FREE SEO TOOLS FOR INDUSTRIAL SEARCH ENGINE MARKETERS
There are a variety of tools available free online to aid search marketers and novices interested in learning more about search engines, rankings, and data analysis.  Here are some helpful resources on finding these tools.

Note: It’s important to know that no tool is entirely accurate.  Some provide information based only upon limited data sets.  In some cases, you may wish to compare data across several tools to get the best picture possible.

Keyword Tools

Choosing the right keywords should be the first step in any SEO plan.  But how do you know if you’ve chosen a keyword that will potentially bring you good visibility or one that will leave you floundering outside the top rankings?

Subscription databases like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker offer free tools that generate up to 100 related terms and the number of times they have been searched.  Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool can help you generate related terms as well and give you a basic idea of the level of searches and Pay Per Click competition those keywords face.

Another Wordtracker tool, Keyword Questions, will also let you see the popular questions people enter into the search boxes (yes, some people do enter entire questions) in many search engines.  It gives you another idea of the content people are looking for with many terms.

PageRank Tools

Google’s PageRank is an indicator of how “important” Google thinks your site is relative to other pages on the Internet.  While PageRank is not a dynamic indicator of a site’s performance (it’s updated quarterly), it is a good indicator of how well established your site is.

Google Toolbar allows you to turn on a feature that can check Google’s PR of a page.  Other sites, like Page Rank Tool and Page Rank Checker, can check page rank across multiple Google Data Centers or multiple domains at once.

The SEOmoz Page Strength tool presents you not only your page strengh, but some of the factors that go into contributing to a page’s rank.  These factors include links to the site, age of domain, and domain visibility.

Speaking of the Google Toolbar, this is an easy to use tool to attach to your browser.  Not only does it have the Page Rank button on it, but it also contains a quick access to Google searches and other Google tools.  It’s easy to customize as well; many developers have come up with thousands of buttons to add.  Another time saving feature is the ability to highlight search terms on a page.

Data Analysis Tools

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools can help you monitor your website and traffic.  Analytics has easy to use pages that cover traffic sources, keywords that generate your traffic, and more.  All the information is presented in helpful graphs.  It’s easy to compare date ranges as well to get a clearer picture of your website’s statistics.  Webmaster Tools is particularly useful in tracking how the Google bots crawl your site and what pages are indexed.  Uploading a sitemap and tracking links to and within your site are also easy to do within Webmaster Tools.  Combined, this and Analytics can really show you what problems your website has and how traffic is or isn’t finding it.

Yahoo!’s Site Explorer can also show you how many pages are indexed and how many links you have coming to the website.  Yahoo! (and other search engines) has warned that these numbers aren’t absolute and can vary by data center and time of day.

The Search Engine Saturation Tool can also be another handy solution.  Here, you can enter your domain and up to five more to provide a comparison of the amounts of indexed pages in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.  As a third party source, the numbers aren’t completely accurate but do provide a basic guideline to determine if the search engines are seeing your site and indexing it.

If you’re looking for every SEO tool under the sun all in one place, visit the Web Tools at iWebtool.  This page has over 40 tools, from link popularity to spider view (see your page as the search engine bots do) to a meta tag generator.  It’s a helpful site that can put some useful information at your fingertips.

SEOMoz also has a great selection of tools at their site.  Many offer information free of charge, while some will provide limited data only.  You can gain access to the fill complement of SEOMoz tools with a membership to their site.

These are a few of the free SEO resources available on the Internet.  There are others, like Keyword Discovery or more frequent access to iWebtool, which require subscriptions or fees.  It’s up to you and your goals to decide if paying for more information will be beneficial to your site.  There’s nothing against using free tools, and they can easily provide you enough information to get yourself running a search engine friendly site.

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