Welcome to the Blekko SEO Tools blog! Here, you can find a collection of tips and news about search engine optimization (SEO).

This blog is for people who are brand new to SEO, as well as those who already know a thing or two about it. You’ll learn valuable information like how to use webmaster tools, what keywords are and why they’re important, and why you should care about SEO in the first place.

Blekko Seo Tools

The new search engine Blekko just launched, and it’s making SEO-related data that it has found during its crawling and indexing of the web available for all sites. Just what does it include and how useful is it?

Accessing SEO Data
You can access SEO data for any domain or URL by clicking the SEO link below any page in search results. You can click link for a list of external links.

Blekko SEO

The SEO tools include:

a list of pages that link to the site
link distribution and anchor text data
crawl data
pages indexed
a site comparison tool
a duplicate content report
Blekko also has created scoring, such as Host Rank and URL Rank. Other than assuming that a higher number is better, I’m not sure what goes into the scoring or what the scale is.

Link data
Of most interest to many site owners is likely competitive link data. Google webmaster tools only provides external link information to verified site owners, and Yahoo Site Explorer, which lists competitive link data but has a questionable future since Bing now powers Yahoo search results. Several third-party tools have stepped up to fill that potential void, another source of data is always welcome.

They keys to value in third party link data are always:

How closely does the third-party index resemble the indices of the major search engines? Is substantial link data missing?
How often is the reporting updated and how complete is each report? In other words, are reported changes in the number of links accurate or does each report simply reflect a different section of the site’s link graph because it’s from a different part of the web?
How well does the third party canonicalize duplicate URLs and eliminate spam?
The first thing that confuses me about Blekko’s data is that the count provided from clicking link doesn’t match the count shown on the inbound links tab.

Blekko Link Data

That said, clicking link under a URL in Blekko search results seems to provide a list of links to that URL (see first image above), sorted by relevance or date. The date sort seems like it could be useful for learning about new links to a site (although I find that analytics referral data is most useful for learning about new links to your own site).

Clicking the rank stats icon beside the sort options generates a list in table view with two scores beside each URL. I have no idea what these mean. The table includes a legend, but I don’t see the legend notations used anywhere in the table. Clicking more details brings up an even more confusing table. I can’t find help documentation for any of this on the Blekko site and while a few columns seem fairly obvious (lang, notporn), others are perplexing (people?).

Blekko Link Detail

The Show Terms button appears to simply include the data from the first view in the second view.

To get to the rest of the link data, you have to go back to the search results and click the SEO link. From there you can get both domain and page level data. Let’s look at page-level data to compare to the tables above.

Blekko Link Distribution

Regional link distribution is interesting, particularly when looking at why certain pages rank in particular countries or for queries where location is relevant.

Blekko External Link Data

The second image shows what appears when clicking the see all 2500 link. I’m assuming that 2500 is the maximum number of URLs shown in this report, not that the link count has changed to 2500. As you can see, the first table includes the rank (although I don’t know what this signifies) and the second includes the date (again, I’m not sure if this date is when Blekko first discovered the page or last crawled it or something else), although both tables list both columns.

Clicking show graphs, brings up, well graphs.

Blekko Link Visualization

The historical data could be useful. The inbound links by domain includes internal links (as does some of the table data), which may be less useful.

Clicking the Visualize icon next to a URL brings up yet another set of graphs, and at this point, while I’m all for more data, I’m getting a bit fatigued by little bits of data spread across multiple pages. Here, you enter up to four URLs to “visualize”, and this seems to provide comparison bar graphs.

Blekko URL Link Comparisons

Blekko Domain Link Comparisons

These graphs include data that is on yet more pages. Head back to the overview page and scroll down for anchor text data.

Blekko Anchor Text Distribution

The table is a little smooshed together, but I think the columns are number (of links with that anchor text), percentage (of that anchor text), good, exclude, and zapsite. This is some of the data I alluded to earlier that’s included on the comparison link graphs. I have no idea what any of it means. I imagine that “good” are the links that Blekko has deemed valuable, but after that, your guess is as good as mine.

But the big question is how does the link data stack up to what else is out there? Is it useful, for instance, for understanding what links Google sees to a site? This won’t tell us how consistent the data will be from crawl to crawl, but at least we can see a current comparison snapshot. Below are the link counts into the searchengineland.com domain (note that Yahoo Site Explorer data may not yet be restored). The first thing you’ll notice is that Blekko shows significantly fewer links than Google webmaster tools. Is this because Google is counting every link and Blekko is only counting each domain once, no matter how many times pages on that domain link in or is because Blekko hasn’t crawled as much of the web? Well, Blekko shows 145,281 inbound links to the URL searchengineland.com (as opposed to the domain), whereas Google webmaster tools shows 1,891,942 unique links and 4,993 total domains, so my guess at this point is that Blekko is counting unique URLs, but just knows about fewer of them.

Google Webmaster Tools Yahoo Site Explorer Blekko SEOmoz Linkscape Majestic SEO
7,103,325 813,152 262,759 738,057 1,612,310
Well. Those numbers are all over the place. Google shows significantly more, but of course, you can’t see competitive data, so the other tools are useful, even if they are incomplete. The only question is whether the index used to generate the data changes from report to report (which makes the data less useful to chart changes over time).

Crawl Stats
The more data the better, but I don’t know how useful it is to know how many pages Blekko has crawled, unless you’re trying to optimize for Blekko. As you can see below, searchengineland.com (I assume the home page) was crawled 19 seconds ago, but the robots.txt file was crawled 30 days ago. I’m not sure if the average page length is actionable (there’s not really an ideal length of a page) and I don’t know if page latency is server side or client side (and I guess it’s in seconds?). I also am not sure what one does with a site’s Analytics or Adsense ID.
Blekko Crawl Data

Site Pages
Site Pages (I think) lists all the pages indexed in Blekko. In this case, the total crawled matches the total indexed, which I find suspect. Either Blekko is doing no canonicalization (searchengineland.com has duplicate URLs with all kinds of tracking codes, for instance) or the numbers are coming from the same source. I can’t get the visualization details (accessible via the icon) to load.

Blekko: Site Pages

Compare
The Compare tab has the link graph data shown earlier, as well as additional slices of the link data, as shown below. I’m not sure if this is the best way to compare lists of links, although I guess the idea is that the links are in order of importance (at least, according to Blekko).

Blekko: Compare

Duplicate Content
This is an awesome concept. I don’t know how awesome it is in execution. The help section says:

The duplicated content tab (/duptext) displays URLs that have content that is the same as that of the website you are looking at. Click on a URL in the “urls with duplicated content” section to see a cached version of that URL with the duplicated content highlighted. You can also see seo, sections and whois information for each URL with duplicated content.

When I look at the ninebyblue.com, I see that 161 sites have content from ninebyblue.com, but I can’t seem to get to a list of what the content is or where it’s located on other sites.

Blekko: Duplication

This functionality seems to be available only at the URL level.

Blekko: Duplicates

URL-Level Details
At the URL level, you can see other information, such as page source (although you can also get this from the source of the page itself). When you click sections, you can see the source code by section.

Useful?
The usefulness of this data depends on how closely you think it reflects Google (assuming site owners care more about traffic from Google than Blekko). More data is always better, but just keep in mind that this data may not provide the complete picture. It’s also the case that while you can see this data for all sites, not just your own, having competitive information is more useful for some categories than others. Blekko also provides a toolbar, so you can view this data for sites as you browse them.

The value of data is always in what you do with it. You can waste your time entirely gathering and analyzing data that’s not actionable or you can find key insights that help you move your business forward. I’m always on the side of more data, but dat alone isn’t enough. As for Blekko data specifically, it’s great that we now have more sources, although I would love some additional explanatory help information. We’ll have to watch the data over time to see how actionable the historical trends are.

Blekko seo tools free download

With a constantly growing influx of new technologies in the digital marketing industry, job responsibilities of SEOs are no longer focused around the on-page keyword integration and off-page link building strategies. SEOs have been faced with an array of new tasks and challenges related to usability and goal conversion rates. In order to keep up with the overwhelming amount of tasks that online marketers have to do on an every day basis, here is a list of free online SEO tools, which we can use to make our lives easier.

• Tools to Spice Up Your Listings on Google
• Tools to Test Your Website Loading Speed and Server Uptime
• Tools to Do a Quick Website SEO Audit
• Tools to Test Your Server Setup For SEO Purposes
• Tools to Test Your Website’s Link Profile
• Keyword Research and Link Building Tools
• Social Media Tools
• Tools to Generate Sitemaps
• Tools to Get Website Credibility/Owner Information
• Tools to Test Website Usability
• SEO Tools For Excel
  Tools to Spice Up Your Listings on Google
  Why Should We Use These Tools?

Being able to stand out on SERPs (search engine results pages) is critical to improve the CTR (clickthrough rate) and drive website traffic. Generally speaking, if your site does not rank in the top 4 results, it is pretty much invisible. With the introduction of Google Places, Schema.org and launch of Google+ and Search Plus Your World, we’ve been endowed with an abundant selection of tools to make us differentiate from the crowd.

1. Schema.org – a collection of html tags (rich snippets) that can be used to improve the display of search results.
2. Google Rich Snippets – online tool to test how Google reads the incorporated rich snippets, and how your pages display on Google SERPs.
3. Author hReview WP Plugin – WordPress plugin that allows the author to leave a review and rating which can then appear as a five star rating rich snippet on SERPs.
4. GD Star Rating WP Plugin – another WordPress plugin to display the rating rich snippet.
5. Google’s rel=”author” tag – allows you to display the author picture on SERPs:

Google rel author tag

Tools to Test Your Website Loading Speed and Server Uptime
Why Should We Use These Tools?

Website loading speed is a critical factor in Google’s algorithm. Fast loading sites improve user experience. We should strive to make our landing pages load as fast as possible and certainly in less than 3sec to avoid losing more than 60% of visitors who just clicked on our link and about to enter the door to our online kingdom.

1. Google Analytics – you’ll need to add the following code to your GA code snippet in order to be able to see the page loading speed: _gaq.push([‘_trackPageLoadTime’]);) .
2. Pingdom – excellent online tool to check the loading speed of a site along with the useful stats for all server requests. This tool can be used to optimize your site.

Tools to Test Your Website Loading Speed and Server Uptime

3. Monitor.us – Test the reliability of your web server. Receive email alerts as well as weekly/monthly report summaries of your server uptime.

Test the reliability of your web server.

Tools to Do a Quick Website SEO Audit
Why Should We Use These Tools?

I hardly know of any SEO who would be able to do his/her job without using one or all of the tools below. These are must haves, as they allow to examine the technical flaws of a given site as well as provide good insights on how to structure an SEO campaign. If you prefer to have a manual, comprehensive SEO audit done on your site, please get in touch with us.

1. Screaming Frog – SEO desktop tool (for both PC and MAC) that spiders websites’ assets (links, images, CSS, script and apps) and returns the results with an SEO perspective presenting them in tabs by type to allow filtering for common SEO issues, or slicing and dicing the data by exporting it into Excel.

Screaming Frog

2. Woorank – online tool that provides instant website review that includes seo basic, social media impact, mobile preview, usability, security and much more. The free version is limited to 1 preview per week.

Online tool that provides instant website review

3. Robots.txt Check – online tool that gives an overview of your robots.txt errors.
4. W3 Code Validator – online tool which helps to validate your coding and point out the areas that need to be addressed.
5. Copyscape – content duplication can result in Google’s penalty. This tool will help to determine whether your site has any duplicate content.
6. Virante Duplicate Content Tool – another duplicate content spotter which also provides additional relevant insights on the way your pages are setup.

Bonus: Check out the Upcity’s step by step SEO audit that you can apply to your own blog.

Tools to Test Your Server Setup For SEO Purposes
Why Should We Use These Tools?

Before doing any SEO work on a given project, it is essential to get as much information on what has already been done (SEO-wise), how the system is setup, what is the target audience and what are the site goals. The following free tools will give solid insights into the technical aspects of the client’s website.

1. The Responsinator – check for correct server response codes. This tool is useful to check how your server-side redirects are setup in order to avoid content duplication for issues like www and non-www domains, trailing slashes, url capitalization, etc.

Test Your Server Setup For SEO Purposes

2. Server-side Compression – check your server-side compression. By enabling the compression, you can significantly reduce the page loading speed and improve user experience on your site.
3. URI Vallet – another useful SEO tool to check what’s going on under your website’s bonnet. This tool categorizes the report into the following sections:

Server Headers
Summary
Objects
Time to Download
Object Details
Internal Links
External Links
Validation
URI Vallet – SEO tool to check what’s going on under your website’s bonnet

4. Built With – very handy online tool for finding out the technology behind a given website. You can get information on the server type/size/capacity, programing language, CMS, widgets and more.

Built With – online tool for finding out the technology behind a given website

Tools to Test Your Website’s Link Profile
Why Should We Use These Tools?

It is a no brainer! These sweet tools will be your best friends in the SEO market. They will help you to plan and execute your off-page SEO campaigns by providing insightful link profile data for your site and the site(s) of your competitors.

1. Open Site Explorer – SEOMoz’s tool to perform competitive website research, explore backlinks, anchor text and much more. The free version of this tool will not give you much data, but still be helpful to get you started.

Open Site Explorer

2. Majestic SEO – it is somewhat similar to the Open Site Explorer, but has the largest and freshest link intelligence database. Majestic SEO will give you plenty of information on your link building efforts or the historical data related to link acquisition.
3. Blekko.com – a search engine/SEO tool, as it allows to get website insights by performing SEO specific queries. The tool is free; however, you must register to use it and know how to use it. Danny Sullivan’s blog put together a great guide on how to use Blekko for SEO.

Blekko – search engine/SEO tool

Keyword Research and Link Building Tools
Why Should We Use These Tools?

Keyword research and link building are integral parts of any SEO campaign. We constantly analyze what people search for, what is the current trend (QDFs), what are the most relevant/converting keywords related to our content and how to get credible and strong backlinks. Keyword analysis is a science in itself and must be taken very seriously. We can write a separate blog post on how to conduct keyword research using various online tools as well as social media listening, news and human psychology; however, in this article I will only list the most popular free online tools that can give you a good idea where you stand in terms of keyword research and what tools you can use for getting sweet backlinks.

1. Google Adwords – free keyword research tool by Google. It is pretty accurate; however you should be cautions relying on the data. Read Rand Fishkin’s blog post titled Be Careful Using AdWords for Keyword Research.
2. Google Insights – this tool will give you a rough idea on what people search for as well as allow to get some data on the rising keyword searches. You can also use Google Instant’s Autocomplete suggestions to get an idea of what keywords may be popular at a certain date.

Google Instant Keyword Research

3. YouTube Keyword Tool – being the second largest search engine, YouTube can provide a variety of great keyword ideas.
4. Bing Keyword Tool – here is something that is not owned by Google and can give you a neutral picture in your keyword analysis. The problem with Bing’s tools is that you have to have a hotmail/msn/live email account to use them.
5. Internet Wayback Machine – this is more of a link building tool. After you’ve done your keyword research, you can use this handy site for finding link opportunities. If you can find a website that has lots of broken links, you can use the Wayback Machine to find out what type of content was on the pages that no longer exist. By recreating this content (and making it 100% better) on your site, you can then ask webmasters to consider to link back to you instead of having broken links to non-existent pages. Wanna take a break from this long blog post? Check out how Google’s landing page looked like in 1998.
6. W3 Broken Link Checker – use this free online tool to find broken links on your site or your competitors’ sites and take action!

Social Media Tools
Why Should We Use These Tools?

Google and other search engines give a big emphasis on the social media sharing, as this helps the engines to improve user search experience by eliminating spam and introducing friend recommendations into the search results. We’ve written a blog post on the top 20 social media marketing tools that can be used by SEOs.

Tools to Generate Sitemaps
Why Should We Use These Tools?

Sitemaps help search engines to index your site faster as well as indicate that you are attentive to details and take time to follow the best SEO practices by properly generating and submitting your sitemap files. In addition, video or image sitemaps can improve your search engine visibility.

1. XML Sitemap Generator – if you are not using a content management system and have a custom programmed site, I’d recommend using this free tool to generate your sitemaps.
2. Google’s Guide to Video Sitemaps – we will not cover various video sitemap genarator tools; however, you can use Google as a reference on how to properly put together your video sitemaps. If you want to learn more about the SEO power of videos, check out Distilled blog post on video SEO tactics.

Tools to Get Website Credibility/Owner Information
Why Should We Use These Tools?

There is so much spam on the web that we should be very careful about where we get backlinks from. If someone emails you and offers to put a backlink to your site or if you are looking for sites that accept guest blog posts, use the tools below to get an idea who stand behind a given website:

1. Spy On the Web – simply enter website url, ip address, google adsense or google analytics code and find out what resourses belong to the same owner.

Tools to Get Website Credibility/Owner Information

2. Domain Tools – the most comprehensive domain name ownership information.

Tools to Test Website Usability
Why Should We Use These Tools?

Google constantly tries to improve the user search experience. Using such parameters as clickthrough rates, bounce rates, time spent on site, search engines can get a good picture of how happy your website visitors are with your content and overall site usage experience. Use the tools below to get feedback on what users like/dislike.

1. Google Website Optimizer – free website testing and optimization tool allows you to test and optimize site content and design to increase revenue and ROI.

Below are some relatively inexpensive tools:

2. Feedback Army – for $20 submit your site and get 10 responses from various reviewers.
3. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – submit an assignment, indicate your budget preferences and find people who will review and feedback on your site.
4. Mobile Phone Emulator – discover the hidden gems or flaws of your site’s look on various mobile devices/browsers.
5. IE Tester – test your websites look and performance on various versions of Internet Explorer. This is a desktop application.
6. Browser Size Google Labs Tool – interested in how your website looks on various screen sizes and screen resolutions? Need to modify the layout to increase the conversion rate? Then this tool will be handy.

SEO Tools For Excel
Why Should We Use These Tools?

You can use Excel to power up your SEO and save a tremendous amount of time performing link building research, link profiling and much more. We could not finish this blog post without mentioning at least one SEO excel tool.

1. SEO Tools For Excel – you can use this tool for:

Onpage analysis and debugging
Create your own SEO scorecard/report
Monitor and analyze back links
Scrape any website or web service and get data directly into Excel
Domain research
String templating
Get any data out of Google Analytics
Monitor social media efforts
Avoid duplicate content when writing texts
Can you recommend any SEO tools that have not been mentioned here? Please use the comments area below to leave feedback.

Conclusion

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

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