In case you weren’t aware Google does not care about your meta keywords tags:

In case you haven’t heard search giant Google has has teamed up with twitter to include tweets in their search results.  This takes away the little moment Bing had when it announced a similar deal of its own.   Both will incorporate real-time search results from twitter. More to come on this…

Tool Name: Advanced Google Searches

Cost: Free

Date Tested: 9/3/2009

Purpose: This tool allows you to search Google in special ways.

Pros: All you to search for keywords in Google.  For example you can search or page titles that include the keywords, keywords in the URL, pages with keywords in anchor text and more

Cons: Although this tool is good at something things it doesn’t fully utilizes Google’s advanced search function.  This tool can be better if they added the ability to search images and blogs.

Conclusion: This tool is good for basic searches, as well as specific searches.  Not a tool that I would see me using everyday but does have some advantages that would be useful to us.

Grade: C+

Advanced Google Search - SEO Tools Reviews

Tool  Name: SEO Toolbar by SEO book

Cost: Free

Date Tested: 8/12/09

Purpose: Quick & Basic SEO info to compare sites

Pros: The SEO Book toolbar is great to get quick info about a site without having to open another page or browser.   The toolbar provides age of domain, link popularity, page rank, DMOZ and # of pages cached.  Also, this toolbar gives you to the option to compare sites, as well as run the site through some competitive analysis tools.  All of this is nice but what I found to be the most useful is the rank checker and SEO Xray.  SEO Xray is a very good tool for find quick onsite SEO info.  This tool pulls the Title, Meta Tags, all Header tags, and more without having to view source on the page.  This toolbar has so many more useful tools that I can’t name them all here; truly an amazing SEO tool.

Cons: One of the downsides of this toolbar this that it’s only available on Firefox.  Although Firefox is a great browser not everyone uses it. Other than that I can’t think of any downsides to it.  This is a great SEO tool and a must have for all SEO’s.

Grade:  A

Screenshots:

Site Info:

Site Info from SEO Toolbar - SEO Tools Review

SEO Xray:

SEO Xray provided by seobook Toolbar - SEO Tools Review

Tool Name: Google Adword: Keyword Tool

Cost: Free

Date Tested: 8/21/2009

Purpose: A keyword research tool from Google

Pros: Next to the Overture’s Keyword tool, this is the best tool out there for keyword research.  This tool allows you to input a list of keywords as well as giving you the option to find synonyms for those keywords. This is an excellent feature that sets itself apart from the rest of the tools.  Also, a feature that I haven’t used often but is available is generating keywords by inputting a website.  There are three types of keyword matches; “Broad”, “Phrase”, or “Exact” to get data.

Cons: This is not a “ one stop do-it all Keyword research tool” because of it doesn’t provide data from Yahoo, Live/Bing or Ask.

Conclusion: This tool is great because you are getting the data straight from Google. The synonyms option for this tool allows you to find other keywords in the category or alternative words which you may have overlooked.  This will help you avoid using the same keyword over and over. This tool should be used for most of your KW research because it comes from Google and it’s provides the best data but with that said we should be using SEO book’s KW tool as well as Overture’s Keyword tool.

Grade:  A -

Google Keyword Suggestion Tool