10 Essential SEO Tools

I’m making this post in response to a Tweet made by Roger who works as a Social Media Consultant about this article: 10 Great SEO tools and resources. Roger invited me to write my own list because I said that the list Josh Chambers published at Viget.com missed quite a few essential tools…

So here are 10 SEO tools that I use regularly and consider essential:

1. Advanced Web Ranking – Best tool I’ve used to keep a track of SERPs.
2. SEO Elite – Great for analysing competition and getting detailed backlink reports.
3. Market Samurai - Useful tool for researching keywords and SEO competition. Market Samurai plugs into several tools including Google’s keyword research tool.
4. Google Analytics – It goes without saying that web stats are really important for measuring, monitoring and mining keywords.
5. Google trends – Particularly useful when checking keyword trends between the UK and US.
6. Google Webmaster Central – Useful for detecting crawl errors and checking pages with external links.
7. SEOQuake – Plugin for Firefox and IE which displays several important website stats including:  PageRank, Google Crawl date, Pages indexed on Google/Yahoo/MSN,  Yahoo SiteExplorer stats, Domain age, Whois info, keyword density, page’s internal links and the page’s external links.
8. SEOmoz PRO Linkscape toolbar – For SEOmoz Pro members, it’s nice to have the Linkscape toolbar which displays mozRank, mozTrust, Domain mozRank and Domain mozTrust.
9. CopyScape – Essential for ensuring unique content and checking for duplicate content.
10. Pidgin – IM client that makes it possible to connect to MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, Yahoo and AIM all at the same time and in one place. Great way to ensure I’m available to vote friends’ content on Digg and StumbleUpon etc. (Feel free to send me your content: MSN: itsdavidtowers@live.co.uk, AIM: itsdavidtowers, Google Talk: itsdavidtowers@googlemail.com,  Yahoo: itsdavidtowers).

Honourable mention: Woopra – Ok, so it’s not essential and it shouldn’t replace Google Analytics yet, but Woopra’s real time web stats are definitely worth checking out!

What do you think about this list? Have I missed out any tools that you think are really useful?

David Towers is an SEO Manager at Mediaedge:cia based in Manchester (UK). David blogs about SEO, online marketing and Joomla at Good Web Practices.

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• January 6th, 2009
• Posted in SEO