Keyword Verification and Link Popularity Tools

This section spotlights a few interactive tools. These pages don’t provide optimization
tools per se, such as meta tag generators. Rather, these gadgets check
on the results of your optimization efforts in two areas:
_ Keyword verification, which checks a URL’s presence on the results
pages of several search engines, when searching for certain keywords
_ Link popularity, which checks the number of incoming links to a URL, as
viewed through multiple search engines

Marketleap Keyword Verification tool

www.marketleap.com/verify
Marketleap.com provides an integrated set of optimization checks. The two
tools described here are beautifully designed and create elegant displays of
results. These gadgets are free to use.
Figure 16-2 shows the Keyword Verification tool. It tells you whether your site
(or specific page) is returned in the search results of 11 major search engines
and, if so, on what search results page it appears. (The definition of a results
page is not provided; my experiments indicate that a page probably equals 10
results.)
Follow these steps:
1. Enter a URL.
If you’re checking an inner page of your site, you don’t need to enter the
full address of that page, although it doesn’t hurt to do so. Marketleap
finds inner-page matches to your keywords to whatever extent the tested
search engines can find them.
2. Enter a keyword or phrase.
Type whatever you’ve optimized for, as if a Google user were searching for
that phrase. You’re likely to get more encouraging results if you enter a
phrase, not a single word. Placing quotes around the phrase, for an exact
match to word order, creates more hits, but doesn’t necessarily create a
realistic report of your site’s visibility to the average Google user.
3. Enter the displayed access code.
Simply type the code that appears in colored letters. Forcing users to
replicate the code prevents this tool from being overused by automated
scripts.
4. Click the Generate Report button.
A moment after the results first appear, they’re redrawn in a table, as
shown in Figure 16-3.
Note in Figure 16-3 that some engines match your keywords with a targeted
inner page (in this example, the page that’s best optimized for the keyword
phrase), and other engines can’t see that deeply. Google has crawled the site
carefully, but AltaVista has not.
Marketleap doesn’t check any engines beyond the third page. If your page
doesn’t appear in the results table, the omission is not necessarily an indicator
that your page has not been crawled by that engine. However, it does indicate
that the page is not optimized powerfully for that engine. In the context
of this book, Google is the top priority, so all is well with the results.


Marketleap Link Popularity Check

www.marketleap.com/publinkpop
Marketleap’s second optimization tool measures your incoming link network
(see Chapter 3). In an attractive twist, this little engine also lets you compare
your main link with three comparison URLs, as shown in Figure 16-4.
Finally — and this goes above the call of duty — the results page fills in gaps
by supplying total incoming links for many other URLs, providing a broad
context in which to evaluate your site. The result can be discouraging, but
here goes:
1. Enter your site’s URL, and then enter three comparison URLs.
In both cases, enter the exact page you want to compare, with the
understanding that in most cases it should be the home, or index, page.
Most incoming links aim straight for the front door. However, if you have
been optimizing and networking an inner page, this is the place to check
out the results.
2. Select an industry from the drop-down list.
This selection determines the nature of the fill-in sites that Marketleap
provides on the results page. The more accurately you choose the industry,
the more meaningful the context of your results.
3. Enter the access code.
Again, this step blocks automated scripts.
4. Click the Generate Report button.
Wait a few seconds for the results to appear on your screen. This tool is
usually slower than the Keyword Verification device.
Figure 16-5 illustrates a results table. You see only part of the table; the
comparison results continue down the page, ending with media juggernaut
CNN.com and its impressive 6.6 million backlinks.
Note that Google often shows fewer incoming links than the other four search
engines in the table. It can be a shock to think that your site’s hard-won backlinks
are incompletely represented in Google. Actually, Google doesn’t necessarily
divulge all incoming links in its index for a given page.

Google excludes similar results, which, in many cases, means inner pages of
sites. Those inner pages might be in your own site, if you generate a lot of your
own incoming links (most sites do). Furthermore, Google (at its discretion)
excludes the display of incoming links with low PageRanks. The result of these
omissions can make it seem that other engines do a better job of assessing a
site’s backlink network. That might or might not be true in any given crawl
cycle. The more common truth is that Google withholds some results of some
searches using the link: operator. Google explicitly warns Webmasters not to
trust the link: operator (used here for Google’s column in the results table)
for a full backlink picture. The value of this table lies in the comparisons it
affords.
From the search results table, use the drop-down menu to run the search
again against a different industry.