“Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) has come a long way since it allegedly was first documented by John Audette and Bruce Clay in 1997. When search engine algorithms were simpler, webmasters could saturate a page with keywords, ensuring a higher rank in search engine results. Ultimately, as users wanted the most relevant data, search engines worked to make their algorithms stronger to avoid “Keyword Stuffing”.
Using a single SEO tool will rarely result in the #1 search engine ranking for your site. As a result of this, there are literally hundreds of tools available on the internet that aid in SEO, competing for the attention of today’s busy webmaster. Rapid development of search engines makes most SEO tools archaic, so you need to change with the times and get updated with new tools in order to keep your sites optimized.
Without further ado, here are some of the best tools you should consider including in your SEO strategy.
All SEO users should know this tool. It is the one of the oldest tools available on the internet. It enables users to save a substantial amount of time on linking. You can identify 10,000 links through this tool, so you can prioritize them accordingly and you can get your keyword rank and overall ranking in the search engines. For use in your own applications the SEOmoz Free API is perfect if you need relatively limited information about a lot of different websites. It’s a great way to get an overview about the quality of pages on the web. If you can budget money for the Site Intelligence API, you can dive deeper into a site or page which is great if you’re developing a highly robust application for internal or external use.
This is an excellent free SEO tool. Highly recommended by many bloggers, it spiders website links, images, CSS, script, and apps from an SEO perspective. It fetches key onsite page elements for SEO, presents them in tabs by type and allows you to filter for common SEO issues, or slice and dice the data however you see fit by exporting into Excel. You can view, analyze, and filter the crawl data as it is gathered and updated continuously. It also allows you to quickly analyze, audit, and review a site from an onsite SEO perspective and enables you to export key onsite elements (e.g. url, page title, meta description, heading, etc.) to Excel to use as a base for SEO recommendations.
This software has grown quickly in popularity. It is a handy SEO tool for Firefox, Chrome browsers. There is also a beta version for Opera and Safari. SEOquake helps to obtain information about any site for a wide range of parameters such as page rank, Google index, Alexa, and many others. The Keyword Density tool serves to demonstrate the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page. It even has a parameter that highlights nofollow links. An easy to install toolbar shows values of the parameters under each search result in SERP of Google, Yahoo, Bing as well as the foreign language search engines Yandex, and Baidu.
Keyword Blaze is one of the best if not the best keyword research tool. The days of just doing simple keyword research are long gone. Now you need to be ahead of your competition and it starts with research, and Keyword Blaze can do just that for you. This tool is free and not only that, its creators also have a great Keyword Blaze video tutorial.
This is an important tool, even for SEO novices. It gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. It allows you to track visitor activity on your website and also provides a complete web analytics report including traffic sources, visitor bounce rate, unique visitors, and much more. Google Analytics prepares you to write better-targeted ads, strengthen marketing initiatives, and create higher converting websites.
This is a well-known Pay per Click (PPC) advertising tool introduced by Google for doing your site’s keyword analysis. Still highly rated by SEO experts, it can provide a number of ideas on the keywords, which are words or phrases related to your business that are highly searched. Although people are neglecting this tool as there are many tools available in the internet, I recommend you continue to use this tool since it can still be very helpful, and even enables you to get mobile search stats, for today’s webmaster on the go.
If you want to understand impressions and conversions to your websites, this is the #1 tool. It’s free to sign up – you only need to paste some code into your websites and you’re off. It enables you to improve your site’s visibility in Google search results and provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. Google Webmaster Tools provide you with Google’s view of your site and diagnoses problems. It shows how Google crawls and indexes your site and teaches about specific problems Google is having accessing it. This tool also enables you to discover your link and query traffic and share information about your site.
The digital marketing products of Webtrends enable you to measure what’s working and what isn’t for your marketing approach. Their mobile stat tool is also gaining traction. These products offer customer intelligence and behavioral segmentation, targeting + scoring, optimization + testing, mobile and social apps creation and Facebook Page management, real-time web analytics, plus unified digital analytics across mobile, and social and web.
This great product enables you to save time and get a better understanding of how your site is positioned in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Especially if you are in a competitive niche, it is crucial to find out exactly which keywords are converting and which are rising in searches. This allows you to target specific keywords that the competition isn’t. Tracking of your keywords can be done for local results and for 35 different countries. This fully automated tool checks your keywords daily. The quicker you get updated results, the quicker you can react.
Did I miss any top SEO tools for 2012? Please let me know which ones.
This is an excellent list and a few I need to add to my own list of secret sauce tools
Thanks for this list…knew the core options…but some new ones for us – screaming frog & keyword blaze….will check these out today! Your system must worked! Very highly ranked for this search!!
Thanks again for this share…hoping for similar success.
Here’s one more tool that uses data from many of those mentioned above: Raventools.com.
Excellent work and Do we have any free keyword tools apart from Google ???
Thanks for posting this article.
usefull post, thanks!
i think seotools like “flesch reading ease” or “synonym finder” are really important 2 for a good seo. a list of my favorutite seotools are here: http://seojuice.de/seo-tools.htm
hey great site, i enjoyed reading it. keep up the good work
There is a fantastic product called Sycara, you missed.
Great article. Thanks for sharing.
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I would like to mention Linkody which is a great tool for 24/7 backlink monitoring, anchor analysis, and link building.