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Top 5 free SEO tools for web developers and marketing professionals
Posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 under SEO, designer tools, web design news by Dustin Brewer.There are a lot of tools out there for web developers and marketers that do all kinds of different things. It is hard to know what is important and what isn’t important when you are using some of the tools available. When it comes down to it, the best way to get search traffic is to get more links to your site. But once you have those links coming in, you have to make sure that you have relevant content to ensure that the search robots (and your visitors!) know what your site is about and where the content is located. But don’t over do it, keep it simple stupid applies to search marketing also.
I’m sure there are tools that I don’t know about but I can share the ones that I find the most helpful in my day-to-day operations for the search engine optimization things that I do at work and for my personal projects.
Useful SEO tools for web developers and marketing professionals
#1 Search status
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321
This tool is actually a Firefox extension, whatever browser you may use is up to you. But the browser of choice for web developers, designers and internet marketing professionals should be Firefox for its wide array of plugins. This handy little tool will tell you the pagerank/alexa/compete ranking for the current site you are on. Which is helpful information, but it also allows you to right click and bring up a menu which will let you search for backlinks (on yahoo, google, msn), indexed (on yahoo, google, msn) pages and keyword density.
#2 SEO for Firefox
http://seobook.com/
This one is also a Firefox extension, it allows you to see information within search results about the various pages that are being displayed. This one is mostly handy to do research on competitors and reasons why they may be ranking better then a site you are optimizing. Some of the information is less important than stuff like backlinks or edu and gov links. But all in all you can get a pretty good idea about a site by just looking at that information.
#3 Webmaster Central
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
This is a Google provided service that will allow you to see some really great statistics about a site. You have to sign up for a Google account and verify that you have access to the domain, but once that is done there is a treasure chest of information available. You can see the most popular search results your site showed up for, you can see what the most popular search results you received a click for and all kinds of other helpful information. This can assist you in trying different methods of getting that user to click on your link in the search results.
#4 Seomoz
http://seomoz.com
By itself this isn’t really a tool in the typical sense of the word, but the amount of tools that they offer for free is overwhelming. Not to mention the fantastic content that is available so you can better understand all of their tools and others to best rank better and create more conversions for your clients. One of the tools is a backlink anchor analysis, which can help you to discover what sites are linking in to your site in the anchor text. It also has a Page Strength tool that will give you some information about how your site is doing in various aspects and assign a calculated “Page Strength.†They also have a premium membership that offers some more advanced tools for $49/month.
#5 SEO Chat
http://www.seochat.com
This is another web site that isn’t by itself a tool but does provide a ton of fantastic tools that can add to your arsenal of optimization. There are a lot of Keyword related tools that can help in your keyword research tasks for your client. One of my favorites is using Site Link Analyzer that will give you a ton of fantastic information about the links in your web site. The site also offers some great articles and a forum to help you even more with your search marketing needs.
I know not all of these are what you were expecting, I’m sure you wanted to see this link or that link for helping you to build up your site in search engines. But honestly, this is what I use to help me. It is important that you optimize yourself with these five resources and not get distracted by some of the other junk that may be offered in other sites. Nearly everything you need will be found in these five search marketing resources. You don’t need to spend a ton of time elsewhere that could be spent adding great content to your site. Really, that is the key to great search engine optimization.
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15 Responses to “Top 5 free SEO tools for web developers and marketing professionals”
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About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout the web design portfolio.
Sorry the article was so late in the evening. Christmas things got in the way.
SEO is something I keep wanting to learn more about, but never quite put aside the time to do so. Is there any single article/site you would say is a good starting point?
There are a lot of really great articles out there. I should probably write an SEO 101 article to familiarize everyone with the topic. Rand Fishkin, one of the premier authorities in the search marketing world, has written a great Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization. The guide is a little dated, but I believe it is updated somewhat frequently.
Look for an SEO 101 article to be coming from me sometime in the near future. It may be a multiple part series.
Good info, Especially for those of us who are new to the SEO biz. Firefox is just what is needed with its extensions. Thanx
I had never comented on a article from DevNews and there are many good articles. However yours was exceptional because of one specific reason. You solutions were firstly accesable to all and cheap. How can I be like the pros even though I don’t have their budget.
Thanks Dustin, I look forward to your article
Hi Dustin Brewer,
It seems you changed your blogger template into your own domain website, how did you do that?
Does google let you do it for free, and if so, what the advantages?
I loved your top 5 seo tools, but I think http://searchenginewatch.com and http://seoadministrator.com should have been included as well.
All in all, it was a nice seo article. I am an exprienced web designer and a SEO specialist as well.
Best regards.
Daniel Chege
Poppa Productions Web Designs
http://poppaproductions.net
Poppaproductions@gmail.com
Daniel, I don’t use blogger but I have recently switched my site from a custom blog to Wordpress.
At any rate, both Wordpress and Blogger will allow you to create a custom template for your site using XHTML and CSS. The largest benefit is that there are thousands of developers out there making more secure code, widgets and other things that will free you up to focus on content and marketing.
Thanks Dustin for the heads up about word press, but how do you change the wordpress subdomain to your own website domain name.
Thanks and have a Happy New Year!
Best regards.
Daniel Chege
Poppa Productions Web Designs
http://poppaproductions.net
Poppaproductions@gmail.com
Daniel, there are actually two different Wordpress web sites. There is a http://wordpress.com and a http://wordpress.org. The .com version is the hosted version that gives you a Wordpress sub domain. Which is probably what you are most familiar with.
The .org version is a downloadable version of Wordpress programmed in PHP and uses a MySQL database. This version will allow you to install your own copy of Wordpress on your virtual hosting or own private server. This is the option I use for my site. It is also the best option for most because it allows you to edit the Wordpress code, which will enabled you to do a lot more with Wordpress then you would be able to do with a Wordpress-hosted version.
However, if you are not technically savvy enough to install your own version of Wordpress… As of October, 2006 they have enabled the ability to purchase a domain from them so you no longer have to use a Wordpress sub domain. The cost for this service is $15/year.
I would recommend going to the Wordpress.org site and downloading a new installation though. The knowledge you can gain from installing and using Wordpress is invaluable.
DB.
an interesting article, it is important for people to get their feet wet, and using all the free stuff is a great way to start. I keep a list similar to this and will add the Search status addon to my list.
thanks
There’s a site that I use called SEOGroup.com to track my Google SERP positions. You can submit up to 3 keywords per report and once it’s there, it’ll be displayed in a graph. The site link is http://seogroup.com/evaluation/ … Its definitly free to use and once it generate the report for you, there’s some helpful hints as well too. Hope this help anyone out there who’s looking for a free seo tool to use.
@ Chicagoshmoe, i tried the tool in seogroup and I think its a great piece of tool but not sure how I can track my google position with it.
You have a great blog here and it is Nice to read some well written posts that have some relevancy…keep up the good work
This is a very nice blog. I knew of seo chat but have not really visited and explored the site. I will def take a look and add it to my seo work. Thanks