I've talked often on this blog about the importance of the online medium to communicators. Clearly, one aspect of this is the visibility of the sites hosting the press releases, podcasts and blog posts we all want to disseminate.

I came across a neat tool to analyze site visibility to search engines (Search Engine Optimization, or SEO) in a post on Steve Rubel's fine Micro Persuasion blog.

It's called ToolUrl.

Steve writes:

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.

I've been playing with ToolUrl a bit and it seems quite useful. While SEO is not one of the areas I focus on in this blog -- there are blogs and entire firms devoted solely to this area -- it is something that's clearly worthwhile for communicators of all types to examine.

If you've got a site you are counting on to disseminate marketing messages or other communications, I'd click on ToolUrl and see how the site performs.