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SEO tools - the essentials

Ash

Top Contributor
Hi all,

I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by all the SEO tools out there. Can anyone shed some light on the SEO 'must have' tools they use?

I'm currently just relying on:

GAKT
Google Trends
Google Insights
Market Samurai (which I bought just before the rank tracker problems but have found to be very slow for any thing I try to use it for)

I have also just signed up for ScribeSEO to see what it's like.

Thanks for any suggestions.
 

James

Top Contributor
Plenty of tools in the market, I have tested heaps most of them are based out of the USA and Europe so that can be a problem at times.

Ones I currently use pretty much dayily, most of these tools are around $100-$300 range a month.

Depends what you need to do but, some of these you probably wont need.

- SEOmoz Pro.
- Majestic SEO.
- Market Samurai.
- Ontolo.
- Raven Tools.
- Buzz Stream.

Also have custom tools agency based I use from time to time, and for sure you have your own methods as well to do things by hand and a bunch of fire fox add on's.

Google tools are also advisable as you have stated.

- Insights
- Trends
- Keyword Tool
- Webmaster tools.

Old review I did on SEOmoz Pro -

http://jamesnorquay.com/seo-moz-new-pro-web-review/

When I get time I will review all tools above so people can have further reference.
 

joe

Top Contributor
IMO the only tools that are really "essential" for SEO are a brain and a spreadsheet but I'll rattle off a few others I find myself using on a regular basis.

For initial site audits i'll use a spider tool like http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp (FREE) or http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ (£99 per year). Other folks swear by Xenu Link Sleuth but I prefer the other two. Dump the results from them to a spreadsheet and you'll get a good overview of the site architecture, onpage optimisation and quickly be able to spot SEF issues like dupe content, dodgy status codes like 404/500/302's etc

It's easy to go overboard with keyword research when you get into the paid tools. I find a solid brainstorm followed up by some metric validation from the popular free tools to be a good way to go. If it's a topic you're not familiar with then tools should be able to throw up some relevant jargon. Not a bad idea to do a bit of keyword frequency analysis of articles/pages/forums that exist on topical authorities, I tend to use http://www.writewords.org.uk/phrase_count.asp a bit, if you're visual then maybe dump it into wordle.net to come up with a word cloud.

SEO for Firefox is great for SERPs analysis: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

As far as free backlink analysis tools go since the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer, http://www.backlinkwatch.com/ isn't too bad. If you're looking at a paid option, then Majestic SEO, ahrefs.com and OSE are quite powerful.

We had a great roundtable session last year about SEO tools at the Brisbane SEO Meetup, you can read the round-up here: http://seomeetups.com.au/seo-brisbane/list-of-our-favourite-30-seo-tools/

I'll leave it at that for now. By no means a comprehensive guide, and individual tastes are bound to vary but I hope that gives you some ideas.
 

DavidL

Top Contributor
Couple to throw into the mix:

Registercompass is great for in depth analysis
Scrapebox is well worth the one off purchase (Has plenty of white hat uses too!!)
Tweetadder
 

Ash

Top Contributor
We've met with two SEO companies in the last week or so and both are using SEMRush, but interestingly it is not mentioned here. Is it any good?
 

joe

Top Contributor
We've met with two SEO companies in the last week or so and both are using SEMRush, but interestingly it is not mentioned here. Is it any good?

Yep, especially for competitor keyword analysis. Just be careful not to drown in all the data it gives you!
 

James

Top Contributor
We've met with two SEO companies in the last week or so and both are using SEMRush, but interestingly it is not mentioned here. Is it any good?

SEMrush recently updated the index to pull data for AU too, in the past it has been a tool which focused on the US. But yeah decent competitive tool as above.

Regards.
 

seolyka2

Regular Member
Don't forget to use Google Analytics that provides you rich insights to measure your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. It's a great FREE tool to determine how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience.
 

Alex

Top Contributor
ScrapeBox

Hi David,

Could you please tell me more about ScrapeBox. It looks interesting, but look quite advanced.

Couple to throw into the mix:

Registercompass is great for in depth analysis
Scrapebox is well worth the one off purchase (Has plenty of white hat uses too!!)
Tweetadder

Is this something a new person to SEO should be looking at?

Kind Regards,
Alex
 

zhenjie

Top Contributor
Scrapebox has both basic and advanced features.

Basic stuff could be things like checking links (live, PR, etc) and more advanced things are scrapping and blog commenting.
 

James

Top Contributor
Scrapebox is also good for Outreach and Keyword research you can do a lot of things with videos and online content....But people really tend to use it for more black hat stuff

A few good new tools on the market:

- Group High (quite expensive around $500+ a month) if you get large scale out reach then you will like it.
- Link Detective (you need a pro SEO moz account to use this tool) worth checking out but.

Their are a bunch other we test on a weekly basis too...
 

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