As an Online Marketing and SEO professional working with small business owners and mid-size company marketing directors, I am continually asked for recommend tools to automate/facilitate SEO best practices. And so, I have compiled a comprehensive list of SEO resources related to keyword ideas and development, competitive research, target research and more.
Keyword Research Tools:
- Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool
- Google Suggest Tool
- Wordtracker Free Keywords
- Keyword Discovery
- Microsoft Ad Intelligence – brilliant extension for Microsoft Excel which puts a load of great keyword research data directly into Excel.
- Alexa – shows traffic trends for competing websites. Alexa has a heavy webmaster bias that is nowhere near as noticeable at Compete or Quantcast.
- Quantcast – shows site traffic and demographic trends and details. Also allows you to download a list of their top 1,000,000 websites.
- Google Trends for Websites – free tool from Google showing traffic estimates, visitor country location, top 10 related websites, and top 10 related keywords. Only returns data for fairly high traffic websites though.
- Google Search Insights – shows keyword trends, hot keywords by cateogry, and top geographic regions for a keyword.
- SearchStatus – highlights nofollow links, shows PageRank, shows Alexa rank, and provides links to some backlink information
- Compete.com Search Analytics – low cost competitive tool showing keywords that send competing sites the most traffic.
- HitWise – similar to Compete.com Search Analytics, but costs about $10,000 and up.
- KeyCompete – shows keywords that competitors are buying
- KeywordSpy – similar to KeyCompete, but with more data – including cached ad copyand affiliate data
- SearchMetrics – offers SERP ranking data & link data. Provides historical ranking data, as well. Primarily focused on enterprise-level clients, but has a more accessible lower cost
- Essentials level.
- SEMPhonic – tracks keyword rankings and provides competitive reporting
- SpyFu – shows terms that competitors are buying or ranking for in the organic search results.
- Trellian Competitive Intelligence – shows keywords that competitors rank for and keywords that send them significant traffic.
- Keyword Density Analysis Tool – finds common words and phrases on your site, or competing websites.
- Spider Test Tool – shows the page size, source code, meta tags, page title, textual copy of the page, keyword breakdown by density (including 2 and 3 word phrases), number of words, number of unique words, and outbound links on a page.
- Link Harvester – web based tool that allows you to dig deeply through a competitor’s backlinks
- Link Popularity Comparison Tool – allows you to quickly and easily compare your link popularity scores to other websites.
- Majestic SEO – link anchor index that allows you to download the link profile for any site…going thousands or millions of links deep!
- Open Site Explorer – similar to Majestic SEO, but with an easier to use interface and perhaps a few less filters. Database is not as large, but it also doesn’t have as much outdated data as one would find in Majestic SEO’s database.
- Competition Finder – tool looks at how many competing pages there are in Google’s index that has your desired keywords in their page title and anchor text.
- Search Engine Saturation Tool – helps you compare how many pages you have in the search indexes compared against competing sites.
- Back Link Analyzer – free Windows based downloadable software allowing you to deeply explore through a competitor’s backlinks. Powered by the Yahoo! API, so it might be a bit spotty, but it is not bad for free.
- Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool – allows you to plug in a URL and shows you what keywords Google thinks the page should be advertising for
- Google Traffic Estimator – estimates the number of Google AdWords ad clicks and bid prices for the top ad position.
- Google Search Based Keyword Tool – shows keyword search volume estimates and keyword values…by keyword, site, or category.
- Backlink Watch – shows backlinks and anchor text used in the backlinks
- Xenu Link Sleuth – Downloadable software which makes it fast and easy to find broken links on your site.
- SEO Power suite Tool
- Web CEO Tool
- IBP Tools
Rank Checking Tools:
- Agent Web Ranking
- Rank Tracker
- Google Webmaster Central – allows you to sign up for Google Sitemaps, shows some crawling errors, and a more complete view of your backlinks. Also shows keywords you rank well for and keywords that send you the most traffic.
Analytics Tools
- Google Analytics – powerful full featured analytics tool
- Clicktale – specializes in customer heat maps
- Crazy Egg – somewhat similar to Clicktale in providing analytics visualization Adobe’s Omniture WebTrends
- comScore’s Digital Analytix Suite
- IBM’s Coremetrics
About Jasmine Sandler
Jasmine Sandler is a veteran in online marketing. She has over 15 years client experience in helping companies, both large and small, use the web to develop and grow business. Miss Sandler has provided interactive solutions for such clients as: Citibank, ISO, Diamonds International, Doublerock Corporation, Loews Hotels, CityLights Cruises, and hundreds of small businesses and start-ups.Subscribe
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Top article for me so far in 2013
Thank you so much, it’s the most exhaustive list a person just learning the basics of SEO and PR could wish for!