There are several excellent applications (and some not so good) available via the App Store that are designed to save you time and effort, hopefully increasing the effectiveness of your on and off-site optimisation. There are also apps focused on improving your use of Google Analytics and PPC campaigns.

iphone pic 300x199 SEO and SEM Applications for the iPhone

Picture Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/williamhook/2830319467/  Copyright: William Hook

Some of the apps are paid, some are free, and as with most things, some are drastically better than others. Here’s a brief overview of some of the apps I’ve come across:

ANALYTICS

A free application, analytics is pretty much what you’d expect it to be; it allows you access to you Google Analytics account from your iPhone. It’s a fairly simplified version of analytics, it only displays your Dashboard, Visitors and Traffic Sources, but it’s free so you can’t really complain.

DOMAIN TRACKER

Domain Tracker is a free application that tracks your domains and gives you an up to date records of their Google PageRank and Alexa Rank. It doesn’t do much else, but seems to be able to cope with this one job just fine.

SERPS

SERPS is another free app.  It allows you to add your domain, followed by selecting a keyword and language. It then gives you the search engine results pages based on the information you inputted. It’s not great to be honest.  It often crashes and half the time I’m not really sure what it’s doing. But that could just be me being stupid … you can never completely rule it out!

iSEO

iSEO is a paid app (currently £1.99) that performs keyword density analysis and tell you your page rank in several different search engines. It’s one of the better apps I’ve come across and would probably be worth getting for most SEO engineers.

PEAR ANALYTICS

Pear Analytics allows you to ‘analyse’ any website, apparantly. I can’t remember if the app was free or not but if it wasn’t it damn well should have been. It might work brilliantly but I just typed in www.freshegg.com and hit analyse and it gave me the loading symbol for five minutes, then crashed and returned me to the iPhone dashboard. I really wouldn’t recommend this one.

SEM CALC.

The SEM CALC is designed and distributed by a company called Elite SEM: Search Engine Marketing. The application is designed to help search marketers regardless of location when trying to figure out CPM to CPA, CPC to CPM, etc. The application gives you the following calculators:

CPM Calculator
CPM to CPA Conversion Calculator
Banner/Email Campaign CPA Calculator
CPC to CPM Calculator
Max CPC for PPC

It’s a little complicated to navigate but it’s not bad for a free app and probably quite useful when managing several PPC campaigns.

SEO ADVISOR

The SEO Advisor app costs £1.19 and is designed to check the basic optimisation elements of a website; highlighting the obstacles and missing elements depending on the keywords you input. A nice design and fairly useful application – not the best one I’ve come across but not bad for the price.

SEO SUBMIT PRO

SEO Submit Pro is a cheap application at just 59p and, according the app, allows you to perform search engine optimisation directly from your iPhone. This is a fairly bold statement considering what it actually does is simply submit your site URL to a number of search engines (including Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc). But it does do that quite quickly and would probably be a useful tool for some people.

PRO SEO

This one’s a little more expensive at £5.99, but Pro SEO is a more useful and usable app than most of the ones mentioned previously. The application used a special browser (very similar in look and feel to Safari) and boasts a source code analysis feature which allows you to break down and view the source code of any page by meta tags, total tag counts, title tag and a view of the underlying code.
The app also features body text analysis, which allows you to view stop words, the amount of keyword phrases present and also let you look at the anchors, link text and the alt (and image) tags of any given web page. All in all I’d say this was a nice little app, if  a little on the expensive side.

With more and more companies and individuals beginning to understand the importance of search engine optimisation and marketing, SEO apps seem to be coming thick and fast and I’m sure as the discipline progresses, developers will come up with some excellent applications for link building and on site search engine optimisation.