Posting will be exceptionally light this Friday and weekend as I will be spending time in Whistler, BC (a 4hr14min drive from Seattle according to Google maps).

My weekend will primarily consist of hiking, eating and sleeping - very enjoyable activities. When I get back, however, SEOmoz will have some exciting new developments in the weeks to come. We are launching several new tools, including a topic extractor that can be used to analyze web pages, a link pricing tool that can help determine what a reasonable price to pay for a specific link will be, and a link finding tool that uses some advanced deduction to find the best pages to get links from in order to rank highly for a specific keyword phrase.

Right now these tools are all in beta development stages, including the long-awaited related terms tool. I expect completion of the tools themselves in 3-5 weeks, along with a new server to more quickly handle requests. Once the new tools and new server are in place, SEOmoz will also offer a paid version of the tools that can be used to "jump" to the front of the queue line so to speak and cut down on wait times. The free tools will all remain as before, and may even get an upgrade in speed as we have completed some technology that queries much more quickly than before.

In anticipation for this event, I advise frequent tool users to get a Yahoo! API key - available for free. We will be requiring these in order to comply with Yahoo's TOS and to save thousands of minutes querying each day.

If you are interested in signing up early for the paid tools and possibly being a beta tester, just send me an email. I probably won't check it over the weekend, but I will be responding to requests next week.