RankQuest Toolbar

Its been a decent time, I had been trying to market our clients websites now, and for sure the biggest help I ever got was from RankQuest Toolbar. It probably is the only one I know of its kind.

The best part about the RankQuest is that it gets installed on Windows 98 as well. A few of members of the SEO team in my previous company, used Windows 98 and it was difficult for them to check the page rank, as Google Toolbar requires atleast windows Xp. With page rank available on this tool bar it really helped.

All you do to start with is type the URL in the toolbar, and click on whatever you are looking for, a web page opens with a detailed information about it.


* You can check for Server Header Validation and verify the HTTP status codes. Over 36 HTTP Codes are checked but only seven (200 | 301 | 302 | 304 | 307 | 404 | 410 ) are of interest to us from an indexing and search engine optimization perspective.

* The Link Checker tools checks for broken links in a page. Broken links are links that show a “page not found” (404) error or something similar when clicked. This tool checks absolute links (Blocked URL here), relative (../mypage.htm) links, in-page links (e.g. yourpage.htm#top), links to other pages on your site (e.g. yoursite/yourpage.htm), links to other sites (e.g. yoursite.com), images links on your page (png, gif, jpg & bmp) and images inside HTML forms. It displays the link status as one of the three options -
o Ok
o Not Ok
o Redirected

* The third tool, and one of my favorites, removes unnecessary HTML tags in a page the can adversely affect the performance of a page in the SERP rankings. HTML Code Cleaner helps you avoid the same by removing unnecessary HTML tags and spaces in a page and thus reducing the page size. The tags that have been removed, the reduction in the page size and the new cleaned page are all displayed in the result. There is also a provision to save the optimized page - which is what I like the most *wink*

* A page that has HTML errors can be difficult for a Search Engine Spider to crawl. Thus it is advisable to have your page HTML validated to spot any errors that may be there in the page. The HTML Validator spots all errors in your page based on W3C standards and lists them with the line number so that you can make necessary corrections.

* Most Search Engine Spiders see your page much the same way as a text browser like Lynx will do. The Lynx Viewer tool in the toolbar, shows the Lynx view of your webpage, and you can use this information to find out what words/links look more prominent.

* One of the factors that search engines use in ranking a webpage is the percentage of text in the web page. The Simply put code to text ratio is % of text in the page / % of html code in the page. Search Engines use this ratio to determine the relevancy of your page and higher this value more your chances of ranking higher. And this is what is calculated by Code to Text Ratio Tool.

* The Link Explorer, explores links in the URL provided and creates a tree view of the same.

* When it is SEO, keywords play the most important role. The Keyword Density Analyzer tool of this toolbar helps you find out the density values for words/phrases in various important parts of your page, like Tile Tag, Meta Tags, Body Tags, Alt Tags etc.

* The Web Speed Report shows how fast your web page loads. Web page should be optimized, if it takes time to load.

* The Meta Tag Analyzer examines the Meta information of the
entered URL and lets you know if the content is Search Engine Friendly or not.

* The Link Popularity Tool helps the user to measure how many other sites indexed by each search engine have links to each of the site provided.

Apart from these there are several other tools, which I leave for you to review and post in the comments

Signing Off,
Sammy