Posts tagged SEO tools

Now that we have addressed What is SEO? and Basic SEO Tips, I thought I’d share some of my favourite SEO tools. These can be used to properly focus your SEO strategy, or just to get an idea of what your competitors are doing. No doubt I will miss some great tools, so if you see anything you think is worth adding then let me know…

Google Keyword Tool

Absolutely invaluable to identify the niche’s you are targeting.  Work out the competitiveness of a certain keyword, the number of searches per month, and other keywords worth focusing on.  Be sure to set the search to Australia only, and when working out how many searches a certain keyword get’s, select “Exact”  from “Match Type”.

Search Status for Firefox

Search Status is a great little add-on for Firefox (don’t use Internet Explorer) which aggregates a few useful SEO tools. Most notable is the Google PageRank (PR) feature which clearly shows a certain website’s clearly. This is a great way of quickly seeing how reputable Google see’s the site as being. If you right click on parts of the toolbar you will see you can easily find a website’s backlinks, Google cache and indexed pages plus much more.

Yahoo Site Explorer

This tool shows every backlink your website has that has been cached by Yahoo. It generally rates links in order of importance, so this is the perfect tool to find out exactly how many link you have, how many you need to be up with your competitors, and where your important links are.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is unbelievably valuable for any webmaster. It tracks every visitor to your site, where they came from, what keywords they used to search, which pages get visited the most, each pages bounce rate, where they are located and much, much more. If you can become an Analytics expert, and then optimise your website based on that information, you need know no more.

These are all you need to get started. Give some of them a go and let me know what you think. These are simply the basic (yet most useful tools) I use. Drop me a comment if you think I’ve left out something worthwhile…