Lee Dodd is a forum guru and the mastermind behind the Elite Retreat, an event that bought Lee together with Shoemoney, Aaron Wall, and Dave Taylor for a two day seminar for 35 people who pony up $4,850 each to attend.
Before heading off to the Elite Retreat, Lee sent me a ReviewMe request to review his new Keyword Tracker service. Lee is the second Elite Retreat leader who has asked me to review one of their products (read my review of Aaron’s SEO Book here). I’m expecting a ReviewMe request from Shoemoney and Dave Taylor any day now. 
EarnersForum Keyword Tracker
The Keyword Tracker allows you to track both keyword ranking and backlinks in the Google search engine. The tool is absolutely free to use and will help webmasters become more efficient and keep a better watch on their SEO progress. Instead of checking your rankings by entering your keywords into the Google search engine, the Keyword Tracker will do it all for you and display the information in an easy to understand format.
To use the tracker, you need to do two things. The first is you need to get a Google API key if you don’t already have one. Without the API key, the tracker doesn’t work. You can get a free key at api.google.com.
Once you get the key, you need to sign up for EarnersForum – only forums members are allowed to use the Keyword Tracker. Membership in Lee’s EarnersForum is free so you don’t have anything to lose. In fact, the forum is a great resource of webmaster information. The forum has been around for only six months but already it has over 5,500 members and 85,000 posts.
To use the Tracker you just input the keyword and the URL of your site. The tracker will tell you the rank of that keyword for that URL. As you can see from the above screen shot, I’m ranked number 1 for John Chow and number 2 for Super Corvette. You can add as many keywords as you like and the tracker will keep a running rank on the keywords and tell you if you’re moving up or down.
Tracking Backlinks
In addition to keeping track on your keywords, the tracker can also track the number of backlinks to your sites. You can enter as many sites as you wish, including the competition if you want to keep track of them.
The API takes a few days to ramp up the tracking. At the beginning, all the sites show zero backlinks. However, as information from the API start updating, it will catch up and start to show real time results. The information for both keywords and backlinks can also be display as a graph.
I’ve been using the Keyword Tracker for the past 5 days and I’ve added to my list of stat pages that I check everyday. It’s a really nice webmaster tool and I congratulate Lee for coming out with it. All your SEO junkies will want to check it out right away.
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