SEOmoz has some of the best paid tools in the SEO industry. But they also have a lot of free tools that you can take advantage of to complete your SEO work. SEOToolbox comes with lots of useful free tools that helps you find out if you are maximizing your SEO opportunity. Here is what you get with SEOToolbox:

• Strongest Pages On a Domain: find your superstar pages on your domain.
• Who Else Is Hosted on my IP?: find out how many other sites are hosted on your shared IP.
• Check Inclusion: find out whether your site is included in Google index.
• Check Backlinks: find out the number of backlinks to your URL.
• Outbound Link Checker: find out your external links on your website.
• Check PageRank: if you are a PR junkie, you’ve got to see this.
• Find Domain Age: find out when was the first time your site was spidered.
• Check HTTP Status Code: figure out if you are using 301, 302 redirects on your pages.
• Check Index Pages: find out how many of your pages are indexed in major search engines.
• Whois: find out a domain’s registration information.
• IP Location: find out where your IP is located and how that can affect your SEO rankings.

There you have it. SEOToolbox is not exactly a groundbreaking SEO toolset, but it does come with standard free tools that you get on some other websites. Overall, you get the best SEO analysis by signing up for SEOmoz PRO. But even if you don’t, you still have plenty of free tools to work with.

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 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!

I have been in the search industry for years now (since I came to the U.S.). Through my time in the industry, I have seen many SEO tools, books, and membership sites. But SEOmoz is the only membership site that I have kept up with over the years. I have learned the years that in business you have to over-deliver to keep your business growing and retain your customers. Unfortunately, many SEO sites over-promise and under-deliver which is the recipe for disaster.

SEOmoz is one of the few SEO goodies that are worth signing up for. Not only you gain access to a world class set of SEO tools (see below), you are also provided with a wonderful feature called Q&A that allows you to ask questions and get answers from real experts.

SEOmoz also has a blog that is legendary in the Internet marketing world, and let’s not forget about the free resources and books that you get with a premium membership. SEOmoz may not be for everyone. It’s for folks who want to do real SEO (not magic). And it is priced at $80 a month, which may be out of your price range. But if you are dedicated to improving your SEO results, SEOmoz is one of the only sources on the Internet with real answers.

P.S. don’t forget to catch their limited time $1 trial for this month..

Linkscape, one of my favorite SEO tools, has just gotten its second update. SEOmoz has just announced that the second update includes most the changes from Q4 2008. Here are some of the interesting information from SEOmoz Daily blog:

Some important & interesting statistics from this crawl:

* URLs: 36,330,454,654
* Subdomains: 225,767,675
* Root Domains: 46,952,859
* Links: 410,360,303,763

Distributions of External Links from this Index:

* 50%: 0
* 95%: 1
* 99%: 8
* 99.5%: 18
* 99.9%: 108
* 99.99%: 1854
* 99.9999%: 104,828

Distributions of Linking Domains to a Domain:

* 50%: 0
* 95%: 1
* 99%: 4
* 99.5%: 8
* 99.9%: 26
* 99.99%: 145
* 99.9999%: 9713

Distribution of External Links to a Root Domain:

* 50%: 2
* 95%: 80
* 99%: 558
* 99.5%: 1,266
* 99.9%: 9,138
* 99.99%: 94,999
* 99.9999%: 12,286,546

If we believe this information, we are looking at many sites with 0 or so incoming links. What that means that if you haven’t paid attention to building links yet, you may want to.

Isn’t Linkscape the most fun online toy or what?

Is getting distracted an art? I don’t know about you, but after a few years of dealing with all kinds of distractions I am pretty certain that there is such a thing as the art of distraction. It’s simple really. The latest buzz in the SEO world is about the new tool that SEOMoz is going to be releasing soon. It’s called Linkscape, and it’s a very powerful tool. Basically, what it allows you to do is to find out how your competitors go about the business of building links.

The Unparalleled link intelligence advantage that you can get with SEOmoz’s tool is great. There is no question about that. But to most of us, Linkscape is like killing a bee with an elephant gun. Now folks new to the art of SEO want to have the most cutting edge tools in the world. After all, if the tool is branded as “Unparalleled link advantage,” then it must do magic. I call it distraction.

Linkscape is a great tool, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. But at the same time, it can be a big distraction for folks. Everybody in the SEO world is talking about how Linkscape will revolutionize the way SEO’s done. That’s all great. But I rather get the job done with my free tools and let folks talk it out.

Here is the thing. We all love “cool” things. In other words, we all want to be distracted, one way or another. The challenge is to stay on the ball and keep your goals in front of you. You can have the best tools out there on the market. But I rather be a producer than a consumer. If you want to take your business to the next level, just pick a few tools that let you do the job and keep your time investment in new tools to a minimum. Again, Linkscape is going to be great, and the next tool after it will be even greater. But the cold hard facts about SEO still remain: relevant valuable content gets the job done!

P.S. I am the master of this art (getting distracted). Are you?