SEO Tools Everyone should use

As you all know, SEO takes a lot of effort. So much effort, in fact, that people would actually pay companies to do SEO on their websites. It's good practice however to know some SEO of your own, even if you let a company handle the tasks for you. To aid you with this, there are plenty of free SEO tools available on the Internet, that you can easily use for yourself. These tools are more or less the very same tools used by professionals, so it doesn't hurt to know what they are and what they do.

First, there is the keyword research tool. You can find this at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml. What this does is it helps you find the right words and phrases to use in the body text of your website to help promote your site. Using it is easy, just enter the words/phrases you wish to be searched under. The tool will also suggest other words and phrases that you can use.

Another useful tool is the keyword analyzer tool, located at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml. It reads the text on your page and tells you which words are most used, and how many times they are used. Most search engines rank sites based on keyword density, so use this along with a word counter to help you stay within the recommended density.

One tool that you will use quite often is the search engine position checker tool (http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-position-checker.shtml). You can do SERPs manually by searching for your site under the keywords you use and counting the position from the results manually, but this is tedious and takes a lot of time, especially if you use more than one search engine. This does it for you automatically, and supports the three major search engines. You'd need to use this at least once a week to check how your site is ranking.

The link popularity tool (http://www.instantposition.com/link_popularity_check.cfm) is exactly that, it measures the link popularity of your website based on how many 'votes' a search engine has found for your website. The results are presented in graphical form, so it's easy to read and compare. You can also compare how you are doing against your competitors.

The meta tag generator will help you find appropriate meta tags. It does this by picking the most used words on the page. You can find this tool at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/meta-tag-generator.shtml.

The last, but definitely not the least, and should probably be the first one you use, is the search term suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). It displays how many times a keyword is searched for, and tells you how competitive your chosen keyword is. It also shows related searches to your keyword. This is a good tool because it helps you determine how feasible it is to rank for your chosen keyword, and gives suggestions in case your keyword is too competitive.

These are just some of the many SEO tools you can find. Keep them in your bookmarks, you will need them. Good luck!