12 No-Cost Tools to Help Improve Your SEO
Posted on 10. Mar, 2010 by Matthew Toren in SEO & Rank
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.
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45 Responses to “12 No-Cost Tools to Help Improve Your SEO”
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Alex
10. Mar, 2010
I don’t know nearly enough about SEO as a should. This is such a huge help. Thanks for sharing. I will be checking out most of these!
Consolidation School Loan
10. Mar, 2010
I really like the 12 tools you discuss… especially because they are free!
Keith
10. Mar, 2010
Was already using a couple of these, re-tweeted and checking a few more you listed to see if I can integrate into my system I already use.
Legitimate Work From Home Jobs
10. Mar, 2010
Seo is a mystery – probably always will be to some extent. This is a great list of tools – I have played around with a few of them already. My new favorite, thanks to this, is the term extractor. Here’s another one I like that is not mentioned: keyrow.com
Umbro England
10. Mar, 2010
the tool i used the most is seo quake to check the backlinks, indexed pages etc…
Agent Deepak
10. Mar, 2010
Nice resource but using 12 tools for SEO, not always possible.
Credit Girl
10. Mar, 2010
Thanks for this list of tools. I’ll definitely have to check out the reciprocal link checker. It’s such a hassle having to go back and forth to check so hopefully this will save me some time.
Laptop Briefcases
10. Mar, 2010
You’ve covered a lot of the more useful free seo tools available. Just don’t expect easy rankings just because you have good tools to help you. You still need SEO knowledge to know exactly what it takes to get rankings. My favorite on this list is the Google keyword tool. If you’re going to learn any one tool on this list, I’d say this is the one to know. Knowing which keywords to target is half the battle.
Jaguar Service
10. Mar, 2010
I have seen that there are many tools are available on the net but it is difficult to find out the blog which will be legitimate.
Andrew@BloggingGuide
11. Mar, 2010
It’s my first time to hear about Keyword Mutation Detection Tool. You are right in saying that misspellings can also payoff. I will definitely try this. Thanks for this information.
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11. Mar, 2010
I forgot what it was called, but a very useful (for data collection) tool is the awstats/webalizer extraction tool – you can actually build up your own keyword data.
Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella
11. Mar, 2010
This is an excellent collection of free SEO tools. I’m going to include a link back to this article in my weekly round-up tomorrow. I also think I will review a few of them for my readers. Thanks so much for sharing them with us!
Bridgette
11. Mar, 2010
This was AWESOME!! Thank you! You definetly add value online!
Laptop Briefcases
11. Mar, 2010
I would personally be careful with the keyword mutation detection tool. While those misspellings may be a valid source of traffic, you don’t want to fill your copy with misspellings for that purpose. That would reflect poorly upon your site to both your visitors and to the search engines. It may be better to target those keywords offsite through link building or PPC.
Web Design Beach
11. Mar, 2010
Great list indeed. I really like the Mutation tool by Microsoft, because if used smartly, it can bring some really nifty results.. Also i would like to add up, that i always prefer using all-in-one plugins for firefox which usually implement many seo tools in one powerful.
Internet Business
11. Mar, 2010
I’ve managed to get top or near-top placement on Google for a number of terms for various sites I own, so I can really vouch for the benefit of good SEO. Every tool that makes it easier is a very welcom addition to the arsenal – especially if it’s free! Thanks for a very helpful list.
Wall Decals
11. Mar, 2010
These tool will come in handy. I am fairly new at the SEO thing and need all the help I can get. Thanks for sharing.
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12. Mar, 2010
I’ve used it in the past, I think it’s probably the best tool of its kind out there. Although it’s free you do need to subscribe at some point as they claim to update the site when Google changes its algorithms.
used tires
14. Mar, 2010
I thought I knew of all SEO tools but some of these are totally new to me. Can’t wait to try them out and put them to the test, thanks. :)
Till then,
Jean
Kim McAllister
14. Mar, 2010
Really useful post – thanks for sharing!
Traffic Ultimatum
14. Mar, 2010
Nice information. now i am using only 7 tools for my travel related blog……..
CameraBags
15. Mar, 2010
OK bookmarked the keyword mutation tool. I am a bad speller anyways so this will probably work out good for me but it will be difficult to misspell words on purpose.
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15. Mar, 2010
You can use it for various purposes include doing research before buying or selling website; want to find out how popular the website is; use it as SEO analytic tool to improve your site performance; or just about curiosity.
WebpageLottery
17. Mar, 2010
Wow, I just found out that Microsoft has two keywoods tools too.
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18. Mar, 2010
Use this Backlink Checker tool to check How many backlinks your site have in Google and Yahoo. Note down your site backlinks and check back from time to time to see if your backlinks increasing or not and try to improve your blog accordingly.
Cash Genie
18. Mar, 2010
SEO mystery is yet to unveil but yea lot of grey areas got cleared with this post.
Dress Sandals
22. Mar, 2010
Be aware that none of these tools will drastically improve your seo if you don’t know what you’re doing. These tools will save you time, but you still need to know which hoops to jump through to get better search engine rankings.
Watch Health Videos
25. Mar, 2010
Thanks for great list!
Talkblogger
29. Mar, 2010
Nice collection of the SEO tools.
At last got them was searching for a nice collection of similar tools.
Now i think i will be able to well optimize my blog.
Scott@ Forex Robot
31. Mar, 2010
These are some pretty cool tools! I just put the 3 keywords I want my website to rank for in the keyword difficulty check and I’m getting between 49% and 59%. Hopefully that’s a good number to be at lol.
Josh
12. Apr, 2010
This is an excellent resource! I have never heard of most of these tools available to us!
Thank you for putting this post up, it will certainly help us improve our odds at the engines!
Cheers
karasu emlak
14. Apr, 2010
I don’t know much enough about SEO . But this is a goo reference to star. Thanks for sharing.
Wealth Creation
07. May, 2010
What a list! haha I’m just so ecstatic I found these SEO stuffs in one page. I already bookmarked this one. Thanks for sharing!
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03. Jun, 2010
It also supplies suggested terms and allows you to export the reports to a text or for Excel file. There are also some drop downs with additional options, most of which are specific to those using Adwords.
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07. Jun, 2010
Wow this is a great list of resources, thanks. Just read your other post on SEO too – your giving away so much value here.
I am going to check out the keyword difficulty checker – very handy.
Thank you again
Used cars buying
03. Aug, 2010
Very good tools,
This free tools will be very helpful for all new users like me. This tools have helped me lot. Thanx for this post and all the best for future.
Venetian Mirror
16. Aug, 2010
This is the first time I have heard of the “keyword difficulty checker” nice tip, will try it out ASAP! :-)
Mauricio Malchevic
22. Sep, 2010
Google Keyword Tool is the best tool ever. You cannot really survive without using this free tool for your keyword research.
Andrew@ Audit Software
28. Oct, 2010
This one is “Must read” article. Thanks for sharing. SEO Score is perfect tool that I personally use a lot. Just Tried Term Extractor, thanks to your post. It’s amazing.
Jia Jun
24. Nov, 2010
I found Term Extractor by SEOmoz. Sometimes we just left out some great keywords to target on.
And the whole list benefits me a lot.
Thanks and great job. :D
Web Services
18. Feb, 2011
Amazing!! The perfect list about the ways to develop SEO.
The bloodline of any online business is traffic. With over a billion internet users how do you attract them to your website? Answer is SEO!
So we need to be very careful when doing SEO.
David Jenyns
02. May, 2011
This is a huge list of free resources. :)
Just have to remember though that even if we are using free tools, we still spend our precious time testing all these, which make me think that there’s no such thing as free SEO (but SEO tools).
I’m sure there will be more people that will benefit from this list.
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30. Aug, 2011
its very informative article,i just check my back links and its great to see do fallow back links