The Optimizer - Weekly SEO News

At Searchification 2007, Microsoft showed off a Webmaster portal designed to run side-by-side with the new Live Search, and it is now available in beta. The portal first asks you to setup a profile for the website you want to analyze, which unsurprisingly includes a verification step; you can either upload an xml file or insert a meta tag. The service seems to pick up the meta tag update immediately, which means you can get right to work.

The summary page is basic but functional, showing when your site was last crawled (or if your site is blocked) and how many pages are included in the Live Search index. For webmasters experiencing problems with a site, this should be your first port of call. The domain rank graphic is a nice touch, though breaking it down into five levels seems insufficient for really being able to gauge performance. For comparison, Google Pagerank goes up to 10, and we're rated 6, how this equates to a Live Search 5/5 we don't know.

Additionally there is a keyword analysis tool, showing how you would perform on Live Search for certain search queries. Again the lack of granularity in the rating system hurts here, to improve your SEO you have to do badly at something! To wrap it all off there is an inbound and outbound link analysis, which if you run a proper website (i.e.: not a blog) will help see where you site is being promoted.

Overall the beta of Live Search Webmaster portal does an OK job, offering nothing stellar if your website is being indexed regularly but offering a good starting location for those having problems.

All that said, you can try out Live Search Webmaster Portal at http://webmaster.live.com

And the latest release of Live Maps also added a new portal for business owners who want to update their listings on the service; check it out at http://llc.local.live.com.

Labels: msn, seo tools

Yahoo! has added a new search function to it's ever-growing bag of tricks.

Yahoo! Instant Search displays results as you type your query. The results come from either Yahoo! Shortcuts to news, weather and other relevant information or from the #1 results in it's index. Yahoo! Search also provides instant corrections for "select" misspellings. I emphasize select because it did not offer any corrections for misspellings that I entered.

If this becomes a popular tool, I see a lot of webmasters scrambling even more feverishly to get their web sites listed in the #1 position at Yahoo!.

Try Yahoo! Search Beta for yourself.

Labels: search, seo tools, yahoo

Iotaweb.org is a new search engine that allows you to search for the approximate values of high dollar keywords for Google Adsense and Yahoo! Publishers Network.

Results are sorted from highest to lowest value. When you click on a result it will show you the approximate pay per click value of that keyword phrase. The values are updated monthly and new keywords are added daily. There's also plans for keyword value trend data as the search engine matures.

Try Iotaweb for yourself.

Labels: adsense, google, seo tools

There's a useful tool at SearchGuild.com titled "Search Term Difficulty Checker".

Search Term Difficulty Checker is an online application that makes use of the Google API to analyze a keyword phrase search in order to dertermine the difficulty of acheiving a top 10 ranking for that phrase.

It does this by analyzing the results of the search with an algorithm that approximates the Google search algorithm.

After sifting through my email for my Google API key, which this tool requires, I tried out a couple of phrases myself and here are the results. (The higher the number, the more difficult it is to rank a phrase or keyword.)

google - PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE: 5458186

web promotion - INTERMEDIATE: 62110

seo - INTERMEDIATE: 30134

search engine optimization - INTERMEDIATE: 27072

robert raught - INTERMEDIATE: 20451

flying spaghetti monster - EASY: 2796

Now if I could only find a client that wants to promote a website about flying spaghetti monsters. Hrm...

Here's a link to Search Term Difficulty Checker

Labels: seo tools

According to an interview by Gary Price at Searchenginewatch.com, Yahoo's Tim Mayer announced that his company will soon be launching Yahoo Site Explorer. A tool that provides webmasters with linkage and indexing data.

"Yahoo Site Explorer is a place to see which pages Yahoo has indexed. After clicking "Explore URL" you'll find the number of pages found in the Yahoo Index and also the number of inlinks. You can sort pages by "depth," submit URLs, and quickly export the results to TSV format. Site Explorer is also supported via an API."

Tim's advice on creating links for link popularity: "Create natural links, make it look natural."

Labels: seo tools, yahoo