SEO can be very time consuming and whether you’re managing one or several hundred websites you’re going to want to be able to make your job easier (who doesn’t right?!). Luckily, other SEO’s have already been down this well trodden path of looking for shortcuts and there are loads of great SEO tools out there that can help you to find and fix errors, track rankings and monitor your campaigns.
Below are a selection of SEO tools that make up my current arsenal, a majority of which are free.
Education
To make the most of the below tool set, it’s imperative that you get not only a basic understanding of the principles of SEO but to continually expand on this knowledge over time. Would you choose a shortcut before you had some information as to where it might lead you? Thought not 
The beauty of SEO is that it’s an ever changing field littered with obstacles. The very best SEO’s I know are not only knowledgeable of principles, but also incredibly technical in their analysis and implementation of techniques whilst being marketing & sales minded. An odd beast, but a gem if you can find it! Whilst the Google Algorithm remains a closely guarded and incredibly complex secret, its important to remember that anything you read about this subject will contain an element of speculation and opinion. Read everything with a pinch of salt and form your own opinions of what works best for you and your clients. My tip here is to never look to how to game the system; just go by best practices and you’ll be better in the long run.
SEOmoz
SEOmoz is the leading SEO community hub with contributions from around the globe as well as an abundance of free and paid tools & resources. The Beginners Guide to SEO is a great start for anybody new to the game, blog posts provide useful insights into techniques, trends and tips and a weekly video provides tips and tricks in the form of White Board Friday, generally presented by the Wizard of Moz himself, Rand Fishkin.
There are also paid educational resources available in the form of the Pro Webinar series whereby you’re invited to attend monthly webinars hosted and attended by the World’s leading experts. When you go pro you’ll also be able to view and even download the previous webinars that have occurred over the years as well as access to the Pro Q&A section whereby you can ask either a Trusted Expert or another SEOmoz Pro Member for their feedback on your woes/issues.
The continuously updated information and great spirit at SEOmoz is what make it my favourite resource for ensuring I continue to expand my knowledge. SEOmoz Pro Membership is available from $99 per month and, with the wealth of tools available, is a worthwhile investment if you’re serious about obtaining good rankings.
Whatever industry you’re in, twitter is a great resource for information. I follow who I see as the leading experts in the field and keep tabs on what they are researching, testing and publishing. It not only delivers me a fresh dose of knowledge every morning but helps to build relationships within the community when I need to reach out for assistance.
Further Reading
| The Art of SEO | SEO Secrets | Don’t Make Me Think | CSS: The Missing Manual |
Backlink Analysis
Link building is hard and you need all the help you can get. One part of link building is to backlink your competition to gain an understanding of the landscape which you’re looking to dominate; how competitive it is, what techniques work and what you can do that the competition are not to get to #1. Google do not themselves make link data available to the public, however there are tools you can use that will give you some insight into yours or your competitors link profile.
Yahoo Site Explorer
Yahoo Site Explorer provides information of the links that Yahoo are aware of in their index, pointing to your nominated URL. There is an assumption that the links are ranked in order of value, however I don’t take too much notice of it. The link data is relatively fresh and I find that new links appear shortly after they are built. The bad news is that Yahoo Site Explorer will cease to exist in 2012.
Update – Yahoo Site Explorer was removed at the end of 2011 and is no longer available
SEOmoz Opensite Explorer
SEOmoz Opensite Explorer is a more advanced backlink analysis tool in that it provides additional metrics allowing you to determine the value of not only your links but the links you competitors have. Custom metrics such as PA (Page Authority) and DA (Domain Authority) are based on the quality and quantity of the links that the site providing the link have. Not only can you sort your links by whether they are follow/nofollow but also see metrics such as how many domains are linking to you, percentages of follow/nofollow links and the variation of the anchor text used to link to you. A good balance of all of these metrics make for a healthy link profile and can help you make some quick inroads to why a site is perhaps not performing at its optimum.
Google Webmaster Tools
If you’re only looking for link information relating to the site that you’re managing, creating a Google Webmaster Tools account will provide some backlink data relating to your site. You can see the domains that are linking to you and also find some link opportunities in the ‘Broken Links’ section for links that perhaps linked to an old post/page that has since been removed.
Google Webmaster Tools also offers several features providing feedback of errors Google have found with your site in the form of duplicate or missing Page Titles & Meta Descriptions, Broken links and sitemap errors. In addition to errors, Webmaster Tools also offers statistics of the impressions your site has received, crawl rate, internal links and Google + 1 information.
Browser Plugins & Toolbars
SEO’s spend 90-100% of their day looking at websites, whether they’re yours, your Clients’ or you’re looking for link opportunities. During this time you will want to be able to quickly identify any faults and get an understanding of the reputation of a website. Rather that open several tools in different windows/tabs, you can integrate these into your browser to get information instantly or on demand without leaving the page.
I personally find Firefox to be by far the easiest to use for site review purposes and all of the below plugins are available for Firefox. A few also have versions available for Chrome.
SEOBook Toolbar
The SEOBook Toolbar plugin adds a great deal of link profile information at your fingertips, displaying the backlink information available from Yahoo Site Explorer & SEOmoz Opensite. It also contains links to the SEO Xray plugin (below), an indication of the age of the website from Archive.org, links to view the source of the page, Google Toolbar PageRank and whether the site exists in leading business directories.
SEO Xray
The SEO Xray plugin is part of SEO for Firefox and allows you to place a layer over the website and get information relating to the header tag formation (H1, H2 etc), Image Alt tags, Page Title, Meta Description and, if used, Meta Keywords. There are also some basic link profile information aswell as links to perform site ownership information via WhoIs and IP Search. The latter is very useful if you’re looking to contact the webmaster to perhaps work on building a relationship.
Firebug
Its common to have to make adjustments to the HTML & CSS of a site to correct coding for optimisation purposes. For example, many developers use the H1 tag for a logo, where we like to use them for keyword orientated headings. Firebug allows you to delve into the CSS of any website directly through your browser without needing to download and open the page in an independent editor such as Dreamweaver or Coda. Being able to identify the line number that the associated style is contained not only saves hours in hunting for the right attribute to change when you do download the file, but you can edit the HTML & CSS directly and test different solutions with your adjustments being reflected instantly on the page you’re viewing.
YSlow & Page Speed
Page speed is becoming an important factor to consider and I’ve personally seen it pay great dividends on sites with extreme speed issues. I don’t think making your site that half a second quicker is going to directly correlate with higher rankings, however having a major page speed issue can impact on the indexing of your pages and thus directly impact on traffic. In addition, a faster site usually leads to increased page views by your Visitors; nobody likes a slow site.
The Yahoo YSlow and Google Page Speed plugins slot into your Firebug console and allow you to run various tests on any webpage to see how large the page is in kb’s as well as the average load time in seconds. I personally always aim for a page speed of <500kb and <2 seconds on a non-graphics/media heavy page.
The tools provide insights into what elements of a page are causing the file size such as bloated javascript, non-compressed images, inefficient HTML/CSS coding, broken links and a lack of caching server side.
SEOmoz Toolbar
The SEOmoz Toolbar contains the same link information from Linkscape data that you can find in Opensite Explorer, without needing to perform an additional search. I find it very useful in identifying good link opportunities as well as keeping tabs on my own Clients’ link profile quality. The toolbar also provides links to tools such as Page Analysis with information on Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Internal Links and Header information such as meta robots and canonical tags, a highlighting tool for the identification of follow/no follow links on a page and a flag to identify the country which a site is hosted. The latter can be useful if you’re finding a site is slow to load as location can cause slow load times.
Spidering Tools
Manually gathering the elements of individual webpages is a tedious and time consuming task. Not only that, but look at everything on a macro basis can cause you to miss the bigger picture. Fortunately, there are tools available known as ‘spider’ tools that crawl the webpages of your nominated URL and gather all the element details such as Page Title, Meta Desc, Meta Keywords, H1 Count, H2 Count, Image File Size, Broken Links, 301/302 links etc for you. You can export this data to csv format enabling you to import into an Excel Spreadsheet or a custom web app.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is available for both Windows and Mac in free and paid form. The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 pages on any one domain, with a £99 per annum license required to remove this limit.
Xenu Link Sleuth
Xenu Link Sleuth is available for Windows only and contains a lot more detailed information than Screaming Frog. It’s also completely free, but with the information gathered being more complex, so is the data export. It’s ideal for larger websites and those highly technical reviews.
