Your Digital Marketing Consultant

Most important SEO Tool

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 post was written by: Franklin Manuel

Franklin Manuel is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Twitter