For anyone wanting to do a bit of their own Search Engine Optimisation, there is an abundance of free online SEO tools available on the internet. Most of them provide some pretty impressive statistics and information to help you optimise your website, analyse search engine positions, research your competitors, plus much more!

There are two ways these free online SEO tools can be used:

(1) For those who are new to the area of search engine optimisation, these tools provide excellent insight on how a website is performing and ranking. They can quickly highlight issues and trends with their current website and provide a good insight as to where optimisation work is necessary.

(2) For the more experienced search engine optimisers amongst us, these tools will act as a complement to the more specialised SEO tools, like WebPosition Gold or SpyderOpts. They can even be used to supplement an SEO’s internal knowledge base and experience.

Here is a selection of some choice tools for both the novice and the experienced search engine optimisers:

Keyword Research Tool

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml

This helps to research appropriate words and phrases to include in your webpage's body text to aid promotion. It’s simple and to use and requires the user to enter the sort of word of phrase you wish to be found under, the tool will then suggest some additional words and phrases you can think about using. One of the great things about this tool is that it gives you the option to select from a range of top search engines, e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma, etc.

Keyword Analyser Tool

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml

This tool reads the body of the page you specify and gives a report on what words are used, and how many times they are used.

This is a valuable tool as most engines will rank your site depending on your keyword density (which typically ranges between 3% and 9%).

Search Engine Position Checker Tool

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-position-checker.shtml

This tool checks whether your website appears in the first fifty results in major search engines for your chosen keyword or phrase.

If the URL is present, it will output what position it occupies. As an

Link Popularity Tool

http://www.instantposition.com/link_popularity_check.cfm

This tool measures the total number of links or "votes" that a search engine has found for your website.

This is a pretty cool tool because as well as tabulated data it also produces a nice graph of the resulting data. One final key element of this tool is its ability to compare your website to your competitors to help you with your overall marketing strategy.

Meta Tag Generator

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/meta-tag-generator.shtml

This automatically generates a Meta Keyword tag by reading the page you specify, removing common words from it, and picking the most used words on the page. Extra weight is given to words in a heading tag ( etc.)

Search Term Suggestion Tool

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Displays how many times a certain keyword was searched for at Overture.com. Shows all related searches for the entered keyword. A good measure to use in determining frequency of search among related keyword phrases

Search Engine Optimisation Tool

http://www.instantposition.com/seo_doctor.cfm

A very impressive tool that tests the performance of a web site, by analysing a page on the important elements of web page creation, such as its title and content. It then scores the page against given criteria for the top search engines, followed by some valuable SEO advice to improve overall ranking. The report produced is well laid out and easy to follow for anyone doing their own optimisation.

A freebie tool that works better than many costly SEO tools I know!

The area of online SEO tools is an exciting area of growth as SEO developers come up with more and more tools to represent website positions on the internet. No doubt we will be revisiting this area again…

Arif Hanid

Internet Marketing Manager for Ambleton Computing.

Experts in all areas of Internet Marketing, inc. SEO and Web Design.

arif_hanid@ambleton.com

www.ambleton.co.uk