SEO Tools of the Trade #seslondon
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SEO Tools of the Trade #seslondon

22nd February 2012

Yesterday at the PPC tools of the trade session, I was expecting a session with an explanation about some good PPC tools. But the three speakers hat another interpretation of the session. They talked about which features to look for, when you are searching for a good PPC tool. So let’s see what we’ll get today in the SEO tools of the trade session …
Speakers in the session are Richard Baxter of SeoGadget, David Naylor of Bronco and Neil Walker, Group Chief Technical Officer, Just Search. The panel is moderated by Chris Boggs of SEMPO & Director SEO of Rosetta.
Neil Walker is the first speaker, he will show which tools he uses every day to solve problems, tools that give data, tools that increase your efficiency. But remember: “A good SEO never blames his tools”. The tool is not going to do your work.

Tools to solve problems:
Tools for multilingual sites:
1. Google Global (Redfly Marketing)
2. Netcraft
3. (missed, sorry)
4. Majestic SEO

“My site dropped what’s the reason”
5. Copyscape: to check if other site use your content.
6. Google Webmaster Tools to check crawl errors
7. Firebug and quickly review the code
8. Google Page speed
9. Pingdom: monitor uptime of your website
10. Xenu or Screaming Frog which allows you to spider your website
11. Download data from Opensiteexplorer and segment anchor text

“My site has a low conversion rate”
12. KISSinsights: find your sales objections and test them
13. fivesecondtest: test your suggestion with user
14. Google Website Optimizer: split test your designs

Data sources:
“I need data for Keyword Research”
Google Adwords, Spyfu, Alexa, Sem Rush, Keywordspy, Wordstream

Find alternate uses for tools: Combine data of multiple tools to build up your own data. “Just search” build a tool to calculate “organic CTR” from Webmaster Tools data.

Now you can use Google Adwords Search Volume data to forecast results.

Use social mention for competitor analysis

Efficiency
Analytics SEO: compare your site and your competitors for things like page speed, indexed pages, rankings.
Furthermore you can use Analytics SEO for potential analysis  and reporting.

The last tip of Neil: Third party tools are designed by third parties: they have resource, man power and data. But it will not necessarily meet your needs. So build your own tools and use the APIs of the different software solutions.

Next speaker is David Naylor. He will not speak that fast. That’s good 🙂
Tools Dave is using personally: Sistrix, Searchmetrics, GTmetrix, LinkResearchTools, APIs of Seomoz etc.
Questions:
1. Was this site affected in Panda? (Use Searchmetrics or Sistrix)
2. Did this its gain PageRank in the last update? (Dave uses Sistrix to see the PageRank development.)
3. How fast is this site?
4. What does this site rank for? (Sistrix or Searchmetrics)
5. Should I take a link on this site?

David shows a screenshot of his desktop to show the tools he uses. I hope you can see it on the picture (click to enlarge):
Screenshot of David Naylor's Browser showing the tools he uses
Other tools Dave talks about:
GTmetrix
Dave Naylor Keyword Density control
Zippy, his own development.

Dave’s final statement: “Data is great but if you don’t know how to use it, it is useless.”

Last speaker is Richard Baxter about the way he collects data. His top tool is Excel and in his presentation he does a live demonstration how to use the SEO Tools for Excel to answer certain questions, like for example:
Check SiteMap to find 404 errors
Fetch Pagerank
Is my link still alive?
Grab link from SEOMoz API
GEO Locate your back links.

It is difficult to live blog this presentation, but fortunately Richard put it live, so go ahead and have fun using Excel for SEO: https://seogadget.co.uk/excel-tips-from-richard-ses-london/.

This post in part made possible by a sponsoring from Majestic SEO who have the largest Link Intelligence database in Search.

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Written By
Evert Veldhuijzen is consulting various international brands about different aspects of online marketing. His company Netlead is in affiliate business and develops websites for his joint-ventures.
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