Sep

Tools

Posted by: Horia Neagu in Miscellaneous

The following is a list of tools I frequently use in my SEO and SEM activity and which I recommend to any serious Web Marketing specialist.

Note: The list doesn’t mention tools like Google’s Webmaster Central, Google Trends or the Google Webasite Optimizer, as these are considered common knowledge. The list is being frequently updated, as new noteworthy software appears. If you have any tools or programs you would like to add to this list, just email the SEO Wolf. I will be happy to test the application, review it and then post it on this list.

Now on to the SEO Wolf’s list of recommended SEO and Internet Marketing tools:

1. SEO – Keyword Research

Keyword Elite - A dominant tool to research niche key phrases. Ideal for long tail targeting.
SEMRush – This tool uses a rich database to track the visibility of websites through sets of keywords. It works as a keyword suggestion tool, as well as an estimator for key phrase value, volume and cost.
KwMap.net – This website helps you draw a mindmap of a keyword, in order to search for semantically related terms.
iBusiness Promoter – A very useful software application that lets you perform keyword research, competition analysis, promote your website online and much more.
goRank Ontology Related Keyword Tool – This tool runs a word lookup on the top 1000 Google search results to find related keywords and key phrases.
Keyword Discovery – This basic Trellian – powered engine lets you research literally hundreds of related key phrases and orders them according to monthly search volumes.
Long Tail KW Research Tool – An interesting lightweight alternative to Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool.
Wordtracker KW Suggestion Tool – A basic keyword suggestion tool offered by Wordtracker.
DigitalPoint KW Ranking Tool – Providing an interesting take on the concept of keyword research, this tool tracks your historical performance within the SERPs and offers a graphical overview of your keyword placement over time.

2. SEO – Link Building

Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Xenu’s Link Sleuth checks websites for broken links on regular hyperlinks, images, scripts et. al.
Dead-Links.com – The free online broken link checker crawls your website and identifies any broken internal or outbound links.
SEO Spyglass – With SEO Spyglass, you can spy on your competition’s backlinks strategy.
SEO Chat SEO Tools – A great deal of useful SEO, SEM and Link Building tools.
Link Appeal – A tool that takes into consideration several factors, in order to determine the value of a website for your Link Building strategy.
Backlinks Anchor Text Analysis – A great tool to check the anchor text of any backlinks pointing to your website.
Domain Pop – Use Domain Pop’s tool to analyze the popularity and quality (read: PageRank and IP popularity) of your website’s backlinks.
SocSciBot – Once launched, the SE spider simulator crawls a number of websites and analyzes the interlinking scheme of said sites.
Link Research Tools – Christoph Cemper’s Link Research Tool give you the power to analyze backlinks and anchor text and to spy on your competitor’s link building campaign.
First Link Checking Tool – A pretty handy tool to check duplicate links within a web page.
Keyword Ranking Tool – Siteopsys offers a wide range of SEO tools, but the most useful has to be the Keyword Ranking Tool, which will reveal your website’s ranking for specific keywords.

3. SEM & PPC

ShoeMoney – For a 10 $ trial membership sign-up, you get access to a host of advanced SEM and PPC tools, focused on competitor and market analysis.
SpyFu – A great research tool for Google AdWords bidding.
Dave Naylor’s Tools – A selection from Dave Naylor’s Search Engine Marketing toolbox.
HitTail – A robust tool for advanced AdWords optimization.

4. Web Development

DomainTools – Search current, deleted and expired domains, in order to identify soft markets.
Google Rankings – A solid tool to check the actual Google ranking. Delivers whenever the Google Toolbar fails.
Redirect Checker – A useful tool for both marketers and webmasters to check the nature and destination of HTML redirects.
IP Address Blacklist Checker – A handy IP Blacklist checker developed by WhatIsMyIPAddress.com.
Email Blacklist Check – This utility checks an email server against 147 DNS email blacklists. It can work either as a checkup tool for your own server, or as a security filter for untrusted incoming email messages.
DNSStuff Tools – The DNS Report Demo strikes me as the most useful of all the DNS tools provided by DNSStuff.
RegexBuilder – A basic tool allowing webmasters to create and validate regular expressions.
CSS Optimizer – Use this tool to validate and optimize your CSS Style code.
W3C CSS Validation Service – Validate HTML and CSS code with this practical tool.
Sorrowman’s Sitemap Filter – A solid performer in the field of XML Sitemap generation and submission.
XML Sitemaps – Not just another XML Sitemap generator… all right, actually it is just another XML Sitemap generator, but it’s a damn good one.
Google Sitemap Editor – A twist in the old XML Sitemap generation formula. This tool allows you to edit your already existing XML Sitemap.
Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer – The BCV handicaps your website, stripping it of certain tags, in order to check its full functionality.
Vischeck – This colour vision simulator displays a web page the way it would appear to people who suffer from various forms of vision deficiency.
Screen Size Test – Does your site behave the way you want it to on different screen sizes? Find out with this handy tool.

5. Black Hat

Mailinator – A vital tool for some serious online activism and directory submission damage. Generate any number of email addresses in seconds.
Yet Another Content Generator – With the YAGC script, you can build massive amounts of website content in minutes. Perfect for the Black Hat in need of minisites, but with very little time (or inspiration) for content creation.
Digerati Blackbox – A naughty collection of cloaking scripts. Strictly Black Hat.
SCIgen – A random Computer Science white paper generator.
Nonsense Generator – A downloadable software that generates series of semantically nonsensical, but syntactically correct phrases. However, with the onset of Google’s semantic analysis, I would suspect the efficiency of this tool has diminished.
Fantomas BlockFrog – Block certain IPs from accessing your domain.
WebDataExtractor – Extract targeted data from any website.
SE Cloaker – A Search Engine cloaking scritp.

6. Firefox Extensions – SEO

SearchStatus – Clean and crisp design, doubled by great functionalities. This Firefox add-on offers user-friendly tools for all your basic SEO research needs.
SEOpen – This FF extension offers 23 different metrics for your SEO research. I usually use it for in-depth data, after an initial check with the above-mentioned SearchStatus.
SEO for Firefox – SEOBook Guru, Aaron Wall’s brainchild. This FF browser add-on adds a few extra metrics to the traditional SEO analysis, like .edu and .gov links, Delicious score, blog subscriber count and domain age. A great addition to the previously mentioned SearchStatus and SEOpen extensions.
SEOQuake – Great for research, as it offers the possibility to save SERPs results. This add-on is exceptionally useful for local business pages and ccTLDs.
SEOMoz Toolbar – The pro version of this toolbar is a must-have for any serious marketer, but the free version is extremely limited and hardly worth the download.
yExplorer – A lightweight Firefox extension, focusing primarily on the Yahoo! Site Explorer. I personally recommend this tool only because it verifies a website’s presence in the StumbleUpon system. Anyone who has ever talked to me about Social Bookmarking should know I’m an evangelist of said platform. As an added bonus, this tool offers a spell checker and a “text only view” of a website, stripping it of any formatting and scripting, for simple content analysis.
KGen – A simple keyword generator, that reveal onpage keyword strength.
Niche Watch Tool – Fairly decent for additional research data. This FF extension offers information about backlinks, indexed pages, keyword frequency and other SEO factors.
ShowIP – Reveals the IP of a website. This extension is a good tool for IP class checkup and C-block verification (competitors’ minisites identification, spam prevention).
Customize Google – A Firefox add-on for the power user: it adds Yahoo, Ask.com, Bing, Technorati and Wikipedia links to Google SERPs. A practical alternative to sites which offer head-to-head comparison between multiple Search Engines.

7. Firefox Extensions – SEM & PPC

SEM Tools – Customizable SEM campaign checker. It also features a pretty decent keyword creation tool. I usually employ it strictly for TLD sites. I found it to lack accuracy when used on ccTLDs.
SEMToolbar – A product from the mind of one Bruce Clay. The reason I use this tool is the keyword search statistics calculator. This tool offers great metrics for your keyword research, like demographic segmentation, ad statistics and trends.

8. Firefox Extensions – Web Development

Web Developer extension – This add-on features a lot of useful tools for web developers and marketers alike.
HTML Validator – Validate your HTML coding from within your browser with this simple extension.
User Agent Switcher – A decent tool to verify site functionality across multiple browsers and platforms. I particularly use it for the Googlebot simulator.
X-Ray – For the lazy slugs out there who find it cumbersome to hit CTRL + U to view a page’s source code. This add-on displays the code directly on the visited page. I use it especially for fast <h> tag identification.
Firebug – A treasure chest for any marketer or web developer. It offers editing, debugging and analysis options for various functional elements of a website (HTML, CSS, Java and the much-discussed Page Load Speed).
Web Development Toolbar – Another priceless jewel for any SEO who wants to take CSS validation into his own hands.
Screengrab – Say “goodbye” to traditional print screens! This extension offers advanced possibilities to save or just copy the visible portion of a web page, a visible portion of it or a mouse-made selection.
SimilarWeb – The SimilarWeb extension presents a series of similar websites to the one being currently browsed.
Chrome View – This extension adds the possibility to open the currently browsed page in the Google Chrome browser.
IE Tab – The IE Tab Firefox extension opens the current web page in an Internet Explorer tab, within the Firefox web browser.
Torbutton – This Firefox add-on manages Tor (The Onion Router) browsing, allowing for easy proxy switching.

9. Miscellaneous Tools

Bookmarking Demon – I usually recommend manual Social Bookmarking, but if you absolutely have to rely on an automated system, I advice on using the Bookmarking Demon.
Copyscape Plagiarism Checker – This nifty tool browses the Web for copies of your website content, to avoid duplicate content issues.
WeBuildPages Internet Marketing Tools – A classic tool collection form WeBuildPages. In my opinion, the star of this lineup is the Spider Viewer, which runs a crawl simulator on your website, giving you a spider-eyed overview of your site.
URL Trends – This Search Engine analysis report tool provides insights into factors like link popularity, ranking history, social bookmarking history and so forth. A decent tool for analyzing your own website’s performance, as well as keeping track of your competitors’ SE performance.
Cynthia Says Portal Tester – A full options web content validator, in accordance with the 508 standards and the WCAG guidelines.
Site Analysis and SEO Score – This tool provides some basic options for analyzing the overall SEO performance of a website.