Essential Search Marketing Tools & WordPress Plug-Ins

While I am one who firmly believes that tools can never replace human ingenuity, they can make the job a human does a whole lot easier. With that thought, I thought I share some of the tools we use for SEO/SEM projects followed by some cool plug-ins to compliment SEO efforts with WordPress blogs.

Note: I also shared these in a presentation entitled “Tool, Glorious Tools” at SMX West 2009.

Keyword Research

Keyword Discovery

An advanced keyword research tool which draws on a database of 36 billion search queries from many different search engines around the world.

Features:

• Keyword Research – Access to multiple databases including…
  • Global Premium: 4.3 billion keyword searches based purely on user panel data
    
  • Historical Global: data from June 2005 to present
  • eBay: searches performed at eBay
  • News: searches performed at major news sites and portals such as Google News
  • Shopping: major shopping sites such as Amazon, Buy, Bizrate and many others
  • Google: searches performed at Google.com and localized Google sites
  • Yahoo: searches performed at Yahoo.com and localized Yahoo sites
  • 13 country specific databases: data from August 2006 to present

• Industry Keywords – Enables you to compare the keywords you are currently receiving traffic for with that of your competitors in the same industry.

• Spelling Mistake Research – View common mis-spellings related to specific keywords.

• Seasonal Trends – Allows you to examine seasonal trends to see how demand for various goods and services is likely to change throughout the year.

• Related Keywords – Discover related keywords that you might otherwise have missed.

Subscription fees start at $69.95/mo. or $599.40 annually.

Keyword Discovery search interface and results

Domain Tools

HTTP Status Codes Checker

Enter a URL and see what server header status codes are being returned. Good for making sure 301 and 302 redirects are working properly.

Static Ranking Reports

Ranking-Manager

While static ranking checkers are not the best metric to measure the success of an SEO campaign, there are projects in which we cannot access log files which are needed in order to run ClickTracks. We will then have to resort to rank checking software to get an idea of where we are positioned in the organic search results for keyword phrases we are targeting.

Ranking Manager allows you to create multiple projects and select from a pretty extensive list of engines although the only ones we really care about are Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. The software also offers the ability to customize the look-and-feel of the reports and charts it generates.

Standard Version – $149.00

Professional Version – $389.00

Also offers annual support after first year at $129.95/yr.

Just one of many reports Ranking Manager generates

Link Popularity

SEO Administrator (Link Exchange Tool)

Desktop tool that allows you to easily monitor inbound links for multiple projects.

Provides the following information about the link:

• Is link is present?
• Anchor text
• Followed / nofollowed

Provides the following information about page link is on:

• Google PageRank
  
• Outbound links
  
• Internal links
  
• Inbound links
  
• Excluded via the robots.txt file

The program allows you export reports into the following formats: Excel, Word, HTML, CSV and Text.

Note: The SEO Administrator includes many other tools besides this one but the Link Exchange tool is the only one we use (and not we do not use it to do link exchanges).

Link Exchange Tool report module

Local Search

GetListed.org

A tool for small business owners that will help them learn more about the way their business is listed in local search engines. View whether or not your business is listed in the local sections of Google, Yahoo, Best of the Web and Microsoft’s Live Search as well as the data that is associated with it. More engines and features are planned in future updates.

GetListed.org 'Overview' interface

WordPress Plug-ins

All in One SEO Pack

Out of the box, plug n’ play for WordPress blogs. Allows you to customize title tags, meta description tags, keyword meta tags and solves duplicate content issues.

What’s really nice is if you do nothing but activate this plug-in, it will automatically generate meta descriptions from either your excerpts or first paragraph of your post.

It also allows you to have tags become your keyword meta data as well.

A couple other plug-ins that will help make WordPress a bit more SEO friendly are:

Headspace – http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/
SEO Title Tag – http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

Dofollow

Allows you to remove “evil nofollow attribute” from your comments. Just plug n’ play.

ShareThis

A plug-in that will display a “Share This” buttom at end of your post which allows your visitors to easily share a post/page with others. Plug-in supports both e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites. Just plug n’ play.

Select 'ShareThis' button and pop-up box displays social media options

Twitter Tools

Integrates your WordPress blog and Twitter account. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Enter Twitter user name and password and select options.

Twitter Tools options

Subscribe To Comments

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

Math Comment Spam Protection

This plugin asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. Does require adding code to comments.php file.

While this is not a complete list of all the tools we use on a day to day basis, it does comprise some of the most important ones.