New and Updated SEO Tools for 2011

Here's a roundup of various new or updated tools from around the web.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Microsoft has unleashed a substantially improved Bing Webmaster Tools. Among other highlights in the litany of new features are: the ability to tell the Bing crawler to slow down indexing during specific hours; an all-new Index Explorer tool that lets you see a more up-to-date version of Bing's indexing details, improved performance of the tool, and more extensive data; and the ability to give access (in read-only, read-write, or admin access levels) to other users.

Raven Tools

Raven Tools, which provides SEO and Social Media tools, has integrated the Google Webmaster Tools API, allowing users to access a wide variety of additional resources. This includes adding and verifying sites, updating preferred domain settings, viewing related keywords (and adding them directly to the Raven Tools Keyword Manager)

, viewing GWT messages and crawling issues, and viewing/adding sitemaps.

SEO for Firefox

This trusted tool from SEO Book has been updated for compatibility with Firefox 4, improved speed, increased compatibility with the "new Google search result format" (presumably social search elements), and some bug fixes.

New Tools Worth Using:

The Google +1 Button

Google has taken to the SERPs to combat Bing's partnership with Facebook and the intergation of Facebook likes with search results. This "like"-like button can be added to websites by webmasters, and the full Google experiment allows anyone with a Google account to +1 a page directly from the SERP. Beyond promoting the site to a top position when an individual in the searcher's contact network has previously +1'd a page, Google has confirmed that +1s are a ranking factor.

SEOMoz SERP Analysis Tool

The long-awaited SERPs Analysis Tool has been released. While it's supposedly still in "early form" (lacking some UI features and data that they're planning to implement in the coming weeks), it's still one of the most thorough tools around. The tool analyzes the results for the sites that pull on the SERP for any given keyword search, with evaluated metrics including numerous factors in the following categories: URL link metrics, on-page optimization, domain name-keyword match, URL anchor text metrics, and domain-wide link metrics.