Free SEO Tools with Blekko Search Engine
Search engine optimization is difficult without tools. They are needed to gather and analyze data. Most SEO tools are commercial—some of them you can get for one time payment while others require also monthly fee. Fortunately, there are also some free tools. One of very powerful free SEO tools is a search engine—Blekko.
Blekko is a different search engine. It is more open and transparent. The ranking algorithms are not known but you can actually check some factors are taken into account to rank pages. One of the approaches used by Blekko is to refine search with slashtags. Slashtags are filters that modify the original search query. There are some predefined search tags but you can also define your own. The first SEO slashtag is /seo. To use it search for any domain and add /seo to the query. Blekko will display information about inbound links, crawl statistics, indexed site pages, duplicate content and you can also compare parameters between two websites. For example, you can compare your website with competitor’s and see why he ranks higher.
This information not only provides details how your website is seen by Blekko search engine, you can also get plenty of useful data about important SEO factors that are used also by other search engines. Blekko also shows information about the website hosting. With /domain slashtag you get crawl statistics which include also IP address of the hosting server and all other domains hosted on this IP address. You can also search for domains on particular IP address with the /ip slashtag.
One of the most important SEO tools is link analysis. Blekko shows which domains link to your web pages, how many links to each page are there and it also displays information about the countries where the links are coming from. A more detailed inbound link analysis is possible with the /inbound slashtag. This way you get information about domains and IP addresses of all baclinks either to the website or to the individual page. Two additional link analyses are also useful. The first one with the /outbound slashtag shows all outbound links. Here you can see which pages you are linking to. The second one with the /internal slashtag shows internal links together with anchor texts and usage count.
Blekko is also useful for on-page SEO analysis. For each indexed page it displays page sections where you can examine tags, ids, links and text. Duplicate content can be checked with the /domainduptext slashtag. This search shows all hosts with duplicate sections.
Another useful feature of Blekko is to search for AdSense IDs. Each page in Blekko’s search results shows also a link to AdSense slashtag (/adsense) if AdSense ads are detected on the page. This search can be used to find other pages (or domains) that use the same AdSense ID.
An interesting shashtag is /rank. It shows presence of the keyword or search term in domain, anchor, title and url. If you click on the more details link you will get many flags and parameters that are taken into account for ranking. The most important parameter is the rank number which is actually a number computed from all parameters that determines the ranking position for this search term. Blekko is the first search engine that discloses some internals of ranking algorithms.
If SEO is your business or just hobby you will definitely love Blekko. It provides a different way of searching. While Google tries to be strictly algorithmic search engine, Blekko gives more importance to personal preferences. Additional important difference is that Blekko shows SEO parameters and allows searches that can analyze any website for on-page or off-page SEO factors. Blekko is one of the free SEO tools with features found only in expensive software packages.
