Do It Yourself SEO – The SEO Tool Box — Part 3 of 4

SEO Tools Can Simplify Tasks

When you do SEO yourself, you’ll find the tasks are time consuming. SEO tools can save time and simplify your tasks. Some tools are free and others can be very reasonable on a subscription basis. Below are some tools for analytics, keyword research, competitive research, and link analysis.

Analytics Tools: Used to optimize site content and design, maximizing performance.

1. Google Analytics: Robust analytics tool
2. Google Website Optimizer: Test and optimize site content and design to maximize performance
3. Piwik: Open source web analytics
4. Webalizer:  Free Web server logfile analyzer

Keyword Research Tools: Used to discover keywords to target, and tell you how competitive the keywords are.

1. Wordtracker Free Keywords: Generates up to 100 related keywords and get an estimate of their daily search volume.
2. Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool: Generates keywords based on your keyword/URL input
3. Keyword Discovery: Free search term suggestion tool generates the top 100 keywords
4. Microsoft adCenter Keyword Forecast: Gives impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords

A tool like MySEOServer crawls your site or blog identifying each page to be optimized for Google, Yahoo! and Bing. It searches content on each page and selects three keywords based on traffic, relevancy and keyword density. This can save you or your webmaster a lot of time and is cost effective.

Competitive Research Tools: Used to determine how much traffic your competitors get and which search terms send them the most traffic.

1. Alexa: Gives you traffic trends for competing websites
2. Compete.com: Track and compare competitors with free site metrics for the top 1,000,000 web domains
3. Google Search Insights: Compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames

Link Analysis Tools: Used to analyze your link profile compared to your competitors, identify and fix broken links, and find new linking sources to give your site the authority needed for top rankings.

1. Xenu Link Sleuth: Free software identifies broken links, verifies internal links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets.
2. Backlink Watch: Free tool shows details on your backlinks including anchor text

Tip: Download FireFox for SEO plugins that streamline many SEO tasks.

Now that you’ve built your site, you should get it listed in local search and industry-specific directories. Part 4 tells you how to get more traffic with local search, universal search, and also gives you tips on SEO training.