Useful SEO Tools for Monitoring & Tracking
If you’re serious about SEO, there’s a plethora of tools that you can sign up for that will help you with various aspects of an SEO campaign and track your progress.
Many SEO tools are free and will give you lots of useful information, but some have a monthly cost, which depending on your level or expertise or your needs, may not be worth buying.
Since we all love a good deal, let’s start with the Top Free SEO tools before we get into tools that have a cost associated with them.
Free SEO Tools
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SEO for Firefox Add-On
This amazing free SEO toolbar can give you a snapshot of a number of key features to help you spy on your competition. All you need to have is Firefox installed on your computer and you can download this add-on free of charge. Plus, if you sign up for an SEObook.com account, you get some bonus tools.
This toolbar can give you the following information: Page Rank, Age of Site, Number of Links, Number of speciality links (.edu and .gov), Alexa Ranking, DMOZ listing & whois listing, plus other valuable pieces of data.
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SEO Quake Toolbar
This is yet another very popular, free add-on for Firefox. SEO Quake provides a great deal of data including Page Rank, keyword density, number of pages indexed, age of site, number of Facebook likes, Alexa ranking and more. Also included is the ability to link up to SEMrush and get a backlinks report, which can be handy to see why a website is so successful in the SERPs.
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Google Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics
Even though you might not be thinking of these as SEO tools, they are perhaps the best SEO tools that you have available to you. Recent improvements in Google Webmaster tools allow you to see where your backlinks are coming from, which will help you develop a backlink strategy. Google Analytics will give you an in-depth look at your visitors, where they came from, how long they were on your site and how they found you.
This is invaluable information to help you analyze your SEO efforts and see what methods are paying off more than others.
Now that we have covered some of the free SEO tools that are out there, let’s look at those that aren’t. Below are 2 paid SEO tools that you should consider looking at. The nice thing about the paid tools is that they usually have a free trial, so you can test them out before committing to buy.
Paid SEO Tools
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SEOMoz Tools
This is a premium set of tools offered by a company that you could call the “godfather†of the SEO world. SEOMoz offers this set of tools for $99 per month, which might be steep for some website owners, but there are a lot of tools offered in this online SEO toolkit. Tools included are a Campaign Manager, On-Page Analysis, Rank Tracker, Crawl Test, Keyword Analysis and a Toolbar that you can download.
These tools are used by over 200,000 webmasters to either track their own website and by many of the top SEO companies to track their clients’ SEO campaigns and rankings. A new addition to SEOMoz tools is Followerwonk, which allows in-depth information and analytics about your Twitter account.
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Raven Tools
Raven Tools is yet another premium set of tools much like SEOMoz. From within the control panel you can see almost everything you ever wanted to know about a website. There’s a rank tracker, backlink checker, it connects with your Google Analytics and Adwords accounts for even more data and you can also manage social media accounts and posting for Facebook & Twitter from within their admin panel. This is a comprehensive set of tools that costs $99 per month as well.
Good SEO tools are necessary to help your SEO efforts, but just having the right tools isn’t all that’s needed. You need to know what to do with the data that these tools provide and this takes constant learning, testing and reading to keep up-to-date on what’s happening in the world of SEO.
Do you use any free or paid SEO tools to help you track campaigns or gather data? If so, tell us which ones you like best and why.
Author Bio
Edwin is an avid marketer and writer currently working and writing for 9thsphere – An award winning company specializing in online marketing and web design in Toronto. Edwin has a passion for great design and helping businesses succeed. For more information on 9th sphere, check out www.9thsphere.com.