Disclaimer: I’m not really calling you a liar, cheat, or dishonest person. But I had to get your attention somehow because I want answers to this question, and apparently the post title worked. And if you use one of the tools mentioned in the post title, there’s at least a chance that you are doing something dishonest. First, try out this simple self-test to determine whether you’re an honest person or not:

1. Do you steal things from stores?

2. Do you tell lies or misrepresent things?

3. Have you ever charged a client for SEO services you never provided?

4. Have you ever made outrageous claims you knew were false about your SEO services, just to get a client to sign up?

5. Have you ever signed a contract and then violated it because it was beneficial to you and you knew you could get away with it?

6. Have you ever used Web CEO, SpyFu, SEOmoz’s Rank Checker, or any other similar programs?

If you’re thinking that question #6 doesn’t seem to fit with the others, then you’re where I was a few months ago. But then I started doing some research and stumbled onto section 5.3 of Google’s Terms of Service, which reads:

5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.

Tools like Web CEO, SpyFu, and SEOmoz’s Rank Checker (as near I can tell) all perform automatic queries of Google. They also display data from Google within an interface that is not provided by Google. Therefore, these tools violate the Google Terms of Service, as do you when you use these tools.

There seem to be five primary arguments for ignoring section 5.3 of the Google Terms of Service:

1. I’ll never get caught or be punished.

2. Everyone else is doing it.

3. It doesn’t hurt anyone.

4. Google doesn’t care anyway.

5. The intent of section 5.3 isn’t to stop programs like SpyFu or SEOmoz’s Rank Checker.

Let’s take these one at a time.

1. I’ll never get caught or be punished. The same rationalization is used by many, if not most, criminals. Would you say that somebody who has a foolproof way to steal cars and never get caught is an honest person? Of course not. Whether or not someone ever gets caught or punished has nothing to do with whether they are honest or not.

2. Everyone else is doing it. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it an honest act. The same logic has been used for downloading pirated music and movies, doing drugs, and killing Jews.

3. It doesn’t hurt anyone. To say something doesn’t hurt anyone is speculative at best, and merely a way to make one feel better about actions they are uncomfortable with but want to justify somehow. People use the same logic to steal from Wal-Mart. After all, they’re just a big corporation, so how does me stealing some batteries hurt anyone? That argument can be made, but it is, admittedly, a more difficult argument to make when it comes to automatically querying Google. But it doesn’t matter. Whether or not it hurts Google or anyone else doesn’t change the fact that automatically querying Google is a violation of their terms of service.

4. Google doesn’t care anyway. Just as with #3, the same goes for claiming that Google doesn’t care. First of all, you’re making an assumption that may or may not be true, and second, it doesn’t matter. Violating an agreement is breaking your word and being dishonest, regardless of how the person or entity you’ve made that agreement with feels about it. If they don’t care, then they can let you out of the agreement, but for someone to make an agreement and then break it based on the assumption the other party doesn’t care is still dishonest.

5. The intent of section 5.3 isn’t to stop programs like SpyFu or SEOmoz’s Rank Checker. This is the only way out, but it’s a hard case to make. In order to say that you are not breaking your agreement with Google, you would have to somehow claim that Google does not mean what they seem to be saying. That the words they are using mean something other than what those words generally mean. You would have to be able to prove that when Google says they don’t want you to “access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google” that this does not apply to Web CEO. You would have to be able to read the words “You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers)” and interpret that as not applying to how SEOmoz’s Rank Checker gets its data. If you can do that, I’d like you to explain it to me, because I can’t see any way around it.

So what is the intent of section 5.3? My opinion is that it truly is not intended to target services like Web CEO or SpyFu. I believe Google included section 5.3 as a safety measure to give them the ability to prosecute anyone doing such things if Google deems it worth pursuing. I can imagine a meeting between Google and their lawyer going something like this:

Google: “Hey, what about this section 5.3? Why do we need that in there?”

Lawyer: “Because you might need to use it some day.”

Google: “What do you mean? I can’t see any reason why I’d need to stop anyone from automatically querying us? I mean, I know these tools like Web CEO and SEOmoz Rank Checker are doing it, but we don’t care about that stuff.”

Lawyer: “You might not see a reason today, and even I can’t think of a reason, but you should put it in there any way just in case. Something may happen that you can’t foresee that damages your business and that section may be the only way you can prosecute the offender and stop it.”

I’m 99.99% sure if Web CEO or any other company talked to Google and Google were completely transparent, Google would say “Go ahead, we don’t care.” But of course Google can’t say that publicly, because that could be used against them in a court of law if they ever did want to sue someone based on section 5.3.

If my opinion is correct, then that’s pretty annoying, isn’t it? After all, how are we supposed to track rankings for our client? By checking them manually? What if we’ve got 50 clients and each one has 200 keywords they’re tracking? Well, then you’ve got a problem. But people have problems all the time. What if everybody said “Hey, I believe in being honest when it’s in my favor, but if it benefits me to break my word then I don’t think that’s dishonest.” That’d be a nice world to live in, wouldn’t it?

Honest people are honest whether or not they’ve got problems and regardless of the money involved. Here’s what real honesty looks like.

Jon Huntsman owned the largest private business in the world–Huntsman Chemical. He’s mostly retired now and is funneling his billions of dollars into curing cancer. In 1986 Jon Huntsman agreed to sell 40% of his company to Emerson Camp, the chairman and CEO of Great Lakes Chemical for $54 million. They shook hands on the deal, but then Emerson lagged on getting the paperwork together. Six months later, nothing had been done on the deal, and Huntsman’s company had done spectacularly well and some things had happened with the economy so that in that short time period that 40%, instead of being worth $54 million, was now worth $225 million, or $171 million more than it was worth just six months earlier.

Emerson came to Huntsman and said that he knew the business was worth about $200 million. Huntsman told him no, it was worth about $225 million. Emerson suggested they split the difference, and that he would pay $125 million for the 40% of the business. Huntsman told him no, he wouldn’t do that deal. He told him he had shook his hand six months earlier and told him he would sell him that part of the business for $54 million, and that’s what he was going to stick to because he had given his word.

So are you an honest person? If you like to think that you are, and you use these SEO tools, then what decision are you going to make that will allow you to sleep at night?

Now, is there some way out of this? Perhaps. A company can try to make an agreement with Google so that they have permission to automatically query the search engine. I’ve tried that myself, but have been unable to get a response. And so far I haven’t found anyone else who has been successful either. If you know of someone who has made such an agreement, I’d love to talk to them. Or if you see some other way around this that allows a company to automatically query Google without violating the terms of service, I’d love to hear about it, because I like these tools and would like to be able to use them without feeling like I’m a dishonest person. I would love to find a way around section 5.3, I just don’t see it.

I wasn’t sure the content was really worth $50, at least not to me. Most of my clients have fairly simple needs that don’t require the latest and greatest info, just the basics, or so I thought. However, over the last few months I’ve come up against questions I couldn’t answer on my own, and so I’d go searching online to see if anyone had a similar experience. 75% of the time I did this, I would come up against a page of SEOmoz’s premium content, mostly in their knowledgebase, where they answer questions from users, like this one about optimal URL length.

After I ran into these pages 4-5 times in one month and due to my lack of a premium membership had to keep searching around to find the answer, I decided if it saved me an hour or two per month, it was probably worth $50, and I signed up.

And of course now that I’m signed up I find myself accessing the premium content more and more. If they don’t already have an answer to my question, I can ask the question and get the answer quickly.

Is it for everybody? Probably not. I wouldn’t recommend that a beginner sign up for it. There is plenty of information out there for beginners, and I don’t encourage people to pay for something until they’ve exhausted the resources they already have at hand. I would recommend beginners do as I do, and start paying for it once you start running into their content on a regular basis.

For SEO professionals I would heartily recommend you sign up right now and at least try it out.

The interface for managing sitemaps is fairly similar to that for Google.

What I found most interesting were the “top links to” tab, which displays the top 10 links to your website. “Top” meaning the ones that are “performing the best,” whatever that means. One would assume it means in terms of traffic generated by those links, but by looking at the links I’m positive that’s not the case and I don’t even have to look at analytics to find that out. That aside, the reason I found it interesting was because I found some links from quite reputable sites linking to my site which I didn’t know about and hadn’t shown up in other reports.

So try it out, let us know what you think.

Lest we cause any confusion, I am using the term “shopping cart” to refer to any of the software that is used for cataloging, organizing, or otherwise displaying products on an ecommerce site, in addition to the pages involved in the checkout process.

1. URL structure. The structure of your URLs is critical. The URL should appear to search engines to be a static page, or in other words, the search engine shouldn’t be able to tell that the page is pulling information from a database as opposed to just having been built completely from scratch in raw HTML. Ideally you’ll want the ability to specify the exact text of the URL so that you can include your keywords in it in the way that will produce the best results.

Bad URL – www.yourcompany.com/products/product.php?lkghl5323FDgdfd

Slightly Better URL – www.yourcompany.com/products/product000224123.html

Best URL – www.yourcompany.com/computers/software/anti-virus/mcafee-antivirus80.html

The first URL tells us nothing by itself, and guess what? That means the search engine can’t tell anything from the URL either. The second URL is slightly better in that it at least looks like a static page, but the difference between these two URLs is very slight compared to the third URL.

Without knowing anything else about this website, what can we tell just from the URL? We can tell that this website sells computer stuff, including anti-virus software, and we also know they specifically sell McAfee’s anti virus software and we can tell what version they sell. This means that if someone searches on Google for “computers”, “software”, “anti virus software”, or “mcafee anti virus software” this page has a chance of coming up in the rankings even if nothing else were done to make the page or site SEO friendly. All things being equal, a shopping cart with this kind of URL structure is going to rank higher than one that doesn’t.

2. Title tag control. If you’re not clear on what title tags are read our post on title tag basics. Title tags are a huge part of what search engines use to rank a website, and having control over them is imperative. Make sure your shopping cart software allows you to type in exactly what text you want to be contained in the title tag of each and every page.

You’ll also want to make sure the title tag is not connected to any other information, such as the page name. Sometimes software will allow you to type in text for a title tag but that text also shows up visibly on the page or in the navigation. You don’t want that. You want complete control over the title tag without it affecting anything else whatsoever.

3. Meta tags. Meta tags won’t have a huge effect on SEO, per se, but they can have a large effect on getting people to click on your link in search engine results, since the text contained in the meta description tag shows up in search engines. You’ll want complete control over the meta description tag so that you can create text that will interest search engine users and cause them to click through.

4. Clean HtML. This should be a given, but you need a shopping cart that produces clean HTML that is mostly tableless and uses up to date HTML/CSS.

Anyone got anything to add?

The question that needs to be asked is not what’s the average bounce rate across all websites, or even all websites in my industry, but what’s the bounce rate for my website, is it good or bad, and what, if anything, should I do about it?

Bounce rate is an inherently subjective measure of performance. That is, you shouldn’t really compare your bounce rate to that of other websites other than for entertainment purposes. The reason being there are simply too many variables affecting the bounce rate, and what applies to one website, even if it’s a direct competitor, may not apply to your website.

For example, my SEO firm’s website is located at mwi.com and has a bounce rate of 65.75% over the last 30 days. Having a three letter domain is great when I’m telling people to go to my website, or when it’s being used in print marketing, but when it comes to SEO and being listed in Google it’s a dubious advantage. The issue is that there are a lot of other companies and organizations out there with the name MWI, and as a result I get a lot of traffic from people looking for MWI Veterinary Supplies, MWI Partners, Mid-wives International, etc. Then there’s the traffic I get because MWI is an acronym for terms like many worlds interpretation, and something to do with Cisco IP phones. Obviously MWI has nothing to do with these entities or terms, but that doesn’t keep people from typing “mwi” into Google and clicking through to our site. Once on our site, people immediately realize we’re an SEO company, not a law firm or a theory of how the universe works, and they bounce away. So this makes our bounce rate considerably higher than it would be otherwise. Is this a bad thing? Surprisingly, it might be. According to this bounce factor experiment there is evidence to suggest that Google uses data from Google Analytics to rank sites, and sites with lower bounce rates can see their rankings affected positively.

But leaving that for the moment, what if I were to compare my bounce rate to the bounce rate of one of my competitors? Chances are my competitor’s don’t have their websites commonly confused as that of another company’s, and so all other things being equal their bounce rate would be lower than mine. But if I didn’t take that into consideration I’d be thinking “Man, what’s wrong with my site?” and that might lead me to make changes that aren’t necessary and that wouldn’t produce any benefit.

The data becomes much more relevant if I measure it against itself over time or against other factors. If you have launched a new website then you will probably see your traffic increase over time. If, as your traffic increases, your bounce rate also increases, it might do to investigate why this is happening. It could be that your website is ranking in Google for keywords that you think are relevant to what you do, but perhaps when other people search for that keyword they are actually looking for something different than what you do, and so perhaps you should revise your keyword strategy.

If you experience high bounce rates (over 70%) then it might be that your website stinks, to put it bluntly, and you need to redesign it or do a better job communicating through your entry pages. Then again, it could be something else entirely. In looking through data for the 30+ sites I have access to I see bounce rates all the way from 16% to 90%, and in each case there are various reasons why those sites have those bounce rates, and a low bounce rate isn’t necessarily a good thing, since it can mean a lack of traffic.

If you see a sudden increase in your bounce rate, chances are some sort of event has taken place that is driving new traffic to your site which, for some reason, is not sticking on your site. If there were a sudden spike in my site’s bounce rate the first things I would do would be to look to see if there is a corresponding spike in overall traffic, and then I would look at my traffic sources to see if there is a spike there that explains where the traffic is coming from.

But even with this data, it’s often hard to say what you should do with it. Obviously a high bounce rate means your site has low relevance to visitors, and so to capture more of those visitors you can work on making your site more relevant. But this only works if your site really is more relevant than people think. In my case, there’s no reason for me to try to make my firm’s site more relevant for the people who are searching for veterinary supplies. That is traffic I have to live with and can’t do much about. I’d have a bigger problem if that traffic wasn’t bouncing, since that would mean my site seems relevant to those people and if it seems relevant to them then it’s probably not relevant to those I’m truly targeting.

To sum up, the bounce rate is affected by many things and there is no blanket answer that can be applied to all website to say “When your bounce rate is high you should…” Each website is different, each situation is different, and analyzing bounce rate data requires a hands-on approach–just one more reason why SEO can never be fully automated.

As with most things Google, the keyword tool is pretty easy to use. You type in a keyword or keyword phrase, click on “get more keywords,” and then it will pull up a list of related keywords. Most importantly, it gives you some data on average search volume and you can also view search volume trends for the past 12 months.

What was nice about Overture’s Inventory tool was that it gave you specific numbers, so you didn’t just know there were more searches for one keyword than another, you knew there were 20,000 searches for one and 100 for the other. But then again, was Overture’s keyword tool data reliable? Somewhat, but not entirely. But still, it was better than the little bar Google gives us, but hey, I’m just happy they give us anything at all, so I’ll take what I can get.

How do I use the tool? Well, I run an SEO firm, right? So I can type in “seo” and “search engine optimization” and get a list of keywords like this:

flash seo
free search engine optimization
free seo
free seo tool
free seo tools
organic search engine optimization
organic seo
phpbb seo
professional seo
real estate seo
and…so forth

Well, I’m not giving anything away for free, I don’t really get into seo for real estate types, and frankly, many of these terms are too competitive for my short-term needs. So how do I make my life easier? By limiting myself geographically. You see, my business is a Utah-based SEO company, and if I try to come up in the rankings for “utah seo” that’s much easier than trying to get a #1 spot for just “seo” by itself. So let’s add the word “utah” to the Google Keyword Tool.

Well, that only pulls up four terms; utah seo, utah seo company, utah seo firm, and utah seo blog. All of those apply to me, but I’d like more terms please. So I type in “seo salt lake city” because my firm is located in a suburb of Salt Lake City, but all it gives me is that term back, with no data. The same goes for “search engine optimization salt lake city”. So if I want to focus on Utah and the SEO related terms, I don’t have too many keywords to focus on, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What would be bad is if I were focusing on 30 terms related to Utah, not knowing that there are really only 4-5 terms that matter. Now I know, and I can use that knowledge to my advantage, and this is the same type of process we go through for our clients.

The Google Keyword Tool is just one small part of the puzzle. It won’t tell you exactly what keywords to focus on to get rich. What it is good at is helping you come up with ideas for new keywords, as well giving you some information to help you prioritize keywords. But every company is different, every industry is different, and every website is different, and for those reasons the only real way to find out how to prioritize your keywords is through our old friend experimentation and his buddies trial and error.

I think the answer is “Parts of it, yes, parts of it, no.”

Where automation really breaks down is prediction of trends. Sure, ultimately you can build software that will predict certain trends, but at some point you’ve got to have a human being who looks at an industry and thinks “Hmm, I think this is what’s going to happen, and if I start optimizing this site for that trend right now, I’ll be at the forefront.” I just don’t see software reaching the level of intelligence necessary to make predictions. I’m sure we could come pretty close, but the people developing that software are probably busy working for the Department of Defense and helping Mary’s Flowers come up higher in Google is probably the last of their concerns.

Where automation does come into play is in the processes of running an SEO business. Anywhere that processes are repeated exactly or close to exactly there’s an opportunity for automation. Do you find yourself giving all your clients more or less the same advice the first month you work with them? Then why write out the same words again and again? Have a template you can customize for each client. Do you run the same four reports every month for each client? Then figure out a way to set up your reporting software to run the reports automatically without you having to go in and click on a button.

Certainly there are all sorts of ways the business of providing SEO can be automated, therefore cutting costs and allowing firms to be more competitive on price or more profitable, but at the end of the day I’d say 100% automation of SEO is a pipe dream. But if anyone ever does it I’m sure we’ll all be sitting around saying “Man, I wish I had thought of that.”

Link Building
Building links is by far one of the most difficult aspects of SEO simply because of a lack of control. You have total control over your website, the content, and HTML structure; however you do not have control of incoming links to your website (unless you own the other website of course).

Link Building Methods
Incoming links usually consist of one of the following scenarios (in no particular order):
1. Someone just naturally linked to your website for various different reasons.
2. You paid someone for a link going to your website.
3. You submitted your website to an online directory or similar-type website.
4. You own another website and placed your link on it.
5. You posted comments or an article with a link back to your website.
6. You had a reciprocal link agreement with another website.

Overview of Non-Buying Link Building Methods
Obviously there are other types of incoming links, probably thousands if you got down to the nitty gritty details, but these are some of the most common. The 1st method, having someone naturally link to your website, usually provides the highest quality links however it is one of the most difficult methods of gaining links. Providing useful content or material that someone will want to link to is often called linkbaiting. The 3rd option consists mainly of online directories is an easier method of obtaining some links quilckly and is often useful for new websites, however the quality of the links are usually not the best. Option #4 is a good route if you have a large collection of websites. #5 is ok and can provide some decent links, and #6 should probably be avoided in most cases as search engines don’t put as much value on reciprocal links as they do one-way links.

Link Buying Overview
That leaves us with #2, buying links. There is debate going on right now in the SEO industry about whether you should buy links or not. The main reason for not buying links is that Google can recognize those links and will not give you any credit for the link or even penalize you for it. The other reason is that overall the quality of links that you can buy are not as good as links obtained using other methods. Right up front I will say there is no clear answer on this subject overall, however you can often find a clear answer to specific link buying situations. There are three questions you need to ask yourself for every link buying situation:

a. Can a search engine determine if I bought this link?
b. Do I know exactly what I will receive once I pay?
c. Is the link I am buying going to help with my SEO campaign?

Examples of Good Link Buys
Yes, these questions are basically the questions that address the concerns for not buying a link and some may think you can not find the true answer but in most cases it is possible. Here are two good link buying situations, our examples will be for an ‘SEO company’:

1. You find a blogger in your area that blogs only about SEO, you send an email to the owner and offer to pay him $100 a month in exchange for posting a link on his blog in the right hand column with the text ‘utah search engine optimization’.
a. Can a search engine determine if the link was bought? Not likely at all; since it is a custom website and the owner has other links going to his friend’s blogs and other SEO resources a search engine would have a very difficult time knowing the link was paid for.
b. You were clear on where you wanted to have your link placed and the text, you should be fine.
c. Yes, since the blog is about SEO and not dog breeding or some other un-related topic this should help your SEO campaign at great lengths.
Overall: This is a very good scenario for buying a link and probably the best method. Contacting individual websites on your own that you know are related to your industry can be very profitable. The drawbacks are it is more time consuming and you may have to make several offers before someone agrees; however you will be suprised at how many people will accept money for a link. The other drawback in this situation, specifically a blog, is that the readers may find out somehow that you paid for the link and may look down upon your company or the blogger.

2. You find a text link broker that has an inventory of websites related to yours. You find a few websites and purchase links through their system.
a. This will depend on the link broker’s programming methods. If the links are delivered via javascript, php, etc. you may run into the possibility that the links can be recognized by a search engine as a purchased link. If the link is strictly HTML you have a better chance of the search engine not knowing it was paid for.
b. Again this depends on the system; however usually you know what you are getting, but not the exact website in some situation. You may know it is a ‘PR 5′ website, with one link on the homepage and 40 links on subpage and the topic of the website is ‘seo copyrwriting’. However usually you have enough information to make an informed decision on whether to place the link; as long as the information is reliable.
c. As long as you place links only on websites that are related to yours, are not ‘spammy’ and chock full of garbage links, and are strictly in HTML format you should be good to go.
Overall: This is an easy and quick method as you can sort through hundreds or thousands of potential websites that you know are willing to accept paid links. The main drawbacks are the quality of the links (which you may never really know until you try one for a few months) and the lack of information in some cases (not being able to see the exact website until after you purchase a link). You may also run the risk that the search engines have picked up on certain link text brokers and knows which links are purchased through them.

Link Buying Cautions!
Although the two above examples are fairly safe and effective depending on several factors there are certain situation and conditions you will want to avoid at all costs:

1. Never ever buy a link on a website that is not related to yours.
2. Never buy a link that you have to ask yourself if it will be worth it or not and you are left to wonder at exactly what you will get.
3. Do not buy links that are non-HTML based.
5. Obviously avoid ‘link farm’ type situations.
6. Carefully consider the value of the link and don’t overpay.
7. Monitor your results for 2-3 months to determine if you should continue to pay for the link.
8. If possible buy links that include a link on every page of the website, not just one.
9. Buy links on websites that have few outgoing links and have valuable and useful content.
10. Try to keep links for a minimum of 3 months, don’t keep changing websites that you buy links from as it takes a while for the search engine’s to pick them up and add value to your SEO campaign.

Link Building/Buying Resources
note: I have not tried all of these personally, some I can vouch for but not all. Do your research and follow the above guidelines and you should be ok though.
1. Text Link Ads
2. Text Link Brokers
3. Link Adage
4. Link Worth
5. Great Link Directory Guide
6. iSnare Article Submission
7. Blog Ads
8. PRWeb Press Release Distribution

Feel free to comment or add your own resources for building links.

Do dead links hurt SEO?
There are few that will argue that having many dead links on your website will not hurt your SEO efforts. The main idea behind this is quality. Search engines want to have quality websites come up in their search result pages. A quality website is one that has lots of information, unique content, and no dead links. Think abou it for a minute, have you ever searched for something only to find the resulting webpage outdated and full of links to websites that do not exist? This is frustrating and you will leave quickly, search engines know this.

So how do I manage dead links?
Yes, it can be difficult to keep up with the world wide web and how it changes so often every day. Websites that you are linking to come and go, they have website redesigns with new url structures, transfer to new domains, and so forth. It can be a daunting task to keep up with the updates if you do it manually. After months of trying out several different ‘dead link’ programs I have found one that is free and very effective, useful, and worth the download. It is called XENU, don’t let the website scare you away, it was obviously made by a programmer, not a web designer. You can put in your website URL in this desktop application and it will search all links on your website and in the end give you a report of which links are dead and where the links are on your website. This makes it easy to get a quick snapshot of your website and be able to make updates quickly and effectively.

Isn’t there a program that will do everything for me though?
Not that I have found. I don’t know of any programs that will connect to your website via ftp, scan all links, and automatically update them. Nor do I think this is actually really possible because of the unique nature of every website on the internet. However if you have any other programs, website, or other resources for managing dead links please post a comment.

When AOL released information on 20 million searches a few were able to create some tools to search the data.

1. Ask the Brain AOL Keyword Search – allows you to search for keyword phrases searched in AOL among the 20 milliions searches with the resulting webpages that the users went to. You can also choose a specific domain and see what searches actually lead people to that website.

2. Don’t Delete AOL Keyword Search Tool – this one is similar to the one above. You can search by keywords and where results went to. You can also expand a keyword here, such as typing ‘seo’ and all ‘seo’ related keyword phrases would appear.

These are some unique tools in the fact that you can actually see which keyword phrases lead a website user to the specific website. It is fun, check them out, but be warned they seem to be getting a lot of traffic so it may be somewhat slow.