Here are some of the best SEO Tools. Check back often since I add a new tool about every week. Every company on this list was selected based on merit.
(Please note: some links in this list might be affiliate links. See the full disclosure on these at the end of this directory.)
Wil Reynolds, the master of SEO recommended the following tools for use by any SEO professional:
Raven Tools - To help you find links and track keywords. Does a great job with text. Great tool for identifying keywords. Link takes you to a free 30 day trial.
Authority Labs - Provides text, video and images ranking.
SEOMoz Toolset - Open site explorer helps you value sites from one to the other when building links. MozRank and MozTrust provides a good relative comparison when determining where to place links.
Google Suggest - keyword suggestion tool
UberSuggest - simple to use, free keyword suggestion tool
SeedKeywords - tool that creates a scenario and then you can see what friends would type to search for the scenario. "Ask if you were looking for xyz product, what would you type in?"
Soovle.com - another helpful (actually way cool) suggestion keyword tool that works with Google, Bing, Amazon, wikianswers. Helps to differentiate keyword searches from Google vs. looking for a product on Amazon. Provides suggestions on 1 screen.
Amazon Keyword Tool - Most keyword tools show all keywords surrounding a term, and it's up to us to determine which of those keywords have a research intent vs. a commercial one. The Amazon keyword tool limits results to those found in a commercial environment. It doesn't offer the level of intel or value that a tool like SEMRush does, but it's a cool secondary keyword research tool for helping you identify search terms with a commercial intent. (change default country in search bar from Germany to U.S.)
Best Free Online SEO Tools
Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Easily the most popular entry on this big list, Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool lets users enter a keyword from their niches and look for those exact terms or for phrases containing them through advanced options and filters.
Open Site Explorer
This service from SEOmoz is ideal for researching your competitor’s keywords.
SEMRush
Use SEMRush to get data on the top 10 keywords that your competitors are getting traffic from on both paid and organic search.
SEOmoz Term Extractor
Another SEOmoz tool, Term Extractor lets users enter a competitor’s URL to receive one, two and three-word search phrases that the site is targeting.
Alexa
Alexa lets users see search engine queries from their competitors and the percentage of traffic that those terms bring to their sites.
Wordtracker Keyword Questions Tool
The majority of the full set of tools provided by Wordtracker are totally free to use, and they allow users to fine tune and get specific data about the relevance and popularity of certain topics within their niches.
SEO Book Keyword List Generator
This keyword research tool is actually powered by Wordtracker and generates a list of related terms for a user’s search and provides links to keyword suggestion tools from major search engines.
WooRank
The Website Review tool from WooRank offers – no surprise – a free review of a user’s website that shows the top keywords that the site ranks for on Google search, in addition to a list of its competitor sites.
KeywordSpy
This tool is also meant to help users track their keyword competitors by showing them the keywords their competitors use in their advertising campaigns, which includes AdWords, the Bing Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing.
Siteliner
You might like this free tool which can help point out basic SEO problems and compare your site to a set of benchmarks for factors such as load speed and page length.
SpyFu
SpyFu will analyze a site’s competitor’s paid search campaigns on AdWords to generate a list of organic and paid search keywords they are using.
Keyword Discovery
Keyword Discovery from Trellian lets users analyze a list of over 100 search terms related to their chosen keywords.
WordPot Free Keyword Tool
This tool will also provide users with a list of the most popular keywords in their niches, and features “Exact Daily” and “Total Daily” lists so that users can easily separate their data.
WordStream Keyword Tool
Users can get free keyword suggestions for the target search terms that they enter into the WordStream Keyword Tool.
Soovle
Speed is the name of the game with Soovle, which will return quick keyword suggestions from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, Wikipedia, YouTube and the always-popular Answers.com, along with statistical data graphs to compile all of that information.
UberSuggest
Similar to the Google Suggest tool, UberSuggest takes your base keyword term and adds a digit or letter next to it that suggests (see?) probably search term combinations.
SEOquake
This is actually an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser that helps user find keyword data based on keyword density.
KGen
Short for “Keyword Generator”, KGen (pretty clever, eh?) is another Firefox add-on that scans the Web page a user is on to determine its keywords, making it perfect for competitor and keyword density research.
Ranks.nl
This online tool offers users a plethora of different variations and combinations of their keywords and phrases.
TweetVolume
Built for social media campaigns, TweetVolume lets users see how many times a specific keyword or phrase has been mentioned on Twitter.
Keyword Typo Generator
Not everyone spells every word right every time they try. That’s why the Keyword Typo Generator from SEO Book comes in handy, as it generates a list of the most common misspelling for a particular keyword, just so you know.
Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
This PPC research tool and Microsoft Excel add-on requires a Bing Ads account and helps users discover new keyword ideas by entering the URL of their website or a list of keywords.
Google Trends
Another Google tool for the list. Trends lets users compare multiple search terms by separating them with commas. Who knew such a simple punctuation mark could be so powerful?
NicheBot Classic
With NicheBot Classic, users simply have to type in a keyword or phrase to receive the top 50 most popular keyword listings for that particular term.
SERPS
Search engine volatility. Graph of Google and Yahoo changes in search engine results across 1000 sites.
Rich Snippets / Schema Markup Tools from SERPS
| Name | Author | Comments | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rich Snippets Testing Tool | Check if your authorship markup is correct. Works for all structured data types now (Reviews, Places, Offers, Events, etc) | http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets | |
| Microdata Generator | Steven Ferrino | Great little tool for generating schema.org tags for a local business. Just fill out a few forms and copy/paste the HTML. | http://microdatagenerator.org/ |
| Authorsure | Russell Jamieson | Wordpress plug that makes it easier to authenticate Authorship with Google using use rel=me, rel=author and rel=publisher links | http://wordpress.org/plugins/authorsure/ |
Site Speed Tools
| Name | Author | Comments | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Webpagetest | My favorite feature here is the ability to watch a video of the test to get a real sense of what a new visitors sees. | http://www.webpagetest.org/ | |
| PageSpeed Insights | Google's pagespeed tool gives a 1-100 score of any URL on the web and suggestions of how to improve page load time. | https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights | |
| GTmetrix | Gossamer Threads | Similar suggestions to the others, but has great help tooltips on what each recommendation means. Great interface. Also does a nice video playback, as well as mobile video playback. | http://gtmetrix.com/ |
Content Idea Generation Tools
Answer the Public
Excellent tool for summarizing the many questions consumers are typing into search engines about a topic. Great source of ideas for website content and PR thought leadership. Perfect in the age of the Google RankBrain algorithm.
BuzzSumo: Enter a topic, keyword or domain to see what types of content on a particular topic is seeing social media success. Check the "Trending Now" section to see content organized by topic. One of the topics is marketing making it particularly interesting for anyone in advertising or marketing.
Technical SEO Site Review Tools
Screaming Frog: Small desktop program you can install locally on a PC, MAC or LINUS machine which spiders websites' links, images CSS, scrpt and apps form a SEO perspective. Quick, easy and free for crawling 500 pages. With a license you can also exceed the 500 URI limit, access all configuration options, save and re-upload crawls, search for anything in the source code, connect to the Google Analytics API and get technical support.
Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer: Easy to use intuitive (and free for limited # of files) tool that identifieswhat URLs on your site are being crawled and you can find redirects, broken links and error pages that are being accessed on your site. Look for and identify specific pages on your site with speed performance issues. If you're not sure how to download your raw log files, you can do a search for "download raw log files [your host's name]" to try and find the instructions for downloading them. If you can't find a help page on the topic, you'll need to contact your host and ask them how you can download your raw log files.
AWStats: log analyzer tool installed in a lot of hosting cPanel admin areas. The tools is not quite as SEO friendly. We prefer the Screaming Frog tool.
Botify Website and Log Analyzer: Botify crawls your website and provides actionable, reliable and continuously updated data. Perfect tool for feeding a BI application such as Gecko board. The tool is perfect for analyzing large data sets.
Deep Crawl: This tool markets itself as the "world's most comprehensive website crawler." It enables you to analyze your website architecture to understand and monitor technical issues to improve SEO performance.
Varvy.com: Fantastic free tool that analyzes a web page and provides feedback for compliance with Google webmaster guidelines. Highly recommended with links to explanations and remedies for any SEO technical problems.
Redirect Check SEO Tool:The redirect check tool looks at a number of different URLs for your homepage, and reports back on the response code given by each. To be completely safe, a 200 response should only be returned by one page. Other pages should return a 404 or 301. Anything else could be a potential duplicate content problem.
Technical Checklist: Helpful checklist that was developed with the end user in mind. Opens as a google document. After the document opens make a copy (file-copy) so that you can edit the worksheet.
Page Speed Tools and Resources
- How to see how much of your site traffic is coming from mobile devices vs. desktops
- MaxCDN - the content delivery network I use to deliver my images and files.
- W3 Total Cache - the free caching plugin I use on my sites.
- EWWW Image Optimizer - the free plugin I use to optimize my images and theme files. See the full tutorial here.
- Ten simple and less discussed ways to improve your WordPress page speed.
- GTmetrix - great tool that shows you load times for every element on page.
- Pingdom
- Google PageSpeed Insights
Wordpress
Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs improve engagement. If using wordpress try the Navxt plugin.
Online Web Scraper
Wayback Downloads: For an $11 fee the service will scrape a dead site from archive.org.
Disclosure: If I like a product and that product has an affiliate program, then I will link to that product using an affiliate link. Using an affiliate link means that, at zero cost to you, I might earn a commission on a product if you buy something through my affiliate link.