Recently a “101 free SEO Tools that don’t suck” list went popular on Sphinn. I love 101 items lists and I love free SEO tools especially if the tools “don’t suck”. While checking out the list I’ve encountered some tools I haven’t been using much or been familiar with at all. On the other hand I was missing some tools I use daily. When I noticed that the list actually contains SEO tools that measure the so called keyword density I finally decided to compile my own list.
Here I want to focus on those few free SEO tools you must know to be able to practice SEO in a meaningful way.
Using 101 tools for whatever purpose is not productive. At the end of the day you got to find your set of say 10 or 12 tools you’ll use. Everything else is just playing around and wasting your precious time. Thus this list will be the size of the usual SEOptimise list, approx. 30 items. I’ll concentrate on free SEO tools here as everybody can test them this way. Some of them are freemium that is they offer basic functionality for free and make you pay for the full fledged product.
This list of the 30 free SEO tools you must know will be a mix of
- web based tools
- stand alone software
- Firefox extensions
Keyword Research
- Google Insights for Search
- Google Adwords Keyword Tool
- Google Trends
- Wordtracker SEO Blogger
- Wikipedia article traffic statistics
Site Check
- Google Webmaster Tools
- GSite Crawler
- Google Website Optimizer
- Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool
- Pingdom Tools
Link Tools
- Yahoo! Site Explorer
- Xenu Linksleuth
- Majestic SEO
- Link Diagnosis
- Link Harvester
- Social Media for Firefox
Ranking
Analytics
Various
- googlebar (not Google Toolbar!)
- Quirk SearchStatus
- SeoQuake
- SEO for Firefox
- SEOpen
- Quarkbase
Take note that I did not mention some of favorite tools because they offer no free version. Also it was important to me that you don’t need to register to use these tools. All of the tools do not require a sign up or log in with the exception of a tool by SEOMoz which is a highly trustworthy SEO provider.
Many thanks to all the knowledgeable SEO practitioners on Twitter who contributed to this list, in no particular oder:
@SEOSEM
@supaswag
@SEOHolicc
@remarkablogger
Of course this list is highly subjective. Plus, I’m quite sure I forgot and left out a tool on purpose you rather would want to see in a “must know” list. So make sure this tool gets a mention too.
Great list of super useful resources. This is going straight to my del.icio.us account. Thanks.
Great list. Some of these I already use, but it never hurts to try other options. These will come in very handy. Thanks
could you please list the paid ones as well ? greatly appreciated :)
Interesting Post! As of now, I know only part of the SEO tools. After seeing your article, I am aware of remaining tools. Thanks a lot :)
Great list. I would add: http://www.websitegrader.com for analyzing your site’s ranking vs your competition and http://www.crazyegg.com for analyzing user experience via a heat map.
Wow man, this is an awesome list of SEO Tools. It helped me a lot. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks all for the feedback! Much appreciated!
Angela: Thank you. Both of them almost made it, Crazy Egg does not offer a free version though. Website Grader is a great tool for the average webmaster but I don’t use it as a SEO. I only trust my own judgment when it comes to grades. For instance it say “No Meta Keywords Found” on my page.
I’d also add the FireFox plugin Web Developer… great way to get insight into the On Page SEO factors… my favorite is the “disable cache” so that my changes aren’t held in limbo!
And of course Firebug too, for interactive changes, and speed testing.
firefox web developer direct link:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
firefox firebug direct link:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
I would also add seomoz.org/term-extractor and seomoz.org/term-target and seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html
Thanks,
@TomaBonciu
Great list, looking to see what I am missing.
Thanks Much, Ben Walter
I was at a tech roundtable the other night and our resident WordPress guy said he swears by the All In One SEO plugin for WordPress. Said it seems to yield great results for him.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
whoa, had no idea there were so many. Time to check some of these out and see which ones I have been missing out on. Good post.
-Rich
wow. Good info, thanks
Also:
ClickTale.com (allows you to record user sessions for analysis)
myIPNeighbors.com (see what other sites are hosted on a server)
Thanks for the list, Tad, you showed a couple of new tools to me. I’m going to check them out. Also I think the free edition of SEO PowerSuite tools could be added to your list
There are some great tools out there when it comes to SEO and online marketing. I know the wordtracker labs have some really great stuff out there.
Nice list of tools, wikipedia rticle stats is particularly interesting if you track the rankings of the article.
MIA: Link Voodoo. http://www.linkvoodoo.com Great tool!
Great list, thanks for sharing. Bookmarked!
Great List. We use most of these now but I’ll give the others a look. Thanks.
Hello everybody. Thanks for the feedback.
# Web Develeoper is a good idea.
# Firebug for SEO purposes? Nice to have.
# seomoz.org/term-extractor is great, the other two are OK but not worthy of this best of list IMHO.
# Clicktale is a good idea as well but its free version is very limited.
# myIPNeighbors.com is useful but not indispensable for SEO I think.
# Link Voodoo is weird, it makes you download a php script to your computer. I won’t allow that for security reasons.
# SEO PowerSuite is fine but it doesn’t let you save your inputs or results in the free version which is very limiting. Also their GUI fonts are sooo tiny I barely can read them.
Did I overlook a suggestion?
great tools … use half of them
will check rest :)
Thanks for the list of resources. I even did not know existance of some of them. It is nice to have a list of free resource in one place. Also I have recorded in my delious account.
Very useful list. Most known but some good new tools there to ‘have a play’ with. Thank you.
Great list
There is also another keyword ranking tool. http://www.onlineseo.com
Great list of tools Tad! I agree that there are about 8-10 tools that I use most often, and you have covered most of them in your list.
Agree some new quality sites should be here. Domainsuperstar has excellent domain based tools – also agree with Tad Chef on Crazy Egg.
Thank you for sharring. Great tools. I know half of them.
Great list – a few really useful new ones but of course also a lot of golden oldies :)
I saw this one retweeted quite a few times on Twitter today: http://www.seosupporter.com
Is in beta at the moment, but looks really good and could have a lot of potential
http://www.webtraffic24.com great for estimating competitors’ visitation.
Greata and very useful list Tad. I am sending you a trackback.
Take a look on http://www.webseoanalytics.com
There are 11 free seo tools and it allows you to build customized reports by using your company’s logo.
Nothing about bing webmaster tool?
Great list of SEO and covers different area.
Thanks for this tools.
Some are very good
Nice SEO-Tool collection. Thanks!
Very helpful. Thank you. Is there a way to know what tools you listed here, or those listed elsewhere, may put our site at risk with google thinking we are using link schemes (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356)?
While the list is good, it lacks one of the top SEO tools out there: SpyderMate!
http://spydermate.com
Thumbs up for all the people providing such an informative tools and link regarding SEO .I already knew a very few of them but now it has added pretty much to my information.
Thought you would be interested in followtopia. ( http://www.followtopia.com ). It is good for backlinks, keywords, mozRank, and do follow.
I might add http://www.urbandata.com to that list.
hoo man, this is an awesome list of SEO Tools. It helped me a lot. Thanks for sharing.
Excellent list of tools. This blog post is still relevant a year later which is impressive.
i agree with Richard, just found your post and a year later i still find great ressources.
You might want to add the new OpenSiteExplorer tool from SeoMoz, quite good.
Great list. Thanks so much for the help.
Some great tools, I thought I knew most of them but some new ones popped up for me to look at!
Fantastic list, thanks! Regarding WordPress SEO tools – I use the plug-in from Yoast: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ The all in 1 SEO kit is good, but I find this easlier.
Really good links here, I’ve tried out a few of them and will definitely be using these. I especially like the Firefox addons since you don’t even need to open a program for them.
Great list that would certainly benefit from an update in 2011. Hope someone puts one together as there’s so many great new ones in the last 2 years.
Koozai Mike: Good idea, indeed some of the tools aren’t working properly anymore either so I might update this list or compile a new one in the near future. Thank you for the suggestion.
Great list of tools and they are free – bonus!
Superb guys, I have bookmarked this page for future reference. It’s quite interesting to see how different some of the figures are in comparison to each other.
Great list that would certainly benefit from an update in 2012. Hope someone puts one together as there’s so many great new ones in the last 1 years.
Wow… That’s what I need, man! Thanks!
Świetny post, rewela :)
Regards / Pozdrowienia
Janek
one of the best ones i have alwasy used is scrubtheweb.com
Where’s scrub the web? I see only one mention of them here and yet they are absolutely the best. Most so called SEO tools do not work. SEO Book is a total joke and SEOmoz for example does weekly crawls and rank tracking which violates every search engine’s terms and conditions, but that is SEOmoz’s claim to fame. What good does it do you to know that your competition is outranking you? Real SEO tools will help you discover the reasons others are outranking you.
Search engines index “content” and they are looking at your web pages. How you place words on the page makes all the difference. Want to rank for “apple”, then consider adding the word “fruit” to your page along with apple and watch your rankings improve. The simple truth is, if you are not making changes to your content, you are not doing SEO. Real SEO professionals know this and that is why their services are expensive. I admit I am a member of stw and it was the best choice I have made. Without stw’s tools I don’t know how you would discover these things. I have also purchased SEOmoz as well as SEO Book with zero success. While they both have a few good videos, their tools are horrible and do nothing for you. I won’t publish a web page without first using stw’s tools.
Just my opinion,
Ron
Some features of these plugins are in addition RDS bar for FireFox. It is easier to use. Try it!
There’s this rather epic list in a Google Doc:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?pli=1&key=0AlgVNSddFpwxdE9rbUZzVEVock5tODFOVWVqellWaWc&f=true&noheader=true&gid=12
…not my company / nothing to do with me, just very very comprehensive.
Hi Chris,
Thank you ever so much for sharing Annie Cushing’s G-docs spreadsheet with us. You’re right, it’s quite comprehensive!
Thanks again for sharing!
Great site, good idea.
I know one more seo tool which is worth mentioning – http://colibritool.com. Works pretty well and you can test it for free.
These tool also could be added Find Long Tail Keywords and Auto backlick submitter. They are free and useful.
Thank You
Very helpful links