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 theseo-shop forum and lets talk about it.
Keyword Research Tools
While keyword research should be the very first thing you do in your optimization process the landscape is always changing. Googles recent changes to the way they display results has resulted in some tools going the way of the abacus (may still work, but not as well as modern methods) here are some that I personally have reveiwed and some that I use and even sell:
- Adwords keyword suggestion tool
The free Adwords suggestion tool takes its results from Google searches and is IMO the best data curently available. Google's huge worlwide reach and search share, simply stated, provide the most extensive database for most searches world wide. The date is all there, but it it not terribly user friendly and since it ony provides competition information in terms of the number of competing sites, you will have to augment these results either with all-in-one programs, custome scripts or lots of sweat equity. This program is unique however in that it provides seperate data for each country in which Google has a dedicated search engine. - 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 a fair tool, in many respects, but it does not provide dats which of itself will show you the traffic you can expect for such terms. Also If you are serious about SEO my advice is to ignore the KEI results which it gives. - Ranking Tracker is a ranking tool as you might expect, but it has an inbuilt access to the Google Adwords tool which is very handy. I have reviewed this toll here>>>>
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 has changed
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.
