The Best Free SEO Tools

Wanting to get away from social media for a while, I decided to compile a list of the best free search engine optimization tools available on the Web. If you are doing a little SEO work on your own site, or just curious to see your ranking and traffic statistics, there are some great free tools that will guide you along the process. Given, most of these tools perform the same tasks you could perform manually if you know what you are doing, but they will definitely save you time and effort.

1. Web CEO
Web CEO is my personal favorite SEO freebie. This is a comprehensive software with a relatively easy-to-use interface. Features include tools to analyze rank, competition, back links and analytics. I especially like the “keyword basket” feature that allows you to work across a project while easily managing your keywords. Many of the tools Web CEO offers are available as web-based tools that do not require any downloads, but if you are looking for a good hub to contain an entire project’s data, Web CEO is the best free tool available.

2. Google Analytics & Google Webmaster
Google Analytics provides really nice graphical presentations of data trends and patterns in easy-to-read charts. These charts are easily exported to a variety of document types that allow you to compare trends and analyze the effect of your efforts over time.

In exchange for giving Google open access to all of your site information, Google Webmaster will help you understand what problems Google may have crawling and indexing your site. You can also use Webmaster to see how users arrive at your site and to create site maps.

3. Firefox Firebug Extension
Firebug is an add on for the Firefox browser that allows you to inspect the HTML and CSS of a site right from the browser window. You can even edit the CSS or HTML in the Firebug window and watch as those changes take place in the browser, as if you had actually permanently made those changes from a web editor. With Firebug, you can easily see messy code that is unnecessary or being overridden. Clean code will, of course, help your SEO efforts, so Firebug is an essential tool to have tacked on to your Firefox browser. Firebug will also help you find errors on your pages and debug those errors. You can also analyze page load time and find out why your pages may be loading slowly. This is especially noteworthy, given that there has been some suggestion that page load time will become an increasingly important factor in Google’s ever-changing search algorithm.

4. SEOmoz Tools
Though you have to pay for a “pro” membership to use many of the tools SEOmoz offers, the freebies can be helpful for scratching the surface of a project and getting your head in the right place. I especially like the Term Target and Term Extractor tools, as they can provide you with a simple, down and dirty readout of what search engine bots may “see” when they crawl your page—which is most oftentimes different than what we think our pages are saying. The toolbar sounds like a good idea, but I wouldn’t bother unless you are willing to pay the ~$100 fee/month to become a pro member; most of the features of the free toolbar are grayed out, resulting in useless clutter at the top of your browser.

5. We Build Pages’ Tools
Similar to the Term Target and Term Extractor tools offered by SEOmoz, We Build Pages’ Spider Viewer and Keyword Density Analysis tools can provide you with a good starting place for an SEO project. The Spider Viewer lets you “see your site how the spider sees it.” I like how it takes all the HTML text from a page and lumps it into a big block of words. This can help you understand why you may be having trouble with certain words.

Know of some other great SEO freebies? Let me know what needs to be added to the list!