2013 Favorite SEO Tools

[goodroi]

Google has changed and so have the SEO tools. Let's talk about our favorite SEO tools that help us to rank in 2013.

This thread is a one time exception to the forum charter [webmasterworld.com] that asks members not to discuss specific SEO tools to keep the forum free from promotional campaigns. For this thread only, we are going to suspend that Charter guideline. We will be more strictly moderating this thread. Our goal is to have a comprehensive list of SEO tools that are fairly represented.

If you see a tool reviewed and would like to add information, please post your comment. The moderators will then move your comment to the original post reviewing the tool.

Only one tool per post, please.

Here's a template that we ask people to use:

1. NAME - LINK

2. PURPOSE

3. FREE or PAID

4. WHAT I LIKE

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING

6. WHAT HAS CHANGED (ONLY APPLIES TO OLDER TOOLS)


Check out 2012 Favorite SEO Tools [webmasterworld.com]

[aakk9999]

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

2. PURPOSE
Tool to crawl a website and report URLs, response codes, page titles, meta tags, canonical, create sitemap.xml, export URLs as csv and more.

3. FREE or PAID
Free for 500 URLs. £99 + VAT (£118.80) for a yearly licence.

4. WHAT I LIKE
Runs from own PC and has a great easy to use interface. It is very feature rich, it can create sitemap.xml, it can export crawled data with inlinks, outlinks and their anchor text, it can (or not) honour robots.txt, noindex meta when crawling, it can search for a phrase/text in HTML and report all URLs with the phrase/text in it, it can follow redirects, it can crawl or not crawl nofollowed links, etc. Too many features to describe.

For me, it is the essential tool when analysing the site, testing redirects etc. Saves huge amount of time when doing domain migrations and similar activities.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
On ocassions, after crawling larger website, if I start to more extensively manipulate the URLs within the tool result set (crawled result set), the tool just dies. I guess it runs out of memory somewhere.

6. WHAT HAS CHANGED (ONLY APPLIES TO OLDER TOOLS)
Lots of new features were added in the last year or so: the ability to control the speed with which to hit the website, the ability to increase the response timeout (great for a slow sites), the ability to export sitemap.xml. Also lots of new data exports were added.

---

ZydoSEO:
I will second Screaming Frog. Great tool. Used to do the same thing by using Xenu to crawl sites for URLs and then feeding them into my own PHP program. The export to CSV needs some work as exporting data as comma delimited does not import cleanly into Excel on many sites (URL's data wraps over two lines).
.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 4:35 pm (utc) on Oct 17, 2013]

[JD_Toims]

1. NAME - LINK
Webmaster World [webmasterworld.com...]

2. PURPOSE
Exchange of information and knowledge.

3. FREE or PAID
Either.

4. WHAT I LIKE
It serves it's purpose -- It's the best exchange of information I've found.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
The number of high-level, knowledgeable, experienced SEOs and/or SE Reps who share information, and, of course, the source code -- I think webmasterworld.com should set the example for source coding, not be years out of date [my opinion only].

6. WHAT HAS CHANGED (ONLY APPLIES TO OLDER TOOLS)
It's become much easier to post inaccurate or unproven information as fact and not be "set straight" by those who are more knowledgeable and can *prove* what they have to say rather than guessing or assuming.

[Whitey]

1. NAME - LINK
PageSpeed Insights by Google [developers.google.com...]

2. PURPOSE
To make your web pages fast on all devices.

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
It calculates the performance of a page for mobile and desktop devices using a "PageSpeed Score of 0 to 100 points. A score of over 85 suggests a better performing page.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Well this is Google's call, and this is what they say : "Please note that PageSpeed Insights is being continually improved and so the score will change as we add new rules or improve our analysis."

6. WHAT HAS CHANGED (ONLY APPLIES TO OLDER TOOLS)
Recent updates have focused on improving mobile performance.

[zdgn]

(Please be gentle.)

1. NAME - LINK
Google Analytics [google.com...]

2. PURPOSE
- Awesome tool to improve optimisation for that mostly overlooked target of "SEO" experts: Humans.
- Good for knowing how living things use my sites.
- Warning: Not good any more for chasing siren wailing medical vehicles.

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
Helps me optimise for my desired audience (male and female humanoids), who were the original intended audience for all websites (thus engines indexing websites, etc.)

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
UI. Horribly unintuitive. Probably designed by someone working for a big Search Engine company. :-)

6. WHAT HAS CHANGED (ONLY APPLIES TO OLDER TOOLS)
Changes for the sake of changes.
.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 6:49 pm (utc) on Oct 17, 2013]
[edit reason] Fixed link [/edit]

[ZydoSEO]

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

2. PURPOSE
Backlink analysis tool

3. FREE or PAID
Both - I subscribe to the Silver Edition (~$50/month)

4. WHAT I LIKE
- They have been crawling the web for a half a decade logging and maintaining link graph data for the web
- Much better than Moz's Open Site Explorer and Ahref data IMO
- Provides not only source and target URLs, but things like dates first found, whether text or image links, if text then anchor text, if image link then alt attribue values, rather the link gets redirected, whether it's nofollow, whether a mention/citation or true hyperlink, a trust rank, and citation rank
- Has historic index data going back a half a decade
- Has fresh index data for last 3 months
- Great for doing link analysis
- Great for competitor link analysis


5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
UI. Horribly unintuitive.

6. WHAT HAS CHANGED (ONLY APPLIES TO OLDER TOOLS)
They have been adding more useful tools. They offer free training (conference call + Webex) to all paid customers.
.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 4:36 pm (utc) on Oct 17, 2013]
[edit reason] As per OP, moved another tool comment to the original post reviewing that tool [/edit]

[hannamyluv]

1. NAME - LINK
Ubersuggest - ubersuggest.org [ubersuggest.org]

2. PURPOSE
Keyword tool

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
Works great to find related topics to expand content that may not show up on search numbers based keyword tools or log walking.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
I love it the way it is.
.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 6:45 pm (utc) on Oct 17, 2013]
[edit reason] Fixed link [/edit]

[Whitey]

1. NAME - LINK
Google Disavow Link Tool [google.com...] ( requires log-in)

2. PURPOSE
Allows webmasters to disavow links they do not wish to be associated with their site, which may be causing a penalty, thus allowing the opportunity to reverse link related penalties.

3. FREE or PAID
Free

4. WHAT I LIKE
The panel provides access to both submit, resubmit and edit the .txt files

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
Can't say at this stage - maybe others can chime in

6. WHAT HAS CHANGED (ONLY APPLIES TO OLDER TOOLS)
Nothing as was only introduced in the last 12 months or so.

I thought it might be handy for folks to be able to find this link in this central reference point.

[FranticFish]

This was on last year's list and I was with a different provider then. Have recently switched and the grass is oh so greener.

1. NAME - LINK
Cognitive SEO [cognitiveseo.com...]

2. PURPOSE
Rank Tracking & Link Analysis

3. FREE or PAID
Paid

4. WHAT I LIKE
Great as a standalone tool or aggregated data source for you to use for your own tools / dbs. Huge great amounts of data and metrics for the same price as others that offer far less data, cross referencing and analysis. And it's fast too.

5. WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING
So far, nothing that I can see (but I'm on a bit of a newbie buzz).

6. WHAT HAS CHANGED (ONLY APPLIES TO OLDER TOOLS)
n/a - newbie