These are 10 of the top SEO tools the we use everyday on clients websites to get maximum results from our search engine marketing campaigns.
1. Compete Site Analytics- Compete gives you accurate data of monthly unique visitors to a website. This is extremely useful for competitive analysis of competitors, and also sizing up a prospective clients site for an SEO proposal. We have found it to be very accurate when we compare with Google analytics, or AWstats.
2. Google analytics- Every serious SEO or webmaster needs to be running Google free analytics software on their sites. The point of SEO is not rankings, or page rank its visitors! Stop guessing and start making statistically informed SEO decisions so that your effort can go into the things that are paying off.
3. SEOQuake Toolbar- This Firefox plugin is one of my favorite SEO tools at a glance I can see a site Page Rank, backlinks, Alexa ranking, domain age, and keyword density. The best part is it’s free.
4. Multiple Datacenter Search- Honestly Google does so much in the way of personalized search, geolocation, etc. that it can be hard to get the straight dope on where your ranking. The multiple datacenter search will show you search results for multiple google data centers so you can get a better feel for your rankings.
5. Wordtracker Firefox Plugin- If your like me you love Firefox for all the great extensions! One such extension is the Wordtracker Firefox Plugin you can see search volumes for search phrases on the fly without leaving your current page. Not as accurate as Google but great for naming Blog posts and making quick keyword decisions.
6. Google Keywords- The best overall free keyword research tool in my opinion. You can quickly be given hundreds of keyword suggesstions by entering keyword phrases, or by entering yours or competitors web address. This tool will show you monthly search volumes for each key word or phrase, and all suggested keywords can be exported to csv.
7. 301 Redirect Checker- 301 are useful for two reasons first so that search engines don’t see http://yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com as two sites. Also if a page moves the page rank can be reassigned to the new page through a 301 redirect. Make sure 301 redirects are set up correctly with this tool.
8. Yahoo Siteexplorer- Google notoriously under reports backlinks, and only gives you a sampling. With site explorer you can see what backlinks you have, and even better you can see competitors backlinks, and use those sites in your link building efforts. The best part is that it will export to a tab separated values file that can used in Excel.
9. XML Sitemap Generator- XML sitemaps are important to get your pages quickly indexed in a few minutes this tool will index your site up to 500 pages, and generate an xml sitemap. Be sure and sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.
10. Google Position Checker- With this tool you can see what position you rank in Google for a particular keyword up to the first 1,000 results.
Bonus! Backlink Builder- This tool searches your submitted keywords for sites that accept links directories etc.
This is another excellent article. I am sure that it is going to help a bunch of beginning web masters.
Thanks for your encouragement. We will continue to strive towards putting resources out there for everyone – from the newb to the seasoned SEO Master.
I use SEO For Firefox over SEOQuake. Is it just me or my IP was temporarily banned when I tried SEOQuake?
-Kai Lo
Twitter @lomak1985
I experienced some of the same problems. I still use SEOQuake, but I modified the settings. You see, when you use SEOQuake with its default settings, every time you access a webpage, you are are requesting Google, Yahoo, and all the other items in the bar to pull and present information. While this is very useful, it REALLY increases your requests to Google – which they don’t like.
They see you as a spammer/hacker/person that doesn’t really know what they are doing, so they block you out. I am going to write up a post here soon about that very issue, and walk you through how to resolve it. But the basic jist of it is this – change the settings so that it doesn’t make the requests on page load, but rather when the desired information is directly clicked on.
Thanks!
Some I need to check out I see.
I currently use statcounter, so far no one has been able to clearly tell me what GA offers, that SC does not.
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..Hello & Welcome To The All New – DennisEdell.com/DirectSalesWebMarketing.com Merged – Direct Sales Coaching Blog! =-.
Don’t forget about proper silo structuring, good link building and good content.
Organic SEO takes a lot of time.
.-= jerry´s last blog ..Building A Relationship With Your Readers =-.
@Jerry thank you for the input we were trying to focus more on tools than methods but we will definitely focus on these three and others in the future. -will
Great list. I use a lot of those tools on a regular basis. I haven’t heard of Compete Site Analytics before, so I’ll definitely have to check that one out.
.-= Rick´s last blog ..SEO Copywriting Resources =-.
I personally use SEOquake and yahoo site explorer the most. For keyword research, nothing beaths the google keyword tools such as the google insights, adwords keyword tool and google suggest and wonderwheel.
.-= Ron Leyba´s last blog ..Webthesurfi Rugs Webdesign =-.
I too am a Firefox nut and have all those plugins installed. You’ve written up an excellent list of SEO tools. I also use another SEO Firefox tool called SEO for Firefox, which can be toggled on and off to show loads of SEO data for particular websites, including PR, Alexa, etc. I love using these tools. Don’t what I’d do without them!
.-= Thomas Forever Singing´s last blog ..Temporary Post – Please Ignore =-.
didnt knew about SEOQuake. I have installed it right now and looks good, but still I dont underestand a few things (like the backlinks report).
Just bookmarked this post. I think I still have a lot of things to learn in SEO…thanks Ron Leyba for the tip…hehehe…
.-= Empress´s last blog ..Lenovo’s First Product and Press Launching in Cebu =-.
Nice article. It is really helpful for the person like me who is good in Real Estate but bad in SEO. I am using Web CEO for Keyword research what is your feedback on the same.?
Great article with some important tools, this are basic tools that every webmaster need to use in a dailt base for improvement and better SEO of a website.
this is great article!
i’m newbie in learning seo
than i really like this article to add me new knowledge..
thanks_
Thanks for letting us know about this. Since reading this post, I have signed up to Google Analytics as you mentioned. It’s much less complicated than I thought it’d be.