SEO is all about increasing the visibility of a website on the Internet. This is done through various means like link building or optimizing on-page elements. It is important to keep a record of everything that is done on and off the site, and to check results regularly. And while it is perfectly possible to do all that manually, it is usually a lot faster and easier to use software for that purpose. Software can aid the webmaster in numerous ways. From automatically checking rankings for targeted keywords to auditing websites, doing research on the competition or keeping track of link building efforts.
SEO PowerSuite is a collection of four tools that aid you in those tasks. The suite consists of the following four tools:
- Rank Tracker for tracking search engine rankings
- LinkAssistant for link management and campaigns
- SEO SpyGlass for backlink and competitor research
- WebSite Auditor for onpage optimizations of a web page
All tools are available separately or bundled in the SEO PowerSuite. Lets take a closer look at each individual tool.
Rank Tracker
Tracking ranks in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo or Ask is one of the most important tasks of a webmaster as it is one of the ways to determine the success or failure of optimizations. It is also used as a way to monitor rankings to react immediately if big changes (usually drops) are noticed.
Rank Tracker is profile driven. Each profile consists of a domain name and up to five competing domain names that you want ranks tracked for.
All major and many minor search engines can be selected to be monitored. Most users will probably stick to the big three Google, Bing and Yahoo, but hundreds more are available for selection.
Rank Tracker keeps record of rankings over time, and displays them as a graph in the main interface. It does not end here though. Webmasters can not only monitor rankings but also the visits (pulled from Google, requires a Google Adwords account set up), KEI (an indicator of a keyword’s competitiveness) and Keyword suggestions (to get new keyword ideas).
The extensive options allow lots of customization. One of the most important ones is the ability to add proxy servers to the program. You may know that some search engines – like Google – display different rankings based on location (and several other factors). Proxies can also help to avoid being temporarily blocked from the search engines which can happen if you make to many requests in a set amount of time.
Search engine API keys can be added in the options as well which limits the maximum number of lookups you can do but makes sure on the other hand that you won’t be temporarily blocked.
A scheduler is available to run ranking checks automatically. Export options are available, which can be handy to process data in other applications or as a means to send reports to clients.
Seo SpyGlass
Seo SpyGlass has two main purposes. It can be used to find new pages that you could try and get backlinks from for your project, and to analyze a site’s backlink structure.
Regardless of the method, you end up with a list of backlinks that you can process further to retrieve data such as PR, Alexa traffic rank, IP address, anchor texts, or the link source (e.g. forums, directories or blogs), and the strength of each individual backlink. A competitors analysis furthermore reveals information about a site’s backlink profile. The information presented here can give you insight about link building strategies and the overall strength of the competitors site.
The program can be quite useful for a number of purposes. You can for instance sort the backlinks found by Pagerank or Alexa rank to find links with a lot of linking power (you still need to contact the site owners, register an account or do other things to get a backlink from the site pointing to yours).
You could also try and replicate your competitors link structure. Sites that link to your competitors website may also be willing to link to yours.
Website Auditor
Before you start looking at external means to improve your site’s ranking in the search engines, you may want to make sure that the site’s on-page factors are optimized as well. On-page factors like the title, headings, links or other HTML elements can have an impact on the rankings of a site in the search engines.
Website Auditor can analyze factors for a single page or multiple pages of the same domain. It first checks for available pages linked from the selected root domain before it offers to run the analysis for each page. Analysis includes checking for HTML and CSS validation errors, total links on the page, a page’s title, meta description and keywords, and a page’s PR. The program furthermore keeps tracks of broken links, monitors domain statistics (Alexa rank, DMOZ or Yahoo directory listing, Compete rank, Google Pagerank), Social Activity, overall PR distribution and link statistics (do follow, no follow).
Links are displayed in a table like structure which makes the data very accessible. Reports can be generated at anytime, which is useful if you do the analysis for a client.
Webpage reports can be generated which highlight missing page elements, errors or other factors that can influence a page’s ranking in the search engines.
Link Assistant
Keeping track of link building efforts can be a time consuming task. You can theoretically use an Excel spreadsheet for that, but that would mean updating it regularly. Plus, it is not really practicable for large link building projects.
Link Assistant helps you manage and track your link building campaigns. The tool can search for prospective link partners based on select factors. It tries to extract a contact email address from the pages to make emailing webmasters easier.
The program supports email templates that you can use or create to customize link proposal messages. A build in email client makes sure that you can handle everything from within the software.
It is usually a good idea to create a custom email address for use in the program to make sure that you catch only related emails in the application.
Verdict
All four tools ship with everything that one would need to get started. They all support proxies, can all be used to generate report for clients or your own, and come with an impressive feature set ideal for experience webmasters who want professional tools for the job.
Free limited versions of all tools are available as well. They usually limit the number of results that you can retrieve or manage.
Giveaway
We have two licenses for each tool to give away today. Please leave a comment below for a chance to win a license. You may add which tools you are most interested in.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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