Okay, so it has been a little more than a week since Part I, but SES NY takes a long time to recover from.

There are a ton of keyword research tools and tool lists out there, but it is still incredibly important to have all of your tools in one place. There are a lot of familiar tools in here, but there should also be a some lesser known ones here as well.

Let’s start this off with an SEO snack provided to you by one of my newest friends, Gareth

Free Tools

SEObook’s ultimate keyword research tool is a great place to start. Another tool on the site, is the Google Scraper tool

We can’t forget everyone’s old favorites, the Adwords Keyword Tool or Overtures Keyword Selector (although it doesn’t always work)

Quintura shows keyword maps to help you to generate more keywords!

Track keyword trends with Blogpulse.

If anything, Kartoo is a lot of fun. It provides keyword maps of who is ranking for what terms. Results could be a little bette

Find your competitors Keyword!

Start off with figuring out how competitive a keyword is

Long tail keyword discovery shows you the 3, 4 and 5 term keywords for your (or a competitors) site.

SEO Digger is pretty awesome tool. Find out what keywords your site ranks in Google’s top 20 for, or use this to spy on the competition

Shoemoney review

Keyword Spy is great at finding what your competitors are bidding on and ranking for and you test it out for free right on their homepage. The free version only lets you see 10 results, but the paid version for $90/month lets you see a lot more.

Digitalpoints Keyword suggestion tool is another good free option. It also lets you specify what country you are looking for data for. They also have a free keyword position tracking tool.

Paid

Wordtracker has a 7 day free trial for their tool, otherwise, it is paid for at $329 a year. They also have very good free version of their keyword research tool.

Trellian’s keyword discovery is another fantastic tool. It draws info from over 180 search engines around the world and has keyword brainstorming tools as well as the ability to import import keyword lists and add descriptors. This is paid for with prices varying, but a 1 year standard subscription will run you about $600.

Keyword Discovery also won Best Keyword Research Tool in 2007 on www.toprankblog.com

Wordze has gotten a bit of a following with tools that let you perform keyword research, get historical keyword data, perform competitive research, and download top searches. They cost $45/month

Wordze also had a great deal of praise TopRank Blog

Wordze review on copyblogger.

AdGooroo, which also deserves a mention in Yoda’s Ultimate Competitive Research Tools Post is also a great keyword research tool. It allows you see what terms your competition is bidding on so you can make sure you don’t miss any opportunities. Prices range from $89/month to $399/month depending on what you need.

Spyfu also let’s you see what your competitors rank for as well as help you find new keywords to use fro your own site. They let you perform some research for free, but if you want to dig deep, it will cost you $308/year or $6.75 for 3 days

Miscellaneous

Shimon Sandler listed some keyword stemming tools on his site a while back that are very useful. Basically, they help you to take the stem of a word and build out additional keywords by adding in the variations of that term. Here are a few good ones:

http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/wordcheck/index.php?word=work

http://www.related-pages.com/adWordsKeywords.aspx

Other Great Keyword Research Lists

The other Loren (Baker that is) recently wrote a post at Search Engine Journal asking what keyword tools his readers liked – WordTracker, SEOBook, and Keyword Discovery seemed to make it out on top.

Mona Elesseily also put together a great list about spying on your competitors including Compete and Spyfu (mentioned above).

SEOBooks keyword research tool list is another great one.

Anne Smarty’s list on SEOMOZ is also very comprehensive

Coming soon . . . Must have Firefox Plugins

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An SEO’s best friend (other than a stiff drink) is a good tool. Tools save us time and energy and streamline the process so we can get to making money instead of researching. They provide the information you need when you need it. But it is important to remember that knowing when to use a particular tool and how to use it is more important than any list.

This is why I’ve created Yoda’s ultimate tool to put all the tools one would need in 1 place. Since this list is too massive to fit in one post, it will be a multi-part list that will cover: Competitive Research, Keyword Research, Must have Firefox plug-ins, Reputation Management tools, PPC Tools, Domainer tools and my favorite non-conformist miscellaneous tools

So here we go: Part 1 – Competitive Research

Step 1: Who is your competitor and where have they been?
Competition Finder
A great tool, this shows you how many pages are indexed in google competing for your key terms. This will let you size up the competition and market saturation.

Archive.org will show you what their website looked like the past as well as give you the age of the site

Whois.sc
By adding this bookmarklet to your firefox browser you can find out the whois information for the site you are viewing simply by clicking on it.

Step 2: What kind of marketshare and traffic do they have?
Compete.com is one of my FAVORITE sites. They have a lot of great free tools (and some really cool paid for ones). You can compare sites, get traffic information and get an idea of how much your competitors are spending.

Index Rank
The first time I saw this was on SEOBook, (Aaron has some amazing tool’s listed there as well, so you should definitely check out that list too). Index Rank is incredible useful in showing you how many times Google is indexing your site compared to competitors sites.

SEO Quake is a pretty cool tool that shows you PR, # of pages indexed, Links, Alexa ratings, Age, whois info and density of every site you open in Firefox.

Who is linking to your competitors?

The Tattler
Originally posted by Todd, this is a great tool to scrape who is linking to your competitors

Backlink and Keyword Tracker
Totally free tool can be used to check search engines for the number of back links to any specific URL over time

Link Diagnosis is a is a great link hunting tool especially if you want to see what kind of anchor text your competitors are using.

Another great one, from a fellow chicklet’s site, is SEOmoz’s Backlink Analyzer. This shows the backlinks to a competitor’s website and the common anchor text. In general the SEOmoz tools section is a must read

What keywords are your competitors buying?
There are a several different tools that do this that vary in prices. Spyfu is a good option, that is not too expensive ($300 a year or about $40/month). It lets you see what keywords your competitors are buying up as well as see what they optimizing their site for.

Have they made any changes?
WatchThatPage will email you with any changes made to a competitor’s site or your site (although you probably should know that already)

Search for Broken Links
Xenu’s Link Sleuth will search for broken links on sire

Great Overall Site Analysis Tools
Last but not least, LinkVendor. This is a site filled with awesome research and site analysis tools.

. . . . . Next Week Part II: Keyword Research

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I’ve got that warm and fuzzy feeling that usually only my husband evokes.  Something has me all hot and bothered.  I’ve been playing with myself at http://tools.seobook.com/website-health-check/ - and of course by “myself” I mean my websites.  God you people have dirty minds!  My husband is a programmer and he makes fantastically innovative bits of code.  For goodness sake people!  Minds in gutters….

What a fantastic tool!  Why did someone not come up with this sooner – Aaron, you are a god (possibly a Nordic one)!  I can now solve a gazillion phone calls from friends who just need a little bit of advice by pointing them at this tool.

Please everyone with “how to” sites out there – please add a link to this tool with your explanations about tags, duplicate content and the like.  I believe that it might even help the new folk out there who want to hire an SEO firm check their own site so they know what is going on before they walk in to that meeting.  Heck, it’s a great little quick and dirty check on any site!

This fantastic tool drills 1000 pages deep on your website checking for missing title tags, missing descriptions, duplicate tags, duplicate descriptions,  www vs non-www issues that we all know and love, it check the index and home page just in case and checks that the proper error codes are being returned.

I fed it several URLs I have *too many*cough* and it flagged some issues I haven’t been bothered to fix errrrr…. have been so busy I haven’t yet had the chance to fix.  It even flagged up some duplicate title issues I didn’t know about.  It tells you exactly what the description or title that is duplicated is and which pages it appears on.

Fantastic!  Go there, have a play, enjoy yourself, have some fun, mock your competitors and boogie - there needs to be more boogie in our lives.

Always remember the call of the cowboy - “Meta tags?  We don’t need no stinkin’ meta tags!”

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Warning: the following post has almost nothing at all to do with SEO. It’s simply a rant.

A good friend of mine just showed me what I think is one of THE most ridiculous things I have ever seen. Besides Scarlett Johannson singing with the Jesus and Mary Chain even!

It’s a flash drive designed exclusively for women! And strangely, they’re not available in America.

What makes them designed for women anyway? Other than being pink, the product has a “sleek, feminine, cap-less design” which will, apparently, “make it ideal for women of all ages.” It’s a f&^(G! flash drive! What does your sex or age have to do with it? I assume that it also allows you to keep up with your menstrual cycle and fend off would-be attackers in dark parking lots. If it came with a rape whistle, MAYBE I could see its benefit but as it stands, this is truly ridiculous and it brings me to a point (amazing!) about products that are designed for women.

The “designed for women” market has really gotten out of hand lately. This flash drive idiocy is only the latest in a string of items ranging from products that are simply smaller versions of their bulky male counterparts to products that are pink, and thus will appeal to all of us for their simple color. Everyone knows that all women love shiny pink things. OK that sounds really vulgar…you know what I mean you big bunch of sickos. Yes, some women are small and could probably benefit from a product that’s designed more for their size than for someone who’s a giant hill person, but I’ve also known quite a few ham-handed brutish females (yes, I mean brutish, not British) who would beat the tar out of many men on their way TO a fistfight. It’s simply another way to make money, so why does it make me so angry? We’re all in this to promote something. So why do I care?

I care because it’s setting a horrible precedent. Especially with regards to technology, the idea that you need to pink up a product simply so women will understand it and relate to it is about as offensive as Britney Spears covering a Ramones song. Obviously, if there weren’t women-only flash drives we’d most likely have one like this:

The problem is that there are many women who will buy into this nonsense, thus creating the demand for more and more of it. Then what will we have? Will someone design a search engine that will work with women’s needs, or a woman-only browser that’s all pink and lacy? What about an analytics program designed for our tiny minds that are usually full of kittens and flowers? Why is it set in stone that all women like pink anyway? I do happen to love pink, but I sure as hell do not want a pink flash drive. Or a pink phone, or a pink iPod…I’d rather have all those in orange.

Obviously there are products that should be designed for women (such as my mom’s Smith and Wesson Lady Smith revolver, for example, so don’t anyone visit her to complain about her daughter please) for various reasons. Knee cap replacements, amazingly, also seem to be a big area for women-only design. I don’t have a problem with these. Well, the gun thing freaks me the hell out but still, I’d rather see Mom coming down the stairs with a weapon that fits nicely in her small hand than holding a giant shotgun that she can’t control. My point is simply that there are legitimate instances where designing for women makes sense. The flash drive, however, is not a case like this.

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Now if you don’t already have this tool, this could make your life a WHOLE lot easier. Well your SEO life anyway, it doesn’t actually help you get a boyfriend or anything like that. Now that would be a great tool? Boyfriend toolbar..

The SeoQuake tool was originally a Mozilla Firefox extension, but they have recently added a Internet Explorer version. Although I would highly recommend you start using Firefox if you are not already using it. Much better, cooler plugins and not to mention so much safer browsing. Ok now this wasn’t meant to be a blogpost about Firefox =)

Anyway, back to SeoQuake. This tool is awesome, it allows you to view a large number of SEO parameters in one go. You get a toolbar that shows you the following parameters of the website you are currently viewing:

- Number of Indexed pages in Google
- Incoming links to URL (based on Yahoo)
- Incoming links to the domain (based on Yahoo)
- Alexa rank
- Age of domain
- Delicious Index
- Whois
- Source
- Internal and External Links
- Keyword density (plus keyword cloud)

plus you can install other parameters such as dmoz info, Technorati index etc etc

Sounds sweet?
Go to find out more about SeoQuake OR to Install SeoQuake

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Yes, I know I should post a lot more often, but (without making too many excuses) I’m juggling a few too many things in the air at the moment, and days just keep slipping by… tut-tut!

OK, now down to business. I wanted to touch on a few topics related to keyword list building in general. Actually I’m about to talk more towards the PPC end of things, and hopefully one of my fellow Chicks will churp in (see what I did there) for the SEO part if relevant.

So I wanted to ask you - where do you find your precious keyword (kwd) “gold dust” these days?

With all these new kwd tools coming out of the wood work, each one claiming to be a lot better than the previous, how do you decide what to use? I’m primarily a marketer, and while I enjoy watching companies in competition trump each other’s offers, I also know for a fact that most of them are just rehashed versions of an old version…

So - I wanted to start a community vote of sorts - and prompt you to share how you find your kwds (give us all your secrets *grin*).

Here is my list of where and why’s - feel free to churp in with your ideas.

• Wordtracker - I will always start my search here. The data is still some of the most reliable there is, and my strategy is to do a quick test of the market - so this is ideal. If the phrases are here - they have enough volume…




• Google and Yahoo!’s own kwd suggestion tools - useful to get more specific variations for the search engine, but I take any of those suggestions with a ‘pinch of salt’.




• Web analytics log files - rummage through your web analytics stats to get some of the best targeted kwds you’ll ever get. The phrases you find in there are the ones people use to find you. If you get one or two specific ‘gems’ in there, you may end up not only cutting your CPC, but increasing your overall conversion rate too.




• Use an LSI tool - this is where you get to see what kwds are logically related to your core search phrase. I use Lexical, but if you know of another tool suggest it.




• Get a second opinion… and third and forth - yes, gather a random party of people - friends, colleagues, relatives, and over coffee and tea, ask them what kwds they’d use to find your site with… take notes…




• Google Suggest - although I must say I don’t use this often.




• Google Trends - for when you need to look for new ideas on the rise.




• Related site content - I sometimes perform a “keyword density” report of relevant content pages I find online. It’s not an exact science, but if you’re looking for ideas - it sometimes gives good ones.




So that’s what I have of value at the moment. I’m sure I’ve missed somethings, and I am sure some of you will have a lot of other good suggestions - so share - please.

Before I go though, I wanted to also leave you with this comprehensive list of other keyword research tools - courtesy of Andre Chaperon (you’d need to scroll down about a third of the way). These are tools that perfom a little more than just keyword research, but may be useful for some of you to know they are out there…

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