Resources

Looking for the best tools for testing your site, conversions, niche research, market research, SEO, and more? We have built a list of the best tools to use that will give you the most comprehensive and accurate overview of what is going on with your site, and where you have room for improvement. Most of the tools on the list are free (unless otherwise noted).

Market Research Tool

Quarkbase – Find information on any domain/url such as description, summary, competitive sites, related sites, social networking profile, traffic stats and more

SEO Backlink Tool

  • LinkScape – (PAID): By SEOMoz, their index is over over 40 billion pages. Data allows you to see the link profile of specific pages (i.e. how many external pages link to an internal page within your site), not just the index page of a domain.
  • SEO Elite – (PAID): While it has had its problems in the past, Brad Callen has done a solid job of keeping the software up-to-date and responding to customer needs.
  • Domain Backlink Checker – groups backlinks by domain and displays how many links each domain has pointing to the page. Great for spotting link networks or Run of Site (ROS) links.
  • Bad Neighborhood Tool – decent tool but it fails to tell you exactly what the problem is. You must figure out the problem on the page yourself.
  • Link Finder – Find possible backlinks for your site quickly and easily.

SEO Keyword Tools

  • AdWords Keyword Tool – Get your keyword research straight from Google. This is really the only tool you need.
  • Adwords Traffic Estimator – How much traffic could you expect? Data is straight from Google.
  • Google Ad Planner – Use this tool to uncover your competition’s reach in the market and affordable sites to advertise on to reach your exact target market.
  • Google Insights – Compare search volume across categories, seasonalities, geographic distribution and properties.
  • Google Trends – See the trends regarding a keyword phrase to see its demand over time.
  • Google Sets – Create additional “sets” of keywords. I recommend using the Small Set option.
  • WordTracker Labs – While WordTracker has lost much of its value, this tool is good to uncover questions prospects are asking. A great content topic generator.
  • Microsoft Search Funnel – Prospects often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences.
  • Entity Association Graph – Get a graphic view of the associations between entities by mining the co-occurrences of entities in search queries.
  • Keyword Group Detection – Find groups of words from the pool of online queries.
  • Keyword Map – a “DNA Strand” representation of the keyword theme.
  • Keyword Discovery – (PAID): The same boat as WordTracker. Once Google upgraded their free keyword tool this tool was no longer elite.
  • Keyword Cloud – Instead of looking at numbers, look at the “Cloud” that blogs made popular.
  • SEO Book Keyword Suggestion – Aaron Wall’s tool. Uses data from WordTracker, Google, Yahoo & MSN.

SEO Analytic Tools

  • Google Webmaster Tools – A must have for your business.
  • Google Analytics – If you aren’t going to analyze your raw log files, this is the way to go.
  • Compete.com – (PAID): Get keyword reports starting at $1.00 a report.
  • QuarkBase.com – Gives a great snapshot of a domain, similar to what Quancast used to give.
  • AdGooroo.com – (PAID): 5 million keywords in their competitive intelligence database.
  • LinkVendor.com – Check out the SEO Challenge which pits two domains against each other.
  • Alexa.com – Owned by Amazon: gives traffic and user ranking by country, graph history & related links.
  • Quantcast.com – Very little data on sites not in the Top 50,000 in Alexa.
  • URLmetrix – A quick way to see the web popularity of a site.
  • SEM Rush – The only valuable part of their tool is it breaks down the projected value of the organic traffic a site receives. Note: Their traffic estimates are off by an average of 30% lower than actual.

SEO Engine Tools

SEO Site Grader Tools

  • SEOmoz Trifecta Tool – (PAID): You can compare multiple domains across many quality indicators.
  • WebSiteGrader.com – Runs slow and reports are emailed to you, although the report does show on the screen after it completes.

SEO SERP Tools

SEO Firefox Tools

  • Search Status – Displays Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Compete, mozRank, keyword density analyzer, nofollow highligher, backlinks and more.
  • SEO Quake – Adds an extra row of info to the Google SERPs.
  • Rank Quest Toolbar – Access to more than 30 SEO tools.
  • SEOpen – Access basic SEO tools with right-click.
  • KGen – See which keywords are strong on a website.
  • SEOBook for Firefox – Aaron Wall’s Plugin
  • JSView 2.0.5 – Allows you to view the source of external files on websites.
  • HTML Validator – Validate HTML files.

SEO Bookmarklets

Validate HTML – instantly access current page HTML W3.org validator

WordPress SEO Plugins

  • SEO Smart Links – automatically links keywords and keyphrases in your posts.

Domain Valuation Tools

  • DN Scoop – Known to be more on the “buyers” side as the estimates for domain values are generally lower than what they should be. If you are looking to buy a domain, I would use the data from this site in attempts to get the domain for less than it is actually worth.

Other Webmaster Tools

  • Copyscape – Search for copies of your content.
  • DomainTools.com – The best domain tool available.
  • Yahoo! Site Explorer – The best place to check backlinks – updated daily.
  • Robots.txt File Generator – from Aaron Wall of SEO Book.
  • Robots.txt Analyzer – from Aaron Wall of SEO Book.
  • Class C Checker – Check if two domains are hosted on the same Class C IP range (detect possible link farm).
  • Lynx Viewer – see how your site looks to a search engine spider.
  • Similpedia – check for duplicate content in WikiPedia.
  • Change Detection – This is a free service that will alert you via email when a change is detected on a web page. This is most helpful for competitor sites, or to monitor blogs for hackers.