Greetings!
Jim Boykin’s blog is a regular destination for me. I enjoy his personable writing style, and his unique, and sometimes whacky, ideas. This evening, I paid a visit over there and got very excited about his post on the Cool SEO Tool he just had his programmer build for him.

Basically, the point of the tool is to give you data about what the top 10 sites in the Google SERPs have going for them for a given keyword phrase. You type in your domain, and you type in the keyword or phrase you want to target. The data returned includes your site’s position, title tag, indexed domain, Yahoo rank, MSN rank, Google pages indexed, AltaVista pages indexed, backlinks (page), backlinks (domain), allinanchor rank, age of URL, and phrase on page.

To test the tool out, we picked a phrase we know we’re ranking well for in Google. As of this evening, we were at #3 for top 10 google ranking. In a matter of seconds, we were able to take a long cool stare at the company we’re in for this term. I have to say, it makes me a little nervous to be standing near another firm that is “guaranteeing” top ten Google rankings, however, that being said, the most interesting data for us to view was the domain backlink count. The top ranked site has 350,000 backlinks as compared to our rather humble 6270. At the same time, we are outranking another website that has 2,200,000 backlinks. What does this prove? I would venture to say that this is a fairly strong illustration of the fact that, though backlinks are of massive importance, there are so many additional factors that determine placement.

Because Jim’s main goal in having this tool created was to be able to see, at a glance, what it would take to get into the top ten for anything he might be interested in, I wanted to run a second test for an off the wall term that has nothing to do with our website. The term I chose was stuffed koala bears.. Sad to say, Solas Web Design is not in the top 10 for this term! But, if we wanted to be, the oldest site we’d be competing against was established in 1998. Backlink counts range from 313 - 138,000. The biggest site has a page count of over 400,000 pages (it’s nexttag.com). I am confident, then, that if we wanted to compete for stuffed koala bears we probably could, and few of the top ten sites have a backlink count of over 1000 and many of the sites are relatively small. So, Mr. Boykin, SEO for Stuffed Koala Bears? Well…it might be a bit of a stretch.

At any rate, I have to say, I think this new tool earns its name. In fact, I think I will call it a WAAAAAY Cool SEO Tool. So much useful data, in plain view, in seconds. I’ve got it bookmarked, and send my thanks to Jim’s programmer for what I consider to be a truly useful resource.

Miriam

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