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If you want to get a nice snapshot of what search engines really feel about your competitors, SEOQuake will probably give you more information than you can handle. SEOQuake is a free web browser extension for both FireFox and Internet Explorer. Once installed you can see information on any page you browse to either up in the toolbar or as an overlay at the top of the website in question.

For each web page you can get the following information from the default package:

• Google PageRank – the rank Google assigns to the site (higher is better on a scale of 10)
• Google index – how many pages Google has from the site in its index
• Yahoo links – how many pages Yahoo has from the site in its index
• Yahoo linkdomain – how many pages on Yahoo linking to the site (has been flaky lately)
• MSN index – how many pages MSN has from the site in its index
• MSN links – how many pages on MSN linking to the site
• Alexa rank – the rank Alexa assigns to the site (lower is better) based on traffic estimations
• Age – first archive date taken by the Internet Archive
• Delicious links – how many times the page has been saved with Del.icio.us
• Whois – information about who owns the domain name from DomainTools, including some SEO information (worth checking out)
• Source – the html source of the page (also a viewable option in most web browsers)
• Keywords density – a breakdown of the keywords on the page (very valuable for how the search engines see the page) by single words, 2-word phrases, 3-word phrases, 4-word phrases and a keywords cloud to show you the most repeated keywords
• Internal links – links on the page which lead to another page on the site, includes SEO info for each link in a table format
• External links – links on the page which lead to a page off the site. This seems to use the full url to determine if a page is on site or offsite, although it may also use the IP address. For example if the page we’re looking at is www.website.com then hiring.website.com is considered an external link

For the more technically inclined, SEOQuake also allows the ability to create custom parameters. They also offer a list instructions for some useful parameters. Plugins can also be customized, but they offer a plugin list of ones you can download and install.

The amount of information that you can obtain from a website for free using SEOQuake is amazing. If you had time and were inclined, you could get this information with various tools on the search engines and indexing services, but this puts all the information together in an easy-to-read format. You should be able to get a good idea of how the search engines view your competitors websites as well as your own. This tool is particularly useful to use before, during and after a redesign and before and after any types of Internet promotions.

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