Masterclass: The Essential SEO Toolkit for better search rankings

Many SEO consultants say they never use tools for their work. This is not true. They have to use at least one authoritative tool:  Google Search and possibly Yahoo Search. Yes, the search engines are the primary tool for competitive research, reverse-engineering of the algorithms, and to make ranking checks.

In this series we have already covered the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and the Google Webmaster Tools. They are among the most important tools you will use. Many websites offer online and desktop tools to make your SEO work easier. It is easy to get into “tool overload” where you waste time on a new tool that does the same task as another. Here are some tools that I use.

Web-based tools -

SEOmoz:

Rand Fishkin and his team run SEOmoz.org, a great resource with many free features and a few paid options. I subscribe to the daily SEO blog post, as it is one of the best ways to learn from experts. The site provides several useful tools, including:

    * Linkscape - a professional grade backlink tool that uses patented metrics to give you a measure of your backlinks. These are mozRank, mozTrust and Domain Juice. Since we can’t get Google’s measurements, SEOmoz has come up with its own benchmarks based on analysing millions of pages. This tells me, for example, that a link from a certain blog passes more link juice than one from another site. For those of you who buy links, this could be a great way to assess the value of a link. The detailed report requires a paid subscription and this tool alone may justify the cost. It is also available as a Firefox plugin.
    * Trifecta Tool Set gives you the number of sites/pages that link to you; the number of times your brand is mentioned on the web; and how much traffic your site receives.
    * Term Target tells you how well a given page is optimised for a keyphrase.
    * Rank Tracker enables you to check, track, and monitor your rankings at all the major search engines.
    * Juicy Link Finder helps you to find links that have authority, such as old domains with a high PageRank that rank well for your keyphrase.
    * Backlink Analysis tells you the anchor text used by the linking sites.

SEObook:

Aaron Wall operates seobook.com, which is focused on his ebook, but also has some useful tools:

    * Keyword Suggestion Tool. Although US-centric, this tool produces a wealth of related keyphrases and their search statistics from several sources.
    * SEO for Firefox. This tool will display details about every result in a Google or Yahoo search, such as PageRank, Age, types of backlinks, Delicious.com bookmarks, and a lot more.


HitTail:

HitTail shows you real-time visitor and keywords information. Even a free account is quite useful. Such analysis could show if your site is coming up for unintended search terms. If they are inappropriate (they chew up bandwidth), you can reword your pages.

Source: Apcmag.com