SEO Wordsmith

There are hundreds of SEO tools posted online.  Many of these are duplicates and some don’t work as well as others.  I’m not going to point any fingers, but some SEO tools online flat out don’t work.  Also, there’s so many of them that it can be pretty overwhelming - you may just throw up your hands and check out your Google Analytics.  I’ve combed through the list and found the top, free SEO tools on the web.

1.  Competition tool: Compare how you rank for important keywords with your competitors. Extremely humbling, or possibly exhilarating. Probably humbling.

2. Keyword density tool: Check keyword density using a number of different parameters: main text, metatags, links, etc.

3. Serps position: Check your positioning in Google/Yahoo/MSN for specific keywords. Also useful to use with competitors (as are most of these). Some of the keyword rank tools don’t work. This one does.

4. Reciprocal link checker: Though reciprocal links are not as premium as they used to be, there’s still important to get the word out. You can’t sift through a link partner’s entire site. Instead use this tool to find out if the person is making good on the link exchange. Good to combine with the next tool to make sure your linking to a reputable site.

5. Bad neighborhood checker: Awesomely useful tool to see if where you’re linking is a problematic site. Where you link is more important than who links to you and you don’t want to go putting nofollow on all your links, or curtailing your links altogether, so you can rest easier with this tool. This isn’t to say the site couldn’t go down hill in the future, but it’s a start.

6. Google’s Adwords tool can be used just as well to target article posts. Really helpful to see the most searched terms in a niche. To my mind, this is as useful as Wordtracker.

7. Link popularity: I find this only moderately useful. Get your incoming links all in one place, rather than having to plug in link:http in different search engines.

8. Page rank: Query page rank from a series of data centers. The page ranks normally match, but this is a more comprehensive way to do it.

9. Copyscape: Check duplicate content by URL.  You can use a Google Alert as well, but this only allows 32 to words a post.  The pay service at Copyscape is worth it to check an entire site.

10.  Metatag Generator: OK, this one is a little old-fashioned, as metatags aren’t that vital, not to mention there are plenty of plugins to do it for you.  But I’ve got a soft spot because it was the first SEO tool I ever used.

11. Xenu’s broken link checker: Perhaps the ugliest website online, especially for such a useful tool, is at Xenu’s broken link checker.  This is especially useful for monolithic sites, or even a blog that’s a few years old.  Make sure all your page’s are functioning properly.  It’s unprofessional for people to be clicking on broken link in internal pages and it hurts spidering.

12: Raven SEO Analyzer: Or you could just do it all in one boat with Raven’s incredible site optimization checker.  It will completely make search engine optimizers obsolete.  Did I just say that out loud?

Plugins

1. Firefox’s Search Status Tool: Reveal the page rank and Alexa rank of every site online.  The Google Toolbar has more tools, but it also slows down your web connection, and most people use it to see page rank.  Also a humbling experience.

2.  Dofollow plugin: Reveal which links on a site are nofollow (red) or dofollow (blue).  Especially good for checking comment signatures.

I’ll update this as they come…