Do-it-Yourself SEO

There are a ton of free online SEO tools available on the internet. Most feature some very impressive statistics and information to help you optimize your website, analyze search engine positions, research your competitors, and lots of other things.

There are two ways you can use these free online SEO tools:

(1) If you’re new to SEO, these tools provide excellent insight on how a website is performing and ranking. Use them to highlight issues and trends with your website and provide indicators for where optimization work is necessary.

(2) If you’ve had some experience with SEO, these tools will act as a complement to the more specialized SEO tools, like WebPosition Gold or SpyderOpts. You can also use them to supplement an SEO.s internal knowledge base and experience.

Here are some choice tools for both new SEO users and more experience SEO users:

Keyword Research Tool http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml/. Use this to research appropriate words and phrases to include in your webpage’s body text so that you’ll rank higher. It’s easy to use. You just enter the word or phrase you want to be found under, then the tool suggests additional words and phrases for you to consider using. You also have the option to select from a range of top search engines, e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma, etc.

Keyword Analyser Tool http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis. This one will read the body of the page and give you a report on what words are used and how many times they are used. Since most engines rank sites depending on that site’s keyword density (which typically ranges between 3% and 9%), this is a really good tool to have.

Search Engine Position Checker Tool http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine. This tool checks to see if your website appears in the first fifty results in major search engines for your designated keyword or phrase. If your URL is present, the tool outputs what position it occupies. This tool also lets you know if any other URLs from your domain appear in the search results.

Link Popularity Tool

http://www.instantposition.com/link_popularity_check.cfm. This tool will measure the total number of links or "votes" that a search engine finds for your website. One of the best feature is that besides tabulating data, it also produces a very cool graph of the resulting data. One other nice feature is the ability to compare your website to your competitors to help you with your overall marketing strategy.

Meta Tag Generator http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/meta-tag. This automatically generates a Meta Keyword tag by reading the page you specify, removing common words from it, and picking the most used words on the page. Extra weight is given to words in a heading tag (etc.)

Search Term Suggestion Tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. This one tells you how many times a certain keyword was searched for at Overture.com. It will also show all related searches for that keyword. It’s a good thing to use to determine search frequency among related keyword phrases.

Search Engine Optimization Tool

http://www.instantposition.com/seo_doctor.cfm. This is a tool with a lot of power. It tests the performance of a web site by analyzing a page by important criteria such as title and content. Then it ranks the page against the criteria that the top search engines use. And as if that isn’t enough, it also provides SEO advice to improve your overall ranking. The report it puts out is well laid out and easy to read.