The Best Free SEO Tools and SEO Software
Articleby Brandon Baker
The Best Free SEO Tools and SEO Software
There seems to be an abundance of SEO tools available on the internet. Whatever you need regarding SEO, there is surely a tool, software, or service out there that can fill it. Although most of these are very valuable, they have the added downside of often being very expensive–sometimes hundreds of dollars!
Luckily, there are also plenty of tools and software that are absolutely free, and in my opinion, absolutely necessary if you plan on doing anything related to SEO. Let me go over some of my favorite free SEO tools and software:
SEO Spyglass
This is by far my favorite SEO tool. I use it each and every day because of how much you can learn about a site in just a few clicks. If you ever want to know why another site is ranking higher than you, one of the most important things to know is where that site is getting its links from. With SEO Spyglass, you can do exactly that. Enter the site you’re curious about into this software, and in just second it spits back everything you need to know: where the links come from, their PageRank, their anchor text, how many other links on the page, where the linking page is located, etc.
If there is a particular keyword you’re looking to rank for, enter that keyword into Spyglass and it will return to you the backlink profile of all of the top ranking sites for that particular keyword. No other free tool comes close to this kind of power.
NOTE: SEO Spyglass is technically not a free tool (the full version costs 0), but the free trial is just about all you will need in 95% of cases. If you only use one tool, let this be the one.
NoDoFollow
A common concern of SEOs is trying to rack up as many “dofollow” links they can. The reason for this is because nofollow links are dropped out of the Google index, and therefore confer no “link juice.” This created a situation where SEOs constantly needed to be able to determine whether a link was dofollow or nofollow, and looking into a web page’s HTML code started to become tedious.
Enter NoDoFollow.
This is an add-on for all you FireFox users. Enable it and all of a sudden, all dofollow links are shaded in blue and all nofollow links are shaded in red. Disable it and you’re back to normal. Couldn’t be simpler. And it’s free!
SEOBook’s RankChecker
How many times have you wondered to yourself, “I wonder what my rank is for this keyword?” With SEOBook’s RankChecker (also a Firefox plugin), the answer to that question is just a few seconds away. Enter a keyword, enter a URL, and in seconds it tells you exactly where you rank in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Not only that, but it gives you a ranking that is independent of your location and past history. This is crucial because it’s a more accurate picture of your ranking progress than manually searching for your site in Google.
Google’s Keyword Tool
Ahh, yes. What would we do without keyword stats from the source themselves? Google’s Keyword Tool lets you know how many monthly searches are being performed for any keyword you can think of. Type it in, and watch the numbers spit back at you. Indispensable for those of you trying to figure out which would be the best and most profitable keywords to target. Now you know what people are searching for!
About the Author
Brandon Baker is a full-time New York SEO specialist and consultant. He offers SEO Services to site-owners seeking to improve their search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Check out his blog and site (http://www.emineer.com) for more valuable information on SEO and search engine marketing.