In this blog, we discuss three groups of SEO data-mining resources covering keyword research, link research and SEO toolbars. Each will help you become more efficient at uncovering nuggets of gold in your ongoing SEO campaign.
Keyword Research
The foundation of SEO is keyword research. You have to know what words your customers use in their searches for solutions, and keyword research builds that foundation. The tools below will help you build a solid keyword framework.
Google Analytics: One of the best places to dig for gold is in your web analytics data, which provides keywords that are driving traffic to your site. Google Analytics is free, so—if you haven’t already—set it up today. This will help you discover how customers are currently finding your site. In addition, make sure to check out site search data to see what kind of information people are searching for once they reach your site. Both of these are likely to lead to ideas for additional content that could be added to your site.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool: Find out relative search volume, competitiveness and related keywords using data from Google Adwords. Great for generating like terms and short tail keywords.
Google Search Keyword Tool: Want a list of keywords based on the existing content on your website? The search keyword tool will crawl your site and offer keyword suggestions. If the keywords suggested don’t match the products you sell, you may want to review the existing content on your site to see if it is in line with your products.
Wordstream: Refining your keyword list is critical to success in search marketing. Wordstream allows you to review your keywords, filter your list, exclude negative keywords and end up with an enhanced list that will work for your business.
Wordstream Keyword Niche Finder: The niche finder gives you groups of keywords for your search terms and is an excellent way to build topic areas around common keyword search queries. The Keyword Niche Finder is also a great help in turning keyword groups into pay-per-click ad groups.
Wordtracker: When you want to tackle the long tail of search or generate ideas for content, head over to Wordtracker. Getting up to 1,000 search terms for a keyword in one click is an excellent brainstorming and discovery tool. The top 100 are free, but you will need a trial or subscription to get the top 1,000.
Link Research
A big part of SEO is acquiring links to your site. The tools below will help recapture lost links, find new links and uncover how your competitor is getting links to outrank you in the search engines.
Google Webmaster Tools: Since your goal is to rank in Google, why not use the free tools provided by Big G to improve your site. Along with diagnostics data, they also provide a view of sites linking to yours. Historical data starts after sign up—so sign up today!
Bing Webmaster Tools: Microsoft gives you some of the same tools as Google, but check and see how Bing rates your site. Link data is available and it’s free, so signing up is a no brainer. You may just find a valuable link going to an old page that needs fixing.
SEOmoz Linkscape: Do you need to find out who is linking to your competitors so you can replicate those links? Linkscape provides all that great data, and the best part is that you can compare, sort and filter data to build the most powerful links to your site.
Open Site Explorer: Powered by the Linkscape API, Open Site Explorer aims to replace Yahoo Site Explorer before it inevitably disappears. Another great free product from our friends at SEOmoz.
Majestic SEO: A great, free tool to discover links to your website along with helpful graphs to see the progress of incoming links over time. You can also acquire data on competitors … for a fee. Sign up and verify your site with Majestic SEO to see what you have been missing.
SEO Toolbars
Quickly assessing a website and web page is vital to efficient SEO. The toolbars below help you uncover areas for optimization on your own web pages at lightning speed. You can also leverage the SEO toolbars to determine the value of a link from a particular site for your SEO goals.
SEOmoz Toolbar: Do you live, breathe and die by SEOmoz trust and authority metrics for websites and web pages? Get the data you crave along with shortcuts to other SEOmoz tools with the SEOmoz toolbar.
SEO Quake: Available for multiple browsers including Firefox and Google Chrome, SEO Quake is a very nice standard that can be customized to your heart’s desire. It may take some time to configure and understand, but it is a power users’ dream.
SEO for Firefox: Looking for a powerful, intuitive and easy-to-use SEO toolbar? Check out SEO for Firefox by Aaron Wall over at SEO Book (maybe you should get all their tools). As the name implies this is for the Firefox web browser.
SEO Site Tools: Relatively new to the scene is a chrome extension for SEO by Carter Cole. Chrome power users will want to check out SEO Site Tools, a great compliment to the SEO Quake chrome extension.
You should be able to stay busy and on top of your SEO game with these seven keyword research tools, six link research tools and four SEO toolbars.
What tools have you found critical to your success that are not listed here? Leave a comment below for others; the best ones will be added to the lists above.
Miva