SEO Spyglass Review

Link-Assistant currently offers 4 tools that are largely catered toward people interested in search engine optimization and getting their websites (or the sites of their clients) up to the top of the search engines. There is Rank Tracker, Website Auditor, LinkAssistant and SEO SpyGlass. These can each be purchased individually or as part of the comprehensive SEO PowerSuite.

Possibly the most interesting of the bunch of SEO SpyGlass. The idea here is quite simple. If you want to rank for a certain keyword or keyword phrase, you take a look at the sites that are already at the top of the search engine results page for that target keyword. You could guess why they’re there, but SEO SpyGlass takes the guesswork out of the equation by literally spying on what they have going on. More specifically, you can look at the links the competition is getting and where they’re getting them.

Most people, myself included, are largely interested in Google, but SEO SpyGlass supports a huge range of other search engines too, including Altavista, Bing, and even Alexa. The kicker is that it also supports versions of Google from all around the world too. These search engines are used to spy out the backlinks pointed toward the competing site.

To get started, you can either do your link research based on a keyword or based on a competitor’s URL. Spying on the competition is probably the way to go here most of the time, but some research on a keyword can be handy too. You then pick the search engine you want to use for the competition research project. Then, you let it do its thing.

What results is a huge report that breaks down all the backlinks that your competitor’s site is getting. There’s plenty of information for each of those links, including the backlink page, the page PR, the anchor text, the title, and more. This really helps you identify exactly what kinds of links work best for your target keyword in your target niche.

For example, you might notice that while the goal is to rank for “keyword X,” a large number of backlinks to your top competitor actually use the anchor text “keyword Y.” This gives you the chance to mirror that strategy when you go looking for backlinks of your own.

You can also check out the sites that are providing those backlinks, approaching the site owners for paid links and other sponsorship opportunities. In the case of forums, you can even start working on those backlinks yourself, maybe in the form of forum signatures or member blog posts. Again, this reveals opportunities that you may have otherwise missed.

The wealth of information truly is impressive and there are lots of options for you to filter the data and develop your own workspaces. In addition to using the various search engines to find these backlinks, Link Assistant also has some of its own backlink databases for SEO SpyGlass. Combined, you get everything from Alexa rank to number of external links, link value (based on the PR formula) to domain age or IP.

There is a FREE version of SEO SpyGlass available just click the link and try it out and see if you like it!

Let me know what did you think of it?