First, Ann Smarty at SearchEngineJournal .com published a blog on how she considers Microsoft Excel to be “the ultimate SEO and productivity tool.” In her article, “Using Excel for SEO – the Grand Collection of Tips,” she adds that while she’s no expert at Excel, she understands it enough to never want to be without it. She shares with readers the most useful tips that she has collected for combining Excel and SEO.

Smarty’s first tip is a reminder that you can export any data to Excel, from virtually any format. From Backlink data to information from Yahoo Site Explorer or Google analytics, all of this information can be transferred onto an Excel spreadsheet for immediate comparison. Smarty also provides information on how to export files from each of these formats, and even provides a link to six more ways to export backlink data to Excel.

For her second tip, Smarty says she likes to use Excel for keyword research. It allows her to create pivot tables for easy rearrangement of keywords. She provides a link to a systematic tutorial on how to make a pivot table with “drag and drop” capability, that allows for various comparisons and analyses. She then uses the “Find and Replace” feature to help her visualize keyword patterns. Her illustrated example demonstrates how to find the most frequent modifiers in any set of statistics as illustrated below:

• “Use CTRL+F (“Find and Replace” feature);
• Click “Find and Replace” tab;
• Type the word you think may be frequently used with your core term,
• Click “Options” button;
• Choose to “replace with” format;
• Click “Patterns” tab;
• Choose the color you want to highlight the cell containing the word:
• Click OK and then “Replace All”;
• You should then see how many times the word was used, plus the cells containing it will be highlighted.

Smarty finishes her list of tips by showing how she uses Excel to help her handle URL manipulation tasks. She provides separate instructions for extracting URLs from a list of linked words and for activating URL lists.  She says this becomes particularly handy when exporting large amounts of data from hundreds of URLs.

In another recent article at SearchEngineJournal.com, “Use Excel to Plan Meta Tags, Titles and URLs for SEO,” Loren Baker at SearchEngineJournal.com shares a tip from a reader who stresses the importance of differentiation in meta descriptions, and how Excel can help you keep track of your titles, file names, keyword descriptions and more. He also stresses the value of the LEN() function, which can provide the character counts of any cell in your Excel document. Baker provides a screen shot of a typical SEO page layout, and instructions on how to set up your columns for best use.

Meanwhile, from the analytical side, Yaov Ezer at SearchEnginePeople.com recently blogged about the ease with which you can use Excel to track your position on Google over time.  He provides a detailed, illustrated example based upon a study he performed for Webmaster World.

Ezer points out that while you can spend a lot of money for commercial products to help you track positions, both time and cash can be saved by simply using Excel.  To demonstrate, Ezer uses information culled from his friends at WebmasterWorld.com to conduct the test.  He then provides a link to an illustration represented in his column, so that you can actually create the same macro and perform the same test that Ezer did.  He provides easy-to-follow instructions for performing the test, and lets you know what you should be seeing when you enter all of the info.

Ezer also goes into detail explaining how the macro works. “Essentially what we are doing here is ‘scraping’ the search result, then looking within the returned content for specific strings (our links),” he says.

If you like using the macro, Ezer’s article includes all of the code you need to make it run automatically whenever you open a designated file.

Site Theme Keyword Cloud Generator

This tool would allow someone to enter the URL of their site in order to have a keyword cloud built based on the keywords found throughout their site.

The tool would spider a certain number of pages (Lets say 10-100), and return a keyword cloud.

Heres an example of a keyword cloud that blinklist.com uses

It would be great to be able to visually see the theme of a site. This would could be used to analyze your competitors or to just get a rough idea of how a search engine might see it.

If anyone wants to team up to make this tool. Let me know. I’ll fund it if someone wants to manage the building of it. This would be a great free SEO tool.

In Aaron’s own words:

SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results.

If your a link builder it can be a real lifesavor. It’s also great for researching domains for acquisition.

Out of the box, SFF only pulls pagerank automatically. If you dont mind your searches being slowed down a bit you can default it to include actual data of things such as Age, Yahoo Backlinks, Links in DMOZ…

Even with all the options defaulted on, SFF will show you the search results first and then add the additional data in real time as you sit there browsing. There is still a slight slowdown in browser performance but you can customize it to show only the info you need which will speed it up.

I’m packing for SES San Jose and didnt have a bunch of time to write a comprehensive review, but take my advice and download it. It will definitly save you some time.

Here’s a screenshot

I’m sure a lot of you had heard the news that Yahoo was building a system to allow people to easily gather both inbound link and indexed page data, but it wasnt until today that I actually searched for it, found it, and used it. And I have to tell you I am extremly impressed. They even include an api for using the information in our tools. Kudos to you Yahoo.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

If you havent been there yet, go there now. If you like the Google backlink command you are going to love using Site Explorer.

As of today Textlinkbrokers has 11,416 pages indexed and 84,729 backlinks.

It would be awesome if someone built a Firefox extension to access this great tool. If someone knows of one, let me know.

There is also a Trial Download on their site http://www.rapidkeyword.com/

Here is the announcement that they made

Dear RapidKeyword Customer,

We are very excited to announce a brand new feature of our keyword software.

As you know Google has released a beta of a new service called Google Suggest, which will make keyword suggestions to you as you type in the search box.

The new feature in our software will allow you to harvest these awesome keywords and make a list of them. This feature is so exciting because finally you can gather some real no-nonsense keywords that lots of people use in Google.

Fire up RapidKeyword right now and check out this new feature. Click on the FIND button and then select the Google Keyword Suggestion. Enter a keyword and watch about 90 keywords rolling in.

Enjoy the new feature, and thank you for using RapidKeyword to find the best keywords out there.

Regards,
Lenard Iszak
Rapid Decision Corp.
http://www.rapidkeyword.com

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/google-ranking-factors.htm

Seo Blog List

There is a great new report that marketleap is offering to see the link popularity trends for a website. If you are not familiar with marketleap they are one of the most popular tools for checking your link popularity. Especially now that the Google Links: tool is giving poor data. Marketleap gives you a much more detailed view of the links coming into your site.

If you check your link popularity using that tool you will find a new option for seeing the trend of you link popularity over time. http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ . I wish I could link to it directly but you have to run the report first to see the option. Once you have run the report you will see a link that says “click here for your trend/history report. Clicking the link will give you some very nice graphs, averages and other useful data.

Why is this important? Well, there are a few reason you would want to look at the trend of a sites link popularity. You may want to see if a competitor is collecting links at a faster pace then you. Another reason would be that you wanted to see Also, with some of the sandbox theories out there it might be very interesting to see some trends of sites that were effected heavily. Perhaps getting too many links too fast is hurting your rankings? etc. etc.. etc…. I’m sure you search engine professionals will find many uses for that tool.