Search marketing has rapidly morphed from the simple days of altering Titles and Tags to today’s extremely complicated, statistic driven sector. The sites we work on today contain a wide variety of file-types and are often far larger than sites were a few years ago. Similarly, the compilation of search results is now based on several off-page factors that can only be measured and massaged as opposed to the performance of relatively easy on-site alterations.

In short, the work-load involved servicing each client has increased significantly. That’s why there are a growing number of tools search engine optimizers use in the course of their daily toils.

Before we dive into the tool shed, let’s make one thing perfectly clear. These aren’t cool power tools like drills, table saws and jackhammers. SEO’s should be so lucky to get to play with those tools. These tools are more like shovels and screwdrivers.
Advanced SEO involves a lot of drudge work. That it is a high-level intellectual career does nothing to relieve the monotony of reading, measuring and assessing lists of potential keyword targets or back-link opportunities. Even working on the social media aspects of client-files gets to be a drag when you don’t have the time to enjoy the social aspect of it. I just wanted to let you know that before you click away from this post to follow one of the links below.

Every SEO operation has an appropriate tool. The first thing an SEO does with a new website is work to find out as much about that site as possible. There are several areas that need to be covered to do an effective website evaluation.

1. Using the Right Browser

Using the right web browser is an important first step. The vast majority of SEOs use Firefox instead of IE7. Firefox is a stronger web browser and as it is open source software, several SEO related tools have been developed for it.

My personal favourite site research tool is SEO for Firefox made by Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com/. This tool is invaluable because it provides so much information at the click of a mouse-button.

SEO for Firefox shows:

  • PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
  • Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
  • Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
  • .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
  • .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimat
    e of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
  • .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
  • Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
  • del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
  • Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
  • Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
  • Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
  • dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
  • Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
  • dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
  • WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

That pretty much gives you instant access to the background of any site.

The only other tool needed to fully explore the history of a website is known as, The Wayback Machine. Found at Archive.org, the Wayback Machine shows every spidered version of websites at a specific URL from the date that URL was first discovered by Archive.org. This is important in determining if sites at that URL have, in the past, been used for spamming search engines. It also gives an SEO a good history of the site, allowing the SEO to estimate the historic view Google or Yahoo might take towards that site.

2. Figuring out how the site is built

Though it doesn’t take long to figure out how a site is built, SEOs are interested in gathering several pieces of critical information. Knowing what technologies are used, the file and server structure, and the depth of any product database is key to considering the right approach to take to working on the site.

The first and simplest tools SEOs use are universal to any web browser. One is the Ctrl-A keyboard command. This will highlight every character and carriage return on a page. This is the fastest way to determine if there are instances of hidden text, pixel images, or hidden links.

A second is View-Source. An examination of critical areas of the source code, including header, link-paths, content layout and footers is done to get a sense of what needs to be worked on.

The last thing common to all Mozilla browsers is the ability to turn CSS and Java Scripts on and off through the View and Tools tabs. These functions allow SEOs to look for hidden scripts, text and links embedded as, or covered by, CSS or js files.

OK… That’s a lot to start with but this was the easy stuff. Tomorrow we’ll be looking at link structure and keyword determination.