Favorite SEO Tools

[tedster]

The Charter of this forum [webmasterworld.com] has always asked members not to discuss specific SEO tools. That guideline helps keep us free from promotional campaigns - and since many SEO tools are operated by our members, the competitive nature of the tools space makes that a real liability.

For this thread only, we are going to suspend that Charter guideline. There are a lot of tools that a practicing SEO uses on an almost daily basis and a bit of sharing about our favorites can be a big help to everyone. Only one tool per post, please.

Here's a template I ask people to use:

1. NAME - LINK

2. PURPOSE

3. FREE or PAID

4. WHAT I LIKE

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING

[tedster]

1. NAME - LINK
Majestic SEO - [majesticseo.com...]

2. PURPOSE
Backlink data - refreshed

3. FREE or PAID
Free for your own website by posting a verification file. Graduated monthly payment scales, depending on volume of use.

4. WHAT I LIKE
This independent backlink data is the most complete available, IMO, and I have access to others. It's the only place I know of to access historical links (to June 2006) that have since been removed.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Until this past year, the user interface was a real puzzle. The power of the data was hidden from many who didn't want to climb the learning curve. Many recent interface improvements and new tools built on the crawl data have made it much better - but there's still a lot of room for improvement in their interface.

[netmeg]

1. NAME - LINK
Raven Tools - [raventools.com...]

2. PURPOSE
SEO Tools, Advertising Tools, and Social Media management and tracking.

3. FREE or PAID
Paid. Starts at $99/month; Free 30 day trial.

4. WHAT I LIKE
There's a ton here - integration with Google Analytics, AdWords, & Webmaster Tools, Facebook & Twitter. White label reports for clients. Event manager for superimposing events over analytics, from Panda implementations to catalog street dates. Link management for linkbuilding idiots like me. Pulls in data from S E M R U S H (that one got censored for some reason), Majestic, Knowem, and more. Great for competitive analysis. If you've only got budget for one tool, this one covers a lot of bases.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
I'm pretty happy with it as is, and the Raven people are available on twitter and respond to all bug reports, questions and requests for features. The one issue I have is that it can be pretty slow. Supposedly they're addressing that.

[tedster]

1. NAME - LINK
SERPs Bookmarklet - [onlinesales.co.uk...]

2. PURPOSE
After you do a Google search, this javascript bookmarklet pulls just the main links from the search results area and offers them to you in a choice of formats, including plain text.

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
Makes doing a lot of competitive SERPs analysis a breeze. The choice of formats is a very savvy thing to offer

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
I've got no quibbles with the tool at all. The explanatory video, however, is nowhere near the quality of the tool.

[Bigwebmaster]

1. NAME - LINK
Google PageRank Checker - [ozzu.com ]

2. PURPOSE
A simple PageRank checker that allows you to query multiple sites at once with an animated bar graph that displays the PR's of the sites.

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
There are literally thousands of these tools out there. I tried to make this tool stand out from the rest by first minimizing the amount of ads that are displayed, and second by making it pretty to the eye. Third, one thing that annoyed me about most of the tools like this is that the majority of them do not work. Finally this tool has the option to remember URLs for your next visit so you do not always have to re-type them in like the majority of the tools do. I typically always check the same sites so thought this would be useful.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
I am not sure yet, I feel that its doing the job that I designed it for and works better than the majority of them out there.

[netmeg]

1. NAME - LINK
Live HTTP Headers (Firefox extension) - [addons.mozilla.org...]

2. PURPOSE
What it says - checks headers for URLs and returns the server response, including redirects.

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
This extension is a non-negotiable gotta-have-it for me. I won't update FF unless I'm sure this extension will still work. I've found some pretty bizarre URL chains this way.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
None necessary.

[Robert Charlton]

1. NAME - LINK
URI Valet - [urivalet.com...]

2. PURPOSE
Provides full technical audit of a URI

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
Beautifully designed and integrated tool, with superb interface, pulling together a range of information otherwise requiring multiple tools. Includes server header checks, user agent selection, head summary, load times, object details, internal and external link verification, source code, various page views, links to validator. Even provides reference links to server header responses.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
I suppose it would be guilding the lilly to ask for formatted data export ;) ...but that's about all this tool lacks.

[koan]

I'm not a huge SEO guy but this answer my daily needs:

1. NAME - LINK
Foxy SEO Tool - [foxyseotool.com...]

2. PURPOSE
Firefox addon with shortcuts to many of the typical online SEO tools like Compete, Google Insight Search, Google Webmaster Tools Links, etc. You can search references to a domain in most social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter.

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
There are others like this one but none as complete, in my opinion.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Since I don't use the Google Toolbar anymore I admit I sometimes wish I could still have the Google PageRank bar somewhere in there for a quick look. I guess I still feel some withdrawals effect.

[affiliation]

1. NAME - LINK
Xenu's Link Sleuth - [home.snafu.de...]

2. PURPOSE
checks Web sites for broken links including external links producing a detailed report which can also be e-mailed. Creates xml and HTML sitemap for you to use


3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
Nice simple tool to use

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Does everything is says, though not very pretty looking.

[Hoople]

Xenu has a user support group - Xenu's Link Sleuth Yahoo! Group [groups.yahoo.com] Beta versions are posted there before the main website and the author does respond to questions quickly.

[rowtc2]

1. NAME - LINK
SEO SpyGlass [link-assistant.com ]

2. PURPOSE
Backlink data

3. FREE or PAID
Paid 99,75$ one time and a smaller fee once at 6 months - Professional license. Enterprise license 249$ allows export to CSV.

4. WHAT I LIKE
Good source of backlinks, nice interface. View anchor text, page title, PR and more. Overall, the price is good because is not a monthly payment.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
They do not have own servers to crawl the web, they use SEs results, so there is a limitation ~1.000 links.

[courier]

1. NAME - LINK
Ranks Webmaster Tools
[ranks.nl...]

2. PURPOSE
I found this many years ago, and without a doubt it is the best keyword density tool I have come across and are ideal when starting or even for established webmasters to get better keyword optimization of your web page

3. FREE or PAID
Free and Paid

4. WHAT I LIKE
Tools are easy to use and visually appealing

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
The tools are great, but the keyword density was given a makeover a while back, I enjoyed the simplicity of the old design, but I suppose everything changes.

[creative craig]

1. NAME - LINK
SEO for Firefox
[tools.seobook.com...]

2. PURPOSE
Basic SEO information on SERP pages directly underneath results

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
This Firefox plugin gives a quick snapshot of basic SEO information when evaluating results pages (# of cached pages, PR, Whois, Twitter mentions, Facebook, simple effective backlink analysis)

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Now Yahoo are stopping their free backlink service this plugin will need to find another source for link data - could make or break this plugin!

[aakk9999]

1. NAME - LINK
Screaming Frog SEO Spider [screamingfrog.co.uk...]

2. PURPOSE
Full website crawl, reporting internal and external links, also internal incoming links for each page, produces a report that includes URL, page title, meta tags, response codes and more. Detailed report and excel export.

3. FREE or PAID
Free for the first 500 URLs per site crawl, £99/year full licence

4. WHAT I LIKE
It is a bit like Xenu, but much nicer interface. Allows the crawl to be saved and re-loaded back into the tool. Easy tabbed interface and allows filtering and sorting of results. Like that it also reports on canonical link element (if found on the page), meta refresh, H1, X-Robots tag and some other very useful info. Also like the feature where you can specify custom search of what you want to find in the HTML source code and it will give you a list the URLs where what you specified occurs somewhere in page HTML.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
The ability to export sitemap in sitemap.xml format.
Would also like to be able to control the number of threads and control the speed with which the requests hit the server (something that **another tool that gets scrambled letters here** can do) - useful when trying to debug random incorrect HTTP response codes you are seeing in the logs and can never reproduce "on demand".

[nippi]

rowtc2

You failed to mention SEO SPyglass dishonestly pretends to "Sell" their software, with 6 months of free updates... giving the impression you are in fact buying a licence that after 6 months you might need to get updates for it to work properly. Im fact, it doesn't work like that at all.

After 6 months, you either buy and update for about 70% of the purchase price or your software is disabled. Rendered inoperable. Software you bought, not leased, now no longer works. At all. Not works, with less than perfect results. Its disabled.

I challenge you to find anywhere on their site where this is detailed. No one buying it would not they are only getting a limited period licence.

Its blatant dishonesty. You aren't buying the software at all, only a right to use it for a short period after which if you don't pay up, its disabled.

Would be fine if that was clear on the site but its deliberately not.

Would be fine if the software continued to work with caveats results might not be as good(advanced web rankings does this). It doesn't. If you don't update, its rendered non functional.

There are a multitude of unhappy reviews of the software on the net detailing how they were duped by this company.

I'd not buy anything from such a company.

[Hissingsid]

I'm looking for a sitewide keyword density reporting tool, something that will visit each page of a directory and give a combined report for pages in that directory and sub directories, if anyone can point to a good one.

[wheel]

Would be fine if the software continued to work with caveats results might not be as good(advanced web rankings does this). It doesn't. If you don't update, its rendered non functional.

I've got a copy of clicktracks I bought when you could buy it one time as standalone software. I still use it occassionally. It's got super tight licensing so that it'll only install on one PC. Need to transfer it, you have to call in. they've long since ceased selling this software, but to their benefit, the last time I called in they still got my software running on my new PC. They weren't really happy with doing so, but they did do it.

[nippi]

hey i;ve got loads on one user software thats protected to make it only work on one computer.

nothing wrong with that.

my bitch is that this application is sold as software. but its not, all you get is period where you can use it, then it fails. there may well not have been any updates. it may not have been improved at all. you still need to pay the licence fee.

and they dont tell you this when you buy it.

[rowtc2]

nippi You failed to mention SEO SPyglass dishonestly pretends to "Sell" their software, with 6 months of free updates... giving the impression you are in fact buying a licence that after 6 months you might need to get updates for it to work properly. Im fact, it doesn't work like that at all.

I have looked again, for Pro version (i am using) is 99$ license, after 6 months you must pay again 35$ to use another 6 months, or 50$ to use it another 12 months.

Is true, these fees are a little hidden so you don't know when you buy license that is only for 6 months. For me this tool still remain useful.

[JackR]

1. NAME - LINK
intoDNS - [intodns.com ]

2. PURPOSE
Comprehensive DNS information

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
Fast, ad-free and very comprehensive DNS information served in moments.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Nothing that I can see.

[nippi]

"Is true, these fees are a little hidden so you don't know when you buy license that is only for 6 months. For me this tool still remain useful. "

No. Its totally not mentioned at all, its intentionally not mentioned. Its totally dishonest, and in Europe where i am currently, updates are $35 euro for a 6 month renewal, not dollars, so its a lot more every 6 months.

[RP_Joe]

1. NAME - LINK
WhoIs ULTRA - [http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/Network/whois/Freeware.htm ]

2. PURPOSE
DNS information

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
Very Fast, ad-free DNS information. Will search for Domain names also.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
GUI is plain but its free. What is there to complain about.

[Zivush]

1. NAME - LINK
In page analytics in the new Google Analytics beta version
Refer to description: [analytics.blogspot.com ]

2. PURPOSE
Visualize how visitors navigate on a given website page.

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
The possibility to learn user behavior on a site per page - how they navigate, what they like/dislike etc.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Load time. Can pull down a server. Carefully exit after using.

[dailypress]

1. NAME - LINK
GTmetrix - [GTMetrix.com...]

2. PURPOSE
Analyzes your page's speed performance.

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
Gives a lot of useful recommendations

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
n/a

[tedster]

1. NAME - LINK
AuditMyPC - Free Sitemap Generator
http://www.AuditMyPC.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

2. PURPOSE
Generate an XML Sitemap

3. FREE or PAID
Free - and there's no URL limit to the number of URLs.

4. WHAT I LIKE
I discovered this free tool from Google's published list of sitemap tools. It does much more than merely generate a sitemap. It offers a lot of functionality that helps analyze and troubleshoot a site.

For instance, it finds duplicate URLs, reports on http status from the headers, lists mime types, title elements, allows all kind of crawling customization, runs desktop or on the server, and the interface gives lots of sort-by-field functionality. One of the nifty extras is that it shows, page by page, the internal linking structure of the site: total incoming and outgoing links for each page. Very useful for setting <priority> of course, but clearly it has a lot more value than just that.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Nothing I've run into, at least as far as generating either xml or txt sitemaps. This tool is well on its way to being a full-blown SEO analysis tool.

[aakk9999]

AuditMyPC - Free Sitemap Generator

I have been using it for a while, and I agree it is great.

Good thing I found about it is also that you can adjust number of request threads and the time with which they hit the server. It did help me once finding threading problem with the custom URL Rewrites on IIS (one thread, longer delay - no problems, multiple threads, short delay - some rewrites did not work).

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:09 am (utc) on Feb 9, 2012]
[edit reason] Fixed blocked word string [/edit]

[Fabt]

1. NAME - LINK
SEOQuake Firefox plugin

2. PURPOSE
Toolbar gives immediate info in regards to PR, #of indexed pages on G,Y!, Bing, as well as other info and inbout links. When you use it on search it shows all of this info at a glance

3. FREE or PAID
Limited info on free license

4. WHAT I LIKE
When I search for competitors i can get a quick glance at where they stand with the SE's plus a list of inbound links+anchor text, plus you can add in more parameters you want like DMOZ listing, quantcast, etc., and you can even build your own.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
if you use too many parameters a lot your server may be banned from SE's which means their data keeps running through the SE's themselves and return the queries in the tool bar

[edited by: tedster at 5:02 pm (utc) on Mar 6, 2012]

[bumpski]

1. NAME - LINK
Web Page Test
[webpagetest.org...]

2. PURPOSE
Detailed analysis and diagnosis of web page load performance issues.

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
a. Provides a complete "waterfall" diagram of web page component load times and sequences.
b. Indicates time to "render start" and "document complete" also known as the "onload" event time.
c. Allows browser selection.
d. Allows communications link type selection. DSL, Cable, FIOS, Dialup.
f. Indicates CPU usage and bandwidth usage.
g. Connection and DNS lookup time.
h. Indicates all domains accesses, IPs, and locations.
i. Page "second load" analysis, caching etc.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Highlights edits of URL in white on white?
Not much else.

6. Notes:
Test results are permanently recorded, keep this in mind!

[netmeg]

Oh thanks for that, that's a nice one. As long as you brought this post back up top, let me also put in a plug for the Screaming Frog SEO spider. Someone up there ^^ mentioned it already, but it's at [screamingfrog.co.uk...]

This tool quickly went from being my favorite new toy to an absolutely essential how-did-I-ever-live-without necessity. I just wish I'd had it when I was doing some site migrations in previous years. It'll give you response codes for internal and external links, page titles, meta descriptions, h1-h5 tags on pages, and all can be exported to Excel. And it's way fast without putting too much of a load on the server. Well worth the money (which is 99£ per year; not sure what the exchange rate is right now) Recommend!

[michaelg4i]

1. NAME - LINK
myposeo - [myposeo.com ]

2. PURPOSE
It's a professional daily rank checker for Google,

3. FREE or PAID
Free trial and then paid plans, price range : 4 euros/month (50keywords) to 65 euros/month (1000 keywords)

4. WHAT I LIKE
The fact that it supports not only google.com but also local extension : .co.uk, .lu, .fr, etc. Which is great for my clients.
The automated reports.
The Universal search support

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Ranking check is on a daily basis, and sometimes it fluctuates a lot. Would be great to have an option to normalize ranks afterward.