There seems to be TONS of SEO tools out there that purport to help you successfully plan and implement your SEO strategy. What exactly are these tools and what are they trying to do? Here are the most common types of tools you can find and their purpose:
- Keyword suggestion tools - these tools help you analyze and gather different keywords most relevant to your business/product - for instance in SEObook's keyword suggestion tool , results of your keyword query would give the following information:
- Links the search volumes to the related global search results.
- Provides links to price estimate tools from Overture and Google AdWords. That Google AdWords tool shows the necessary bid to rank #1 for 85% of queries, and roughly how much traffic you could expect AdWords to send you based on that bid price.
- Links to Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonyms, Yahoo! Suggest, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker keyword research results.
- Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing.
- Search engine rank checkers checks where your site ranks in a particular search engine for a specific keyword- some advance tools also have the ability to check for multiple domains and region specific databases.
- General webpage analysis tools such as the one found on webuildpages gives you your yahoo rank, pages that are indexed, backlinks to your website, .edu backlinks, domain age, and phrasecount. This information helps you check your site's SEO "report card".
- Link Checkers are quick and easy tools that help you check your site for dead links.
- Sitemap generators - According to xml-sitemaps.com, the free generator helps you do the following:
• Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.
• Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.
• Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
• Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your website.
Many many more tools are at your disposal, but a caveat before you jump into the "free tools" fray - there is still risk of viruses, so definitely do a virus check. Also, some tools are as simple as going on a website and typing a keyword, others require downloading software, be aware that since the tools are free there will be no customer support to help you through possible system problems you may have.
Here are additional resources for you:
SEObooks' Free tools
SEO chat Free tools list
Best 5 Free Search Engine Tools
free-search-engine-optimization-tools.htm ">13 Best Free SEO Tools
Google Rankings
