Understanding SEO Tools: Adwords, Wordtracker, Keyword Research, Alexa, Link Analysers

Search Engine Optimization

There are many products in the SEO area that help webmasters and marketing departments in making changes to web sites and pages so that they are ranked higher in search results. This blog post gets under the skin of some of these to explore what makes them tick.

Keyword Research

1. Tools to find search frequency of keywords

Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Google provides an interface to find frequency of searches made on a particular keyword and related keyword terms. Google can provide such a tool because what keywords are used for searches is already known to the search engine. This tool has been provided as part of the Adwords package which allows advertisers to display their PPC ads in google. But it can be used by anyone.

WordTracker
WordTracker associates with the dogpile / metacrawler meta-search-engines (i.e. those which combine the results from google + yahoo + bing etc.). It collects search terms people use to find the latest keywords being used. It counts the number of times each individual word or phrase is used and uses this information as a basis for each keyword’s traffic. Using this, users can build lists of promising keywords for their sites.

2. Tools to find useful keywords

Webmaster Toolkit: Keyword Research Tool
This tool finds keywords related to the word or phrase you supply. It asks for the selection of a search engine and returns a list of alternate or related terms. It seems to do this by executing the search on the selected search engine and then parsing the meta tags of the results to provide a list of alternate keywords. Since it does this for the top matches, it is likely to come up with a good set of related keywords.

Keyword Analysis

Most of the popular tools in this category accept a url and identify all the unique, non-common words and key phrases on the page and display a frequency table for them. The advantage of this tool is that it shows what the search engine sees and helps modify the copy for the web page so that it has a richer set of keywords.

Search Engine Submission

The tools in this category have some manual steps involved. Typically, this is due to the captcha element on the page. Most tools work with specific search engines and will navigate the user to the submission page and from that point on the submission process is manual. In the case of certain search engines, the submission process can be completely automated.

Site Popularity Ratings

Alexa
A browser toolbar was made available to internet users which kept suggested related sites and at the same time sent site browsing information to a server which collected data about user browsing habits. This system provides site popularity ratings based on the data collected.

Link Partners

Inbound Link Analysers
I'm not sure how these work, but they must be working on the assumption of reciprocal links and links from directories.

Link Popularity Analysers
These mainly look to make sure that the existing incoming links to the site are not broken.

Site Directory Submissions
These are again like search engine submission tools. Where possible, they will automate the process. Otherwise, they will navigate the user to each directory where the submission can be done manually.