Knowing the popularity of your domain can be extremely useful in knowing where you stand within a niche. It will give you good insights into the demographics of your audience and whether your website fulfils their needs.

The websites mentioned in this article are all great at what they do, and are highly recommended. If you’re thinking about entering a niche and want to know how the competition is performing then these 3 tools will serve you well.

Alexa

Alexa.com

If you were to be referred to a domain popularity tool Alexa is probably one of the first websites you’d be directed to. It has been running for over 15 years and for a good reason. There are many different numerical statistics that are handy. However the most important and used is the ‘Alexa Traffic Rank’ which gives you a relative estimate of the websites traffic compared to others. Even though the tool does also include page views as well as visitor counts it’s mostly reliable.

Other important metrics that it includes is the amount of sites that are linking in, its regional traffic ranks by country and some of its most popular search queries. All of these things can be used to give you a great insight into your domain or your competitors.

Quantcast

Quantcast.com

While not all websites are quantified under Quantcast, the ones that are certainly benefit. There is a large array of data available for the websites. One of the best things about Quantcast is the customer profiles that it has on its data sheet. You will be able to look into your customer demographics with specifics such as gender, age, income, education, family size and ethnic origin. All these can give you great cues into your websites profile and help you better target your audience.

One thing about the audience profile on Quantcast is that it also allows you to see what other websites your users like. This will give you an indication into competition but also other little niches which you could possibly tap into.

Compete

Compete.com

Compete is another nifty tool that allows you to see some estimated traffic data and traffic rank. It will show data for a lot of websites, however for websites with little to no traffic it’s unlikely you will have access to the data. For the websites that do have relevant data it’s very helpful. It has a graph in the middle highlighting the estimated traffic for the past 12 months. As well as that it has the estimated traffic rank compared to other websites and its estimated amount of visits per month.

An extremely useful thing about compete.com is that it allows you to see how relevant other websites are to yours. It will have a match of around ten websites and rank them on similarity out of 100. This is great news if you’re wondering who the competition is, or who your users are also likely to visit.

These three tools can be great assets to your SEO and websites arsenal if you’re willing to put the time in. They can provide you with data that other companies would have charged you for. Use them wisely and you’ll have a definitive edge over the competition.

Analyzing yours and the competitions backlinks is vital to a successful SEO campaign. You need to know where you’re currently at and where your competition is, and to do this you need to track the websites performance. Doing competition research used to be pretty hard a few years back, but now there are tools to complete a variety of tasks easily.

Backlink Analyzers present business owners and webmasters with a variety of opportunities ranging from partnering with other websites, reviewing website SEO performance and seeing the SEO strength of competition.

Without further ado, below are five of the best backlink analyzers that you can use for yourself or to spy on competition with.

Majestic SEO

https://www.majesticseo.com

As a free tool Majestic SEO does a great job. It allows you to see the amount of referring domains and also the amount of external links for the page. Since backlinks are one of the most important factors in deciding which page Google ranks, this data will do you good. Also if you sign up for free you have the ability to see what your competitors ‘Top Backlinks’ are, and the webpages ‘Referring Domains’.

Backlink Watch

http://www.backlinkwatch.com

Backlink Watch is a backlink analyzer that is a bit different to others and this helps it stand out. Its main advantage is that it enables you to see if a competitors links are do follow or no follow and gives you the direct link towards them. This is great if you’re seeking an extra source of relevant backlinks that are relevant to your SERP position.

Open Site Explorer

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

It’s quite surprising that the Open Site Explorer is free considering what you get with it. Firstly you have the ability to compare your website to the top five within the search engine for your specific phrase. This comes in handy as you can see what your competitions page authority is, the links to the root domain and the percentage of ‘do-follow’ compared to ‘no-follow’. The paid version allows you to see metrics such as the Facebook likes, shares, Twitter tweets and how many Google +1s it has had.

Seo Spyglass

http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/

Seo Spyglass is a downloadable tool that allows you to see the anchor text, the page rank and how many external links the links to your website has. One of the best things about this tool is the ability to filter the backlinks allowing you to see only from sources that you want to. This includes filtering for only link directories, blogs, forums, home pages and even the popularity from social media at the click of a button.

Link Diagnosis

http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

Link Diagnosis is a backlink analysis tool that is designed specifically for Mozilla Firefox. It takes a while to generate the report but once it’s done it has some useful metrics at your disposal. The information that it displays includes the total backlinks, the amount of pages indexed and the page rank statistics. One interesting thing about this tool is that it shows the amount of ‘good’ links a domain has and breaks it down into page rank statistics which gives you a great demograph for your links.

Here are 5 of the top backlink analyzers. There are many more out there, but the tools above will more than help you get what’s needed to be done.

Checking your Search Engine Result Position (SERP) is important as it allows you to track the success of your SEO efforts.

Knowing how your SEO efforts are doing enables you to change certain aspects of your strategy. Tools can help you with this and make it possible for you to check many different keywords on your domain. Below are 5 of the best SERP checkers.

SEO Centro – Free

http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/keyword-position.html

SEO Centro is a tool that I especially like due to the fact you don’t have to log in, it’s free and
you can even compare a keyword to a competitor’s website. SEO Centro is a SERP checker that
gives results for Google, Yahoo and Bing as well as the competing pages each search engine
has. One of the surprising adds ons of this tool is that it shows related keyword phrases that you
can rank for with other pages; this obviously helps when looking to capture extra traffic.

Google Webmaster – Free

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Google Webmaster tools have a tool inside that allows you to see the average position for all of
your keyword phrases. Any keyword phrase that is getting impressions but not clicks appears on
the table. This gives you the webmaster the opportunity to find keywords which are getting a lot
of traffic but you’re not ranking very well for. Used wisely you can use it to track your positions for
keywords bringing even the smallest of traffic.

Firefox Rank Checker – Free

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

The Firefox rank checker is freely available to download from SeoBook.com with use from
the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The great thing about this tool once downloaded is that it’s
extremely simple to use. You simply input your domain name and then add the keywords that you
desire to check. It gives your rank from Google, Yahoo and Bing. One extra feature that’s quite
impressive is the ability to save your keyword rankings and check them at a later date. This is
useful if you have a lot of keyword groups.

Rank Tracker – Free (Optional Upgrade)

http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/

Rank tracker is a great SERP checker and one that I use fairly often due to the accuracy and
options available. One of the main selling points of this software is the amount of different search
engines that are made available for you to check the rankings for. This is obviously important
if you have a presence in other countries and need to see how your keywords are doing on
different search engines. Once your keywords are put in you’re presented with a large screen and
plenty of data for you to analyse.

SEM Rush – Free (Optional Upgrade)

http://www.semrush.com/

SEM Rush is a reporting tool that allows you to see the different reports and rankings for various
keywords. It gives you data on the top 5 keywords bringing traffic to your website and what their
current rankings are. If you want to see all of the keywords traffic and their ranking you can
upgrade for $69.95 per month. The common competitors section also gives you an insight into
websites that are competing with you for your current keywords and how you stack up against
them.

Above you have 5 of the best SERP checkers out there. There are more tools out there but to
offer this amount of value and data for free these tools deserve to be mentioned. You can track
how well your keywords are performing and quickly adjust if some aren’t ranking how you want
them to.

You should edge on the side of caution if you are to use black hat SEO tools. Although they can
produce some pretty good results, Google doesn’t like what they do as they feel it’s ‘gaming the
system’. This can cause your web pages to suffer a rank drop thus causing your traffic to fall.
However, if they are used in moderation, some can be pretty useful for your website. Read below
to investigate the top 10 black hat SEO tools.

Xrumer

Xrumer is a tool which allows the owner to blast their own website with forum links targeting the
selected keywords. This is a way to increase the webmasters search engine rankings as Google
sees the new links coming to the website. This is possibly one of the most black hat tools out
there.
http://xrumerseo.com/

Scrapebox

Scrapebox is a black hat SEO tool which allows you to ‘scrape’ domains across the web and use
it for competitor analysis or link building acquisition. One of the things you can do with this tool is
actually post thousands of blog comments on your own blog to make yours look popular or even
post it on other websites to get more links.
http://www.scrapebox.com/

Traffic Booster Pro V3

Auto blogging is a black hat area that a few have used successfully while others have failed. The Traffic Booster Pro V3 is a tool which allows you to get content from many different sources (including different languages) and use it as an auto blogger. This means you can generate content quickly and easily.
http://trafficboosterprov3.com/

The Best Spinner

The Best Spinner allows you to spin your content so it won’t be deemed as duplicate and will thus appear in the SERPS. This is useful when you’re submitting to different article directories and are looking for different links back. There is no guarantee how long this tool will be functional due to the fact search engines are placing less and less importance on directories. On the other hand it may still be useful for other blogs that you wish to publish to.
http://thebestspinner.com/

SE Nuke

SE Nuke is a tool that has different black hat aspects inside. The first one includes a built in spinning engine which bypasses Google’s duplicate content filter, the second is one a tool which allows you to submit your video to the top 14 video websites. The third is instant social bookmarking and the final tool is RSS feed submission to the top 16 RSS aggregators.
http://www.senuke.com/

Sick Submitter

Sick Submitter allows webmasters to submit their websites automatically via forums, bookmarks, directories and RSS feeds. Due to this the tool uses many proxies and allows users to actually swap the ones they are using.
http://sickmarketing.com/

Tweet Attacks

Tweet Attacks is a black hat tool that allows users to tweet people who have spoken about your specific product. For example if they mentioned they want the new iPhone you could send a tweet including a link to your sales page. This can be done for thousands of people and you don’t even need followers.

http://tweetattacks.com/

Unique Article Wizard

Unique Article Wizard is a piece of software that is used a lot within the internet marketing community. This is because it submits all of your articles to thousands of directories providing your website with thousands of backlinks. Having this amount of backlinks is good if your website is established, but if it’s new then it’s best to take it slowly and make it submit at a lower rate. This is one of the most successful black hat tools there is.

http://www.uniquearticlewizard.com/

Bookmarking Demon

Bookmarking Demon allows the webmaster to create backlinks by utilizing the power of social bookmarking. Many webmasters have stated it can be pretty effective at gaining a few ranks but isn’t as effective when it comes to the top spots (of course this will depend on the competitiveness of the keyword).
http://bookmarkingdemon.com/

Market Samurai

Market Samurai could be considered black hat due to the fact it allows you to do so much. There aren’t too many shady tricks with this tool but it has excellent keyword research tools and also a fantastic SERP checker that enables you to keep track of your websites on a daily basis.
http://www.marketsamurai.com/

Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword tool was always going to be mentioned in this list and this is notably due to two main factors. The first factor is that since it’s owned by the largest search engine in the world most of the data is going to be extremely reliable. This means that all your results will be more likely to be correct and applicable to the specific search engine. The second factor is that it’s free and allows for even more scope if you have a Google Adwords account.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a great keyword research too that gives estimates into the amount of competition each phrase gets while also estimating the daily searches. There is a free version of this tool with limited scope. The full version is $69 per month or $379 annually, which is actually a small investment if you intent to use it often. The ability to mine data easily and have access to a large database is this tools strongest points.

Market Samurai

Market Samurai is a keyword research tool popular with internet marketers and it’s no wonder why. It has many different options which give you much scope when it comes to both inserting and choosing your keywords. When your vast list of keywords are presented you can sort them in many different fashions ranging from the amount found in the title, amount of searches or relative competitiveness. It’s possible to get a 30 day free trial but after that it’s a single payment of $149.

SEO Spyglass

Even though some webmasters may state SEO spyglass is mainly a backlink tool it does offer something with regards to keyword research as well. It gives a unique experience and gives you keyword suggestions for your site based on the anchor text and current backlinks that are pointing to it. You can get the SEO Spyglass Professional edition for $99.75.

Keyword Discovery

One of the great things about Keyword Discovery is that it compiles data from across all the different search engines and puts it in its database. One of the key benefits of this software is the ‘analyse’ function where you can view a percentage of searches that generated a click, this will give you great insight into the potential of a keyword. As with other packages you can get a free trial but afterwards the subscription fee is $199.95 per month.

Forums can give you a vast array of knowledge on specific topics, and that’s no different when it comes to SEO. Many knowledgeable people gather on the forums and share advice and many new discoveries are made by the members. The forums that will be mentioned in this post have a lot going for them with lively SEO discussions and much help and knowledge being passed.

In no particular order here are some of the best SEO forums.

V7N Forums

The V7N forums are a great spot for webmasters to learn SEO related things. It’s a forum for webmasters but its SEO section is one of the most helpful around. With many members being there for many years there’s plenty of rich advice to be given out freely. The SEO topic on this forum can have as much as 300 people viewing it at one time, so it could be worthwhile to check out.
http://www.v7n.com/forums/

SEO Chat Forums

When you want a SEO forum that has many different topics and categories then the SEO chat forums is where you should be heading. It has many different topics ranging from specific search engine tactics to what’s happening within the industry. One of the great things about the SEO chat forums is that it has many sticky threads that help webmasters such as ‘Google Crawling and Indexation 101’. This can be great for beginners looking to get information quickly.
http://forums.seochat.com/

Warrior Forum SEO Discussion

The Warrior Forum is known to be the hot spot for all things to do with marketing and that includes search engine optimization as well. New threads are created there daily and most of the threads have many replies. If you’re looking for an answer to a quick question you can be sure to get it from the Warrior Forum. Since the Warrior Forum is so old there are members there that are extremely experienced in SEO and give you some great gems of advice if you just get networking.
http://www.warriorforum.com/

SEO Forums.org

The SEO forums have a large user database that frequently interact there. Many of the threads have plenty of views and always have at least a couple of answers to the question. The most popular category is ‘On Site Optimization’ with questions such as ‘News page or blog to support website SEO?’ being asked. Looking into threads like these will answer your own questions or just simply give you ideas for your own discussion.
http://seoforums.org/

Digital Point Forums

The Digital Point Forum is one of the most popular webmaster forums on the internet. It has a large span of topics to help the webmaster and most categories usually have to do with Marketing or SEO. There are many experienced members here that can help with large aspects of SEO ranging from Search Engine Optimization to Link Development. One of the main benefits of being a Digital Point member is that helpful threads such as lists of directories or tools are often created.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/

Here you have the top 5 SEO forums based on helpfulness, activity and scope of topics. Using these forums wisely can grant you to a whole new host of information on SEO. They can also be great on certain topics where you’re stuck or need an answer quickly. If you have any new suggestions for the list leave them below

This post may cause some controversy as some people still indulge in manual link exchanges. However, much evidence suggests that they are inconvenient, time consuming and ineffective. Below are 7 reasons you should think twice before using manual link exchanges.

1. Extremely Time Consuming
There is no doubt finding quality links from websites can be hard. Many won’t respond and more often than not you’ll find yourself feeling frustrated. In business time is money and you need to make sure you’re making as good as a return as possible. If the return is likely to be low then you could be finding time to do activities which could bring in more money instead.

2. Links Can Be Lost Easily
Unfortunately web pages aren’t on the internet forever. Web owners could sell their domains, have it expire or have an error with their content management system. In some cases they may not even be aware of it! This is an issue for you as you’ve spent time to contact the owner and also put a link out from your website. If you’re putting a link out to an expired website, the search engines might even go as far to think your site is of low quality.

3. Most Are Low PageRank
Just because a websites homepage has a PageRank of 4 doesn’t mean that all of its pages are going to carry that rank as well. Pages are assessed individually on a website and only carry the link weight of the specific page when a link is passed. This means most pages you get a link from will be PageRank 0 meaning little to no influence on your SEO rankings. Automatic Backlinks only gives you PageRank 1 backlinks and above, and these are all from context relevant pages.

4. Site Could Take Part in Spammy Practices
Looking at a websites exterior won’t be enough justification as to whether they are legitimate. Some websites take part in some real dodgy activity that you must keep an eye out for. If you’re getting a link from a bad neighbourhood or even linking out to one, it could do you more harm than good.

5. Website Owner Could Be Untrustworthy
As well as taking part in spammy link practices, website owners could be untrustworthy and not give you what you expected. This will be most common with competitors who will use sneaky tactics such as cloaking or blocking the page. Examples of this would be using the no follow tag in the html or blocking the page to search engines using the robots.txt file.

6. The Need To Manage All Links
When you get to a certain stage of manual link exchanges you’re going to have a large list that you both get links from and link to. The downside of this is that you’re going to have to manage all of it, you’ll also have to ensure that the webmasters that you have on your list are still playing fair. If you own a large array of websites and use this SEO practice, it could turn out to be a real headache.

7. Google Isn’t A Fan Of Reciprocal Links!
It’s been known for a while now that Google has caught onto reciprocal links, Matt Cutts talks about SEO mistakes on his blog. Making sure your links are coming from context relevant websites that have trust is still as important as ever.

In the next few weeks AutomaticBacklinks.com will switch from using Google PageRank as a metric for determining the quality and price of a backlink to using mozRank by SEOmoz.

Why we are abandoning PageRank
For a long time it has been common knowledge that PageRank is not a very good or trustworthy metric for quality even Google agrees.

Additionally PageRank has never been made publicly available by Google except for in browser toolbars, so for us to get the PageRank of a particular page we have to pretend to be a browser toolbar and send a fake request to google. As Automatic Backlinks has grown, we have been sending tens of thousands of these requests on a daily basis and Google quickly detected that we were no ordinary browser toolbar and blocked our servers, even as we added more and more. Lately it appears that Google have started replying to these requests with a 0 instead of the usual ‘#blocked’ message meaning that we incorrectly marked pages as having a PageRank 0.

A final reason for the change is that we do not like to send requests to google with the URL of every page in our system. It gives them an opportunity to detect our network and this is a risk we feel we can no longer take.

Why we have chosen mozRank
mozRank is a metric quite similar to PageRank as it is a score from 0 to 10 on a logarithmic scale. In fact our preliminary tests show that mozRank and PageRank seem to follow each other quite closely. The number is calculated for using the metrics of 9,200,000,000 links on 400,000,000 pages.

Additionally, the clever people over at SEOmoz have made an API available that makes getting the mozRank of a page a very simple task which means we finally have a reliable, accurate and up to date method of determining the quality (and thus price) of a backlink.

What does it mean for our members?
We have decided to go with a rolling launch of this new system which means that we have already started adding pages with a mozRank of 1 or above. We expect that we will start adding links to pages using a price calculated from their mozRank (as opposed to their PageRank) as early as next week. Existing links added using PageRank as the price metric will remain calculated using the “old method” in a transition period of some months. This is to avoid large fluctuations in our members’ Link Credit balance.

Some members will have noticed that they will now have both a www and non www entry (and possibly other subdomains) of their sites in the dashboard. This is because Google does not distinguish between the two versions, however SEOmoz does. We encourage members to create a redirect from the non www to the www version of the site (or vice versa). This is a best practice SEO technique anyway and it will mean that the mozRank will all be on the same subdomain. Members are also welcome to activate the additional site, although we will not place links on it unless it has any mozRank.

We recently decided to remove the 30-day limit for rejecting links hosted on your site’s pages. Previously, to encourage permanency, we imposed a 1 month time limit within which to reject a link after it was placed on your page. We found that this inconvenienced users who did not log in to check their links very frequently. Thus, we are happy to announce that this limit has now been removed and you can now reject links no matter how old they are.

At Automatic Backlinks we are constantly working to make it easier for you to freely exchange links on your web sites and get them ranked faster. This is why we are proud to announce that just a few hours after the release of Joomla 1.6 and less than a week after the release of Drupal 7, we have released officially supported native modules for both of these platforms.

You can download the modules from the Link Display Codes section of your account dashboard and install them just like you would any other module for the CMS of your choice.

Please note that these modules are not compatible with their respective predecessors. Don’t worry if you’re not planning to upgrade any time soon – we will continue to support previous versions of all modules for as long as they continue to be supported and as long as they continue to be used by our users.