I was complaining to my co-workers about this because the only way for me to check a site is to go through EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the site and check the html code to see if Analytics is there. This is, as you can imagine, incredibly time consuming. SEO-Browser makes this a bit easier because you can click through the pages of the site and it checks the html code for you.

Still though, you have to click on every link to every page of a site. Now you can imagine, this is no easy task if you are looking at a 100+ page site.

So while I was complaining, Jeff sends me a link to this great tool. I was skeptical at first but thought I would try it out. It is called SiteScan by EpicOne and it does just that – it scans any site and spits back a report letting you know if any pages are missing the code, and if they are, it gives you the URL of the page! Brilliant! The free version let’s you run 11 or 12 tests a day!

I have gone through all of my clients and checked. Luckily, there has only been one who had a bit of code missing. Phew! This tool saves me hours of time. Maybe it can help you as well!

He lists a variety of tools but the one that caught my eye was the Keyword Tree developed by Juice Analytics. To used the tool you need data in a Google Analytics account.

This tool combines the value of tag cloud and relationships. Very quickly you can see which combinations of keywords people are using to get to your site. The menu of keywords at the bottom of the screen show a list of all the keywords – it is so easy to use.

The Referrer Flow Tool is also interesting and valuable.

The purpose of this tool is to answer 2 questions:
a) What pages are visitors viewing?
b) Where are they coming from (referral page)?

The tool takes a bit of practice to understand but in about 5 minutes you can gain an appreciation for which pages are valuable and where referrals are coming from.

When you have a bit of idle time, try out these tools.

In our company, we frequently change search settings to look at different results. There are a couple reasons why we make changes. First, if a page that we are optimizing is in the top 10 result – great. But occasionally, pages are lower especially at the beginning of a campaign. In this case, we need to see where the page is ranking for a specific keyword phrase. We change our settings to expand the results so that we can quickly find where a webpage is ranking for a specific keyword phrase. To do this we click the Search Settings link and change the Number of Results from the default of 10 to 100 results per page. Then we use Ctrl-F and the company’s URL to find the page we are looking for. The position of the listing on the scroll bar is a quick way to estimate where the page is within the 100 results. If we need a precise ranking number we switch back to the default of 10 results and page down and find the listing manually. Or we will run a ranking report to get the full list of keywords and their positions.

Another reason we may change the settings to 100 results per page is to see which pages might be used as an alternative in the SERP. For example, if you search for “business laptops” in Google.com you will see one listing for Dell, www.dell.com/business/laptop. If you change your settings to 100 results per page you will see 2 results. The second result is indented, http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfb/notebooks/ct.aspx?refid=notebooks&cs=28&s=dfb. It is our experience that this second listing is Google’s way of testing additional pages. Most people performing searches won’t see this indented page but some will.

That was in May 2005. Since then the tool has turned into a powerhouse for webmasters and SEO professionals. We now get over 15,000 visitors per month.

In Simple Mode the tool is great for browsing through a website and looking at the text and links. I can usually pick up one or two ways to improve a site just using Simple Mode.

In Advanced Mode we’ve added about 25 metrics related to the website and the page you are viewing.  In addition, there is a menu at the top with links to various tools; some that we have developed and some that are off site.

Visitors and users frequently send us questions about there site. Most often the problem is with their site but occasionally they point out a problem with the tool. A couple weeks ago, one user showed us a site using SEO-Browser that looked different in Internet Explorer and Firefox. That problem we had to fix.

Have a look at the tool: www.seo-browser.com. Try it out on your site and your competitor’s sites. You may be surprised by what you find out.

Contact me if you have questions.

Jeff Nelson
jeff.nelson@anduro.com