Intelligent SEO Research Tools

Every day I’m hacking Google, MSN or Yahoo! for things that will make my life simpler. So I thought I would stick some in here for todays post. Oh and they’re also free – I do have some paid for things and things I’ve built maybe another day I’ll give these up!

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a pain. Its dull, its boring and it takes time. I hate it. But we all know that its a must. Using overture is fine – if you dont mind hitting the refresh button 400 times a day, Hitwise can be good but we dont all have clients with a couple of grand spare to let us get access to it.

So often I’ll resort to using Good Keywords, installable on the desk top. Simple to use and saves and lets you export to Excel. Unfortunately bulk keyword searches aren’t doable but you can’t have everything.

Backlink Research

Gone are the days when you could hack about in MSN and rip competitor backlinks down in full and then surf about for the juicy ones and get them. Even Yahoo! site explorer can be a pain when it stops at 1000. You can of could build a system to query Technorati and get the additions to the authority score for a site that Technorati thinks is a blog and keep getting these but that can be a bit of a pain – as smost blogs are rubbish

So I often resort to using a backlink analyser – not the best in the world but for a quick overview of competitor backlinks does the job. If you can get it Google webmaster tools is far superior and quicker for the domains you own but other wise SEO Book have a nice one and you can download the source code and mess about with it to your hearts content – assuming you can program it in PHP.

Other Stuff

For intelligent research, or checking out some competitors or even just to get ideas I had been using spyfu – but I have to admit to getting a bit bored of it! Sorecently I started messing about with Zippy, its pretty funky – once your query resolves and often its a pain at loading. But at the same time it can give you some juicy bits of info (the sites on IP number is a bit iffy and I’m not convinced by its veracity).

So here are some queries I made earlier:

• Zippy Information on JustMarketing blog
• Zippy Information on SEO Scotland
• Zippy Competitive Analysis for JustMarketing Blog Vs BoydOfAyrshire Blog

So I think thats enough for today. Away back to mess about on Stumbleupon.