Free SEO Tools
Some of the best tools in the industry are either free, have great free trials, or work on a “freemium” business model. Here are some of my favorites. This list is frequently updated so check back often!
Far and away, one of the most valuable tools out there. Unbelievable, world-class, enterprise-level analytics. Not optional.
Again, not optional. Use Google Webmaster tools to fix crawling and indexing issues, site speed data and more.
If you’re interested in penetrating the 25-ish% of the US market that Bing / Yahoo have, you need to sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools! Setup your account, submit your XML sitemap, and go through every tab at least once.
The defacto tool for search engine optimizers everywhere. Use this as a general barometer for search volume. My caveat is that search volumes can vary widely from industry to industry, vertical to vertical, so take it with a grain of salt. I believe the Google Keyword Tool is best used as a “relative indicator” for search volume.
SEOBook SEO Tools (Free and Paid)
Aaron Wall is one of the most revered minds in the industry. I highly recommend some of his tools.
SEO Site Tools (Google Chrome Plugin)
An awesome SEO plugin for Google Chrome.
Another good relative indicator for the general barometer of search volume. Doesn’t apply to low-volume queries however, which makes it less valuable.
Enter your URL and detect whether or not other people have plagiarized your content. You’ll have to sign up for a premium membership to get full access but it’s definitely worth doing once.
BuiltWith does an instant, deep analysis of everything going on behind-the-scenes of your website. Server information, CMS systems, frameworks, analytics and tracking, javascript libraries, widgets, aggregation functionality, document information and encoding. Worth doing once just to check out how much is going on within the inner workings of your page.
A great, free tool that can be used to find broken links and errors. It’s great to run this every few weeks / months and make sure you don’t have any major crawling errors!
An instant, comprehensive report on your on-page optimization. This is a great tool, I think it’s white-labeled from someone else that has created it, but it’s an awesome “final check” once you’ve gone live with a site. This one always catches ALT tags that I miss out on.
SEM Rush (SEM Data and Organic Ranking Information)
A great tool for competitor rankings and data on paid search.
See your website the way search engines see it. This is a great tool for an instant diagnosis on technical issues. I frequently use this to check if 301 redirects have been implemented.
A great firefox extension for SEO. Tons of data within the search engines, before even clicking the page. This is really good for competitive analysis.
Internet Marketing Ninjas On-Page Optimization Analysis
Another on-page optimization tool from Internet Marketing Ninjas. There are a bunch of these kinds of tools out there, and I’m going to make you choose your favorite rather than listen to me. I like using this one in particular to check all of my internal links and external links.
Just plugin your URL and XML-Sitemaps.com will create a free sitemap for you, up to 500 pages.
Use this tool to check how Google views your structured data markup. It’s particularly useful if you have a G+ profile and you want to verify authorship for your blog posts.
Virante Duplicate Content Checker
This is a great tool to scope out whether or not you have duplicate content problems. First it determines whether or not you have a www vs. non-www issue in the Google cache, followed by checking whether or not Google has “omitted entries similar” to pages on your site. It’ll also check default page, 404′s and PageRank dispersion. It looks like some of the graphics on the tool are broken, but it still works.
Advanced Link Manager - Manage your links. This tool is awesome.
Link Research Tools - Compiles link data from lots of sources into one dashboard.
Majestic SEO – One of the best link explorers in the industry.
Open Site Explorer - THE best link explorer in the industry.
Ahrefs – Another very good link analysis tool.
4 Comments
Tommy!! Thanks for sharing your secrets to success. You are making me smile! Thanks man!
Copyscape and Bing webmaster tools. I would not have thought about BING just because Google is so large. You raise very good points.
Mr.MakingUsmile
Great post Tommy! Loved your click minded course. I used all of the tools you suggested and was later turned on to SEO quake by a friend. It is a google chrome plugin that is a huge help in quickly analyzing competitor’s websites.
Just a suggestion I thought you might find useful :)
Twitter: Red_Web_Design
Great list Tommy.
Hadnt heard of Advanced Link Manager or Link Research Tools before. Will give them a try.
I miss Site Explore by Yahoo. It was one of the best free tools to check back links. It is unfortunate that it merged with bing. Open Explorer has been something I used since then and also got SEOMoZ pro membership for a month.
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Majestic SEO is something I hope to spend more time on.
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