As part of my research, I will look into Search Engine Optimisation. What are the best ways to boost your position in search engines? What keywords should you use on your web-pages? And which tools should you use to improve the quality of backlinks, link popularity and Google Pagerank? You will find below a good starting point for SEO tools, that you might consider using.
Ranking Tools
Google Ranking Tools
Advanced Google Search Methods – this is a tool is to search Google in many special ways. A useful resource for search engine optimization (especially keyword research) among other things.
Google Datacenter Watch Tool is a tool that lets you do a search on Google at all the different datacentres. Note, that at this time there are 700+ known Datacenters.
Google Rank Position shows Google rank position, PR, number of entries indexed, DMOZ and Google Dir status.
Google Rankings check the ranking of a web page in Google.
Yahoo Ranking Tools
Yahoo Search Rankings is a free online SEO tool to check the position of your website in the search engine of Yahoo.
Alexa Tools
Alexa Page Ranking allows you to cut and paste a number of domains. Get the 3 month Alexa Ranking. If you want to check Alexa Ranking for a number of sites, you can browse your harddrive and provide a list of domains.
Alexa Rank Check is a tool that let you check the Alexa Rank and Google PageRank for up to 10 websites in one go – perfectly for site comparisons. Please note that the best possible Alexa Rank is 1 and the best possible Google Pagerank is 10
Alexa Ranking Find out how your web site traffic stacks up against all your competitors! This is one of the most accurate freely available tools to find out how well your site ranks up against millions of other sites on the Web.
Alexa Related Rank Check tool to check several Alexa ratings at once. This could be useful when checking out your competition.
Page Rank Tools
Datacenter Quick Check checks all Google datacenters for BackLinks, PR and Ranking of keyword.
Future PageRank Tool will query Google’s various data centers to check for any changes in PageRank values for a given URL. Usually all data centers will output the same, but if queried during an update, you might get a glimpse of any upcoming changes in your chosen URL’s PageRank value.
Page Rank Tool will query and return the Google PageRank values for submitted URL from various Google datacenters. Usually all returned values are the same, but when there’s an update going on, you will be able to watch out your Page Ranks closely.
Compare Search Engine Ranking Tools
Dogpile Search Comparison gives you the top results from Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
Google vs Yahoo Graph looks at the results from Yahoo and Google, finds the similarities and then gives you a graphical display of what results are in both search engines. This illustrates that optimizing your site for both engines is not a very easy thing to do, but not impossible.
Google-Yahoo-Ask Search search engines differ more than you think. Compare Google, Yahoo, and MSN with one search.
Myriad Search is a search engine that combines Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask Jeeves in one screen. You can modify the individual influence of each search engine in the results.
Thumbshots Ranking is a fun way to learn about search engines and optimizing a site’s ranking.
Yahoo vs Google compares top 100 search results from Google and Yahoo!
Combo Search Engine Ranking Tools
Search Engine Placement Check is a verification tool that checks if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword. It’s important to be in the top 3 pages of a search result because most people using search engines don’t go past the 3rd page.
Search Engine Positioning check your Search engine positioning (SERPS) on Yahoo, Google, All The Web. MSN and Hotbot. Just enter your keyword/keyword phrase into the “Keyword” submit box, then enter your URL into the field labeled “Your URL” and specify the “Page Depth” this variable tells the spider how far to go page wise before giving up trying to find your rank. If you are not in the serps within “X” specified pages then the message “There is no information for your query” will come up. It doesn’t really mean there is no information for your serps, it just means that you don’t rank for that keyword within your specified page depth.
Search Engine Ranking Report Enter your own keywords (one phrase per line) and domain to find out where your domain ranks for a set of keyword searches.
Related Page Rank Tools
Backlink Checker counts the Page Rank of your backlinks. To use it, just enter your URL and Google API Key. If you don’t have an API Key, you can fine one at www.google.com/apis. They are free and very easy to get.
Google PageRank Calculator – enter the “Number of Links From Each Page” that links to the page in question to get a Page Rank estimation.
Google PageRank Prediction attempts to determine a future Google PageRank value of a particular site. The tools does several calculations to come to this figure.
Google PageRank Report checks the Google PageRank values for the list of URLs.
Multi DC PageRank Checker will query the varios Google Data Centers to check for any changes in PageRank values for a website.
PageRank Lookup allows you to check the Google PageRank values of multiple URLs at once. A time-saver for keeping tabs on you and your competitors’ PR values.
PageRank Search allows you to search Google using any keyword(s) you wish. It will then return, in order of Google relevance, the sites associated with those keywords. Each result displays a graphical bar with the PageRank of that particular site.
Keyword Tools
Keyword Suggestion Tools
Free Meta Keywords Tool analyzes the meta keywords of your competition. Use the tool to see what keywords your competitors are embedding in their meta keywords tags and then research these keywords using other freely available tools including the Overture keyword suggestion tool, WordTracker and Keyword Discovery.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool – use it to get new keyword ideas. Pick one of the tabs below and enter keywords or URLs that are relevant to your business.
Google Keyword Suggestions helps you choose relevant and popular terms related to your selected key term. Simply enter a key term and this tool will query information from several Google searches, which it will use to determine popular and re-occurring terms used by websites in the same industry.
Google Suggest – as you type, Google will offer suggestions. Use the arrow keys to navigate the results.
Keyword Popularity Tool gives similar data, including search figures from the previous month. It also adds statistics for average searches per hour, day, week, projected figures for the next 12 months and then also a figure to see how searches may look in 3 years from now.
Keyword Research Tool helps you research appropriate words and phrases to include in your webpage’s body text to aid in promotion. Simply enter the sort of word of phrase you wish to be found under, and the tool will suggest some additional words and phrases you can think about using.
Keyword Suggestion Tool is a handy little tool will show you the results of your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases are searched most often. Enter a search phrase below to see how often it’s searched for, as well as get suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords.
Search Term Research is an invaluable research tool that will tell you what users are searching for and help you find the right keywords to target.
Website Keyword Suggestions tries to determine the theme of your website and provides keyword suggestions along with keyword traffic estimates.
Keyword Tools
GoogleDuel Original a popularity contest using the Google search engine. Enter two words, names, or phrases, and find out which one occurs on more pages on the web. For example, try cat vs dog.
Keyword Density is useful for helping webmasters and SEOs achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms. It will analyze your chosen URL and return a table of keyword density values for one-, two-, or three-word key terms. In an attempt to mimic the function of search engine spiders, it will filter out common stop words (since these will probably be ignored by search engines).
Keyword Density Analyzer will crawl the given URL, extracting text as a search engine spider would. It then removes common stopwords (and calculates what percentage of the total text is stopwords) and analyzes the keyword density of the one word, two word and three word keywords the the text. This tool also calculates the noun density and the verb density, that is; the ratio of the total number of nouns or verbs on the page to the total number of words.
Keyword Density Analyzer is a keyword density and word depth calculator.
Keyword Density Analyzer is important since search engines use this information to determine the theme of your website, the perfect keyword density will help archive higher search engine positions. This tool is useful for helping webmasters achieve optimum keyword distribution.
Combined Keyword Suggestion Tools
Combine Words is a tool to create combinations of keywords for use in a Google AdWords
or Yahoo! Search Marketing Pay Per Click PPC campaign.
Domain Tools
DNS Report is a test that provides comprehensive information about the specified domain that may verify DNS ‘health’ or identify problems or issues. Common uses: find problems with a domain, verify Mail Servers, Query a specific DNS server.
Bad Neighborhood Checker checks link pages and reports if there are links to bad neighborhoods.
Browser Screen Resolution Checker shows what your web page looks like with the viewer’s monitor set to different screen resolutions.
C Class Backlink Analyzer Tool investigates the links pointing to a website (backlinks), and groups them according to the C-Class IP addresses they come from. For example, if one backlink comes from 53.25.14.5 and another comes from 53.25.14.6, they would be grouped together. Backlinks coming from the same C-Class IP are most likely hosted by the same company, which may lower the site’s search engine ranking.
Class C Checker allows you to check if some sites are hosted on the same Class C IP Range. This Class C Checker may be used if you own several cross-linked sites – it may be more efficient (for SEO purposes) to host them on different Class C IP ranges (this is only an advice, not a must do). And if you’re going to get new links from different sites – check if they share the same class C IP range.
Domain Age Tool displays the approximate age of a website on the Internet and allows you to view how the website looked when it first started. It also helps you find out the age of your competitor’s domains, older domains may get a slight edge in Search Engine Rankings.
Domain Dossier investigates domains and IP addresses.
Domain Stats Tool helps you get all kind of statistics of your competitor’s domains. The statistics include Alexa Taffic Rank, Age of the domains, Yahoo WebRank, Dmoz listings, count of backlinks and number of pages indexed in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn etc. It will probably help you figure out why some of your competitors are ranking better than you.
HTML Header Viewer shows the exact HTTP headers that a web server is sending with a HTTP response. This can be useful if you need to know what cookies are being set or where any re-directs are going to, along with other details such as mime-type.
HTTP / HTTPS Header Check allows you to inspect the HTTP headers that the web server returns when requesting a URL. Works with HTTP and HTTPS URLs.
IP Address Report check for a duplicate Class C block or Class C subnet IP address in a list of websites, these can be either hosted affiliate and internet marketing sites or potential reciprocal link exchange partners.
Redirects And HTTP Headers Checker checks your server headers and the HTTP result codes it returns. It will follow any redirects it finds along the way, whenever possible. With this tool you can check to see how your server is redirecting and if your server is returning 404 for URLs which do not exist.
Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker help you determine if the redirect you have created is Search Engine Friendly.
What Is My IP Address shows the IP of your computer or routers.
Link Tools
Exchange Link SEO Tools
Free Reciprocal Link Checker with pagerank calculation and web thumbnails. Put your website or weblog home page URL in the input box and a little spider will read the html code and check for the broken links. The spider splits links in two categories, internal, from the same host, and external, outgoing link to different domains. Once you have put your start URL the bot will visit your website and follow all links checking for their status. When finish you will see a report showing all the bad links found, not only 404 status.
One Way Link Verify generates a detailed report on many search engine-related factors for that page. Requires a Google API Key.
Online Free Reciprocal Link Checker just input the link to search for (the link towards your site), and the listing of the websites where you have done link trades. The spider will crawl one by one each of this addresses looking for links towards your website within your’s link partners html code. You must put the exact address where your link should be found. The crawler doesn’t follow links inside frames, javascript, flash or going through server script.
Site Link Analyzer analyzes a given web page and return a table of data containing columns of outbound links and their associated anchor text. If a hyperlink is represented by an image, the image’s alt attribute will be included as the anchor text.
Link Popularity Tools
Link Popularity Checker is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your website’s online awareness and overall visibility. Simply put, link popularity refers to the total number of links or “votes” that a search engine has found for your website.
Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer will help you determine the backlinks of your website and link text used by your backlinks to Link to your wesbite.
Link Appeal will calculate the desirability rating of having a link on the URL you specify. This calculation includes factors such as PageRank, number of outbound links and the overall percentage of links to html. It is intended as a guideline for evaluating whether you should ask for a link on a certain page or not.
Site Analysis Including Link Popularity generates a complete site analysis e.g. amount of backlinks, indexed sites, Google PageRank and also if your domain is listed in DMOZ and Yahoo directory.
Link Popularity Checker tells you how many websites are linking to yours. Website popularity is an important factor in your search engine ranking. The more popular your site is, the better it will be ranked on the search engines.
Link Popularity Tool checks the number of pages that link to you in AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google, HotBot, MSN Search, and Yahoo!, as well as check for your site’s presence in DMOZ and Zeal.
Link Popularity Checker and Link Quality Assessment is a tool to find out the necessary statistics on your links and your competitor’s links.
Link Popularity Check using this script you can revise detailed statistics of backward links for one domain in the most popular directories and search engines.
Backlink Tools
Backlink Check Tool is a tool is to check your backlinks and the anchor text used in those backlinks.
Toolbars
Google Toolbar For Firefox add buttons to the toolbar to search your favorite sites. Bookmark frequently visited pages and access them from anywhere. Search smarter with instant suggestions. as you type in the search box. Share web pages with friends via blog, email, or SMS. System requirements: Windows XP/2000 SP3+, Mac OS X 10.2+, or Linux, Firefox 1.5+.
Google Toolbar For IE Block annoying pop-ups. Fill out web forms with one click. Translate pages into English instantly. Check your spelling in webmail messages, and more. System requirements: Windows Vista/2000/XP, Internet Explorer 6.0+.
Mozdev GoogleBar project was initially created to address the widespread desire in the mozilla community for the Google toolbar to support the Netscape 7, Mozilla, and Firefox web browsers. In the past, the Google toolbar was only available for IE on windows. While we are in no way affiliated with Google inc, our current release emulates all of the basic search functionality of the toolbar, allowing users to easily access almost all of Google’s specialty searches (some of which are not yet supported by the original Google toolbar!) from one convenient toolbar. However, because the developer community for Firefox is so vibrant, we have decided not to implement features found in other extensions (such as form fill) or built into Firefox (such as the popup blocker). If you are looking for AutoFill, you may find the AutoForm or AutoFill extensions useful.
PR Toolbar Widget For Macintosh requires Mac OS X 10.3 or higher. Internally it’s built with JavaScript, PHP and AppleScript. Works for HTTP sites, does not work (intentionally) for HTTPS, FTP, etc.
Search MSN Toolbar helps you start a search from any Web page, see instant previews of maps and more from any Web page, personalize your Web experience with custom buttons. Requires Internet Explorer 6.0 or later.
Yahoo Toolbar For Firefox helps you make the Web a safer place – Pop-Up Blocker stops pop-ups in their tracks. It allows to quickly search your bookmarks, from Toolbar or Yahoo! Search. Personalized buttons get you to your most used sites in 1 click. Built in Web Search helps you find whatever you want fast. Yahoo! Mail alerts lets you know when you’ve got new mail.
Web Site Optimization Tools
Poodle Predictor is a tool that attempts to give you an idea of how your site will show up in the search-engine results, before it’s too late, and they have already cached it. This helps you avoid making mistakes that will either prevent your site from getting a decent listing, or will show a useless description of you site in the search-engine results.
Advanced Meta Tag Generator provides you with fields for 19 different mata tags and generates the meta code for you.
Cache.it not only searches and finds the cache pages; it also gives you a graphic view of the results over a period of time (from the first day of your research until now). Additionally, it shows you the site pagerank.
Code to Text Calculator – to avoid diluting your keyword relevancy you should design pages with as little code bloat as possible. Check the percent of your page that is comprised of text with this too.
Copyscape searches for copies of your page on the Web.
Google Banned Tool uses two methods to check to see if a URL you enter is in the Google database. Its a great way to check to see if you have been banned by Google for various reasons. If your site is quite new, you may also not show in the Google database. This tool is aimed towards people who think that they have been punished.
Meta Tag Generator generates a search engine friendly Head Tag for your web site. Keep your meta tags free of information that only slows down a search engine robot crawl.
Title and Meta Tag Generator Create your sites meta tags instantly to help achieve higher search engine ranking. Includes title tag, description, abstract, keyword, and robot meta tags. You can read the Meta Tag Description page for an explaination of the meta tags created by our meta tag generator.
Search Engine Spider Simulator is a tool that simulates a Search Engine by displaying the contents of a webpage exactly how a Search Engine would see it. It also displays the hyperlinks that will be followed (crawled) by a Search Engine when it visits the particular webpage.
Similar Page Checker allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages. The exact percentage of similarity after with a search engine may penalize you is not known, it varies from search engine to search engine, Your aim should be to keep your page similarity as low as possible.
Web Page Analyzer will read the page you specify, and put it through a few basic tests to see if qualifies as ’search-engine-friendly’ for the phrase you specify. It then gives a report on the good, and the bad points of the page in SEO terms.
Code Validation
Atom & RSS Feed Validator is a validator for syndicated feeds. It works with RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. It also validates Atom feeds. Despite its relatively simple nature, RSS is poorly implemented by many tools. This validator is an attempt to codify the specification (literally, to translate it into code) to make it easier to know when you’re producing RSS correctly, and to help you fix it when you’re not. The validator also supports the IETF standard Atom format for syndicated feeds.
W3C Markup Validation Service is a validator that checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. If you wish to validate specific content such as RSS/Atom feeds or CSS stylesheets or to find broken links, there are other validators and tools available.