SEOQuake Review: Free SEO X-Ray Spex?

SEOQuake Review – SEO-X-Ray Spex?

Generating free search traffic for even slightly competitive keywords calls for a little detective work, and (dare I say it?) spying on your competition. (For even more spying check out this SpyFu Review!)

Spying on your competition means more than just Googling your keywords and noting the top results. You need to be able to look below the surface for certain pieces of key information about your competitors.

A quick peak with some ‘x-ray spex’ at the wiring under the board of your top competitors pages for the search terms you want to rank for will help you learn how to get ranked for those terms. On top of that, modelling the SEO strategies and tactics of more successful blogs is a very effective way to learn how to lift your own SEO game.

Thankfully there are tools out there which are designed with this purpose in mind, and in this Friday’s Resources and Tools for Bloggers I’m going to have a look at SEOQuake, a free browser add-on which reveals a whole host of info about any page you like.

SEOQuake: Free SEO X-Ray Web Tool

SEOQuake is a free Firefox add-on, also available for Chrome and Opera. There’s a ‘light’ version with just a couple of basic features available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.

Upon installation, SEOQuake (although customizable) is ready to rock’n'roll without any tweaking or adjustments. What it offers is easily accessible stats for any web page including:

- Google Page Rank, inbound links (Google version), cache date, number of indexed pages

- Alexa rank, web archive age

- Yahoo directory presence, inbound domain links (Yahoo version)

- Digg, Delicious, Technorati index links

- Whois info, domain source IP, page source code, robots.txt, sitemap

- Ability to check nofollow links and keyword density.

The list goes on… (it really does!)

It’s fully customizable and can show whichever information you prefer from it’s parameter list, including indexing stats from a number of sites and search engines along with the major ones mentioned above. For the average blogger, the default settings provide more than enough info.

Operating SEOQuake.

SEOQuake can be set up as a toolbar, sidebar or in the status bar at the bottom of your page (I like the status bar, it’s the most discreet). Click the SEOQuake icon to activate it and have it do it’s work for results as you open up a search page.

Here’s it is in action – info like this comes up for every search entry on the page:

It’s worth noting that Google can frown upon excessive requests for Page Rank information (and punish users accordingly), but the default settings in SEOQuake take this into consideration. Between caching and only requesting stats upon clicking, this should never be an issue for any normal usage levels.

Highlighting NoFollow links

Clicking the ‘Line through nofollow and no-index’ option in the menu to reveal nofollow or no-index links on a page. Want to know if a blog will give you a dofollow link for commenting? Checking whether you’ve forgotten to nofollow links from or within your own blog? This is the tool for you.

The other tool I’ve been using to check nofollow links is the SearchStatus toolbar. The single (to my mind) advantage which the SearchStatus tool has is over SEOQuake is that it ‘pinks out’ any nofollow link, even if it’s an image. SEOQuake only reveals nofollow text links.

This post will tell you more about nofollow and dofollow

Learn more about SearchStatus

Keyword Density Checking

The next handy feature of SEOQuake is it’s meta data and keyword density checker. Simply click on this option when you’re viewing a page, and a new tab opens up revealing title, meta description and meta keywords.

Below that appears a comprehensive table of keyword density, sectioned into 1, 2, 3 and 4 keyword phrases. Customize the results even further with the filter to find exactly the information you’re looking for.

Monitoring keyword density in your own posts, or analyzing your competitor’s use and density of keywords is extremely easy with this handy feature.

Thumbs up for SEOQuake?

Yup. I like this one very much. Not only has it allowed me to remove my Alexa toolbar (read my Alexa.com review to learn more about Alexa) but SEOQuake provides information I need to:

- Monitor my own site progress and stats at a glance

- Optimize my commenting to include higher PR and dofollow blogs (note – I don’t limit my commenting exclusively to those, but it is good to have a healthy proportion of both from a link-building perspective)

- Study competing sites and pages for specific keywords

- Identify high traffic blogs with a view to guest posting

- Analyze and model some of the SEO tactics of top bloggers

Think SEOQuake might come in handy?

I thought so. Here’s the link:  >Download SEOQuake<

Over at SEOQuake.com, you’ll also find a number of simple tutorial videos explaining how to install it, reconfigure it, make sure you don’t get banned from Google(!), along with support and various further articles.

Using SEOQuake already? Or have you got a different set of x-ray spex? I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments below. After you’ve shared this post to let your friends and networks know about SEOQuake too.

BONUS: Click on the +1 below to access my free ‘Blog Post SEO Cheat Sheet’ (Simply click and download) – fine-tune your content for maximum rankings with this simple on-page SEO guide for bloggers…

Free SEO X-Ray Spex? SEOQuake Review ©2011 Blogger’s Alchemy