New Analysis Tool Helps Compare Top Ten Search Results

Software that's designed to help make a search engine marketer's job easier is a dime a dozen. Companies release new products on a regular basis and savvy marketers have no shortage of great tools to choose from. While any search engine marketer worth their salt knows that software can't replace the intelligence and thought that goes into building a good search engine marketing campaign, most will also tell you that a few key tools can come in handy when they're trying to get an overview of a situation.

One of these tools is the new "Top 10 Google Analysis" tool offered by the folks at We Build Pages. Designed to provide a generalized report on relevant factors of the top ten sites for any particular keyword phrase, the tool operates off of the Google API and scans both Google and Yahoo!'s indexes for relevant information.

The report can take a reasonable amount of time to run, but that's understandable considering it's checking multiple data feeds on two different search engines. It works by having a user enter a keyword phrase, a specific URL they wish to track, and their Google API key. (If you don't already have a Google API key, you can get one on their site.) The data mostly pulls from Google, but relies on checking the back links at Yahoo!.

Results are displayed in a table format starting with the user's URL and followed by a listing of the top ten search results. Data includes:

• The number of pages indexed by Google and Yahoo!
• The number of pages displaying back links in the Yahoo! index.
• The number of domains displaying back links in the Yahoo! index.
• The assigned Google Page Rank.
• The assigned Yahoo! Web Rank.
• Results of a Google "allinanchor" search by the entered keyword phrase.
• Keyword density analysis of the body of the Web page.
• Keyword density analysis of the anchor text.

As with any tool, it's important to remember that this one isn't the holy grail to better search rankings. It can't do your optimization for you; it simply helps you analyze what some of your competitors are doing. A good marketer still needs to consider a variety of factors that aren't covered here, like:

• How many sites are competing for a phrase
• The relevance of the sites linking to your competition
• The stability of the rankings (in other words, is someone using spam tactics currently ranking well? They may not be there tomorrow...)
• Keyword prominence
• ...and a variety of other factors

I ran the tool on a site I'd been analyzing earlier this week and was pleased to discover that many of the things I'd taken time to calculate and track manually showed up in the report. While the data provided is only a sampling of what I was looking for, it will still save me some valuable time and effort.

You can check out the Google Top Ten Analysis tool here.