Tools to automate/facilitate SEO best practices

Keyword Research Tools:

• Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Google Suggest Tool
• Wordtracker Free Keywords
• Keyword Discovery
• Microsoft Ad Intelligence – brilliant extension for Microsoft Excel which puts a load of great keyword research data directly into Excel.
• Alexa – shows traffic trends for competing websites. Alexa has a heavy webmaster bias that is nowhere near as noticeable at Compete or Quantcast.
• Quantcast – shows site traffic and demographic trends and details. Also allows you to download a list of their top 1,000,000 websites.
• Google Trends for Websites – free tool from Google showing traffic estimates, visitor country location, top 10 related websites, and top 10 related keywords. Only returns data for fairly high traffic websites though.
• Google Search Insights – shows keyword trends, hot keywords by category, and top geographic regions for a keyword.
• SearchStatus – highlights nofollow links, shows PageRank, shows Alexa rank, and provides links to some backlink information
• Compete.com Search Analytics – low cost competitive tool showing keywords that send competing sites the most traffic.
• HitWise – similar to Compete.com Search Analytics, but costs about $10,000 and up.
• KeyCompete – shows keywords that competitors are buying
• KeywordSpy – similar to KeyCompete, but with more data – including cached ad copy and affiliate data
• SearchMetrics – offers SERP ranking data & link data. Provides historical ranking data, as well. Primarily focused on enterprise-level clients, but has a more accessible lower cost
• Essentials level.
• SEMPhonic – tracks keyword rankings and provides competitive reporting
• SpyFu – shows terms that competitors are buying or ranking for in the organic search results.
• Trellian Competitive Intelligence – shows keywords that competitors rank for and keywords that send them significant traffic.
• Keyword Density Analysis Tool – finds common words and phrases on your site, or competing websites.
• Spider Test Tool – shows the page size, source code, meta tags, page title, textual copy of the page, keyword breakdown by density (including 2 and 3 word phrases), number of words, number of unique words, and outbound links on a page.
• Link Harvester – web based tool that allows you to dig deeply through a competitor’s backlinks
• Link Popularity Comparison Tool – allows you to quickly and easily compare your link popularity scores to other websites.
• Majestic SEO – link anchor index that allows you to download the link profile for any site…going thousands or millions of links deep!
• Open Site Explorer – similar to Majestic SEO, but with an easier to use interface and perhaps a few less filters. Database is not as large, but it also doesn’t have as much outdated data as one would find in Majestic SEO’s database.
• Competition Finder – tool looks at how many competing pages there are in Google’s index that has your desired keywords in their page title and anchor text.
• Search Engine Saturation Tool – helps you compare how many pages you have in the search indexes compared against competing sites.
• BackLink Analyzer – free Windows based downloadable software allowing you to deeply explore through a competitor’s backlinks. Powered by the Yahoo! API, so it might be a bit spotty, but it is not bad for free.
• Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool – allows you to plug in a URL and shows you what keywords Google thinks the page should be advertising for
• Google Traffic Estimator – estimates the number of Google AdWords ad clicks and bid prices for the top ad position.
• Google Search Based Keyword Tool – shows keyword search volume estimates and keyword values…by keyword, site, or category.
• Backlink Watch – shows backlinks and anchor text used in the backlinks
• Xenu Link Sleuth – Downloadable software which makes it fast and easy to find broken links on your site.
• SEO Powersuite Tool
• Web CEO Tool
• IBP Tools

Rank Checking Tools:

• Agent Web Ranking
• Rank Tracker
• Google Webmaster Central – allows you to sign up for Google Sitemaps, shows some crawling errors, and a more complete view of your backlinks. Also shows keywords you rank well for and keywords that send you the most traffic.

Analytics Tools

• Google Analytics – powerful full featured analytics tool
• Clicktale – specializes in customer heat maps
• Crazy Egg – somewhat similar to Clicktale in providing analytics visualization Adobe’s Omniture WebTrends
• comScore’s Digital Analytix Suite
• IBM’s Coremetrics