1. Ranking Checker by SEOmoz.com

This nice SEO tool allows you to check your rankings for up to 5 keywords per day for FREE and it keeps an archive for you. All you need is to sign up for a free SEOmoz account. The coolest part is that you are able to download your archived rankings as CSV. When you install the “browser button” it automatically copies the URL of the page that you are visiting into the tool for a fast ranking check. Since this free tool can handle up to 5 keywords daily, you’ll be able to check approximately 150 keywords monthly.

2. MultiRank Checker by iWebtool.com

Let’s say that you are interested in checking the Google Page Rank and the Alexa Ranking for one of your clients and also to do the same for 9 of their competitors. You have two options: 1) Go it the manual way and gather the information one by one or 2) just dump the 10 domain names into the MultiRank Checker and copy/paste the results table. I personally like this tool because it checks in bulk and saves a bit of time.

3. Fiddler Web Debugging Tool by Fiddlertool.com

Let’s say that you don’t like the Charles debugging tool because you have to pay a whole $50 for it. Don’t panic, Fiddler does basically the same and yes, it is for free. Currently it’s available only for Windows and it needs the .NET framework that you can download from their web site as well. The main benefits of this tool is the capacity to analyze all the background communication that goes on between the browser and the servers. I know what you are thinking about: Why not just use firefox and install Tamper Data? Well yes, that is a possibility. But if you are looking for a tool that won’t freeze your browser (seems to be a common occurence with Tamper Data) then Fiddler can become handy. Professional SEOs absolutely need a web debugging tool like this in their toolbox.

4. SEO Analyzer by Sitening.com

The SEO Analyzer is a great tool to start off optimization efforts. It is a report that gives a detailed list of SEO components that might require a closer assessment with a web site. The coolest part is that this tool keeps a copy of your previous reports and you can download them as PDF with a click of a button. This tool is definitely not intended to substitute a complete SEO site analysis though. The interface is very user friendly and it also gives you a score that you can use to quickly assess how much work a site might need.

5. Strongest Subpages Tool by WeBuildPages.com

This tool gives you an organized list of the strongest pages on any web site. This is important because by looking at the results you can easily determine what pages are carrying the most amount of inbound links. This tool is especially useful for webmasters looking at competitor’s strongest pages and, at least for us, running this tool on a competitor always spawns some creative ideas for building link campaigns via content additions.

6. Backlink Checker by WeBuildPages.com

Every SEO needs a backlink checker tool. This free tool is an excellent free backlink checking tool. It’ll come in useful if you need a place to start with your linking campaigns. You can also analyze competitor backlinks as well as your own using the Neat-O tool.

7. Firefox with the Web Developer Extension by Chris Pederick

Firefox in itself is the most flexible browser out there. But when you pair it with the Web Developer extension Firefox becomes a useful SEO tool. With it you can easily remove the cascading styles (inline, external or both), you can take a fast glance at all the external links in a page, or you can remove all the javascript components at once just to name a few of its features. The nicest part of the extension is that you can add your own SEO tools to the menu (online or desktop).

8. SEO for Firefox by SEOBook.com

There is no other tool out there that could give you the amount of information that this tool does right from either the visited page or the search engine. Perfect for a quicky competitive overview. This tool will give you PageRank, cache date, domain age, backlinks in Yahoo, number of .edu links, the number of cached pages, and many other stats for any given page with a simple right click. The most amazing feature is that you can export your information directly from the SERPs to CSV.

9. Google Analytics / Google Webmaster Console by Google.com

Based on Urchin, Google Analytics is a top analytics tool made available to everybody for free by Google. This analytics tool can give you detailed reports about traffic behavior, content visitation, funnel information and much, much more. On the other hand, the Webmaster Console tool now gives you a good view of what Google “sees” for your site including: crawling rate, crawling speed, backlinks, highest PageRank of your site and more.

This two tools together constitute the fundaments of free search engine marketing but beware because by using either ou are giving Google access to all of your site data.

10. Keyword Selector Tool by Overture.com

This tool is one of the first keyword tools that was available to webmasters. It’s still very useful and is still free. Lots of newer keyword tools build over the last few years are based on the Keyword Selector tool. If you use it in conjunction with Google’s keyword tool then you could get really crazy.

11. XENU’s Link Sleuth by Tilman Hausherr

XENU is one of those tools that you download for free and keep a copy just in case the owner decides to start charging for it. This tool is basically a spider. And the benefits of having a spider in your SEO toolbox is priceless. Using this tool you can determine if a site has endless loops, broken links, redirect detections and much more. As its name indicates, Xenu is like having a detective look at your site – a free detective that is.

12. Xinu BETA by Miguel Camps Orteza

Yeah the name is similar to XENU but these are two totally different tools. This excellent SEO tool will give you detailed stats about any site including rankings, syndication, social bookmarkings, validation, indexation and backlinks from several major search engines: ALL IN ONE PAGE! Also the best part is that it is open source, so not only you can use the tool, you can download it an install it in your own server.

13. Keyword Density & Prominence Tool by Ranks.nl

This tool allows you to crawl a particular page and analyze the density of keywords not only in the content of the page but also in the tags.

14. Visual PageRank by iWebTool.com

If you are a graphic person, then checking page rank in your site is probably as boring as watcing Home Shopping Network on a saturday night. Well now you can check your page rank visually with sweet tool. This tool gives let’s you see your web page and overlays that page rank for each one of your links.

15. GeoTargeting Detection Tool by SEOmoz.com

This tool helps you determine if you have optimized a site for country-specific search engines. SEO can be valuable for many industries if applying local or geographic optimization. Nice tool!

Did we leave any other free SEO tools out of the list? Let us know of any additional ones below.

A Visual FAQ to SEO is a great infographic from Matt at Datadial.net covering many of the different aspects of Search Engine Optimization for your web pages.

Images are a fantastic way to present data and abstract concepts, they’re a much clearer way of getting information across and more people take the time to digest it. I thought it would be a good idea to try to present solutions and explanations to the more common SEO questions that we hear from our clients.

The image covers everything from basic keyword research concepts, through site architecture, page optimisation, link building, SEO tactics, social media, and some basic SEO and PPC clickthrough stats and explantions.

#1 – Pie Chart of SEO Time Expenditure

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#2 – Hat Color vs. Value Scatterplot of SEO Tactics

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#3 - Flowchart of SEO-Friendliness

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#4 – Venn Diagram of Internet Marketing Professions

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I happened to find my ray of light whilst re-organising my SEO related bookmarks. Yes, they may have been messy and a clean out might have been overdue, but if I didn’t do it today, the day I happened to be thinking about what to blog about then we would have never arrived here, would we?

Trying to structure my bookmarks made me very aware of what was current and what was out of date. It made me realise what tools I could, and couldn’t live without. What blogs I could and couldn’t stop reading. And most importantly, what people I could and couldn’t stop listening too. The top blogs and people are another post altogether so you will just have settle for the most valuable tools and stay tuned for the rest of the series. So without further ado, here we go, the top ten SEO tools and plug-ins you literally couldn’t live without:

SEO Quake

This powerful tool is compatible with a range of browsers and gives a user a wide range of SEO parameters. It saves you so much time it must be similar to hiring a personal assistant, without the tea making ability. You can utilise it to see a quick overview of number of links to page and domain, number of internal & external links from individual pages, age of domain, keyword density and other important SEO factors of a page. Go see for yourself.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036

Open Site Explorer

This is one of the best link analysis tools around (without paying) Essential for any link building campaign , it will show you up to 10,000 links to a page or site based on Page Authority OR Domain Authority. You can even see the anchor text used, compare two domains side by side, and which content is drawing the most links on your competitor’s website. AND if that wasn’t enough they even offer a good sorting and filtering option for reports and can be exported to CSV for further analysis. How considerate of them.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

Redirect Checker

This tool lets you check what type of redirect is in place for any individual page. A programmer’s nightmare as we are now able to see very quickly just how lazy they have been by implementing 302’s instead of 301’s.

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

SEO Book Tool Bar

Where would a workman be without his toolkit? This is another great toolbar which contains a lot of valuable and essential tools of the trade. It has many of the same features as SEO Quake but also a few more hidden up its sleeve. You can compare up to 5 different sites which is great for link analysis for competitor research and another great gem is an easy no follow link highlighter.

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

FireBug

I recently read Kelvin Newman’s “Are we ignoring the Golden Age of SEO” post here, and I agree, technical knowledge is important within the field of SEO and can’t be ignored. Firebug goes someway to addressing these concerns by putting a wealth of development tools at your fingertips. You can monitor CSS, view HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page and it can even help you see how long pages take to load and what may be causing the slow loading times. Absolutely essential for web developers and very handy for knowledge hungry SEO’s.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843/

Spider Test

Ever wondered what a spider sees when it crawls your page? Is it giving you endless sleepless nights? Then worry no more with our star prize this week. This spider simulator tool displays shows the source code of a page, and identifies all outbound links on the page, provides cached copies of the page, the number of indexed pages in major search engines, and common words and phrases found in the page copy.

http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/

XML Sitemap Generator

Creating XML sitemaps is a key part of technical SEO. It helps you monitor broken links and is particularly useful if your site has dynamic content or has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to.
This tool lets you enter your full website URL and some optional parameters and then provides a detailed sitemap page, including the number of pages, broken links list, XML file content and a link to a compressed sitemap. It is FREE up to a maximum of 500 pages and you can manually or automatically adjust the priority of pages.

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Whois

Great for domain ‘who dunnit’ mysteries and snooping around online. You can check important server and hosting details via this tool.

http://whois.domaintools.com/

Google Webmaster Tools:

I had to have one Google based tool in here. Webmaster tools let’s you see an overview of your site, including broken links, http error pages, Geo Targeting and the option of resubmitting of sitemaps. Two of the more recent additions is the search query feature, which lets you see  the number of impressions for search queries, the CTR you are achieving for it and an average ranking position. Another addition is the subscriber stats for your site. Go have a look and boost you ego.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

SEOmoz GeoTarget

As explained from the horse’s mouth “this tool determines how well a site is targeted to region-specific search engines”. This tool is great for small local businesses as it helps you understand where search engines think you website is located, and how this may be affecting targeting a specific audience. It also highlights your local online presence by providing a list of local search results for the 3 major search engines for your brand name and website.

http://www.seomoz.org/geotarget