[/QUOTE]Someone mentioned them being all sizzle without the bacon. I can kind of relate to that. Take the "Juicy Link Finder" tool - awesome principle, we'll go off and find all the best sites you should be getting links from - when it comes back with nasa.gov and bbc.co.uk, what are you supposed to do!!?[/QUOTE]
Those tools are crap, the new version of the juicy link finder tool is just as bad. They basically just execute a bunch of advanced search queries to find relevant sites that let you add links but you just end up with a load of really shitty directories.
There are a few tools I like a lot though:
Keyword Difficulty - this gives some good metrics
On Page Keyword Optimisation - this again can give some good metrics
I am working on some quite large campaigns at the moment and having quick access to these additional metrics for keyword research is proving invaluable.
We are looking at the keywords and track the following for each variation:
- Keyword Variation
- Quality score (adwords competition)
- Exact match volume,
- keyword difficulty
- optimisation score for top 3 results
- manual review notes checking relevance of results etc
We can then, depending on the results, order by various fields like volume, difficulty, quality etc to get quick directions on the terms we are going to go after.
Of course, there is still the manual approach, but this most recent job for an assisted living company has had thousands of keywords and these tools have allowed us to get some quick and dirty metrics in place to help with the direction.
That said, most of what we have proven, has been the same as we suspected but, where there was a board, that wanted justification for choices, again, this has helped.
The thing to remember is that no matter how good the tools, they wont do the SEO for you, they are just there to make your life easier and save you some time.
I am done in this thread as I sound like a freekin seomoz sales man.
