Best Free SEO Tools/Addons?..

Hi guys

Im new to this forum, and relatively new to SEO too, so that gives you an idea of the kind of tools im looking for - i dont need to deeply analyze my competitors as itd probably just confuse me! but what id like to do is have a good idea of what keywords to go for for this specific category, some idea of the best pages internally to put them, and an idea of what other keywords people searched for to get to the same category/term as mine - and anything else you think is useful for someone planning their content, and how to word it.

Ive researched this and just found tons of stuff, too much to decide whats good and whats a waste of time, some tools ive noticed are more specified to 'old' seo - meta tags etc, and some tools that analyse other sites in such a complex way that the information is no use to me - i dont understand it.

Some things ive acquired so far:

RAGE SEKeyword (dont really understand what the advanced options do..)
Firefox addons: wordpot, nodofollow (although im yet to get the hang of these..)

anyone recommend anything else? also been looking through SEOmoz's paid membership..

i simply need some good free tools that will help me confidently choose keywords that have a good chance of being effective - i want to keep in mind the fact that some keywords will be overused on bigger sites with more credibility than my new site, too, and not just use a 'most popular keyword' tool.

the blog i want to SEO is sort of 'media and music', and the site will offer how to articles on getting into the industry, sneek peeks inside or at least thats the general topic of the blog. itd be great to get some help and im sorry if any of that seemed ignorant, as i said, im new!


emma

I'm more on liking the quick search status add ons. It is very useful like the highlight No follow link and Show indexed pages service.

try here:
http://forums.seochat.com/seo-tools-75/a-listing-of-seo-chat-s-seo-tools-64670.html

Also seobook toolbar and seoquake for firefox. So freebies at seomoz.org too.

thanks for the hints - my main problem at the moment is working my way around these and how they actually benefit..

i have just signed up to alexa is this good for SEO>

I never use alexa in all honest, I find seobook toolbar by far and away the best individual tool.

Plus some of the google freebies like keyword tool, webmaster tools etc etc.

What are you trying to do?

Hey Emma,

A couple good tools to get you started:

Google's keyword tool - for researching the keywords you'll want to target. Enter a few terms you think are important for your site and this tool will return the number of times those phrases are searched for and also make some alternative suggestions based upon the kind of phrases you want to be found for:

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google adwords - If you've got some money available to kick off this site project, try adding loads of relevant keywords to an adwords campaign and see what happens - this is the quickest way to gauge which keywords are most popular (and potentially convert best - if you're doing anything monetary-related on your site).

Once you've got an understanding of what people are looking for most, you can prioritise certain terms in your link building campaign. In addition, google adwords now also suggests 1000's of similar keywords for you to add, which may supplement your knowledge of potential terms/phrases (a bit of inspiration):

http://adwords.google.co.uk/

Google analytics/Hittail - You've probably already signed up for google analytics, but one of the benefits of either of these tools is ascertaining the long-tail terms that people are entering into google (and finding you with). As above, you'll gain a really good insight into what people search for most, and on what kind of scale. If you've got some money available, you can also import all the long-tail searches into google adwords for a better converting (& cheaper) campaign:

http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://www.hittail.com/

I've tried tools such as Wordtracker for keyword discovery, but to be honest the results aren't better than google's free keyword tool IMO.

Also, something really straightforward & simple you could do as a starting point is to browse through the page titles/keyword tag's of your competitors/similar sites - simply to get an idea of what they're trying to target. With any luck they've already done a lot of this hard work, and you can get some free & easy ideas.

Unfortunately, no tools will give you a 100% accurate idea of what keywords will bring you short-term success, but if you combine the above with a lot of measured testing, you should build up a good picture of what you need to target after a period of a few months or so.

UPDATE: Don't bother looking at Alexa, it's data isn't particularly accurate and it won't help you in any way. Focus on keyword discovery, developing content and building links.

Good luck!

Dan

Err... I sound like I work for google.

Dan

SEMRUSH.com is a good keyword research tool. So is keywordcompetitor.com. Also, if you need plugin for firefox for seo purposes, check out the seo toolbar from seobook.com and seoquake plugin.

This you can easily get through search.....on google

SEO quake has not been giving the correct results i feel, has any body else experienced this?

I am using it from a long time. Haven't observe anything like this.
Can you share your experience for the results?

http://www.seosoftware-reviews.com/popular-seo-tools.html . Check this article here.

If you belief in ehical seo then overall work do as manual but you may take help to some tool, PR checker, Back link checker. but every software are running by many owner and its may have differnt rule. so two same tool result are not same(in some case may be). You can use best tool as
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
www.seochat.com
www.webconfs.com

thanx

Wow thanks for so many useful replies, i have been away for work so ill reply one at a time.. lots of info there!



Not sure what you mean by quick search status addon Diane.. i had an addon called Nodofollow which did that. Am i right in thinking that
nofollow = link that doesnt 'pass page rank' to the page it links to?
dofollow = does pass pagerank

thanks!

Wow thanks for so many useful replies, i have been away for work so ill reply one at a time.. lots of info there!



Not sure what you mean by quick search status addon Diane.. i had an addon called Nodofollow which did that. Am i right in thinking that
nofollow = link that doesnt 'pass page rank' to the page it links to?
dofollow = does pass pagerank

thanks!