SEO Inc. Releases SEO Toolbar 2.0
One of the best things to happen to Internet browsers are toolbars. Until recently, most toolbars were used to enhance a user’s browsing experience. For example, the Google Toolbar offers features like inline spellchecking, autofill and keyword search highlighting. Luckily, companies like SEO Inc. are taking toolbars to the next level. In this sponsored review, I’ll walk you through the newly released SEO Toolbar by SEO Inc.
Installation
One of the first things I noticed when I downloaded the SEO Toolbar was that it was an .EXE file. For me — and avid Mac user — this meant that I could only use the toolbar on Windows. Fortunately, I run Parallels Desktop for Mac and was able to start the installation quickly running Windows XP virtually on my MacBook Pro.
Installation was effortless and quick. After the installation was completed, I opened up Firefox, but the SEO Toolbar wasn’t there. I checked my Add-ons list, but it wasn’t listed. This was disappointing since I also use Firefox as my preferred browser.
Next I opened up IE6. The toolbar wasn’t visible until I activated it. I then opened up IE7 and experienced the same scenario.
Although the installation wasn’t too painful, I would have enjoyed seeing the toolbar show up on IE6 and IE7 immediately after installation, instead of having to activate it manually. I also wished it supported Firefox, but maybe they’ll work on that for a future release.
Features
Doing SEO for a living, I found the feature set to be quite useful. SEO involves a lot of research — researching the client’s website and researching their competitors. The SEO Toolbar provides powerful and quick tools built right into the browser.
The toolbar works contextually. The user can use its search input field to conduct keyword searches on any major search engine. Then, after the user visits a site listed in the search results, they can analyze the website using the toolbar’s feature set.
The toolbar has four major features to choose from: Ranking, Site Data, Engine Data and Network Data.
The Ranking feature quickly retrieves the ranking for the current domain and keywords. In the example below, Sitening ranked #2 for Google, #1 for Windows Live and wasn’t in the top 40 for Yahoo! for the keywords “nashville seo”. It’s important to note that this tool only searches forty deep.
The Site Data feature has a tool that will create a keyword density report. The report was practically instant and it displayed Percent in Title, Percent in Meta and Percent in Body.
The Engine Data feature provided information from all three major search engines. Specifically, it captured the Google Cache Date, Directory Inclusion for both Google and Yahoo!, and also included the index and links number for all three search engines.
Conclusion
The SEO Toolbar is an incredibly useful and snappy tool for search engine optimizers. I also like the fact that it’s free and that it doesn’t contain any spyware or other malware. My only wish is that they’ll eventually create a version for Firefox that runs on Mac. You can download the SEO Toolbar at http://www.seoinc.com/seo-toolbar/.
Filed under: Internet Explorer, SEO, Search Engines