According to Dictionary.com, quake is defined as “a trembling or tremulous agitation”; it’s no wonder SEO Quake has appropriately named this tool as it can definitely shake up your SEO research.
If you are the webmaster of your own site and haven’t looked into SEO Quake yet, you would be remiss not to do so. SEO Quake is a powerful tool to have at your fingertips and if used correctly can give you a wealth of information.
It can only be used on the Firefox browser however it’s my recommendation that if you don’t currently have Firefox than you should install it. Firefox is an excellent browser for the webmaster in that it offers add-ons such as SEO Quake, Chris Pederick’s Wed Developer and Firebug that are by far some of the best applications you can use to build and analyze your site.
For those of you who are raving fans of Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari (amongst others), don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you stop using them; just switch to Firefox when working on your site or doing research with some of the tools listed above.
OK, getting back on topic … SEO Quake.
SEO Quake is a free tool that allows webmasters to obtain tons of information regarding SEO parameters on any website. Here is the toolbar as it appears on your browsing window.
Once installed you will also see a small icon on the lower part of your browsing screen that when you right-click will give you a host of options.
1 – Preferences – Click on preferences to change the default parameters.
2 – Page Info – Click on page info to get more in-depth analysis of the page you are viewing.
3 – Check/Compare URL’s and Domains – This a really neat tool in that you can check the parameters for multiple URL’s at once; it shows up in a chart which can be further filtered as well as downloaded to your desktop.
4 – Keyword Density – Get a full report of the pages keyword use for 1-4 keyword phrases.
5 – Line-through “nofollow” and “noindex” – This will allow you to see what sites are allowing for do-follow links and indexed pages (that is, site owner has decided to exclude the page from search engines).
6 – Click on Seobar or Seotoolbar to choose whether or not to display on your browsing window.
7 – Search Engines – Check which search engines you would like to use with the toolbar.
We will get into further detail on how you can use this toolbar for SEO research purposes but first, if you haven’t done so already, install the add-on. Here is a video on exactly how to do so.
How to install SEO Quake:
Now let’s take each feature and see how you can apply them.
Since Groupon seems to be the hot topic of the month, let’s use their site as the example to work with.
Click on Page Info to get some more in-depth information on this page.
As we can see here, you can use the Meta Keywords and Meta Description to do competitive research; see what your competitors are targeting in terms of keywords and how they are marketing their website.
PR tells you the page rank of a particular page. You can also click on other links to get more information on the page such as how many times it’s been bookmarked, indexed pages and backlinks.
Keyword Density page will come in particularly in handy as it allows you to evaluate your copy’s keyword usage. If search engine ranking is important to you than this can be an invaluable tool.
Going back to our example and clicking on ‘Keyword Density’, we can begin to evaluate whether or not Groupon is using its keyword sufficiently.
As you can see from this example the term ‘groupon’ is 35 times giving it a KD percentage of 1.7.
How often should you include your keyword(s) and what’s a good percentage? Well, the answer is going to be different unfortunately depending on who you ask. There are so many different opinions on the topic. The most common answer seems to fall between 2-3%. Personally, I don’t obsess about it. I make sure to include it in my title tag <title></title>, the first paragraph and several times throughout the copy.
It’s important to note that if you are evaluating a blog posts’ keyword density using this tool, it takes into account all words in the page including those contained in the comment section.
One other feature I would like to briefly talk about is the ‘Line-through nofollow‘ option. This tool comes in particular handy if you are searching sites that are dofollow. Whenever visiting a site and you see lines through the commentators name, then it’s a nofollow blog; no lines means it’s a dofollow blog. Just make sure to have this function activated by clicking on the SEO Quake icon.
Here’s an example,
Here another tool you can use not related to SEO Quake yet can get you a list of dofollow / keyword luv sites very easily. Although, if want to know if a particular site that you are on at the moment is dofollow or nofollow, than SEO Quake is the best tool for that.
OK, here it is – Keywordluv Blogs. Ssshhh …don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret.
There are plenty more things you can do with SEO Quake that I can’t cover in one post. However, I feel the basics have been covered, but if you want to really get into the nitty griddy than I would suggest heading over to their home page and browsing around.
So are you ready to shake your SEO up with SEO Quake? Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think. And please feel free to share this tutorial with all your friends!