SEO Tools
I have attempted to list here some of the tools that I find useful in the practice of SEO. There are many others and there may well be many better tools, but these work for me.
If you find some tools that you think are better than those listed here by all means drop over to the WebWorkshop forum and lets talk about it.
Keyword Research Tools
Keyword research should be the very first thing you do in your optimization process so lets start with a few keyword optimization tools:
- Overture keywords suggestion tool
This free tool uses the Overture search results for the past 30 days from all sources of Overture search including partners, Idiosyncrasies include lumping singular and plural forms of words under the singular term which can be make it difficult to choose which form to target. - Adwords keyword sandbox tool
The free Adwords suggestion tool takes its results from Google searches and is the best for finding Google related information. - Wordtracker keywords
suggestion tool
This is a commercial tool which takes its data from metacrawlers so that the results are based on searches from many different search engines. There is a very limited free trial available, but for the best results you need to subscribe at prices ranging from $8 per day to $150 per year. This is the most complete and most flexible tool available but my advice is to ignore the KEI results which it gives. - Digital
point keyword suggestion tool
This is a very handy free tool which gives partial results from both the Wordtracker and Overture databases. Very handy for quick searches - Seasonal Keywords tool is a tool which overcomes the limitations of many keyword research tools, in that it is a fixed database of over nine billion terms over a one year time frame which enables you to identify and target seasonal keywords that other tools miss most of the time. While this appears to be a free tool it is in fact by subscription if you want to get all the results.
Backlinks Tools
Backlinks contain anchor text and are an important consideration in any ranking campaign. You will need tools to find sites to exchange links with, tools to verify the number of links a competitor has and tools to verify that reciprocal links remain reciprocal.
- SEOelite is very useful tool to source reciprocal links.
- Backline Analyzer is a great tool to use for either finding the details of your competitors backlinks or for seeing who is really linking to your site according to Yahoo.
Ranking Tools
Once you start to rank you should check your rankings regularly to make sure that they are not slipping or disappearing. This soon becomes a chore doing it by hand, but Google has been adamant in not allowing the use of automated ranking checkers, which do save a lot of time. Here are a few solution:
- WebPosition 3.5
A new version of an old standard which has great features to automate ranking searches, prepare reports and even send them to clients automatically. This version uses the Google API interface to get the rankings which should mean that it is not a problem with Google, since each user has to sign up and receive his own code to use it. You are limited to 1000 search queries on Google per day, but that should be enough for most of us. It should be noted that strictly speaking the Google API is provided only for personal, not commercial useage.
Webposition will allow you to search for multiple keyword rankings on up to 200 search engines in a fully automated manner.
- PRsearch is
a handy free tool that will allow you to semi-automate
many of your SEO chores. Rankings allows you to search
for as many as 15 keywords at a time and for positions up to 1000 results
quickly and easily, but is restricted to one domain at
a time and one major search engine at a time.
Other modules allow you to determine the number of backlinks a URL has in several engines, the PR of a page, and and another will give you some nice lists of keywords together with the number of searches done. Another nice feature is a Google search with the PR of the results page showing alongside the first ten results with the number of IBLs at the right hand side. You can try this search tool in Google mode by putting a search term in the box below. You will be taken to a results page which has access to that bunch of nice tools across the top.:
Miscellaneous Tools
There are other tools that come in handy from time to time. Among those I have found useful are:
- Search engine relationship chart will show you at a glance which search engines supply results to or get results from another search engine or directory.
- SimSpider looks at your page from the viewpoint of a spider and lets you see how spiders see your page. Useful for checking why your pages are not being spidered.
- Server Header Checker Allows you to view the headers returned by any server, enabling you to see if your server is set up right.
- Google Dance Tool lets you see the results of searches on 54 different Google data centers, which suprisingly are not always in sync.
- Copyscape is a handy site that will allow you to search for plagarised pages from your site. You may be surprised what this will reveal.
- Backlink Checker will give you a fast answer on the backlinks of any page or site in both Google and Yahoo
- Keyword Lizard can be a great help in formulating Adwords and Overture keywords lists.
- Links Estimator will give you an estimate of how many anchor text links you will need to rank on a given keyword together with a table showing how many links the top sites have in the major search engines. Not exact but yields a perhaps 70% accurate estimate
- Anchor text report tool will show the anchor text of links pointing to a given site with reports from both Yahoo and Google. A bit slow but the results may be worth it.
- Google backlink checker will give you many more backlinks than you can find with the Google link: search and will show you the PR of the linking page, but will still not show all your links.
- RSS feed converter will provide you with the code you need to display results from any valid RSS feed in Javascript, PHP or Iframes in minutes.
This is the first preliminary list, If you have any suggestions for additions please do so through our contact page.
