Whether you're new to SEO or an experienced consultant we all prefer automated tools, free when possible, which make our life just a bit easier at times and allow us to spend more time on the creative elements of the SEO work. By successfully using these tools and others, you'll be able to concentrate on what you do best.
Below are some of my favorite tools which I normally recommend on my blog to support your SEO work:
Basic SEO health check and analysis
1. Website Grader by Hubspot - Website.Grader.com is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness potential of a website. It provides a score that incorporates elements such as website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
2. Content Duplication finder by Virante - Virante's content duplication tool can diagnose common causes and effects of duplicate content penalties such as server headers, Google index issues and more.
3. Builtwith by Gary Brewer - BuiltWith.com is a website analysis tool, providing technical analysis and SEO optimization information to assist in your website's SEO effectiveness.
4. Quarkbase - Quarkbase.com is the great way to find website information including social bookmarking stats, Alexa ranking, related sites and domain information.
Basic back link analysis
5. Yahoo Site Explorer is a fantastic tool for basic back link information, to view the most popular pages from any site and to dive into a comprehensive site map.
6. Google Browser by Touchgraph - TG Google Browser is a free Java application which you can use to explore the connections between related websites.
Basic on-page analysis
7. SEO Browser by Anduro Marketing and McAnerin International Inc - SEO-Browser.com is a free tool which lets you see your website like a search engine sees it. Useful to find image with no alt text, to ensure drop downs are crawlable and much more.
8. Image Analyzer by Juicy Studio - Image Analyzer will highlight images without alt text, long image names and much more. Because image optimisation is essential for successful SEO, image analyzers are an absolute must.
9. Server Header Checker by SEO Consultants - Server Header Checker allows you to analyze your non www homepage version and other pages to check that the server header is returning a 301 redirect response, 200 OK response etc.
10. Popuri by Xavier Larrea - Popuri.us allows you to quickly check your link popularity across social bookmarking sites, Google Page Rank and much more.
Which tools are you using?
Ran Nir is founder of Conversion Counts, a web analytics and conversion optimisation agency, and a guest blogger at Econsultancy. He can also be found on Twitter and LinkedIn.
3:48PM on 15th April 2009
Thanks, this is really helpful. Linked to it from my blog: http://www.optimizeforengines.com/seo_blog/
6:04PM on 15th April 2009
learning about SEO is incredibly confusing at times. Thanks to sites like these to help cut through a sea of information to deliver the good stuff!
9:31PM on 15th April 2009
Do these sites not go against Googles terms of service?
Founder at Conversion Counts Ltd
10:33PM on 15th April 2009
Hi Tony,
I am assuming these services use various APIs (not Google necessarily) and furthermore they don't check particular keyword ranking.
On the contrary, by giving you more visibility on potential issues effecting your site (such as content duplication) you'll help the engines better crawl your pages and thereby consuming less resources.
9:04AM on 16th April 2009
Nice instruments Ran, but I hate those services that provide false free services asking your e-mail to send you their final report.
The service is free or it's not. It doesn't exist the half way.
Anyway I'll post something about this and include some of the links you proposed.
Have a nice day.
Founder at Conversion Counts Ltd
9:31AM on 16th April 2009
Hi Andrew,
None of these sites require your emails address. If you're referring to website grader, I believe an email address is optional.
10:12AM on 16th April 2009
Hello Ran,
thank you for this nice compilation - it is a good starting point.
Cheers,
Matthias
10:49AM on 16th April 2009
Hi Ran
builtwith.com asked the e-mail to send their final complete report, so I assume that what they shown me was just half of what I could get.
And there was another one that asked me the e-mail, but I dunno remember which one.
5:59PM on 16th April 2009
nice round up, might as well add senSEO firebug extension http://getfirebug.com/extensions/index.html#senseo for firefox
thanks for list.
9:54PM on 16th April 2009
Great little tools, recommend link diagnosis with mozilla firefox for backlink checking
9:55PM on 16th April 2009
Nice list. I'm not a big fan of toolbars, but I do use the SEO Book toolbar in conjunction with some of the sites you wrote about.
The thing I like about it most is that I can get some basic SEO information right away without leaving the page.
Search Marketing Manager at British Council
3:18PM on 17th April 2009
Hi Ran,
thanks for this useful post, i bookmarked it and some of the other URLS you provided, may i add a few other tools that also do the job and I find very useful:
-the 'Live HTTP headers' extension on firefox to check your pages headers and also the 'Flagfox' extension to ascertain the location of the current server. Actually it usually gives the location of the IP which is not always the same as the location of the physical server, but it helps.
-as an alternative to the SEO Browser I have always used the search engine spider simulator from web confs: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php
11:27PM on 21st April 2009
This was an incredibly helpful shortcut to knowing what I need to do - and not worry about! Thanks very much, can't wait to go on the course in June!
12:31PM on 22nd April 2009
Eziseo offers FREE seo tools, tips resources, worksheets, training & reports to streamline website search engine optimization strategies. SEO made easy…
1:34PM on 27th April 2009
Very very best links.
Very helpful.
Thanks
Ronny
7:11AM on 30th April 2009
Thanks for sharing these tools, and some of these tools are currently in use in our online business. Keep on posting related contents.
11:25AM on 6th May 2009
Great list - and bookmarked
:)
6:32AM on 9th May 2009
Fantastic post. Thanks for the great SEO resources. I especially like BuiltWith.com!
4:35AM on 14th May 2009
oh my head is spinning. SEO can be such a headache but a necessity. apparently i am not using any of these tools. it seems i've barely scratched the seo surface
4:57PM on 15th May 2009
Very helpful. Thank you!
10:27AM on 26th May 2009
Hy,
i also suggest http://website-seo-tools.com/
9:16AM on 28th May 2009
I find Firefox plugins of great benefit, I use SEO Quake and Rank checker.
SEOQuake gives you loads of infor on PR rating links etc for every site you visit ot every entry you see in a search engine.
12:47AM on 31st July 2009
Hi,
Thanks for the list.
9:06AM on 10th August 2009
thanks !! it can be quite easy and helpful if we get this kind of sites to learn the tools and basic of what seo is ..
4:33PM on 19th August 2009
Go to www.sitesubmit.ca and find twenty moree free seo tools for free
3:29PM on 25th August 2009
Great article! I have already applied part of them but also I found some new things to try. By the way: is it worthing to pay for listing to Yahoo Directory or not?
3:40AM on 11th September 2009
Make it 11 and add http://spydermate.com ! :D
8:05AM on 17th September 2009
Hi! You should also consider http://www.estimix.com They provide a nice summary of the website performance. I trust that you’ll find this very useful cause it seems to use the Alexa traffic information quite well and provides much better traffic information.
6:42PM on 4th October 2009
Great List, I'm especially looking forward to using the first one.
12:22AM on 14th October 2009
Thanks for this information,was helpful for me.
2:56AM on 4th November 2009
his was an incredibly helpful shortcut to knowing what I need to do - and not worry about! Thanks very much, can't wait to go on the course in June!http://www.uggsmvp.com
11:17PM on 22nd November 2009
Anyone heard about <a href="http://onepieceofmylife.com/BMP%20standalone/index.php" title="bookmarkposter">BOOKMARKPOSTER</a>
It can bookmark up to 22 social bookmarking websites less than minute.
Ill suggest to list it :)
8:33AM on 23rd December 2009
These tools are very useful to me.thanks
2:15PM on 29th January 2010
That's surely top 10 list.
I will add http://www.doloop.com to that list tho.
7:34PM on 1st March 2010
Nice article. By the way I will add to this list one of my favorite site - http://www.surcentro.com - It will provide Alexa, Compete ranks and graph, unique visitors per day and other extra information about keyword.
3:56AM on 4th March 2010
these seo tool, this morning I got no 3 and google.ro what interested us, a good SEO tool it SEOmoz, I think 50% is preferred by seo man
8:32AM on 7th May 2010
I tried some of the links you have in your list ... many were new to me. But for others alternative firefox plugins also do the job (as has been pointed out in many of the comments) - in case you want them easily accessible ! Keep it up ... hopefully you'll dig up new links the next time I visit.
Cheers !
7:18AM on 21st July 2010
Thank you very much for yet another first-rate article. I am always searching for original make money tips to suggest to my readers. Thanks for creating this article. It's exactly what I was searching for. Truly great post.
3:33PM on 23rd September 2010
Also check out SocialBacklinker. For a Wordpress plugin, it's really slick for automatic backlinks.
12:06PM on 17th August 2011
It is saying the open directory listing is most important for a good SERP result especialy in google. But no body is suggesting a way to get in to that listing. For example i have a website to sell gadgets electronics and accessories (affiliate) named coolgadgets4u.com i am trying since last 3 years (i have added the site to the directory 4-5 times during this period. Still i am not in.
Do i need to wait to get listed in this directory? Is this listing is purely a part of paid SEO?