SEOmoz PRO has a lot of cool tools, but Linkscape has created the most buzz in the past few months. Linkscape is the ultimate link analysis tool. Currently, the system covers 38 billion URLs made over 240 million domains which allow you:

• Linking domains: unique domains are linking to a page, subdomain, or to your entire website.
• Linking strategy: find out about your competitors’ linking strategies and beat them in their own game.
• Link quality: not all links are created equal. Use Linkscape to find out why!
• Link Partners: find link partners for your niche sites quickly.

That’s just for starters. Let’s see what exactly you get with Linkscape.

Now this is only the basic report, but you get a lot of information on how you can improve your websites. The advanced report provides you with more information, including inlinks to subdomains and your root domain.

The advanced report is so powerful. Not only it shows you all kinds of information on your domain that you can use to improve your website, you can also dig deep and go through your links one by one.  By clicking on links to URL and links to domain, you can go through each and every link and figure out which links are bringing you the most juice.

Another powerful feature that you get with Linkscape is the anchor text analysis report that allows you to figure out who’s linking to you or your competitors with what anchor text. You can figure out your competitors anchor text strategy, and what you can do to nullify it.

Believe it or not, the guys at SEOmoz have an advanced API available that you can use to get all kinds of data. That’s going to cost you $5000 minimum per month. This includes:

• Advanced full link data
• Advanced Website data
• Advanced Keyword data

Now I wouldn’t recommend anyone getting this $5,000+ monthly plan unless you have a lot of money and need to dig much deeper than most folks. Linkscape comes with enough features to keep you busy for a while, so don’t go spending $5K on API access before extracting everything there is from the standard Linkscape access that you get with SEOmoz PRO.

In the past few days, I have focused on SEOmoz tools that help you figure out how you are doing when it comes to building links. By analyzing the frequency and location of keywords throughout a page, Term Target shows you exactly why you are not getting ranked as high as you should. It assigns a grade to you, and while I wouldn’t take these grades literally, if you are getting a C or a D, you’ve got a lot of work to do. Here is how it works.

I have used my own site as an example here. Keep in mind the word SEO is not exactly the best keyword to use here. I like longer terms, but for the purpose of this demonstration it will do.

You get more than a grade from this tool. It also shows you the areas that you can improve upon. For instance, I don’t have the word SEO in my H1 tag (a shame!). The same can be said for H4 and my META Description tag. Just imagine running this tool for all your pages and optimizing them step by step.

Term Target is a powerful on-page optimization tool. In highly competitive markets, on-page optimization is not going to push you over the top, but it could hold you back. But in niche markets with less competition, your on-page optimizations can produce remarkable results. Overall, Term Target is one tool that you shouldn’t ignore and can help you get your SEO campaigns on the right track.

In the past few days, I have talked about how SEOmoz tools can help you get more done for less. BacklinkAnalysis is one of those tools. It makes spying on your competitors silly easy. All you have to do is enter their URL in the box and let the system search through their links and analyze them for you.

BackLinkAnalysis allows you to figure out who’s linking to your competitors. That way you can go to those link partners and ask them to link to you as well. If someone is doing article marketing, you can discover that as well. What I like about this tool is the fact that it shows you your competitor’s popular anchor texts as well. That way you can figure out what keywords your competitors deem to be important. Analyzing your competitor’s backlinks is a great way to figure out their link building strategy and duplicate it. It saves you time and lets you focus on more important things.

Crawl Test is a pretty self-explanatory tool. If you have been doing SEO for a while, you have probably seen lots of crawler tools. These tools allow you to figure out if search engines will have any issues with navigating your website. SEOmoz’s Crawl Test is one of these tools. A lot of folks think of these tests as being overrated, but I have personally solved a lot of issues on my sites and those of my clients by applying this test.

Crawl Test will show you:

• your indexed pages on Google
• the last time your pages were navigated by Google agents
• the status codes of your pages
• your meta file information
• the number of incoming links

What I like about Crawl Test is the fact that it shows you your duplicate title tags or descriptions tags. That’s really powerful. I am a perfectionist, and I have optimized my robots.txt and title tags time and time again to make sure there are no duplicate title tags on my websites. But after running Crawl Test, I still found a few duplicate title tags:

Crawl Test is a great tool to diagnose underperforming website. Obviously, there are a lot of other tools that you should use to pinpoint problems with your website, but using Crawl Test is a good start.

In the past few days, I have been covering what SEOmoz PRO is all about. Trifecta and Keyword Difficulty tools are wonderful, but your PRO membership comes with powerful link-building tools that you should not ignore. Juicy Link Finder is one of those tools. Juicy Link Finder returns links that carry authority across different niches. All you got to do is figure out the niche you are trying to enter. Once you do that, you can use your main keywords to fetch authority links.

So here comes my favorite term: credit cards. Obviously, you want to use the terms that apply to your niche, but this term is highly competitive and is a good way to demonstrte the power of JLF. You can fetch 50, 100, or even 200 links in every niche. Here is what you get when you run the report:

Once you have this list, you can use the link next to each link to figure out whether these sites allow you to submit your links to them. What that link does is pass this command to Google:

“submit * site” OR “add * site” OR “add * link” OR “add * url” OR “submit * listing” site: http://www.yoursite.com

Juicy Link Finder is not going to cure cancer. But it does help you save time with your SEO. Think about it. Instead of you having to do all the research to find sources for juicy links, you can use Juicy Link Finder by SEOmoz PRO to save time and get more done.

If you thought JLF was cool, stay tuned for the next part! We not done with SEOmoz PRO by a long shot.

Have you ever wondered why some folks get to dominate the search engines while others keep banging their heads against the wall trying to get ranked for terms like “credit cards?” If you go pro with SEOmoz PRO, you won’t have to keep doing the same thing. I know a lot of SEO purists are going to jump at me here and claim that they could get ranked for highly competitive terms. I don’t question that. But I rather pick my spots for my own websites. Let’s see exactly why a term such as credit cards is hard to get ranked for.

Once you run the Keyword Difficulty tool available with your SEOmoz membership, you are provided with a grade that helps you gauge how difficult it is to get ranked for your term. In case of the term “credit cards,” Keyword Difficulty returns the difficulty score of 70%. That means you are going to have to heavily optimize on-page and off-page to get ranked for that term. Not only that, you need to have a well-established history to break into the top 10. I have tracked the top 10 results for this term for a year now, and the top 10 lists hasn’t changed significantly in a year. The number of players in this market is too large, but the top guys are well-established and well optimized.

But you shouldn’t just dismiss a keyword phrase based on the difficulty number that you receive from this tool. Thankfully, Keyword Difficulty provides you with a list of numbers that can give you a good indication whether a term is right for you. Here is what to look out for:

• Number of “” (phrase) matches on Google
• Number of allintitle results on Google
• Number of allintitle/inanchor search at Google
• Pages in top 10 that are root URLs
• Average Page Strength to get in top 3
• Average Page Strength from position 4 to 10
• Average Page Strength of top 1o results at Google & Yahoo

And there are a lot of numbers here, but what I would really pay attention to are:

• .edu, .gov links
• domains links
• URL links
• domain age
• DMOZ links
• Technorati Links

If you look at the numbers, it’s not really that hard to figure out how much work you have in front of you if you want to get ranked in this market. Most of the sites here are highly optimized and most top 10 guys have links from .edu and .gov websites. Now, you have to get much deeper than that to figure out why position No. 2 is beating all others even though it doesn’t have as many links or is not as old as the other ones.

Keyword Difficulty is not be the only tool you use to conduct your SEO analysis, but it is a very good place to start.

As I mentioned yesterday, this next couple of week I will be covering SEOmoz and their tool-set. With that, let’s see what Trifecta is all about. Trifecta (previously called Page Strength tool) is a cool tool that allows you to figure out where the strengths of your pages lie. In essence, you can figure out the number of pages that are linking to you, the number of times your brand is mentioned on the web, and how much traffic you are getting from search engines.

You have 4 options here. You can choose to compare your site against that of your competitors. You can also define how broad you want to get with your analysis. You can choose just a domain, a blog, or just a page. The metrics defer for each of these. Let’s take iPhoneness.com and see the results that we see for each option. Let’s try the page option:

You also get Yahoo! information with this report. This is really powerful as you easily figure out what the other guy is doing right, and how you can too. The blog metrics are a little bit different. It shows you information from Technorati and other blog related services. If you own a blog, you should try this option as well:

The “domain” option is a killer if you are a domainer. you can figure out all kinds of information about a domain and its worth. It provides you with information such as Age, Wikipedia links, PR, incoming links, mentions on Google news, and even Compete.com data. If you have a domain and want to figure out how much it’s worth, you can get a pretty good indication with Trifecta by SEOmoz.

Trifecta is a great tool by SEOmoz. It provides you with everything you need to know to get started with your optimization process. You just have to sit down and do the work. And if that’s not enough, there are a bunch of other tools that you can use to perform a more thorough analysis. There is a reason why SEOmoz tools are so popular, and you quickly realize why once you use Trifecta.

Stay tuned for the third part.

If you have been doing SEO for a while, you know the importance of having tools that you can rely on. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if you provide inaccurate data to your clients? Wouldn’t it cost you money if you make decisions based on inaccurate information? SEOmoz is one of the best paid SEO packages around. SEOmoz not only trains search engine optimization professionals on the latest SEO development, it also comes with a set of tools that make it easy to make reliable business decisions for yourself and/or your clients. SEOmoz is not a cheap SEO package, which means you better know what you are getting before paying $70 a month to get your hands on the pro version. The free SEOmoz membership is decent. You read the blog, and you have access to premium content,  but if you are a serious SEO professional, you want to consider SEOmoz for yourself and your clients.

SEOmoz PRO Tools

A SEOmoz PRO membership provides you access to way too many tools that you can possibly handle. With that in mind, let’s see what you get with a PRO membership:

• Linkscape: a killer link competitive analysis that allows you to figure out exactly what your competitors are doing right.
• Term Target: Targeting tool assigns a letter-grade to a page that represents how well certain keywords are targeted. This is really powerful as you can really get deep with your SEO analysis and get the details right.
• SEOmoz Firefox Toolbar: you can now have Linkscape right on your Firefox browser. Combine it with SEO Tools toolbar and you are golden.
• Rank Checker: Check, track, and monitor your rankings at all the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com. Pretty similar to what WebPosition accomplishes.
• Crawl Test: quickly diagnose search engine crawling issues on your website. Can’t tell you how many times folks have failed to catch this error.
• Keyword Difficulty: shows you how easy or difficult it is to get ranked for a keyword on Google or Yahoo!
• Popular Searches: aggregates and archives popular searches from various sources. Awesome for niche marketers
• Trifecta: it measures the strength of your brand or blog. You can figure out how many folks are linking to you, how many times your brand is mentioned, and how much traffic you are getting from search engines.
• Anchor Text Analysis: find out how websites are linking to you and whether you can optimize your anchor texts here.
• Juicy Link Builder: find out juicy link partners using SEOmoz’s JLB.
• Term Extractor: allows you to plug in a URL and figure out what words are relevant to the content of your site.
• GeoTargeting Detection: Discover how well your website is targeted to country specific search engines.
• SEO Toolbox: a collection of free tools that allows you to get more work done in less time. You get:
  • Strongest Pages on a Domain
  • Who Else is Hosted on My IP?
  • Check Inclusion
  • Check Backlinks
  • Outbound Link Checker
  • Check PageRank
  • Find Domain Age
  • Check HTTP Status Code
  • Check Indexed Pages
  • IP Location
  • Whois

As you can see, you get more than just a collection of SEO tools that may or may not be useful. The guys behind SEOmoz PRO have hit it on the nails by providing tools that help you get more SEO work done and focus on tactics that actually matter. In the next part, I am going to discuss how you can get the best out of your PRO membership. Stay tuned!

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could list your place of business on Google Earth? If you have used Google Earth in the past, you have probably seen locations showing up when you search on Google Earth. You can also use the same approach for Google maps. Now this may all look difficult, but can be accomplished with simple modifications to your Sitemap.

If you want to have geo-content listed on Google Earth and Google Map, you really have two options. You can use either KML or GeoRSS. Both KML and GeoRSS use the point element to pass coordinates through your sitemap. The Placemark element provides you with the opportunity to add more information about your place on the map.

Using KMl or GeoRSS is a cool way to give Google pointers about your location and your business. Google does not guarantee anything here, but you give yourself a better chance of showing up on Google Earth. Are you showing up on Google Earth?

Let’s face it. The whole SEO game has changed a lot in the past few years. You wouldn’t have to be a genius to see that the game people played a few years ago wouldn’t really cut it these days. A few years ago, people were more worried about exchanging reciprocal links and building link management systems. But today, folks are giving away toolbars, books, iPhone apps, and even organs (you name it). You know what else has changed in the past few years? The SEO Tools landscape. A few years ago, people would settle for WordTracker or Keyword Discovery. There were not too many options available to SEO professionals. And Overture’s keyword research tool was king. Not today!

I have talked about in the past how top SEO professionals use as many tools as possible to gain a competitive edge over their competitors. The problem is, when you get into this game, you may not be able to stop. A couple of years ago, I started experimenting with other tools besides WordTracker and KWD. I first got Wordze, then jumped to SEO Elite, and even tried Keyword Spy. Then there was KeyCompete. And Nichebot was nice too! The problem is, you’ve got to know when to quit or you are going to spend more time playing around with tools and less actually doing some work.

STDD is a disease and should be treated as such. Before trying new tools, you should try to figure out what is it that you are hoping to get with those tools. If WordTracker does everything you need it to do, why would you want to switch to Wordze. And owning both does not make sense either. Now, if you have a podcast about keyword research tools, it makes sense to buy all these tools and review them. But if you are doing actual SEO work, you should pick your tools as fast as you can and avoid the temptation of trying new cool tools that add no real value. STDD can be difficult to shake off, but by keeping your eyes on the ball you can avoid the temptation of buying new tools, that add no real value.

Are you suffering from STDD?