SEO Tools Everyone should use

written by: Sandino Garcia; article published: year 2008, month 02;



In: Categories » Internet » Search engines and SEO » SEO Tools Everyone should use

As you all know, SEO takes a lot of effort. So much effort, in fact, that people would actually pay companies to do SEO on their websites. It's good practice however to know some SEO of your own, even if you let a company handle the tasks for you. To aid you with this, there are plenty of free SEO tools available on the Internet, that you can easily use for yourself. These tools are more or less the very same tools used by professionals, so it doesn't hurt to know what they are and what they do.

First, there is the keyword research tool. You can find this at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml. What this does is it helps you find the right words and phrases to use in the body text of your website to help promote your site. Using it is easy, just enter the words/phrases you wish to be searched under. The tool will also suggest other words and phrases that you can use.

Another useful tool is the keyword analyzer tool, located at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml. It reads the text on your page and tells you which words are most used, and how many times they are used. Most search engines rank sites based on keyword density, so use this along with a word counter to help you stay within the recommended density.

One tool that you will use quite often is the search engine position checker tool (http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-position-checker.shtml). You can do SERPs manually by searching for your site under the keywords you use and counting the position from the results manually, but this is tedious and takes a lot of time, especially if you use more than one search engine. This does it for you automatically, and supports the three major search engines. You'd need to use this at least once a week to check how your site is ranking.

The link popularity tool (http://www.instantposition.com/link_popularity_check.cfm) is exactly that, it measures the link popularity of your website based on how many 'votes' a search engine has found for your website. The results are presented in graphical form, so it's easy to read and compare. You can also compare how you are doing against your competitors.

The meta tag generator will help you find appropriate meta tags. It does this by picking the most used words on the page. You can find this tool at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/meta-tag-generator.shtml.

The last, but definitely not the least, and should probably be the first one you use, is the search term suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). It displays how many times a keyword is searched for, and tells you how competitive your chosen keyword is. It also shows related searches to your keyword. This is a good tool because it helps you determine how feasible it is to rank for your chosen keyword, and gives suggestions in case your keyword is too competitive.

These are just some of the many SEO tools you can find. Keep them in your bookmarks, you will need them. Good luck!

legal disclaimer

1) Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article as well for any and all copyright infringements by authors and writers. E-articles is a free information resource. If you suspect this article for any copyright infringements, please read the Terms of service and contact us to investigate the problem.
2) The E-articles directory team is not responsible for inaccuracies, falsehoods, or any other types of misinformation this tutorial may contain and will not be liable for any loss or damage suffered by a user through the user's reliance on the information gained here. Please read the Terms of service

Useful tools and features

Translate this article to...    Send this article to you or to a friend

Link to this article from your page   
If you like this article (tutorial), please link to it from your web page using the information above. Linking to this page, this is the only way to help us improve our service, the same time providing your visitors with a way to improve their online experience.

related articles

1. How to Use Google Advanced Search
Google has and Advanced Search page. To get to this page, you click the Advanced Search link on the Google home page. Use Advanced Search for any one of three reasons: You want to focus a search more narrowly than a general keyword search You don’t want to bother with the complexity and thorny syntax of search operators You want to combine more than one search operation As you see in, the Advanced Search page bundles many keyword boxes ...

2. Basic Information About Google Catalogs
Most of Google’s great ideas depend on behind-the-scenes technology that works invisibly to precisely meet information needs. But one Google service relies more on hard work and continual maintenance than great programming: Google Catalogs, a searchable directory of mail-order catalogs, is brilliant in conception and execution. And keeping it going must require a monumental effort of scanning. Unlike Google’s Web index, which crawls through Web sites and reduces their content to a tagged database controlled by retrieval algorithms, t...

3. Breaking Down Google Web Search Results
Other elements on the search results page enable you to understand the result, continue the search, narrow the search, or avoid Internet traffic jams when seeing the target page. Some of these features are present on every search result, and some exist occasionally. Here they are. Page description Remember when I said that the search result text wasn’t composed by the Google staff? Well, sometimes part of the accompanying text is so composed. If the search result appears in Google Directory (which is built by h...

4. How to Use Google Advanced Image Searching
As with Web searches, Google provides a collection of enhanced search tools on the Advanced Image Search page. Follow these steps to reach that page: Go to the Google home page. Click the Images tab. Click the Advanced Image Search link. The Find results portion of the Advanced Image Search page is nearly identical to the Advanced Search page for Web searches.The difference is that the keyword modifiers here relate to images by matching file names, cap...

5. A Quick Tour of Google
Google is far more than a search siteit has grown to be a sizable collection of services and tools, and the collection is getting larger all the time. No longer is Google a single search site; instead, it's a conglomeration of multiple sites. And no longer can you even call it Web-based because Google now includes software that you download and run on your PC. This article often refers to tools and services. Although there is a lot of gray area in the definitions of these two terms, generally a service is a website run by Google. So,...

6. Google and U.S. Government Searches
Arguably, the most useful of Google’s specialty search areas is that devoted to the U.S. government. Actually, this distinct search engine is both larger and smaller than the name implies. This engine is global in reach. At the same time, it reaches below federal government sites to the state and municipal level. You might think that this entire search engine merely replaces the site:.gov operator:keyword combination. Not so. In fact, site:.gov remains quite useful in the UncleSam search because the results pages dish up a hear...

7. Google Search Operators
Google allows you to search using search operators, special words and symbols that make it easy to get search results that match as closely as possible the information for which you're looking. You combine search operators with search terms to form a query, like this: zeppelin "Led Zeppelin" That search would bring back pages that had the word zeppelin on them, but did not have the term Led Zeppelin on them. Here are the common operators you can use with Google: ...

8. Recommended Searching Strategies
Everyone has her own strategies for better searching, so it's always a good idea to ask others for their ideas. But here are a few hints that should help you with Google searches: Be specific The Web is an enormous place, containing literally billions of pages. Almost any search you do brings back far too much information. So make sure that your search is as specific as possible. If you're looking for a history of the making of the album Blonde on Blonde, by Bob Dylan, don't just search for "Blonde on Blonde&q...

9. Searching Google Catalogs
As in Froogle, Google Catalogs presents a topical directory and keyword searching. After you get into the directory, you can limit further searching to that directory category or launch a global Catalogs search. Start at the Google Catalogs home page. catalogs.google.com The directory tempts by listing a few mail-order companies in each main category. Feel free to leap into the directory by clicking either a catalog or a topic on the home page.Google maintains an archive of past catalogs, which can gum up th...

10. Google`s Approach to Online Shopping
The main difference between Google’s shopping services and those in other major portals is that Google doesn’t get its hands on the money. You don’t buy anything through Google. Both Froogle and Google Catalogs function purely as directories to products, sending you elsewhere to get your hands on the goods. Google has no revenue-sharing association with e-commerce retailers (in Froogle) or mail-order companies (in Google Catalogs). The search results you get in both services are pure; preferred placement in the search resul...