Here’s a cool piece of software from Neil Shearing for building back links to your web site.  It’s great at finding blogs you are interested in that do NOT use the “nofollow” attribute and leaving comments.  At first I thought this was something of a spammer’s tool, but it actually makes blogging more efficient, while helping to market your web site.

Get your own copy of this blog commenting software by clicking here!  The best part is … right now it’s free.

I stumbled across a whopper of an article on search engine ranking factors on SEOMoz.org.  After having read a ton of advice on how to get pages ranked, it is great to see a quantified list of items and their relative importance to the search engines.

Since I’m still figuring out what it takes to move up in the search engines, this article helps alot by showing the relative importance of each kind of SEO action.  Since there’s a lot of “noise” concerning good SEO practices, this makes it easier to filter-out the junk and only use techniques that will actually pay off.

Best of all, the contributors for this article are all SEO experts, so there’s more than one opinion being expressed for each of the tactics being discussed.

Kudos to Andrew Hansen for “The Best SEO Advice I’ Ever Received.”  That’s where I stumbled across SEOMoz.org.

Here’s a slick trick that will give you a fast peek at what Yahoo! has in their index for your site.

Go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and enter your site’s URL. After Yahoo! returns the page, make that page a Bookmark in your browser.

Anytime you hit the bookmark, Yahoo! will retrieve the current information, and display it.

Viola, a fast way to check Yahoo’s index and also see what incoming links are listed for your site. This may not be the most elegant solution, but it’s fast and free.

For Google, in their search bar enter “site:www.yourdomain.com” for a list of indexed pages. For a list of sites linking to your domain, use “link:yourdomain.com”. (These additional operators “inurl:”, “allinurl:”, “intitle:”, “allintitle:”, “info:” and “related:” also contain useful information. See http://www.google.com/help/operators.html.

Mat Cutts (from Google) discusses the best ways to keep Google from indexing pages you may NOT want in their search results. If you have a download page you don’t want everyone seeing, watch this.