Best of 2008: SEO Tools
What are the best tools for analyzing your website text? How can you view your website the way search engines see it? Which URL shorteners work best? How can you use free Google tools to benchmark your search marketing performance against your competition?
Find the answers to these questions and others here in more of the best blog posts and sites for SEO tools.
5+ SEO Text Analyzers for SEO Diagnostics & Copywriting by Search Engine Journal
The always brilliant and resourceful Ann Smarty here reviews several different for analyzing keyword usage and prominence (a.g., the SEOworkers SEO Analysis Tool), readability (TextAnalyser.net), heading tag analysis (Fangs) and more. Another of her articles from last year worth bookmarking is 3 Tools to Generate and Manage Keyword Phases, which describes three tools to help with the task of generating large keyword lists.
SEOpen: The SEO Firefox Extension
SEOpen is a Firefox extension that combines several helpful SEO functions into one tool, including Google / Yahoo /MSN backlinks, Pagerank check, Alexa overview, DMOZ inclusion, keyword density and an HTML validator.
Traffic Travis is very helpful free SEO tool for keyword analysis, backlinks and on-page SEO. I’ve found its page analysis tools (for keyword density, headings, meta tags etc.) to be particularly valuable, and have even sent before-and-after page analysis reports to clients.
The Benefits And Pitfalls of URL Shorteners by SEOmoz
While TinyURL may be the most popular URL shortener, it’s by no means the only or best option. Jane Copland reviews a baker’s dozen alternatives here—such as Snipr (great for tracking), NSFW.in (great for safety), icanhaz (amusing) bit.ly (strong overall)—and explaining the strong and weak points of each.
How To Walk A Mile In A Search Engine’s Shoes by Search Engine Land
Matt McGee explains how to use the search engines’ webmaster tools, the site:yourdomain.com search command, and free third-party SEO tools like SEO Browser to determine how search engines view your site. This can help identify and eliminate issues with crawling, duplicate content and other factors.
SEO Tools from webconfs.com
Webconfs.com offers an impressive collection of helpful, free SEO tools for functions such as analyzing backlink anchor text to determine the quality of links to your site, building backlinks, checking keyword density, generating keyword lists and rewriting dynamic URLs.
SEO Tools from Site Submit
Site Submit provides an array of free and fee-based SEO tools including a meta tag generator, link checker, keyword ranking tracker, site search tool, keyword density tool, website testing wizard and more.
Free benchmarking tools you should be using by iMedia Connection
What’s important during an economic downturn isn’t year-over-year performance, which can fall off due entirely to factors beyond your control, but rather your performance vs. industry peers. With that in mind, Michael McVeigh of Zeta Interactive explains how to use free Google Tools—Google Trends, Media Planner and Insights for Search—for competitive intelligence on online benchmarking.
Counting links the easy way by Searchlight
Brian R. Brown, consultant and natural search marketing strategist for Netconcepts, reviews Link Counter, a simple tool to help evaluate links on any website. Brown writes that he “absolutely loves” the tool “both for what it does and its simplicity. Links play a very important part in SEO, both internal links as well as external links.” Link Counter shows you which links on a site are live, broken, 301 redirected, HTML or JavaScript-based.
Spying On Your Paid Search Competitors by Search Engine Land
Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media shows how to use tools like Compete, Alexa and SpyFu to get a better understanding of your competitors’ positioning and online marketing strategies, and use that intelligence to fine-tune your own market approach.
THE Best Link Analyzer Tool by Search Marketing Blog Online
Jon Clark raves about the Link Diagnosis tool, which provides detailed data on any site’s backlinks including Pagerank, anchor text and nofollow information.
Website Grader Gives Out Free SEO Tips by TechCrunch
Erick Schonfeld gives high marks to the Website Grader tool from HubSpot. Simply type in any URL and (optionally) a couple of competitors, and this tool provides a very useful and detailed report on the SEO quality of the site, including metadata, domain information, Google Pagerank, social bookmarks, and an overall score.
Rank Checker is a simple but slick Firefox plugin from SEO Book that easily check the current rank for any website, on multiple key phrases, across Google, Yahoo and MSN. Two attributes of Rank Checker that it set apart from other position checking tools are 1) the ability to load a long list of keywords at once then let the tool run in the background, and 2) the fact that it doens’t just return a site’s rank for a particular keyword, but also the URL of the specific page that has that rank. That makes Rank Check one of a handful of must-have SEO tools to me.
KeywordEnvy is a rank checking tool that lets you track the position of your website, and competitive sites, on a defined set of keywords over time. The tool provides both raw data and graphical reports. It seems to work better in IE than in Firefox.
Keyword Tool updated with search volume data by Inside AdWords
The mysterious Trevor Claiborne of the Inside AdWords crew at Google announced the inclusion (finally!) of average monthly search volume figures in Google’s keyword tool, an overdue but welcome enhancement that makes the tool much more valuable.
Cool Tools & Firefox Extensions for SEO Enthusiasts by SEO People
“Link ninja” Paul Teitelman reviews several of his favorite SEO tools and plugins, including HTML Playground (a free tool that helps simplify HTML coding), SEOpen (a sort of SEO Swiss Army knife that shows Google backlinks, Yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer and other items) and SearchStatus (Firefox extension that displays Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking, along with a keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting and other functions).
Traffic Marks: Terrific New Linkbuilding Tool by Small Business Search Marketing
Online marketing consutant Matt McGee praises Traffic Marks, a tool that helps identify the top authority sites for link building by showing which sites link to the top 10 sites most frequently for any given keyword. The free tool works fine for broad keywords, but finding link sites for very specific or long-tail terms may require a subscription to the fee-based version at a hefty $400/year.
SheerSEO – Track Rankings And Index Pages by SearchNewz
Navneet Kaushal details the benefits of SheerSEO, a comprehensive SEO tool that tracks search position on Google and Yahoo, backlinks, Pagerank, keyword density and more.
Online SEO Tools – the Ultimate Collection by Search Engine Journal
If, for some strange and unfathomable reason, you were only able to bookmark on blog post about SEO tools, this piece from Ann Smarty would be it. Ann provides helpful, objective comparisons and reviews of more than 60 SEO tools across 15 different categories such as keyword research, on-site analysis, rank checking and reporting.
Tags: Ann Smarty, best SEO tools, bit.ly, Erick Schonfeld, HubSpot, KeywordEnvy, link ninja, Matt McGee, Rank Checker, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, SEO Book, SEOmoz, Snipr, TechCrunch
