Free SEO Tools on the Internet

Free SEO Tools

August 22nd, 2007

Humble Beginnings

I started my journey into the webmaster world early in 2004. I had absolutely zero knowledge of website coding and had never even heard of search engine optimization (SEO). Now a little over three years later I am still very much in the learning mode. I read a number of blogs, participate in a couple of webmaster forums and experiment with various aspects of design and marketing. So far this site averages about 1100 unique visitors a day, not where I want to be but I think I am on the right path. Here is a list a few of the free on-line SEO resources I want to share with you.

Free SEO Tools

The first tool I would like to discuss is one that I think is a must have for every webmaster. SEO for Firefox. SEO for Firefox puts a number of resources and data at your finger tips in one easy step.

Just enter your search term and press enter! Once the search results are displayed you can use the which are under the search bar - KW Research, this link brings you to a comprehensive look at the keywords search popularity and also offers other keywords and their search popularity to assist you in determining what words and phrases you should optimize for. That tool by itself is worth its weight in gold but that is not all - you can use the links to the AdWords Keyword tool and Google Trends to enhance your keyword research. Nothing worse than optimizing your site for terms nobody is searching for…how many times have you heard someone say, “I rank number one for my term but I don’t get any traffic, what am I doing wrong?”. You optimizing for the wrong term! When you complete your search the tool also delivers a good report card for the results.

This report card provides a good snap shot with clickable links to the result pages, check out who is linking to your competition!

Next tool is useful and fun to use. Hittail displays in real time the path your visitors used to access your site.

The tool displays the time/date, referrer and search term used. I find the tool useful in helping me broaden my site keyword list. You will see some visitors enter your site from any page of the search results, I have actually seen people click through from page 60, guess they were committed to their term. Each result in the tool is a clickable link to the referrer page. Finding those terms from deeper pages and utilizing the SEO for FF keyword research options will provide more optimization options to increase your organic traffic.

Google Analytics provides very detailed results for each landing page on your site. One aspect of the tool I like very much is the ability to view which pages are most effective by comparing average time spent, the pages bounce rate and you can also physically look at the page to see what on page links your visitors are clicking. It is a great tool for assisting you with your design/page layout.

Google Webmaster Tools. What I like about it beyond everything else is the ability to check your robots.txt file, sitemap submission and the only comprehensive list of links (internal and external) Google claims to see (both follow and nofollow).

I am sure there are other tools I could add but these are my main ones and most importantly they are free, free effective tools for SEO is almost as good as free beer…almost.

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