8 SEO Tools Everyone Should Be Using
I just wanted to give a little recommendation on what I believe to be some very good tools to use in your SEO efforts. This is a list that you should keep and reference from time to time for when you need it. So it would be a good idea to bookmark it with Delicious. So with out wasting your time here is what I believe to be a good comprehensive list of tools to use in your SEO efforts.
1. If you are having any of your work outsourced to a different country and are wondering on how their great insight into your niche seems implausible it would a good idea to check their work in Copyscape. It looks at the content and sees if it has been taken from any other source on the web. Of course if you are looking for SEO tools there is a good chance that you understand duplicate content and its penalties. This will help in that effort to make sure that you are getting only original content on your website.
2. If you want to get a quick idea of how your website links look to the search engines, it would be a good idea to be able to compare your site to a couple of your competitors. Use their link popularity tool to figure out how many inbound links your website has and that of your competitors. This tool is good because you can look at your competitors and find where they are getting their links. I would stick with what Yahoo says. Google seems to hide a lot of the links. Yahoo will give you a good idea. And in Yahoo you can see if they are ranking because of a very good internal linking structure, paid links or actually are getting really good links. The only thing that I don’t like is that it doesn’t give page rank of the link pages. Although many SEO’s will say to not try to structure your links around PR and NoFollows, I still like to see it. Old habits.
3. If you want to get an overall look at all aspects of your website then it might be a good idea to checkout webmasters toolkit. It has everything from spider eyes to link checkers. This is a website that you will want to frequent often. With all the great things they have in the arsenal, you can think of this place as the hub for your SEO needs.
4. Google Insight is like Google Trends on Steroids. I have heard from Google that Trends might be going to the wayside and Insight be the main sha bang. This is a great tool if you are trying to see where globally, your keywords are being searched the most. It is also a good tool to figure out what are some rising keywords that you should take notice of. It is also a great tool if you are an SEO firm. The reason is because you can look at the trends and graphs to see what news affected the dips and rises in the chart. This way you can go to your clients with a better informed presentation because it will look like you did all kinds of research figuring out what is happening in their industry. Which you should do anyhow to get a better understanding of your potential clients. This tool just helps speed up the process.
5. Another really good tool that I like to use a lot is Rank Checker by SEOBook. These guys have it down. Aaron Wall is one of the top SEO’s that I know of and I try to listen to what he says and implement it in anything I am doing at the time. His tools are by far some of the best in the industry and a couple of them are free. This happens to be one of those tools. It is a Firefox plugin and is great at searching for your top keywords and seeing where you rank currently in the search engines.
6. Again I will get some information from SEOBook. These guys…have it down? I sound like a broken record, but my vernacular is very very not large. 
But the tool that you also need to utilize is SEO For Firefox. This is another great Firefox addon that will help in your efforts to figure out what your competitors are doing right and where you can get a competitive advantage. However if you decide to utilize this tool you can almost check off MarketLeap. This gives you all kinds of information that you can use to keep you busy. Good idea to keep off when you don’t need it because it will slow down your searching speed.
7. I know that we are getting to overkill with having all these cool tools that tell you page rank, but you have room for one more. This one just sits in the bottom of your browser (firefox). Another note really quick, if you aren’t using Firefox for SEO then your work might be hard. Chrome is too bare, and IE is um… how do I say this nicely? I got it the devil. Anyhow the tool is called Search Status and it tells you the page rank, alexa rank, compete and moz Rank. I know that some serious SEO’s are saying “forget PR”. Even Matt Cutts said that they throw in skewed PR’s just to mess with us SEO’s. That is great, because I love wasting time. But I still say it is based off trust and I tend to trust sites that have something rather than nothing (as I write on our blog with a 0). We recently redid everything here and lost a lot of everything, PR on of those things. But anyhow here is the link to that as well.
8. This last one is a great tool to be able to blog about stuff really quickly with the window open. It is called Scribefire. Now I know that this is actually a blogging tool, but in terms of being an SEO tool I consider it to be a great tool. The reason is because you need to get fresh new content for your website and if you are able to gather from all sources for a new blog post then why not. Are you saying you had an original idea? I had one of those in the shower once. But online there is a lot that you can use from sharing and expanding on current ideas to use in your own spin. This tool helps to keep those original ideas there to put your spin on it.
Category: SEO Tactics, Search Engine Optimization
by Robert Dyson
On September 17, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Great article, thanks! I like Hubspot’s wesite grader at http://websitegrader.com too.
by James Butts
On September 27, 2009 at 3:05 am
You left out google analytics nub.
by Brett Burky
On October 15, 2009 at 12:08 am
Wow James,
Really you are going to come to a blog and say stuff like that. Go find some place else to spread your negativity. Yes we know Google Analytics. Why don’t you install the wasp plugin and then figure it out. A nub. Let me see you at a conference.