If you’re on an online marketer with a limited budget, then you’re in luck. I’ve compiled a list of online or downloadable SEO tools that I recommend and use on a regular basis. Each of these tools has to do with the organic or “natural” search engine rankings of websites. Savvy online marketers use a combination of these tools to analyze and generally “figure out” why one particular web page is ranking better than another web page.
Aaron Wall’s Free Link Popularity Software – Back Link Analyzer
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001108.shtml
Aaron Walls’ tool is fairly new to the game, and he apparently has spent a lot of money developing this tool. This SEO tool allows you to analyze all of the links that are pointing to one particular website. Once you download and run it, you are given several reports–one of the reports allows you to see the anchor text of the links that are pointing to that site. Anchor text is the actual clickable link text that describes a link. Search engines rely anchor text information in order to “figure out” what a web page is about–they use that as an important part of their algorithm. This tool requires that you install it on your PC. Aaron also has a list of more free SEO tools on his site at http://tools.seobook.com.
Internet Marketing Ninjas’ Free SEO Tools
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/tools/
I’m amazed by the number of tools that the We Build Pages folks have available in their arsenal. There several good free online SEO tools and analyzers. I really like the Find Broken Links, Redirects & Site Crawl Tool, you can use it to find broken links on your site and generate an XML formatted sitemap. You also have the option to export your data into a downloadable spreadsheet.
With the On-Page Optimization Tool, you can see your site how the spider sees it with one of our most useful Internet marketing tools. This one stop glimpse of your site’s most basic information can give insight into minor adjustments which can have a major impact.
My buddy Jim Boykin over at Internet Marketing Ninjas as 11 other free SEO tools that you can use.
URL Trends
http://www.urltrends.com
This online tool gives you a “big picture” and an overall analysis of a website. URLTrends allows you to view trend reports of a website’s current and previous Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and incoming links for the URL. It also tells you the site’s DMOZ status (if it’s listed in DMOZ.org).
Server Header Check
There are many tools that allow you to perform a server header check. This is important especially if you’re dealing with redirects or setting up a redirect from one page to another. By running a server header check on a URL, you can easily see what error code or redirect code the server is returning when the URL is loaded. For example, if you’re setting up a 301 Permanent Redirect from one domain to another, checking the domain using a server header check tool is a must. Several good server header check tools exist:
http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.php
http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp
http://www.serverheader.com/
IDServe (http://grc.com/id/idserve.htm) is a free tool that I keep in my desktop. This lets you perform a quick server header check without having to open a web browser.
Search Engine Spider Tools
There are a few search engine spider simulator type of tools that I use on a regular basis. One of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free to spider up to 500 pages):
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a tool that will spider your entire site or URLS from a list that you provide. It grabs data such as Title Tag, Meta Tags, Heading Tags, Image Alt Tags, etc. and lets you export the data. There’s a lot more that this tool will do.
The other spider tool that I still use on a regular basis is OptiSpider:
http://www.leftsidesystems.com/optitools-download-page/
Optispider spiders a site and compares the topic of a page to its internal anchor text links–helping you further optimize a site and look at all the internal links. It does more than that, but that’s one handy use.
Checking Backlinks to a Web Site
There are several tools that you can use for free to check backlinks–most offer free versions but are limited in the results. If you’re serious about backlinks, you might consider upgrading any of these tools:
http://www.majesticseo.com
http://www.ahrefs.com
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
http://www.linkresearchtools.com
Find more online SEO Tools
There are several websites that list even more online SEO tools worth exploring. SEO Company maintains a great list of SEO Tools worth checking out at http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html, and even has a few of his own online tools, including a Page Rank Checker, a tool to check Internal Page Rank, a tool to check Link Popularity, a tool to check Indexed Pages, a DMOZ Listing Checker, and a SERP Checker. More free online SEO tool lists are available at the following sites, as well:
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/
http://seo.zunch.com/free_seo_tools.htm
http://tools.digitalpoint.com/
SEOMoz has a free 30 day trial of their entire toolset. There are a lot of SEO tools there, and you may find, just like I did, that you cannot live without their tools (I am a PRO member there).
Privacy Issues
Many search marketers have expressed concerns about privacy issues when it comes to using online tools. When you use an online form and enter a URL or any other data, you’re potentially giving that data to the website providing that online tool. So, be sure to check the site’s privacy policy before you use the tool–or only use the online tools to check your competitors’ search engine rankings.
Have a free SEO tool for me to check out, one that I haven’t added to the list here? Let me know by using the contact page here on my site.
