Monitor and Increase Your Search Engine
Visibility with the DIY SEO Tools
In this three part article, you’ll find many tools that any webmaster can use to monitor your
site’s search engine position, and use to increase the visibility of your site in major search
engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
URL Trends
http://www.urltrends.com/
Most of the coverage I've seen focuses on the ability of UrlTrends to allow you to "View Any
URLs Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Popular Search Terms and Incoming Links".
And that's a great thing, to be able to see all of that from one place. But one great thing
missed about this tool are that you can subscribe to changes to the results via RSS -hands
off monitoring of your site.
Fagan Finder’s URL Info
http://www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/
This online gadget is like the Swiss Army knife of site information, giving you one-page
access to dozens of pertinent check-ups. But monitoring relevant search engine information
like your backlinks, or the cached pages in a search engine are just the tip of the iceberg.
You can use URL Info to check that your HTML code is validated, translate your page, and if
you’re a blogger, discover where your site is mentioned in the blogosphere.
Spannerwork’s Spider Simulator
http://www.spannerworks.com/spidersimulator.0.html
Ever wondered what your site looks like to the search engine spiders that crawl the web,
looking for information to include in their databases? Go to this page to see what
information is seen by the spider and what it skips over.
Spannerworks.com can also help you figure out how to troubleshoot content that seems like
it should show up to a spider but doesn’t, with its HTTP viewer. They also have a tool that
will analyze your keyword density.
GoRank.com’s Top Ten Comparison
http://www.gorank.com/seotools/
If you’ve been banging your head against the wall in an attempt to figure out why you
haven’t hit the top ten results in Google, GoRank.com has a page that can give you
important clues to help you figure it out. One of my favorites, the Top Ten comparison
report, will scrub the raw data of the top ranking results for a given keyword.
In studying the results, you may find it easier to understand where your own optimization
efforts are going wrong. Don’t forget to stop by Google for your API key at
http://www.google.com/api as you’ll need it to create your free account.

Search Guild’s Keyword Difficulty Checker
http://searchguild.com/difficulty/
This one’s an old favorite of mine. When you find what you may think is an ideal keyword,
before you start tweaking your pages, it’s a good idea to run it through this tester. Using
the Google API, it analyzes whether or not a given phrase will be worth your efforts.
You’ll already have to be well-versed in how to find good keywords to plug into the tool, but
once you have that nailed, it’s pretty reliable in telling you whether it’s worth your time to
target that phrase. If you use flash on your site, check out the flash viewer on their utilities
page as well.
In the next article in this series, you can read more about tools specific to Yahoo and Google
that will help you track your rankings and study your site.
You can find hundreds of pages of tips and news on traffic generation, search engines, blogs
and RSS every day at http://www.freetraffictip.com .