The Best Tool Online for “SEO At a Glance”

2008 November 16

by Urbain

“SEO” means search engine optimization. As a mom and pop business owner, you need to take a look at your site’s SEO to see how many pages are indexed, where your links are coming from and so forth. At the end of this post is a video that will show you why SEO is important for your bottom line.

There’s a handy tool that you can use with either Firefox or Internet Explorer that’s called SEO Quake. I prefer Firefox, so the images in this article come from the toolbar that I installed on Firefox. I’m assuming that the toolbar will look the same on Internet Explorer. I haven’t tested it on Explorer.

I can toggle the toolbar on or off. The SEO Quake toolbar gives you information at a glance so you don’t have to look it up.

The SEO Quake Toolbar

Here’s a closer look at the left side of the toolbar, which gives information about this blog site, NotGuru.com.

A closer look at the toolbar.

It’s a fairly new site and as of the last Google Page Rank update, it has a Page Rank of 1 (the first button on the toolbar). It shows that 168 pages are indexed by Google, 5,937 pages are indexed at Yahoo, there are 6,421 inbound links and indexed pages showing in Yahoo, and 53 pages indexed at MSN.

To see what pages are indexed at Google, all I need to do is click the button (the one that shows I:168) and a new page opens that shows what pages are appearing in Google’s index:

Pages indexed in Google.

In the image below, I clicked the Yahoo button that reads 6,421 and can see the sites that are linking to the notguru.com domain as well as pages within the domain that appear in Yahoo’s index.

Yahoo links and indexed pages.

Finally, by clicking the MSN button, I can see the pages currently indexed with MSN. This number tends to go up and down quite a bit, but I seem to get quite a few MSN Live hits to pages that do not show in the index.

Pages indexed at MSN.

In the center of the toolbar, you can easily see the Alexa page rank, De.licio.us links and other information. When you install the toolbar, you can click on any of the buttons (such as De.licio.us) and see more detailed data.

Center of the toolbar (close up)

Another neat feature of SEO Quake is the expanded tools, which I accessed by clicking the SEO Quake icon:

Additional features.

Not only can you get information about your own sites, but you can use SEO Quake to analyze the SEO of your competitor’s websites.

If you want more space on your browser window, simply toggle the toolbar off and it disappears until you turn it back on.

SEO Quake is free, although donations are accepted. You can get a clean download directly at SEO Quake’s site, which is http://www.seoquake.com . Once you have installed this easy-to-install plug-in, you’ll be thrilled with the information delivered. What’s really sweet, at least with the Firefox version, is that an automatic update installation is provided whenever the toolbar is upgraded.