Welcome to SEO SpyGlass Online Help!
SEO SpyGlass is an advanced competition research tool designed to let you see exactly how your competitors got to the top in major search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Bing. It does so by researching all the backlinks that point to your competitor's site, and analyzing them using dozens of SEO factors.
Once SEO SpyGlass reveals the complete linking profile of your competitors to you, you can use this information to your advantage to create your own linking strategy and get ahead of your online competition in the rankings.
There are two ways you can go with this online help:
- You can Take a Tour of SEO SpyGlass going from section to section or navigating by the contextual links.
- If you've already got a grip on the tool and just need some specific information, pick a topic from the table of contents below and find out how you can use SEO SpyGlass to its full potential.
Table of Contents
- Main Window Description
- Using SEO SpyGlass
- Creating a New Project
- Analyzing Backlink Data
- Updating Backlink Data
- Removing Backlinks
- Rebuild the Project
- Managing Workspaces
- Copying the Data to a Spreadsheet
- Exporting Backlink Data
- Generating Reports
- Working with Reports
- Managing Report Templates
- Using Quick Filter
- Creating a New Report Template
- Editing Report Templates
- Removing Report Templates
- Quicksaving Reports to Your Local Hard Drive
- Publishing Your Report
- Creating a New Publishing Profile
- Saving Reports Locally on Your Hard Drive
- Sending Reports via E-mail
- Uploading Reports onto a Website via FTP
- Editing Publishing Profiles
- Configuring SEO SpyGlass
- Configuring Proxy Settings
- Configuring Search Safety Settings
- Using Search Engines API Keys
- Configuring Preferred Search Engines
- Configuring Customer Profile
- Configuring your Company Profile
- Editing Stop Words
- Configuring Export Templates
Main Window Description
The main working window of SEO SpyGlass has three sections: Search Engines Data, Incoming Backlink Details and SEO Report.
Search Engine Data
This is the first section you get into right after creating the first project. Here you'll see the backlink data that SEO SpyGlass managed to gather from the search engines.
Search Engine Data Window
Here's a quick overview of all the columns available by default in the main SEO SpyGlass window:
- Search Engine
This is the search engine that you SEO SpyGlass used to retrieve the backlink data. - Backlink Page
This is the exact URL of the Webpage that is linked back to your competitor's URL. - Webpage PR
This is the Google PageRank of the Webpage that is linked back to your competitor's URL. - Alexa Rank
This is the Alexa Rank of the site linking back to your competitor. This gives you a rough traffic estimate of the site. - Title
This is the exact title of the Webpage that is linked back to your competitor's URL. - Links Back
This shows you if the Webpage is still linked back to your competitor. If a page is not linked back, this probably means the link has been removed, but the search engine doesn't know that yet, because the index has not been updated. - Anchor Text
This is the exact anchor text of the Webpage that is linked back to your competitor's URL. - Outbound Links
This is the number of outbound links on the Webpage with your competitor's backlink. The fewer outbound links a Webpage has, the greater value a backlink has. - Link Value
This is an approximate calculation of the value each backlink brings, based on the original PageRank formula. - Total Links
This is the total number of links on the Webpage with your competitor's backlink. This is calculated as the number of outbound links plus the links to the internal pages of the site with the backlink. - Anchor URL
This is the anchor URL if the backlink. This shows you exactly where the backlink points. - Domain
This is the domain that contains the backlink to your competitor. - IP Address
This is the IP address of the site that contains the backlink to your competitor. - Domain PR
This is the Google PageRank value of the domain that contains the Webpage linked back to your competitor's URL. - DMOZ
This shows you if a site linking back to your competitor is listed in DMOZ. - Yahoo!
This shows you if a site linking back to your competitor is listed in the Yahoo! Directory. - Domain Age
This is the age of the site that is linked back to your competitor.
You can select what kind of data to display with the help of Workspaces.
Incoming Backlink Details
When you select the backlinks you wish to analyze and click the "Analyze" button, SEO SpyGlass will open the "Incoming Backlink Details" window presenting an analysis summary of the backlinks you've chosen.
Note: You can hold down CTRL (or CMD on a Mac version) and/or SHIFT keys to select multiple backlinks, and then click Analyze. You can also hit CTRL-A to easily select all of them.
If no backlinks are selected, SEO SpyGlass will assume you need to analyze all the backlinks when you press the Analyze button.
Incoming Back Link Details
Here's a quick explanation of all the tabs you can see here:
- Keywords
The Keywords column shows all the keywords found within the titles and anchors of all the links pointing to your competitor's URL. The Tile Density and Anchor Density columns show the respective percentage values. - Anchor Text
The Anchor Text tab allows you to see at a glance the exact anchors of all your competitor's backlinks. This is different from the Keywords tab, which shows separate keywords within the anchors and titles of the backlinks. - Anchor URL
The Anchor URL tab shows all the URLs within the anchors of all the links pointing to your competitor's URL. Basically, this shows you the exact location where the backlinks point. - Webpage PR
The Webpage PageRank tab shows the PageRank values of all the exact links pointing to your competitor's URL. E.g. if your competitor has a backlink of www.some-site.com/some-page.html, this tab will show you the PageRank of this backlink page. - Domain PR
The Domain PageRank tab shows the domain PageRank values of all the links pointing to your competitor's URL. E.g. if your competitor has a backlink of www.some-site.com/some-page.html, this tab will show you the PageRank for www.some-site.com. - Domain
The Domain tab allows you to see at a glance the domains that are linked back to your competitor's URL. E.g. a value of 33% next to a certain domain means 33% of your competitor's backlinks come from the exact same site. This most probably means there's a site-wide link to your competitor. - TLD (Top Level Domains)
In this tab you can clearly see what domains link to your competitor. SEO SpyGlass will show you how many backlinks come from .gov, .com, .edu and other types of domains. The data is given both in figures and percentage. - IP Address
The IP Address tab allows you to see at a glance the IP addresses of all the links pointing to your competitor's URL. E.g. a value of 33% next to a certain IP means 33% of your competitor's backlinks come from the exact same IP address (that is, basically, from the same site.) - Country
With SEO SpyGlass you'll find out every single detail about your competition, even the countries where the webpages linking to them are hosted. - DMOZ
The DMOZ Listing tab allows you to see at a glance how many of the links pointing to your competitor's URL are listed in the Open Directory (aka DMOZ.) - Yahoo!
The Yahoo! Listing tab allows you to see at a glance how many of the links pointing to your competitor's URL are listed in the Yahoo! Directory. - Links Back
The Links Back tab allows you to see at a glance if the backlinks returned by the Search Engine really link to your competitor's URL at the time of scan. SEO SpyGlass will not count nofollow links as real backlinks.
SEO Report
Now that all this search engines data has been collected and processed, just click the "Report" button and SEO SpyGlass will open your personal SEO Success Blueprint Report:
Note: Use the hot-keys 'Alt + 1' and 'Alt + 2' to quickly switch between the Search Engines Data and SEO Report tabs.
SEO Report
The report contains the analysis of the backlink data together with optimization advice. If you go through the report step-by-step you'll find there the following tabs:
Best Keyphrases
Best keyphrases
These are the phrases that will be most effective to optimize the website for. The competitor uses these keyphrases for his site to get to the top of SERPs.
Best keywords
These keywords are in use by the competing site to vary keyphrases and help promote the site in search engines.
Best keywords
Pages with high Google Page Rank
Literally, Page Rank is the value Google assigns to each page. It is measured from 1 to 10.
This table gives a list of domains with high Google Page Rank, and then pages in these domains that are important to get links from.
Pages with high Google Page Rank
Quality article directories
The table represents a list of quality article directories that may bring the site big value if arlictes are submitted to these directories.
Quality article directories
Quality press release directories
The table contains a weighty list of Press Release directories that should be used to submit press releases to.
Quality press release directories
Traffic-intensive sites
This table represents a list of traffic-intensive sites. Firstly, you can see Domains with their traffic rank and Google Page Rank. Then, the table contains exact web pages and shows their Page Rank. A good thing is to get links from this site, because as the site has a lot of traffic (= visitors), a good share of them will follow these links.
Note: don't be confused by the Traffic Rank values. The lower the value, the bigger traffic the site gets.
Traffic-intensive sites
Social media sites
This is a list of social media (blogs, forums etc.) that are being used to promote the competing website. The table also displays the domain Traffic Rank, and Page Rank of both domain and each page.
Social media sites
Most popular social bookmarking sites
This table gives a list of most popular social bookmarking sites that can bring huge traffic to a website.
Most popular social bookmarking sites
Internet directories
Directories categorize links to internet sites that site owners submit. Thus submitting to numbers of directories can be of great use for site promotion.
Internet directories
The table represents a list of Internet directories that are able to bring real value if a website is submitted to them.
The reports are generated according to Report Templates. There are several types of ready-made templates you can switch between to change the content and structure of the report as well as the way it looks.
You can edit existing report templates and even create custom templates. SEO SpyGlass lets you not only select what sections to include into the report but also change the look and feel of any report template choosing the color scheme or adding your company logo.
