Website History

As you might already know, the age of a website can affect your optimization efforts, especially if the site is brand new. New sites typically have not had the time or longevity to acquire good anchor text links, a factor Google uses in its algorithms for ranking relevance. Here is a tool to help you find the age of a website, which can be helpful when assessing an SEO plan for a client or company. Web Rank Info's free Server Header Checker tool allows you to check the HTTP status returned by a server. This is useful during the site review process before you start optimizing the site.

It's always most important to make sure the site communicates well with robots before you get started; otherwise, what's the point of optimizing? URLTrends allows you to view trend reports of your current and previous Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and incoming links for your website as well as DMOZ status. This can be very helpful during the pre-campaign analysis.

Alexa collects online data about websites regarding their reach, rank, pageviews, incoming links and similar sites. I find this information helpful when researching prospects and their competitors. Hoovers is an excellent source for company and industry information as well as competitor data. This helps when compiling information for a client competitor analysis, which is essential in keeping yourself ahead of the competition.

Linking

Links are a huge topic of discussion in search engine optimization. Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer is a tool that lists the backlinks to your website. It also reports the anchor text used in the link going back to your site. Hub Finder is another link analysis tool, and it's free. This tool provides a good way to find backlink neighborhoods. Class C IP Address Checker is a site that gives you a breakdown of websites on the same IP block, which is useful when investigating the quality of links to a website.

Optilink's free Link Analysis Tool analyzes top-ranked websites on 10 major search engines. It gives you link popularity, the number of outgoing links, optimizes your internal links and finds relevant sites to request links from. Expansion packs are available at $49, and the full version is US$149 for this offline tool. OptiSpider is a site linking analyzer that spiders your site, runs a keyword count on all pages, compares link text to page topic and title tag, and discovers which link text or page title needs improvement. Cost is $98 for this offline tool.

Keyword Analysis

Google Sets is a very cool tool to help you create keyword sets in the same family. It is easy to use, helpful for finding related keywords and is also free. Go Rank's Ontology Finder lets you find words that Google considers related to your keywords. It is always important to keep relevance in mind as you optimize your website for search engines.

MarketLeap's Search Engine Marketing Tools are free and easy to use for checking link popularity, researching search engine saturation and keyword verification. The Keyword Combination Tool allows you to combine two keyword lists into one and expands the list, this is useful for developing a keyword strategy.

The Keyword Density Tool measures keyword density which some people say can be helpful when you compare two pages for keyword density. The Keyword Helper Tool helps you find more keywords, which is always useful when designing an organic SEO program.

Position Reporting

Poodle Predictor shows how a site listing appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It also tells you how 'search engine friendly' the site is by letting you know if the engine will spider the site easily. If so, the site will have a better chance at acquiring good rankings.

Web CEO's Website Ranking Checker is another tool that lets you track search engine rankings, it also compares website performance to your competitors website and allows exporting to clients. This tool has free basic services with add-ons up to $400+.

RankingManager is an excellent tool, and my first choice for reporting the position of various keywords on search engines. It's easy to use and provides numerous options for reporting the data to clients.

Web Analytics

ClickTracks is a web analytics tool for path tracking and collecting PPC information. It has a great interface with excellent visitor click stream tagging options. There is a free version with upgrades to $10K.

LiveStats is another good web analytics tool; it has good reporting options, is easy to understand and has great export options. Cost runs from $195/month to $1,795/month.

Miscellaneous Tools

GoogSpy tells you what terms your competitors are bidding on at AdWords, this can be helpful in planning your own AdWords campaign. Copyscape lets you search for copies of your pages on the Web. This is particularly useful for preventing competitors from outperforming you in search engines and allows you to protect your content and prevent page-jacking.

RoboForm Password Manager is a simple tool used for remembering all your passwords; it fills in fields when campaigning a website and includes profiles. There is a free version and a pro version for $29.95. Print Screen Deluxe is great for capturing screen shots from your desktop. This is particularly useful during SEO work when you want to show someone else what you have found in the engines or document log reports etc.

Website Resources for SEO/SEM Tools

SEO Company Tool Page is a resource list of 115 SEO tools, including free tools and new tools. Webmaster Free Tools from Digital Point includes a good Keyword Suggestion Tool that lets you quickly see what phrases are searched most often for your key terms. SEO Tools offers a selection of search engine optimization tools, including a keyword typo generator and a Google Dance tool. Many of these tools are free. SEO Tool Set offers top of the line essential tools for search engine optimization; some are free and others have a 30-day free trial.