SEO PowerSuite is a collection of four tools that aid you in those tasks. The suite consists of the following four tools:

• Rank Tracker for tracking search engine rankings
• LinkAssistant for link management and campaigns
• SEO SpyGlass for backlink and competitor research
• WebSite Auditor for onpage optimizations of a web page

All tools are available separately or bundled in the SEO PowerSuite. Lets take a closer look at each individual tool.

Rank Tracker

Tracking ranks in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo or Ask is one of the most important tasks of a webmaster as it is one of the ways to determine the success or failure of optimizations. It is also used as a way to monitor rankings to react immediately if big changes (usually drops) are noticed.

Rank Tracker is profile driven. Each profile consists of a domain name and up to five competing domain names that you want ranks tracked for.

All major and many minor search engines can be selected to be monitored. Most users will probably stick to the big three Google, Bing and Yahoo, but hundreds more are available for selection.

Rank Tracker keeps record of rankings over time, and displays them as a graph in the main interface. It does not end here though. Webmasters can not only monitor rankings but also the visits (pulled from Google, requires a Google Adwords account set up), KEI (an indicator of a keyword’s competitiveness) and Keyword suggestions (to get new keyword ideas).

The extensive options allow lots of customization. One of the most important ones is the ability to add proxy servers to the program. You may know that some search engines – like Google – display different rankings based on location (and several other factors). Proxies can also help to avoid being temporarily blocked from the search engines which can happen if you make to many requests in a set amount of time.

Search engine API keys can be added in the options as well which limits the maximum number of lookups you can do but makes sure on the other hand that you won’t be temporarily blocked.

A scheduler is available to run ranking checks automatically. Export options are available, which can be handy to process data in other applications or as a means to send reports to clients.

Seo SpyGlass

Seo SpyGlass has two main purposes. It can be used to find new pages that you could try and get backlinks from for your project, and to analyze a site’s backlink structure.

Regardless of the method, you end up with a list of backlinks that you can process further to retrieve data such as PR, Alexa traffic rank, IP address, anchor texts, or the link source (e.g. forums, directories or blogs), and the strength of each individual backlink. A competitors analysis furthermore reveals information about a site’s backlink profile. The information presented here can give you insight about link building strategies and the overall strength of the competitors site.

The program can be quite useful for a number of purposes. You can for instance sort the backlinks found by Pagerank or Alexa rank to find links with a lot of linking power (you still need to contact the site owners, register an account or do other things to get a backlink from the site pointing to yours).

You could also try and replicate your competitors link structure. Sites that link to your competitors website may also be willing to link to yours.

Website Auditor

Before you start looking at external means to improve your site’s ranking in the search engines, you may want to make sure that the site’s on-page factors are optimized as well. On-page factors like the title, headings, links or other HTML elements can have an impact on the rankings of a site in the search engines.

Website Auditor can analyze factors for a single page or multiple pages of the same domain. It first checks for available pages linked from the selected root domain before it offers to run the analysis for each page. Analysis includes checking for HTML and CSS validation errors, total links on the page, a page’s title, meta description and keywords, and a page’s PR. The program furthermore keeps tracks of broken links, monitors domain statistics (Alexa rank, DMOZ or Yahoo directory listing, Compete rank, Google Pagerank), Social Activity, overall PR distribution and link statistics (do follow, no follow).

Links are displayed in a table like structure which makes the data very accessible. Reports can be generated at anytime, which is useful if you do the analysis for a client.

Webpage reports can be generated which highlight missing page elements, errors or other factors that can influence a page’s ranking in the search engines.

Link Assistant

Keeping track of link building efforts can be a time consuming task. You can theoretically use an Excel spreadsheet for that, but that would mean updating it regularly. Plus, it is not really practicable for large link building projects.

Link Assistant helps you manage and track your link building campaigns. The tool can search for prospective link partners based on select factors. It tries to extract a contact email address from the pages to make emailing webmasters easier.

The program supports email templates that you can use or create to customize link proposal messages. A build in email client makes sure that you can handle everything from within the software.

It is usually a good idea to create a custom email address for use in the program to make sure that you catch only related emails in the application.

Verdict

All four tools ship with everything that one would need to get started. They all support proxies, can all be used to generate report for clients or your own, and come with an impressive feature set ideal for experience webmasters who want professional tools for the job.

Free limited versions of all tools are available as well. They usually limit the number of results that you can retrieve or manage.

Giveaway

We have two licenses for each tool to give away today. Please leave a comment below for a chance to win a license. You may add which tools you are most interested in.

Search engine algorithms have become sophisticated over the years and some changes can have great impact on a website’s visibility in the search engines. Most SEO tools assist the webmaster in this regard by analyzing the contents of the website and relevant ranking factors to propose improvements to influence a website’s rankings in the search engines.

Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Toolkit is part of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer which can be downloaded from the Microsoft homepage. The core components of the Web Platform installer will be installed with the SEO Toolkit.

The Search Engine Optimization Toolkit can be found in the What’s New section of the installer.

A new analysis can be started once the installation has been finished. The webmaster needs to supply a project name and url of the website. The advanced settings limit the number of urls and download size per url as well as other settings like ignoring nofollow and noindex attributes, authentication or external link definitions.

The number of urls and the performance of the local Internet connection and that of the web server influence the time it takes to retrieve the data and generate the report. The report concentrates on onpage factors of the website. It is divided into the five sections Summary, Violations, Content, Performance and Links.

Summary:

Displays a basic summary that includes the url, start and end date, downloaded items, links and violations. This summary seems to be buggy as it reported back 0 links and violations which did not correspond with the data found in the violations and links section of the report.

Violations:

Violations are divided into warnings, information and errors. The violation summary lists all violation categories, their level and count. Typical violations are page titles that are to long, broken hyperlinks or mission descriptions. Some of the violations that are listed on the page are not seen as such by members of the SEO community. It is therefor recommended to research the entries before starting to make changes to the website. Violations can be listed in the summary view or sorted by most violations, by category or violation level.

A double-click on an entry will load the urls where those violations have been found.

This opens a window with powerful information about urls with violations. The tabbed interface provides detailed information about the page (content length, title, meta tags or url), the violation type and recommended actions, page header information, content (source or website), word analysis (total words, unique words, two words, three words, text), incoming (from the same domain) and outgoing links and additional violations found on that specific page.

Another interesting option is to display the routs to the specific pages. This will list the top 5 routes that visitors can take to reach that specific page on the website.

Content:

The content category lists various content related information about the analyzed website including duplicate files, titles, descriptions, keywords as well as large content, content that has not been found or pages with broken links.

Performance:

Lists the performance of the pages that have been crawled by the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. This category lists slow pages which can be sorted by directory, content type and pages with many resources.

Links:

Provides a detailed analysis of the links found on the pages that have been analyzed. It provides an overview of the pages with the most links, the pages that are linked the most, redirects, links that are blocked by robots.txt, links by protocol and link depth.

Export options

The SEO toolkit will also allow you to export your results as CSV files which may be loaded and viewed in Excel or other spreadsheet software. For an example of this, take a look at the ‘Violation Categories’ tab. You’ll see each of your violation categories listed. Here you can see my site showing 2146 various violations!

You can generate a CSV file with details of the Violation using the ‘Report’ button at the top of the screen. This selection will offer a comprehensive report if you choose “Export all violations”. Once data is in a CSV file, you can manipulate and resave as an Excel file.

If you prefer to customize the fields that are reported, you can do this using the Query Engine use the which is available by pressing the ‘Query’ button at the top of the report, and selecting ‘New Violations Query’.

(via Web Platform Blog)

Verdict:

Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Toolkit offers a detailed analysis of a website’s onpage SEO factors. Errors that are reported by the tool should be fixed by the webmaster as soon as possible. Violations or warnings on the other hand need to be analyzed more carefully to avoid over-optimizing a website.

The program will then analyze the text and display various statistics about it in the lower half of the interface. Statistics are divided into the three tabs General, Word Statistics and Unique Words. General lists the word and unique word count, lines and full size of the text.

The Word Statistics tab displays all words of the text including the time they have been used and their percentage. Next to that are word phrases and their occurrence in the text. The Unique Words tab lists all unique words of the text document.

The information provided by the text analysis might be interesting for webmasters who optimize their text for search engines.

Text Analyzer is compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5.

Professional webmasters use search engine optimization software to check the search engine position of their keywords. Those software applications provide a history, comparison and access to hundreds of other information that can all be useful in determining why a website is ranking the way it is.

Low budget webmasters have to either rely on manual searches which is so time consuming that one could spend a whole day checking a few dozen keywords in the major search engines.

That’s where SERPs Finder comes into play. The basic SEO tool can check the search engine position of a given keyword in the major three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Windows Live).

It checks the first hundred results only for Google who like to temporarily ban an IP from their search engine if excessive use has been detected. The other two search engines are checked for the first 1000 results.

It is only possible to check the results in one search engine at a time. The user will be notified if the website is found in the results and the search engine position checker will load that search result’s page in the default browser.

SERP’s Finder is no tool for webmasters who want to check hundreds of keywords but it is great for small websites with only a few keywords.