Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

In this three part article, you’ll find many tools that any webmaster can use to monitor your site’s search engine position, and use to increase the visibility of your site in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

URL Trends http://www.urltrends.com/

Most of the coverage I've seen focuses on the ability of UrlTrends to allow you to "View Any URLs Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Popular Search Terms and Incoming Links".

And that's a great thing, to be able to see all of that from one place. But one great thing missed about this tool are that you can subscribe to changes to the results via RSS -hands off monitoring of your site.

Fagan Finder’s URL Info http://www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/

This online gadget is like the Swiss Army knife of site information, giving you one-page access to dozens of pertinent check-ups. But monitoring relevant search engine information like your backlinks, or the cached pages in a search engine are just the tip of the iceberg.

You can use URL Info to check that your HTML code is validated, translate your page, and if you’re a blogger, discover where your site is mentioned in the blogosphere.

Spannerwork’s Spider Simulator http://www.spannerworks.com/spidersimulator.0.html

Ever wondered what your site looks like to the search engine spiders that crawl the web, looking for information to include in their databases? Go to this page to see what information is seen by the spider and what it skips over.

Spannerworks.com can also help you figure out how to troubleshoot content that seems like it should show up to a spider but doesn’t, with its HTTP viewer. They also have a tool that will analyze your keyword density.

GoRank.com’s Top Ten Comparison http://www.gorank.com/seotools/

If you’ve been banging your head against the wall in an attempt to figure out why you haven’t hit the top ten results in Google, GoRank.com has a page that can give you important clues to help you figure it out. One of my favorites, the Top Ten comparison report, will scrub the raw data of the top ranking results for a given keyword.

In studying the results, you may find it easier to understand where your own optimization efforts are going wrong. Don’t forget to stop by Google for your API key at http://www.google.com/api as you’ll need it to create your free account.

Search Guild’s Keyword Difficulty Checker http://searchguild.com/difficulty/

This one’s an old favorite of mine. When you find what you may think is an ideal keyword, before you start tweaking your pages, it’s a good idea to run it through this tester. Using the Google API, it analyzes whether or not a given phrase will be worth your efforts.

You’ll already have to be well-versed in how to find good keywords to plug into the tool, but once you have that nailed, it’s pretty reliable in telling you whether it’s worth your time to target that phrase. If you use flash on your site, check out the flash viewer on their utilities page as well.

In the next article in this series, you can read more about tools specific to Yahoo and Google that will help you track your rankings and study your site.