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Search Engine Optimization is a rather complex and never ending process. You have to analyze a lot of things including what keywords people are searching for, the density of those keywords in your sites, how many sites link back to you, how popular your links are and so on. Doing all this manually can be a huge pain.
With that in mind, regardless of whether you're an SEO guru or a beginner, these twenty tools are guaranteed to make your life easier.
When people - like us - build web sites, they assume they know what keywords people use to get to their sites. For the basic keywords this works but there a lot of untapped keywords that you might be unaware of. Doing the proper research to find out all possible keywords is imperative in this case. The keyword research tools below let you do all that in a jiffy.
Google's tool provides keyword ideas and suggestions siphoned directly from Google's search data. This is slightly different from the Adwords Keyword tool in that it suggests keywords not already associated with your Adwords account and provides a lot more information.
Just key in your site and normal keywords and let it provide you with a plethora of new ideas.
An excellent tool, with a paid counterpart, which lets you find out related keywords you might have missed out on so far. It also provides rough estimations of the search volume generated by the keywords.
This tool cross references the keyword you input with multiple search engines to provide suggestions.
This tool predicts search volume and impressions for the keywords you enter into the system. Useful tool when you are about to launch a SEO campaign. Also provides a ton of target demographic data you'd want to take advantage of.
Another popular keyword research tool with a paid version available for those who want additional features. Just type in your basic keywords and let it generate a list of top keywords which will work well for you.
The number of times a keyword occurs in your page's content is extremely important. Be too skimpy and your site won't be counted for that keyword. Go overboard and you'll be penalized for keyword stuffing. The optimum numbers seems to be between 2 to 4 percent and these tools will let you make sure you make this number.
Just enter your URL and let the tool do its thing. It shows you which keywords are present most in your content, how many times it occurs and how much place it takes up relative to the other words on the page.
Another tool which looks through your page and creates a tag cloud. If you prefer raw data, it also shows you how many times each keyword occurs on your page.
Webconfs' tool produces a keyword cloud for easy perusal. Just like with other tools it also produces a listing of which keyword occurs the most and its density.
This Page Rank checker lets you find out your Page Rank at individual Google data centers.
This tools lets you find out your page rank quickly with minimal fuss.
You can find out your PageRank and Alexa rating along with a bunch of other useful info using this tool.
A major part of SEO is getting linked. The number of backlinks you are getting is a fair approximation of how well your site is doing and makes tracking this statistic an important affair. Using these tools, you can find out who links to you, which pages are linked the most and a lot of other data.
Just enter the URL in question and it'll show you how many pages popular search engines link to through their search engine result pages.
Lets you know how many incoming links you have and breaks it down to individual search engines. Also provides an interesting table of sites with differing numbers of incoming links for reference.
An excellent tool which provides a plethora of information including how many web sites link to you, how many individual linkbacks you get, your PageRank, your Alexa rank and so much more.
Monitoring your site's traffic, page views and visitor behavior is extremely important once you've finished the initial SEO to make sure your plan is sound. Use these tools to track down your site's statistics.
Google Analytics provides an extremely slick summary of your data. Use it to check which pages get linked to the most, how much time people spend on your site, what percentage of visitors are new and a lot more.
Just like Google Analytics, this tool presents an extremely pleasing way to monitor your site's well being. As a fun feature, it lets you compare the stats of up to 5 different sites.
If you don't mind a paid solution, Mint is a top-notch analytics suite which a lot of developers swear by. It features a beautiful interface to present all the data.
Understanding how your pages look to spiders (heh) is important while optimizing for them. This lets us strip out all the visual elements and see the page as a crawler would see. Such a test helps you understand how accessible a page is to a crawler and lets you weed out potential issues before full deployment. These 3 tools let you do just that.
This tool not only lets you see how your page looks to spiders but also returns a lot of useful information including the number of words in the page, the keyword density and pages you link to.
If you are just looking to find a tool to simulate a spider without any extra frills, this is the tool for you. Crawls through your site and lets you see how it looks to a bot.
WebConfs' Spider Simulator simulates a spider crawling through your site. Shows you how a page looks to a spider and also nets you the list of sites you link to, the meta description and meta keyword.
I hope this list made it easier for you optimize your web applications for search engines. With the internet being a big place, I am sure I've missed a ton of equally useful SEO tools. Let us know about these hidden gems in the comments. Thanks for reading!
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User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Andy Gongea September 30th
Isn’t the title a little confusing with the word ONLY in it. When you say only you would think that you want to showcase several items not a full list.
Also Compete is a little far from SEO.
( )Cheers!
Caroline Schnapp September 30th
I think the opposite. The ‘only tools’ mean you won’t need OTHER tools so the list _is_ complete.
Of course that’s meant to be a catchy title.
( )Andy Gongea September 30th
Agree, but when you say Only you don’t list most of the tools there are out there.
Tylor October 5th
Yeah I agree. When I saw this this, the first question that came to my mind was why he chose to use the word “only”. But in his defense, the author doesn’t always get to choose the title for their tutorial.
Still, it is a very comprehensive list of tools and I am glad that I stumbled across it none the less.
( )Khawaib Ahmed September 30th
I thought this would be a detailed tutorial about one good tool. lol
( )Dean October 1st
The title is called…”The Only SEO Tools You’ll Ever Need”.
( )“Tools” is plural….which means more than one. Dont be a smartass…this is a great article.
Virtuosi Media October 1st
If you want an explanation for how to use the Google Keyword Tool for keyword research, I just posted a blog on it (and other SEO basics) a couple of days ago: http://www.virtuosimedia.com/articles/seo-in-10-minutes-search-engine-optimization-tips-for-beginners
( )Peek September 30th
Great work! Thanks heaps !
( )DemoGeek September 30th
Critics aside…this is indeed helpful and I’ve discovered quite a few sites that I never heard of. Thanks Siddharth.
( )Marty Martin October 1st
Me too. It’s amazing no matter how much you *think* you know, there’s always something out there new to discover!
( )Siddharth October 6th
Heh. So true. There is always something new to learn everyday.
Alexis September 30th
have you tried Automatic Backlinks…this tool must be in your list
( )Jason Garrison September 30th
Thanks for the heads up on the Google search-based keyword tool. I’ve been using the AdWords tool for awhile, but that one looks to be much more comprehensive.
I’m not sure how useful keyword density is at this point, but nice collection nonetheless. Thanks!
( )Gregory September 30th
Great post, however I don’t think keyword density is a metric experienced SEO’s bother with any more.
( )Haiko Peters September 30th
Great post! Learned a few new methods/tools, thanks alot!
( )Siddharth October 6th
I’m glad you found it useful.
( )Joel September 30th
Regarding web analyitics, I enjoy Clicky. It’s been serving me much better than GA did in the past.
( )Michael Krapf September 30th
SEO is such a necessary evil. Thanks
( )Chris September 30th
http://www.websitegrader.com/ is handy tool that I like.
( )Scott Alberti September 30th
Thanks for the article Siddharth. There are a lot of great tools here.
I just took a look at Website Grader for the first time. Very nice! It may be the most useful tool on this page for SEO.
( )Morgan Polotan September 30th
Website Grader is nice because it’s a free tool that analyzes a variety of factors that contribute to your website’s SEO optimization and puts it together in a simple, easy to read report. Hubspot also provides suggestions on how to improve. The report won’t just say “your page has a low number of metatags.” It will also suggest metatags for you to add, how to use them, and why they are effective.
http://www.websitegrader.com
( )Andi September 30th
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/seos-toolbox
( )neil pearce September 30th
great stuff, just what i was looking for!
( )luis September 30th
Semantically and syntactically correct, but misleading I agree wit the previous comment.
Anyway, what we want is good info about the webdev world, and a “SEO toolz list” is good information.
keep it up tuts folks
( )Lee Rickler September 30th
Page rank is irrelevant (except to marketeers) and therefore hardly required reading!
( )Steve September 30th
http://www.the-escape.co.uk/tools/pageanalyzer/ – Great little tool
( )Joschka September 30th
great article! some of the tools/sites are gonna be pretty handy.
interesting (tho not recent) news btw: http://tr.im/AeCI
( )Rob September 30th
I’m with Andy on the title: “Only” doesn’t go with Twenty. Perhaps “all the SEO tools you might want” would fit better :>
( )Siddharth October 6th
Duly noted.
( )cdoggyd September 30th
I’m very surprised there aren’t any tools from SEOMoz listed. Very good site.
( )Timmy Christensen October 6th
(Timmy is an SEOmoz employee)
I’m a little surprised none of our tools were listed too. I made our Rank Tracker and I thought it was pretty darn good.
( )Siddharth October 7th
I just had one reason. I’d be glad to divulge it privately.
paul September 30th
keyword density formulas are an SEO myth.
( )Just pay attention to include keyword phrases naturally in strategical places in your web pages and you’ll be fine.
Michael September 30th
thx, there are some very interesting links
( )José Henrique September 30th
Relly cool list!!
I always need tools like that but not, remember the url or where i see.
Thanks!
( )florian September 30th
what important features does mint have which are not available in the free google analytics?
( )BK September 30th
Awesome tools, we have some design tools on our site http://www.rinish.com under Resources, They’re all free too.
( )Marc September 30th
you forgot webceo
( )Shane September 30th
Lots of toys to use on my website
Some of the items mentioned are new to me, and it’s always good to learn new things!
( )Siddharth September 30th
I am glad you found it useful.
( )Cameron Baney September 30th
Wow, this is a great list of tools! SEO is hard to do if you don’t know what you’re doing. I didn’t really know how to start it, and found a few articles talking about it. Until now, there wasn’t really one place to go to get solid information. Thanks!
( )Jonathan September 30th
Thank you very much. I was looking for a list of resources like this. And ta-da, you provided!
( )Axel Scheuering September 30th
Only those SEO Tools (named here) do a good job:
-analytics
-adwords keyword tool
-the spider simulators
Unfortunately SEO is more than just knowing free tools. SEO is collecting and interpreting of a lot of data & creating ideas for linkbuilding.
( )You definitely have to spend a lot of money for really great tools. But that’s not enough. You also have to spend a lot of brain power for SEO.
Neil Osman September 30th
A great frefox plug in http://addons.seoquake.com/
( )Marcin September 30th
The title of this article is completely misleading, and lots of the tools listed here are of no use in any serious SEO.
If are serious about SEO, think how to automate and scale link generation.
The only tools from this list which are useful are Google keyword tools (Google has actually many more tools useful for SEO), Google Analytics, and – to a limited extent – some other keyword tools. Don’t waste your time with the rest.
And the author should really better research his subject.
( )Siddharth September 30th
I must apologize about the title. It was a judgment call and it seems I messed up.
Thanks for reading. I’ll try to come up with more appropriate titles next time.
( )Vicki Ayala October 5th
This is great. And honestly, if it weren’t for the catchy title then I may not have even taken the time.
Your article provides a great deal of information and I appreciate the time you put in to it.
Those that are critical are looking for any easy way out and don’t want to do the work themselves. Let them complain and remember that SEO professionals – as well as SEO rookies – will be able to gain insight and knowledge because of your article.
I am thankful to people like you who take the time to educate others because you care about the profession.
( )Siddharth October 7th
Thank you your kind words. Much appreciated.
Vipul Patel September 30th
this is nice
( )Pertrai1 September 30th
Siddharth, you don’t worry about the title. You have shared some valuable information and it is up to the reader to determine what is of value to them. Without the shared information nobody would ever expand their knowledge. Your article is valuable and very appreciated.
( )Jeffrey Way September 30th
I’m the one who picked the title. It’s probably not perfect – but it’s just a title.
( )Joel September 30th
I must admit… it is quite a bad title.
But nevertheless it has got great tools.
I do SEO for my design agency and have many tools that I use that are not in this list of tools. Some tools that are actually far better than the ones in the list.
So the title does do some damage to under-skilled people’s conception of what they can research in SEO.
Good stuff though, there is some helpful tools in here.
I like SEO posts
Matt Hodgson September 30th
Nice post – very informative!
We’ve also run a few newsletter articles re SEO tools and the must haves.
http://www.addme.com/newsletters/seo-toolkit-firefox.htm
( )http://www.addme.com/newsletters/free-affordable-seo-tools.htm
http://www.addme.com/newsletters/seo-resources.htm
Sandeep September 30th
Great stuff, Thanks
( )Ignas September 30th
wow! Really great!
( )rudra October 1st
To make your search engine optimization work properly, one works out a road map of how to proceed with the site optimization process.Very often, SEO professionals miss out these critical aspects of optimization rendering all their site optimization work ‘useless’. Know them..
( )http://tinyurl.com/yahn463
mona October 1st
at “Site Analytics” I’m missing piwik (.org)
( )Barry November 2nd
Piwik is entirely superfluous if you have Google Analytics installed. GA does all Piwik does and then some.
( )orchid box crawler October 1st
Hi you misses the orchid box page rank crawler. It crawls the entire site to check for hidden jems. You might have a PR2 site with a couple of inner pages with PR4 for instance. These pages could push your PR2 to PR4 if you use page rank channeling properly.
Anyway this is a great tool to find these hidden jems.
Cheers
Frank
( )Deebo October 1st
Andy Gongea. What a twat…
( )Lincoln Plumber October 1st
Great list – that’s been bookmarked within my ‘SEO tools’ folder.
Many thanks for the compilation.
( )Jamie Buchanan October 1st
Inaccurate, sensationalist titles have become a trademark of poor quality, tabloid newspapers in printed media, is the web so different? Sacrificing integrity for a few more clicks can’t work forever and can’t be good for the brand.
Think the title on this post is a little misleading. Despite the useful content, still left feeling a little cheated.
( )David Fitzgibbon October 1st
Yet another great tutorial Siddharth. Thanks!
( )Chris October 1st
IMHO also Koego it’s worth a look (for analytics tools section, but not only this), the service is young but well promising.
( )techiepark October 1st
Great tutorial.. very useful..!!! thanks
( )tehkemo October 1st
great tutorial! Only replace link to google Analytics, it goes wrong!
( )Stephen Webb October 1st
Your Message…As someone who is only just being introduced to the world SEO, this appears to be a thorough and well-researched list. There are so many different aspects to search engine optimisation that it can sometimes become difficult to distinguish between which are more valuable, especially when you read conflicting articles on “Getting your website to the top of Google”.
Google’s own site analytics program seems to be an excellent resource, especially considering that it is free! Combining this with a “link popularity” program such as LinkVendors tool, and a “keyword research” tool such as Microsofts Keyword Forecast should give anyone a good grounding in SEO I imagine. There are so many companies out there falsely promising to get sites to the top of Google’s first page that it is beginning to tarnish the reputation of SEO in general. However with the usage of some of the suggestions here all web developers should gain a basic understanding of SEO, how to create real results and hopefully prevent the industry from cementing a bad reputation.
( )MikaRed October 1st
Nice list, however, can’t leave off SEOMoz.org – some of the best tools and SEO advice out there:
http://www.seomoz.org/tools
( )Nikki October 3rd
SEOMoz Tools are great
( )DemoGeek October 1st
Anyone have issues with Google Search base Keyword Tool? I’ve been trying this yesterday and today using Google’s Chrome and the circle keeps circling as if it’s doing something but nothing happens after that.
( )SEO by Just Say ON October 1st
I concur with Gregory regarding keyword density. It doesn’t matter all that much, and worrying about to any great degree is a fast track to madness.
( )Matt Mikulla October 1st
The problem with most SEO tools is you need a bunch and they are all individual tools.
At Raven we’ve combined many of those listed above into one cohesive tool that includes analytics, research, monitoring, and reporting.
( )paul October 1st
there is an excellent commercial tool that has everything you need for SEO, it’s called market samurai
( )Marshall Moore October 2nd
Maybe I’m missing something, but why is there such a heavy emphasis on keywords? Hasn’t Google officially stated that it’s crawlers pay no attention to keyword meta tags?
( )Siddharth October 5th
I meant the keywords in the content of the page. Keywords in the content are extremely important as I am sure you know.
( )Marshall Moore October 25th
Ah, I was missing something… thanks for the links.
Carl - Web Courses Bangkok October 2nd
Fantastic tools thank you, we will be using this post in our marketing courses. Cheers!
( )KA October 2nd
This is an awesome list of keyword research tools!
( )Fabian October 2nd
Great post! Allthoug I already knew most of these tools, there were some which i havent used so far.
( )thx.
Alvaris Falcon October 3rd
Cool compilation! I use Google’s keyword tool and Word Tracker the most, also Compete for tracking and analyzing competitor’s keywords.
( )Connor Crosby October 3rd
Very helpful list, thanks so much!
( )Cesar Noel October 3rd
Nice list of SEO Tools. Most of these are very essential. Thanks for sharing
( )Siddharth October 5th
Thank you for reading.
( )Imam October 3rd
I used most of the tools above, but still there are tools above that surprise me! thanks dude!
( )Ravi October 3rd
Don’t mind the title at all.
Like to see you are sharing some tools you know about for free. I did not know a couple of them, so it was worth reading. Thanks
( )Mujtaba October 4th
Hello there!
I have a few questions about SEO , can anyone plz answer
being a designer , i have created many wordpress themes and i always put a link to my website in the footer as credit for the theme, i ‘ve read that i will get a good page rank if many (and good) websites link to me… but what if sites completely unrelated to my niche link to me? I ‘ve discovered that a bunch of porn sites are linking to me since they are using my themes, will links from porn websites get me blacklisted???
( )Please answer
Siddharth October 5th
As far as I know, there is no reason for you to be concerned.
( )Patrik October 5th
With Market Samurai you only need one tool.
( )Luke October 5th
Thanks for this list – it’s handy to have all of these resources together on one page.
( )For keyword research I generally find google’s tools to be sufficient, but I think I might have a dabble with a few others and see what they throw up.
wayno007 October 5th
Disregard the grammar Nazis, Siddharth — great article.
( )Siddharth October 5th
Thank you. I’m glad you found it useful
( )Vicki Ayala October 5th
By the way, Siddharth, how many languages do you speak (besides computer languages!)
( )Siddharth October 6th
I am fluent in English and Tamil. I partly understand Hindi and French. I know tiny bits of other Indian and European languages.
( )Joe.D October 6th
There is one more tool which is very useful for backlink tracking.
( )The Backlink Spider: backlink-spider.com
Sergey October 6th
I can add service for monitor keyword positions in main search engines and monitor uptime – http://monitor.mazecore.com
( )Sumeet Chawla October 6th
Great list of tools… am sure I can use them to tweak my site with respect to SEO
Thanks Siddharth
( )Can Berkol October 6th
Nice collection thank you for sharing. For site analytic we also make use of http://pmetrics.performancing.com . Although not always reliable, it provides really good details.
( )Alexander Osipov October 7th
Thanks for this article, very nice tools for SEO!
( )Bryce October 8th
Great article. Very informative. Thanks!
( )Andy Brown October 8th
Thanks for a great article.
( )Alexis Brille October 8th
This list is sick, thanks, Siddharth.
( )James Ballard October 8th
Great one-stop resource. Thanks again Siddarth!
( )Jabbo126 October 9th
Using Google Analytics long time and I´m very happy with it.
( )Animesh October 10th
nice compilation of seo tools! Thanks Siddharth.
( )Mike October 10th
Great Post! But I wouldn’t go without a good SEO software. I have SEO Elite that has worked wonders to generate traffic. Newbies should also look for DIYseo.com. These tools are made for starters who otherwise struggle to get top rankings…Get your HTML codes here!
( )psdtuts October 11th
Change your avatar, you look creepy
( )Scott October 11th
Nice post! but you fogot about mazecore – http://monitor.mazecore.com
( )TimHolmesDesign October 12th
A great resource, very useful….. I have bookmarked a few for further research. Cheers NetTuts
( )William Whitlow October 26th
That’s a lot of tools you revealed.
Thanks for the post. The one I found most interesting was the spider crawl test tool. I didn’t know those existed. I’ve seen a lot of the others like Google Analytics, and Keyword Density Checker.
I’m fond of Brad Callen’s SEO Elite. A great tool for the Home Business On Line Marketer.
Very good information. A little overwhelming for the beginner. But more information is better than not enough.
( )P-C October 27th
Good article. Don’t worry about the title. With 12 years as a freelance writer, I’m used to hearing complaints – some that count, some that really don’t.
You article is good. Thumbs up.
P-C
( )hiittech November 25th
awesome tools and very nice they are free too
( )Asad December 14th
nice tools , really thanx
( )Georg February 1st
Thanks for the great list of tools. I’ll use many of them!
( )Anabolic February 8th
Nice tools I will use them Thanks
( )