General SEO Tools

There are many various tools which help make the job of SEO quicker. These are some of my more commonly used tools. All the tools in this section are free.

FireFox browser – browser allows tabbed browsing, which saves a ton of time when I am looking at about a half dozen sites at the same time. (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox)

Digital Point keyword ranking, backlink, and PageRank checker – I use this tool to view my position for various websites in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. It also helps me hypothesize some of the ways they may have changed their algorithms. (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords)

Yahoo! Tracker – tracks keyword rankings in Yahoo! (http://www.webmaster-gadgets.com/ytracker/)

Xenu Link Sluth – finds broken links on your site, and helps you build a sitemap. (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html)

Free Meta Tag Generator – helps you create the code for your page title and meta tags
(http://www.search-marketing.info/meta-tags/make-meta.htm)

The Google Toolbar – good for highlighting keyword density and doing many things like giving you a quick glimpse of a cached copy of a page and its backlinks. (http://toolbar.google.com/) If you are doing lots of exceptionally aggressive promotional techniques it may be unwise to install any toolbar distributed by a major search engine since it will help them track and cross reference your sites.

GoogleBar (for Mozilla) – used on non internet explorer browsers.
(http://googlebar.mozdev.org/)

GoogleBar Hack (for Mozilla) – used to show PageRank on the GoogleBar. (http://www.prgooglebar.org)

Top25Web PageRank lookup – shows PageRank of any page you input. (good to use when the toolbar is broken) (http://www.top25web.com/pagerank.php)

Show IP – FireFox extension shows what IP Google results are coming from (http://l4x.org/site/node/1078)

GoLexa – SEO Swiss Army Knife tool (http://www.golexa.com/)

Books I found helpful toward learning web marketing and website design. (http://www.search-marketing.info/literature.htm) some of these books on this site are affiliate links, although most are through Amazon and they really do not pay much money. Feel free to buy through non affiliate links.

Office application. Things like spreadsheets make life much easier as an SEO. I use MicroSoft Office sometimes (http://office.microsoft.com/) and sometimes I use OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/). Either will probably work for most jobs.

Content generation & scripting: http://www.elance.com is an online auction where people bid on your projects. You can find real bad deals and real gems there. http://www.constant-content.com is a content bank full of content for sale. The US government and the BBC are also offering free
RSS feeds.