10e20 Blog

Over the weekend, a blogger by the name of Dean Hunt asked for advice about an email he had received from an online store who apparently is “competing” with him in the SERPs. Apparently, Dean’s site ranks higher in Google than the online store’s site for a particular search term. From the correspondence, the online store threatened to sue him, because as he puts it, “You have to understand Dean that an online business should be higher in Google than a blog.”

The discourse continued (and the popularity of the blog post on digg crashed his web server — twice) as search engine optimizers began taking note. In one blog response, Loren Baker humorously replies that a BLOG, by definition, means Better Listings On Google. (Marketers who haven’t yet taken note: maybe now you should!)

In all seriousness, however, the request by the owner of the online store is completely unrealistic.

SEO itself is a daunting task, but thankfully there are tools to make it a lot easier.

Here are some of the essential tools that I recommend. Each performs different tasks, and therefore these tools are all unique to each other (with some overlap):

• Inbound Link Quality (ILQ) Rating Tool: This Firefox plugin displays in your bottom status bar and displays the quality of inbound links. ILQ is measured based on the number of links in dir.yahoo.com, DMOZ, .edu and .gov links, domain age, and Alexa ranking, as seen below: