Free Online SEO Tools Review

Here's my favorite free online seo tools ....They each have a distinguishing or unique feature to make this list....

1. Find out the number of searches on a keyphrase - Yahoo-Overture Tool

2. Find out how a page does for a certain keyphrase. Plus who is doing well and why. Amazing!!!!! http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool . Jim's company has the BEST free tools. For instance: see the list of backlinks with anchor text

3. Tells you how many links a domain has totalling the different engines. Has the additive feature of tracking history and "categorizing you" (unknown vs 900 lb gorilla - great marketing!) http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop

4. Start with a phrase and find out which pages on your website are doing the best: http://tools.morevisibility.com/ranking/index.php

5. A range of tools that highlight the source of page rank and how its "used" across the number of outgoing links http://www.rustybrick.com/tools.php

6. A great tool that reminds you of your outgoing (and internal) links - http://www.dead-links.com/ . My new favorite link/html checker is: http://www.elsop.com/quick/

7. Find out the number of .edu or .gov links (considered to be "authority" sites) . go to yahoo search - http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain%3Ahomeschoolfun.com+site%3A.edu&ei=UTF-8&fr=slv1-&x=wrt and search for: linkdomain:webdomain.com site:.edu

8. Want some keywords to consider? Put in your phrase and get a list of choices: https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

Note that the google search engine - www.google.com - itself is perhaps the greatest free seo tool. To find out how recently google spidered a site, search on google in a way that finds the site (if you must, you can always put the url into google) and then clicked on "cached" to see when it was last spidered. Do this regularly and see what schedule you are on. To see how google is viewing your keywords on a page, search with those keywords so that it comes up and look at the cached version for the highlighting (example: to see whether google recognizes homeschool on a search for home school, type into google: home school domain name and look at the results. Lastly, the "similiar sites" choice in google reveals google's concept of relevance. And, google is pretty upfront about their approach, you can read their summary or their actual patent filings)

To find out your page rank, if you don't want to install toolbars, use http://www.checkpagerank.com/ for google page rank (a primitive view of your incoming links, the higher the better, 1-10) or http://www.alexa.com for alexa page rank (a ranking of user time on the site measured by users with the alexa toolbar instatlled, the lower the better, starting at 3.5M and working down to the most popular site which is #1 - its yahoo followed by google.

Paid tools - This is not the focus of this article but of note....
- www.wordtracker.com - Great site for info on searches, they have a repeatable "2 hour" free trial.
- Web position Gold - Great software that automates alot of the above. Its also full of "BS" in terms of suggesting that you follow the formula for word density etc that the leaders in your category are doing.
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Below - some details & feedback on a few of these tools and some other near-favorites:

2. Find out how a page does for a certain keyphrase. Plus who is doing well and why. Amazing!!!!! http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool
- enter a page and a keyphrase to find out how and why that page does well on the phrase.
- On a single chart, you get the top 10 sites for that phrase for google, msn, yahoo compaged with your page in terms of:
- rank, Pages Indexed (google/yahoo), Backlinks to that page, backlinks to the domain, Allinanchor rank, Domain Age, & Phrase count
- Desired features: add in the Yahoo analysis of number of searches for that term last month

3. http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop
- Provides for up to 3 domains at once, a "total" count of links from google, msn, yahoo, hotbot.- Has the very addictive feature of maintaining your history of searches so you can see progress.
- Also a very motivating but silly set of categories: Limited, average, above average, contender, player, 900 pound gorilla.
Should I admist that I celebrated when I became "average" and then "above average"

4. http://tools.morevisibility.com/ranking/index.php
- For a single word or phrase at time, provides which page (or pages) on your site are in the top 50
- the good feature is finding multiple pages which are doing well for a given term
- Request: it would be great if we could submit multiple phrases at once


6. I started with this tool while I was checking my site for dead links. Amongst other great features, for SEO purposes, it analyses the links out of each page. http://www.dead-links.com/Theres also a reciprocal link checker.

What other free tools do you find useful?
WOW - jsut found the motherload - try a google search on free seo tools.....

Also of note:http://www.dnsstuff.com/ This is a great collection of cool stuff, some too sophisticated for me to appreciate yet. I did find out how to get my dns number and other useful free info.....

Heres one that evaluates the "quality" of your links - http://198.68.180.60/cgi-bin/link-reputation-tool.cgi

http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp - another link popularity check. this one gives, for a keyphrase, your rank on google, the leaders, plus the link count (G&Y), Google PR, and allinanchor for you and the leaders...Not as good as cooloh

www.globalpromoter.com has a buncho tools but nothing special has jumped out at me... they have a tool which searches the Yahoo tool and another which supposedly will run a batch thru yahoo...but it didn't work for me.