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Monitor Your Visibility in Google, MSN, and Yahoo with these DIY SEO Tools (Parts 1 & 2)
By Tinu AbayomiPaul (c) 2005

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.

The following tools are for monitoring your search results in
the three major search engines. It isn't an all-inclusive list,
but rather a highlight of some of the tools you can use. (I'll
point you to one of the master lists when we get into more
general tools in part three.)

Using Your Google Site Information Page

I've covered this in an earlier article, but just in case you
missed it, we'll go over it again briefly here. (If you need
more help following along, you can listen to one of my recent
podcasts for a convenient audio walkthrough.)

Open up your browser and go to Google's home page. Type in
info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So if your site was ExactSeek.com
you'd type info:exactseek.com. You can also use
site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find out which pages have been
indexed by Google's search engine spider.

This search will tell you pages that Google considers similar to
yours. It will also show sites that it considered linked to you,
and show sites that carry your full url, hyperlinked or not.
It's not 100% accurate as far as telling you all the sites that
are linked back to yours, but what you can learn from this is
which backlinks matter.

From here you can also see the last day Google spidered your
home page.

To see this in action, click on the first group of information
links, "Show Google's cache of yoursitename.com" If you look
next to the word "cached" on the first line, the date is
expressed also.

Sometimes it seems that the cached time for yoursitename.com and
www.yoursitename.com are different, so be sure and check both.

Finding Information About Your Site In Yahoo
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/tips/tips-08.html

This document will tell you how to find out what sites are
linking to you, give you the results for how many pages of your
site are in Yahoo, and more. Once you get to the results page,
you'll be able to view your cached pages, etc.

Discovering Your Site's Status on MSN
http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx

As the page in the help section states, you can use
site:www.yoursitehere.com to find out if a document at your site
has been indexed. The results page will also give you the date
of last caching.

Google Rankings
http://www.googlerankings.com

You'll need a free Google API key for this one, and this site
has the direct link telling you where to get one. You'll have to
enter this key in order to query the site for information on
Google.

With Google Rankings, you'll be able to see where you rank
within the top 40-1000 results in Google for a given keyword. I
recently noticed that it also displays results for MSN and
Yahoo, with links to each search engine.

They also have some other tools that will track your keywords
over time, as well as one they call the "Ultimate SEO Tool" that
will measure your site's keyword density.

Google Backlinks Checker
http://lilengine.com/tools/backlinks-tool.php

LilEngine.com's Backlink Checker will measure the number of
links you have pointing back to your site against competing
sites. Handy if you just want a quick comparison of how many
links you have versus others, though how much getting more links
back will help varies, depending on other factors.

Yahoo Search Rankings
http://www.yahoosearchrankings.com/

From the same folks who brought you Google Rankings, using Yahoo
Search Rankings, you'll be able to see where you rank within the
top 1000 results in Yahoo for a given keyword. If you just want
to see your Yahoo rankings, it's quite helpful.

You can find more Yahoo tools that use the Yahoo Web API at
their developer's site :
http://developer.yahoo.net/wiki/index.cgi?ApplicationList

In the next part of the article, we'll take a closer look at
other tools that give you more specific information about the
links pointing back to your site, keyword research, and more.

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Tinu is a website promotion specialist who can teach you many
do-it-yourself ways to bring more traffic to your site in
addition to DIY SEO. Subscribe to her ezine at
http://www.freetraffictip.com/ for more details.
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