In SEO, success is as much about your toolkit as it is about your skillset. Without great tools at your disposal, your ability to get the job done is really hampered. At SMX East this month I presented some of my favorite tools on the “Tools, Glorious Tools” panel. (Download my Powerpoint.) What I came to realize from gauging the audience’s reaction to my presentation was that many of the tools I presented were new to much of the audience. That surprised me. This stuff isn’t exactly a government secret. There are blog posts about them, and many are free or inexpensive.

Sure, there are proprietary, secret tools developed for in-house use, that few of us have heard passing rumors of, and even fewer have been fortunate enough to see. I’ve heard stories of amazingly sophisticated tools both built for in-house use and by agencies.

We at Netconcepts have developed our own top-secret internal tools too. One of our tools — the Google Directory Mining Tool — I “outed” in the “Give It Up” session at SMX Advanced this year (I’m still questioning the sanity of my decision!). It’s a tool that spiders the Google Directory (Google’s robots.txt allows this), and along the way, compiles a list of all sites in DMOZ with their URLs, ODP categories, PageRank (length of pos.gif), site name etc. This information goes into a database which can then be queried via web interface for high-value link targets (you can isolate sites by factors such as super high PageRank, category, and TLD). So you can, for example, identify all .edu and .gov sites with PR8+ in science-related categories, and export that to a TSV file. The tool can run an optional second pass over the results set to determine data such as each target’s site age and toolbar PageRank. Further automated assessment is planned, like link neighborhood analysis, presence of AdSense or other monetization, presence of attribution links, and presence of paid links. Now that the ‘cat is out of the bag’ on this Google Directory tool, and undoubtedly SEOs are making their own knock-offs of my tool, I figured what the heck, I might as well donate the tool’s source code to our friends at SEOmoz so the tool can have a good home in SEOmoz PRO (subscriptions run $79/month and up). It should be up by the end of the year.

It’s a huge investment to build your own tools, and many SEOs don’t have such resources — in terms of internal staff or budget — at their disposal. That’s okay, you can accomplish a lot with publicly available tools. Note that you’ll still need to spend some money — for subscriptions.

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