3 SEO Tools I Am Thankful for This Thanksgiving

Having automated SEO tools performing tedious and mundane tasks and providing alerts to things of which you want to be made aware, saves a SEO professional a great deal of time. Anything that saves time for me is a huge plus. Here are three SEO tools I use everyday to make my life a lot easier as a search marketer.

  • Google Alerts

    There are many ways to use Google alerts for SEO. The obvious one is setting up alerts for your name, company name and your top brand terms. Also, don’t forget to include your actual URL  ex: “yourdomain.com”. You never know when someone is going to drop it in a forum post, asking for the community’s opinion of you. Later on down the road, you can expand the list to include non brand terms. When you want to start engaging with your audience, this is a good way to find current conversations going on online about your niche.

  • Open Site Explorer

    SEOMoz, as a whole, is seriously THE holy grail of search information. Yahoo! Site Explorer used to be good, and I can only imagine its days are numbered, unfortunately, probably due to the Bing takeover. But, with using Open Site Explorer, even with the free version, it is really getting your hands dirty. I consider working with this tool being advanced SEO. Working with their API is really where it’s at. Without going in too much detail, you could query thousands of domains in a particular niche for their stats, store it in a database and map it over time to see trends. It could show you exactly which domains are improving in rank and how quickly they are growing, what keywords they are targeting with their back links, where they are scoring back links, and the key to it all, what’s actually working.

     

  • SheerSEO

My most favorite SEO tool that I am thankful for is SheerSEO. I don’t think Eyal receives enough credit for his SEO Software master piece, which is even free for 90 days! That allows you to really kick the tires on this thing, which is what I did and became a believer. He continues to add value with the directory submission tool, back links monitoring, and much more. My account includes the daily keyword monitoring which has shown me some very interesting trends with the Google dance.

 

So, what are some of the SEO tools that you use to make your job easier for which you are thankful?

Nathan O’Leary
Hungry for some turkey!