ToolUrl is an invaluable Web site that gives you lots of great data about any Web domain in the world. Best of all, it's free and it dishes great data for PR professionals.
In addition to the standard whois information, ToolUrl sniffs out a site's Google Page Rank (defined) as well as Alexa data and more. In addition, there are keyword tools that let you check your link popularity from the five major search engines on certain keywords as well as a link analyzer. There are even widgets and buttons for your personalized Google Home Page, Google Toolbar with Firefox support in the works.
SEO tools like those offered at ToolUrl are fully underutilized by PR pros. They provide rich information that can be used to set benchmarks at the beginning of a campaign. Later on you can track your progress and report on it by running the same tests. These sites come particularly in handy when analyzing sites like blogs that don't have hard data like published circulation figures and/or subscriber counts. It's also important not to look at this data in a silo, but to view it in conjunction with other data sources like Technorati, Google Trends and more.
Consider the following scenario. A client comes to you with a challenge: get us visibility on the mommy blogs. A great place to start is the Technorati blog directory. A search for parenting pulls up a nice list of blogs. Right now you have one and only one way to measure these blogs against each other and that's their authority ranking. This is based solely on in-bound links from other blogs in the Technorati database. However, by taking the next step with Toolurl, you can learn more.
For example, I ran the top two parenting blogs listed in Technorati through Toolurl - Dooce and Flagrantdisregard. ToolUrl provides additional data points that help me compare these two blog sites beyond links. For example, I discover that Dooce has a higher page rank and thus is more likely to show up slightly in relevant searches. In addition, when checking the keyword popularity for the two blogs on the phrase "mom blog" Dooce shows up number four on Google, while Flagrantdisregard does not crack the top 100 results.
This is just a quick overview of the data you can get from ToolUrl. There are other similar resources out there, but this one is very easy to use and inviting. As more eyeballs migrate to the Web and down the Long Tail of content, PR pros must take a broader view of measurement. We should use every tool available to us to measure the online impact of a PR campaign. Search engine positioning is something almost nobody in PR focuses on, yet it's critical. It offers rich data speaks reams about how discoverable a site is on the Web and it's one key way brand awareness will be evaluated in the years ahead if not already.
