Even to some who have been online for years, SEO can be somewhat of a mystery. While there are a lot of differing opinions on the techniques that are the most effective for getting your site to the top of the search engines, there’s no doubt that a key factor in your success is being able to effectively access and analyze data. Below are 12 free web-based tools to help you in your SEO efforts:
Keyword Mutation Detection Tool We all strive for our sites to look professional and for our writing to be grammar and spelling error-free, but if you can find a way to incorporate some strategic misspellings into your page, it can pay off. This tool will give you common “mutations” of your key words, including misspellings as well as correctly spelled variations. For example, enter “entrepreneur” and you’ll get: entrepreneurs, entreprenur, and entreprenuer. As these are all commonly entered search terms, there’s an opportunity to capitalize on the mistakes people make when searching.
Term Extractor From SEOmoz, which offers quite a few helpful tools, this one will analyze your pages and determine which search terms it looks like you’re trying to target. It’s a valuable tool, especially if the resulting report shows you’re optimized for terms other than what you had hoped!
Wordtracker Suggestion Tool Enter a keyword into this simple tool, and it will provide you with a list of up to 100 suggested search terms that include your keyword. The nice thing about this tool is that it also provides the number of searches performed for each phrase, so you can target those most likely to drive more traffic.
Keyword Difficulty Check Want to see how hard you’re going to have to work to get on the first page of search results for your keywords? This tool is for you. Just enter the word or phrase you want it to check, and you’ll get a percentage of difficulty result. For example, if you want to be on the first search results page for the word “blog”, you’re looking at a 93.48% (out of 100%) difficulty ranking. Want to be right up toward the top for “sesquipedalian armadillo” though? You’ve got a great chance at just 22.91% difficulty!
Term Target Grader You might not have been an A student in school, but now you can get A’s where it really counts. Enter your URL and targeted keyword or phrase into this tool, and you’ll get a letter grade reflective of how your page actually targets your desired keyword, along with a detailed report. The only catch: unless you’re a premium member of SEOmoz, you’ll only get one of these reports every 24 hours.
Keyword Group Detection Tool Another tool from Microsoft’s adCenter Labs, this one “helps you find groups of words from the pool of online queries that are related or similar to keywords that you enter.” In other words, you enter a keyword you want to optimize for, and it will give you common search words and phrases relating to that keyword for which you might also want to optimize. It’s a good way to get your creativity going when planning your SEO.
SEO Browser is a tool that allows you to see your site as the search engines see it. Offering both basic and advanced modes for free, the resulting report generated by SEO Browser gives you a clear view of your site content, including meta data, text-to-page weight ratio, number of internal and external links, and tons more, all on one page. This allows you to easily identify problems and ways you can improve your site.
Keyword Tracking with Backlink Tracker Meant to be used over time, this very cool free tool tracks your search engine placement (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) for specified keywords over time. This tool also checks search engines for the number of backlinks to your page over time. You’ll need to sign up for a free account and place a PHP script on your server for it all to work. The detailed charts and reports you get make it worth the effort.
SEOToolSet offers several tools, from the not-so-useful source code viewer (your browser does that), to the very cool Competition Research Tool, which analyses your site and finds and compares it with your competitors based on your chosen key words. They’ve also got a keyword tool that returns results detailing demographics (gender and age statistics), click-through rates, and the CPC average for the major engines.
SEO Scores This tool gives you a ton of information about your site. Broken into four sections, the data is well organized and very useful. The areas analyzed are: 1. On-page SEO, which includes metadata, image summary, W3C validation, more; 2. Off-page SEO, including domain information, Google rank, backlinks, last Google crawl date, and traffic rank; 3. Blogosphere, which just tells you if your key words appear in your blog, and your Technorati ranking; and 4. Social Mediasphere, giving you del.icio.us bookmarks and a Digg submission summary.
Google Keyword Tool Meant for Google Adwords users, this simple keyword tool provides local and global search volume numbers for the keywords and phrases you enter, as well as about 150 related terms. It also supplies suggested terms and allows you to export the reports to a text or csv (for Excel) file. There are also some dropdowns with additional options, most of which are specific to those using Adwords.
Reciprocal Link Checker Want to see if people are placing the reciprocal links they promised? This tool does just that. Enter your site and multiple reciprocal sites, and you’ll get a report showing how many (if any) links on their sites point back to you. While this particular tool does not tell you which page(s) on the reciprocal sites are linking to you, it does save the time of hunting for your links on their sites.
These twelve tools should begin to get you the information you need to help improve your SEO. There are, of course, other tools out there. Which ones have you found useful? Be sure to share your experience in the comments below.