Internet Marketing Tools Review
Posted on December 1st, 2006by Michael Gray in Reviews, SEO, Tools
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Jim Boykin and the crew over at WeBuildPages have been pretty busy working on a redesign and fine tuning some of their tools, and Jim asked me to take a look at a few of them.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you probably know that I’ve got a heavy duty industrial strength tin foil hat that I firmly wear on my head when it comes to people gathering user data. I’m pretty hesitant to use a lot of the public SEO tools because well I think people may be using them for research. However I feel completely comfortable using Jim’s stuff since it’s just not what he’s about, now that we got that out of the way on with the show.
If you crusie over to the internet marketing tools page you’ll see he’s got quite a few things to offer, but I’m going to talk about my favorites that I use regularly. First up is the Top Ten Analysis SEO Tool, I use this one all the time, in fact I used it just the other day when I was looking up my name (see Michael Gray) Here’s a screen shot of the results (you gotta click through to the big version to be able to see the data)
First off you get a decent idea of how powerful the competitions backlinks are, as far as raw number and # of edu’s you also get an idea of their depth and coverage for the keyword by looking at pages indexed and Alexa data (yeah I know it’s only one metric, not the be all end all, just use it to corroborate the other data). Lastly this tool is really good at giving you an idea of how much link time and trust (or as Aaron says link equity) you have to work against. For example for my name my domain is from 2004, everybody else is from 2001 or earlier. Yes you can outrank age with power, this just gives you an idea how much you are up against. My only complaint about this tool is if you hit it late in the night, the API has used up it’s allowance and you get incomplete data. not much he can do about it if he wants to play by the rules, so visit early in the day.
Next up the backlink and anchor text tool. This is a 2-fer the first report gives you a list of the sites linking to you and the anchor text (screen shot below click to enlarge)
At the bottom is another link to the summary report (screen shot below)
Now I think the value is in looking at both of these together (do a printout) you’ll get a nice idea of who’s linking, and what biases exist in anchor text. IMHO this is a really great tool to run against your competition, it may help you discover some phrases you missed with your own discovery. There’s a lot of number crunching going on behind the scenes here so the report is a little slow and takes some time. Like get up and make your cereal and coffee time, so start the report in a tab or window, let it do it’s thing and come back in a few minutes. Secondly since the report is using backlink data from some of the engines who follow and count nofollow links there may be a bias in there.
The next tool I want to talk about is the common backlinks tool. You can put in up to 10 different domains and find sites that link to more than one of them. (screen shot below click to enlarge)
For this sample I picked my site, threawatch.org and webmasterworld.com. However I feel the best way to use the tool is to take the ten domains that are ranking in the SERP you are going after and plop them in. IMHO that would give you a list of people that you should spend the time writing a quality link request to. The last tool I want to mention is strongest subpages tool which will look at a site and point out where the power pages are deep within the site. It takes a minute or so to run. When the results come up CTRL+CLICK the link so it opens in a new window or else when you hit the back button it will reprocess the data a second time.
Disclaimer
This post has been a paid review. Now in all honesty I’ve linked to some of these pages before (see Mr Ploppy and Other Tools and Googlebase Preliminary Results) and really wouldn’t have had a problem linking to them again even if this wasn’t a compensated review. From where I stand I wasn’t being paid to endorse the tools, just to take the time to write about them in greater detail. I can say without reservation that have used these tools in the past and will continue to use them in future.
December 1st, 2006 at 2:24 am
Here’s the tricky things about “reasons why…”
The whole time I was reading this I was thinking, why would this really make Michael get over his well-founded paranoia?
It kept bugging me.
I wonderered if maybe there was some secret SEO blogger deal-making that I wasn’t aware of.
Then I hit the bottom and got it.
I’m not saying I have a problem with this, although the nagging questions and the ultimate answer have overridden all other info and I’m not sure what the piece was about, due to the distraction.
I’m just letting you know my thought processes on the way down. I’d much rather you just sell me something than be paid to “objectively”" pitch flat rate, I guess.
December 1st, 2006 at 7:36 am
I totally get where you’re coming from and I think it’s a matter of trust. For example if my brother in law or my next door neighbor wanted to buy a domain from me for 5K but said could you transfer it to me today and I’ll pay you next month there’s no way that I would do it. If someone like Oilman, Webguerilla, Rand or Jim asked the same thing I wouldn’t have to think about it at all.
December 1st, 2006 at 8:14 am
FYI, we’re not collecting any data from these tools. maybe I should put that in big red letters on the top of each tool “None of this information is stored”. I don’t know what’s being searched…and I don’t care.
We make these tools to give them away for free which helps us get backlinks….that’s it. I’m not spying on anyones searches or collecting any data.
December 1st, 2006 at 11:21 am
Heh… because I *do* trust you, you could have just said go use Jim’s new tools and I would have.
December 1st, 2006 at 12:31 pm
I think this is a great example of how a paid review can offer value all around. A trusted blogger accepts an invitation from somebody he trusts in turn. He provides his user experience on it, unbiased.
This helps the reader understand the value (or lack of) of the product. It helps the promoter extend the reach of the product and get feedback on it, and in this case, it provides the blogger with highly relevant content to post.
I’ve always wondered how I could best use Jim’s tools; now I have some great new ideas about how to put them into action. Thanks Michael for the insights and thanks to Jim for the tools.
December 1st, 2006 at 2:45 pm
I am more interested in seeing how “paid” blogging ranks.
December 1st, 2006 at 3:25 pm
http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/ is busted, getting this error:
Can’t connect to http://www.google.com:80 (connect: Permission denied) Can’t connect to search.live.com:80 (connect: Permission denied)
must be banned from the engines, else wbp connection to other sites tiz busted.
December 1st, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Phil I’m pretty sure that’s what happens when they went over the API allowance.
December 2nd, 2006 at 7:31 pm
Why not support subdomains? Odd.
December 3rd, 2006 at 1:22 pm
While I don’t wear the same hat (Tin Foil not colored) as you, I like to aggregate the results of as many of these tools as possible to get the bigger picture. This collection is actually pretty great. Jim really know his stuff.
May 9th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I love SEO tools. It’s amazing what tools out there for free while others charge for the same thing. Bookmarked.
May 16th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
I like them and the good thing is that they are free plus Jim said it himself. He aint a spy.
(maybe you should see into that “no storage of info” thing so that people will not accuse you of such - imho)
May 20th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
I am commending Jim for these free useful tools. It makes a marketer see the results of their hard work easily.
August 31st, 2007 at 1:20 pm
It’s all about the free tools! They are really handy for SEO newbies and give the smaller fish a chance to make it amongst the big boys!