LevelTen Looks Back at The Year's SEO Tools

Everybody's got to have a gimmick, a shtick. Pizza Hut has the cheese crust, car dealerships throw in the key chain, and in the online marketing and seo industry, one of these gimmicks is the free marketing tools offered by websites that guarantee to yield results for the marketing team lucky enough to find them first. Over the past year, many sites and marketing tools have been used and discarded, however a few gems have managed to woo us into regular usage. Overall Website Measurement: XinuReturns This robust metrics website allows the user to enter in any website and have a complete list of website stats flow across the screen. The information provided includes: back links, W3C compliance issues, Alexa rankings, meta tags, and index pages, only to name a few. By no means is this an end-all-be-all to examining a website's marketing situation and capabilities, but a good start. Back Links: Link Popularity An easy and consistent method to check your site's back links over Google, Yahoo, and MSN (a good check and balances tool for XinuReturns). Traffic and Ranking: Alexa Alexa has been the industry staple for some time for ranking sites and examining traffic. However, we have been looking for a similar tool with a wider reach considering that Alexa does not delve into the traffic of sites with a ranking over the 100,000. Compete This want for more information has been filled by Compete ranking and measurement. Compete provides traffic for most sites on the Internet and its own ranking system (that some of us here feel trumps Alexa in its accuracy across theWeb). Also, Compete offers a FireFox tool bar feature, conveniently listing site traffic and rank. Keyword Ideas and Analysis: Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool A satisfactory tool for finding out what keywords and phrases are being searched daily. While the tool utilizes both Overture and Word Tracker search terms; there is rarely enough information to populate the Word Tracker portion of the search, leading to approximations and guessing from Overture data. Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool Having come out only a few months ago, this keyword and phrase tool is quickly replacing the lesser performing Digital Point in the free seo tool arena. Operating much like a fee-based membership keyword-search program, Seo Book allows a wide examination of daily keyword and phrase searches over Google, Yahoo, and MSN; the results page also offers a Google and Yahoo suggestions, traffic estimators, and an AdWords function.