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March 30th, 2010
12 Stellar SEO Tools
Analyze your site to get the best results
When you’re ready to get a good look at how your site is stacked up for SEO success, there is no shortage of SEO tools that you can use to analyze your site inside and out. The tools listed below are some of the best of the plethora of great SEO analysis tools available today.
See your site like search engines do
One of the most basic and necessary SEO tools is one that allows you to see your pages the way a search engine would, because search engines may not always “see” your site the same way we do when we visit it with a web or mobile browser. Two tools are listed below—the first one is a simple check of your site in search results, and the second is a tool that you can add on to your Firefox browser.
Search Engine Cached Pages
Cost: Free
Most search engines provide a “Cached” link with their search results, which allows you to see what the search engine indexed on its last visit to the page. Our blog post “Is Your Site Invisible?” provides details on how to determine if the search engines are seeing your site, and what exactly they are seeing.
Firefox User Agent Switcher
Cost: Free
The User Agent switcherallows you to switch your user agent to make it look like you’re a search engine visiting the site, rather than a person using a web browser. The User Agent Switcher will only work if you use the Firefox web browser.
When you’re done viewing the site as a search engine, remember to change your user agent back to Default User Agent.
Keyword research and management tools
Doing keyword research allows you to get an idea of the competitive space, guide your site structure, and gives you the information you need to laser-target each individual page on your site for the most relevant and popularly used terms for each page.
Keyword Discovery
Cost: Free trial. Subscriptions from $69.95/mo (or $599.40/yr) – $495.00/mo (or $4652.00/yr)
Keyword Discovery is a comprehensive keyword research tool that includes features like historical trends, competitor keywords, keyword effectiveness and price-per-click (PPC) bid values.
Wordtracker
Cost: Free trial. Subscription $59/month or $329/year
Wordtracker is a keyword management tool that provides search popularity with several filters like misspellings, plurals and U.S. or U.K. searches.
SEO Book
Cost: Free w/ registration
SEO Book enables you to enter a keyword about which you’re interested in learning search patterns and trends. The tool returns estimated search popularity from Wordtracker and the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing) for that term and popular searches with that term or phrase in it. It also returns Yahoo! Search Suggest results, and more.
Google Adwords
Cost: Free
Another long-time popular free keyword research tool, the Google Keyword Tool lets you enter a keyword and determine the search popularity in Google (only) for that term and related terms. Results show estimated search volume globally and locally, plus advertiser competition on each term.
Site Analysis Tools
At the heart of any SEO audit is the on-site analysis. The following tools unearth the kinks and bottlenecks that your site might be encountering, by crawling your site, reporting errors, providing analysis, and often suggesting action items, as well.
SearchCLU
Cost: Varies, depends on domain size and number of users
SearchCLU is an industrial strength site analysis tool that crawls a site or network and reports back detailed information on the SEO attributes and search engine stats, both site-wide and at the page level.
Google Webmaster Central
Cost: Free
Google Webmaster Central allows you to see the data and information that Google sees when it crawls your site. It helps find missing or duplicate meta tags and title tags, crawl errors in web, mobile and news search, and non-indexable content, and so forth
HubSpot Website Grader
Cost: Free trial. Multi-functional products from $250/month to $15,000/year. Call for pricing.
This product lets you enter your URL and receive an SEO optimization grade plus a full report of any issues found, plus advice for those issues, such as site content (blogs, indexed pages, readability level), meta data, image summaries, page analysis, domain info, link info, promotion and conversion assessment and suggestions, and competitor analysis.
Link analysis tools
Inlinks are the crown jewels of SEO. At its most basic, an inlink is like a vote to your site. Site owners strive to have a high number of keyword-rich inlinks from relevant quality sites to help boost their visibility in search engine results.
Yahoo SiteExplorer
Cost: Free
Yahoo Site Explorer provides inlink information to a page or s site. You can check your own site and your competitors’, look at links from all pages or just from external sites (not including links to your site from your own site), filter by links to one page or the entire site, and export results.
SEOmoz Open Site Explorer
Cost: Limited version is free. Full version with $79/month-$229/month SEOmoz membership.
Open Site Explorer is a good-looking and powerful inlink analysis tool, with several layers of link data and filtering. You can sort Linking pages by nofollow and 301 filters, see pages with the most links, view the domain authority of the domains that link to your site, see the anchor text that is used most often in links to your site, and get even more data with the Pro version.
SEOmoz LinkScape
Cost: Limited version free. Full version with $79/mo-$229/mo SEOmoz membership.
LinkScape layers calculations on regular link data to provide you with link performance and page scores, and the ability to dig into the details to determine the quality of links, find link acquisition targets and measure the success of viral marketing and link bait campaigns.
Even More SEO Tools
SEOs love tools, and while the tools mentioned above are some of the best tools out there, they barely skim the surface. A few other awesome SEO tools out there worth mentioning are:
- Quarkbase—Shows site traffic data, similar sites, social comments, people, description, social popularity and much more
- Web Developer Toolbar—A heavy-duty Firefox add-on that provides page information and tools to alter the view of the page to suit your needs
- Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit—The Site Analysis module, Robots Exclusion module and Sitemaps and Site Indexes module let you perform detailed analysis and offer recommendations and editing tools for managing your Robots and Sitemaps files
- Link Research Tools—Offers Common Outbound Links Tools, Common Backlink Tool, Backlink and Anchortext tool, Juice tool, and Strongest Subpages tool
- Bruce Clay SEO Tools—Offers SEOToolSet, Dynamic Site Mapping, LinkMaps, and PathMaps + SEO, PPC, analytics, design and branding training
- Raven Internet Marketing Tools—A suite of 19 tools that allow you to manage SEO, social media, conduct competitive keyword research and create reports
- WeBuildPages SEO Tools—A plethora of SEO tools that includes Header Checker Tool, Search Combination Tool, Keyword Density Analysis Tool, Spider Viewer, Tune Up Report, Website Structure Analysis and several more
Know of any amazing SEO tools not listed here? Drop us a comment and let us know!
— Laura Lippay. Visit her at Lip Service.
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67 Comments Add your own
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11. Karen Clark | March 30th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
There is a Firefox add-on called “Wordtracker SEO Blogger” that opens a sidebar where you type in keywords while you are posting anything anywhere, and it gives you keyword ranking. Then you add the ones you want to use in your post and it tracks how many times you’ve used it as you write. Helpful for creating SEO’d blog posts, tweets, fan page posts etc.!
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20. Caliban | March 31st, 2010 at 12:43 am
This is a great post, there’s lots of tools I allready know and love however there are a few (like search CLU) that I haven’t.
I just wish I had a bigger monthly budget to get off of them…
21. Peter | March 31st, 2010 at 12:43 am
One more tool for your list, the SEO Workbench from http://www.interleado.com.
Targeted at website owners and online marketing agencies/web designers looking for an SEO automated analysis and reporting service.
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26. Web Traffic | March 31st, 2010 at 4:24 am
A very good list of tools, I have been working in SEO for a while and some I even had to take a closer look at!
Thanks for sharing
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36. Amit | March 31st, 2010 at 12:35 pm
In addition to all the free tools discussed above, there is a free tool at http://www.seo-browser.com/ which lets you see what major bots like google, yahoo, msn see in your site. Its a web based tool, so you don’t need to have a certain kind of browser.
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41. Prudential West | April 1st, 2010 at 9:57 am
SEOmoz has some of the greatest tools and Open Site Explorer is probably my favorite.
42. Alison Groves | April 2nd, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Appreciate the Raven shoutout, Laura! We actually pull in some of the keyword research tools you mentioned, Google AdWords and Wordtracker into our toolset as well.
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46. Seth | April 6th, 2010 at 11:34 am
Wow, what a great set of Tools. Wish you could help us a little more with a similar guide to Pay Per Click tools, aside from YSM, of course.
Take care, thanks for the insight
Seth
Vacation Rentals, Hotels, Bed and Breakfasts
47. SEO | April 6th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Very nice article.. worth reading it. Thank you for posting such a nice post about seo
48. Internet marketing home study course | April 8th, 2010 at 5:34 am
Really great set of tools they are and i love the wordtraker as it delivers what it promises but for last few months i am using MNF tool and it works great and helped me a lot to rank for keywords with enough traffic to burn newbies like me.
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50. martina | April 15th, 2010 at 9:50 am
I´m working with a tool called SEOaholic and I´m really satisfied. Try it out!
http://seoaholic.com
51. Today’s Most Important &hellip | April 19th, 2010 at 12:51 am
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53. Dan - E Cigarette Web | April 27th, 2010 at 4:38 am
Some really great tools here..well done for collating them all in one place!
54. Jennifer at Shop Cancerversary | April 27th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Wow, just when you think you know it all, there’s something else to be learned about optimizing your web site. Thanks for the info!
55. Dan | April 27th, 2010 at 10:47 am
I have used many of the tools listed in this post and I would agree that these are great tools. This blog definately provides great credible information.
56. Jesse | April 27th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Most of these tools are extremely beneficial and very helpful.
57. hostgator | April 28th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
The ironic thing is that the Overture free tool was an industry leader and very popular back in the day – and certainly would have been up on that list as well.
I will never understand why one would just let the Overture keyword tool just fade away after being a leading tool that led the keyword explosion… I chock that up as missed opportunity…
58. lungguy | April 28th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Very Helpful!
59. Chutikan | April 29th, 2010 at 6:49 am
Great tip, Thank you
60. Lessons for Social Media &hellip | April 29th, 2010 at 9:43 am
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61. Amin | April 30th, 2010 at 5:22 am
I am very impressed with the article I have just read. I wish the writer can continue to provide so much practical information and unforgettable experience to the readers. There is not much to state except the following universal truth: Figuring out why it doesn’t work is almost always more fun as using it. I will be back. Bookmark!
Amin
62. Birmingham SEO | May 4th, 2010 at 5:10 am
outstanding SEO tools… this will highly helpful to SEO members who were doing SEO..Right now I have bookmarked this post for future consider…Thank you for sharing such a nice post..
63. iddaa | May 29th, 2010 at 2:03 am
i like it.. thank.
64. iddaa | May 29th, 2010 at 2:05 am
what is searchclu analytics. ??
65. iddaa | May 29th, 2010 at 2:06 am
seomoz is very expensive.
66. Alex | June 3rd, 2010 at 2:18 am
Thanks for sharing with us.
Here i found an one seo tool like google analytics. In that we no need to add any code inside our website. you can also get it from here http://www.analyticsseo.com/
67. nuclei | June 28th, 2010 at 6:01 am
Another tool for backlink analysis that is already proven: http://linkrep.seofox.com
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