ia play

I often refer back to SEOMoz ranking factors article when I think teams are getting hung up on minor SEO issues.

Will from Distilled just ran a free webinar about the SEOMoz tools so it seemed a good opportunity to learn more about what more is available from SEOMoz.

Will says that SEO tools (some free) give you three things:

1. Quick research (basic understanding)
2. Deep dive research (actionable insights)
3. Making things pretty for boss/client (ever important)

The Pro tools aren’t particularly cheap, so it was useful to have someone talk you through what the return on that investment would actually be. In places the data looks a lot like the stuff you get from your web analytics tool e.g. Google Analytics. But remember this is data on your competitors as well as your own site.

Using AutoTrader as an example, Will talked about

1. SEOToolbox: Free tools. Will likes and uses Firefox plugins instead of some of these. Still likes and uses Domain Age tool
2. Term Target: free, aggregates data on a given page, identifies keyphrases
3. Term Extractor tool: free, uses for competitor and keyword research. 3 word phrases might give you something new.
4. Geotarget. Get Listed is an alternative.
5. Popular searches. Particularly likes the Amazon content.
6. Trifecta. Useful aggregator. But has the comparison of your site to the rest of the web as whole (possibly unique data).
7. CrawlTest: pro-tool. Xenu is an alternative.
8. JuicyLinkfinder: finds linking opportunities
9. Keyword Difficulty: how hard a keyword is going to be to rank for, regardless of domain.
10. Rank Tracker: Will keen to stress that individual keyword ranking isn’t the important thing. Often your boss will demand it. Makes little graphs and will export to CSV. Can combine with analytics data e.g. using Google Analytics API
11. Firefox toolbar Will loves this. Uses it more than any other SEO tool. Pro version better. Shows some pagerank-esque data for page and domain. Going up 1 MozRank point is equivalent to 8x stronger. So decimal points are important.MozTrust is similar but restricted to links from trusted sites.  Page Analysis also part of the toolbar? Alternative is Bronco tools.
12. Linkscape: the tool SEOMoz are heavily investing in. Web graph of which pages link to each other on the web. Will doesn’t see an alternative to this. Free version does basic stuff. Pro version produces more data and prettier data. Will recommends the Adv Link Intelligence Report. You can get data on who links with “nofollow” which Will thinks is unique data.
13. Labs: Online Non-Linear Regression is scary. Visualizing Link Data is more mortal friendly. Link Acquisition Assistant helps you construct queries for search engines to find link opportunities.Other tools include Social Media Monitoring and Blogscape.

(As a side point, Will recommends learning Excel functions MATCH and LOOKUP. And pivot tables.)

Distilled are going to do more conference calls, including one on keyword research tactics.  Could be  useful. Free webinars are another useful alternative to conferences when budgets are tight but you need to keep learning.