or added any pages in your website.

What do you do with the generated XML sitemap? You can input it to search engines, like Google’s webmaster tool called Sitemaps. Through this tool you can tell Google which pages are more important to you. Google Sitemaps allow webmasters to include additional information about each URL in the web site. These include change frequency, last update, and importance of each page. These pieces of information help the search engine to crawl the website more intelligently and more effectively.

In order to use the generator script, your web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, and you must be knowledgeable in Python commands. A step-by-step guide is provided in the documentation.

Go to Google Sitemap Generator

Face it. Most site owners have, at one point, scratched their heads in frustration because their web sites couldn’t get a better ranking in the search engines. You’ve tried everything, yet your site is still buried deep. Meanwhile, your competitor keeps getting rich, consistently landing in the first Google page. Well, you can say goodbye to those days now that there’s SEO Spyglass.

A web master’s dream, SEO Spyglass will help you decode the competition’s secret strategies so you can apply them on your own web site. No more costly trial and error – SEO Spyglass spills the beans so you’ll know exactly what to do. Among the things you learn are the total number of back links of your competitor along with their exact URLs, their Google Page Ranks and anchor texts, where they come from (forums, blogs, sites), and if any of them come from search engine directories like Yahoo and DMOZ. Not only will you know their quantity, SEO Spyglass will also tell you how valuable each of these back links are in generating much-coveted traffic.

However, you need not stop there. Although SEO Spyglass was designed to scout the competition, you can use the tool on your own web site. Compare your site’s results with those of your higher ranking competitors. An honest evaluation will help you determine your weak points so you can easily remedy them. With SEO Spyglass, you’ll soon be the king of the hill.

SEO Spyglass runs on Windows XP.

Go to SEO Spyglass

With millions of web sites aggressively competing for higher rankings, search engine optimization continues to be an active battlefield. In this arena, keywords play a crucial role. Get them wrong and you’ll likely find yourself at the bottom heap of search engine results. This is why, before even lifting a pen, all competent content providers must do their homework in keyword research.

One popular free tool used for this purpose is Overture, considered a must in every content provider’s vocabulary. While the tool itself has its own criticisms, particularly concerning possibly bloated figures, it is still considered a good starting point in the keyword selection process, where you can get a good number of seed keywords for deeper research.

The Overture site is fairly straightforward. You simply type in your keywords, and afterwards the tool will give you a list of search phrases related to your keywords. These search phrases were actually used by real web surfers in their queries. They are arranged according to the number of times they appeared in Overture’s database for a certain month. These results are helpful when deciding which keyword pairs to use when optimizing a particular web page. If you see a related keyword that is appropriate for your web page, click on it and Overture will return additional related keywords.

Overture helps you determine your target market’s searching behavior, enabling you to better position your website. It’s a game of exposure, and Overture can give you the spotlight.

This tool runs in all the popular browsers with JavaScript enabled.

Go to Overture