The best tools for SEO are free.

The first thing any aspiring SEO needs is a tool kit. Just like a plumber or mechanic SEOs need their tools too. With all the squillions of tools floating around on the web choosing the right tools for your kit can be just as confusing as the whole SEO side of things.

Over time I have managed to collect some good, and filter out some not so good free SEO tools.

Here they are…

Firefox Plugins

SE Open Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimisation. Including google back links, yahoo back links, Page Rank check, http header viewer, and more.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/570/

Web Developer 1.0.2, Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. So many great tools on this extension

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/

Some great free tools from www.seochat.com

Page Rank Lookup
This tool streamlines the process of monitoring Page Rank for your sites. Enter a list of URL’s and it will give the Page Rank value for each one.

Page Rank Search
Enter your Google search term, and the tool will search Google and display the Page Rank next to each resulting website.

Robots.txt Generator
Use this to generate a robots.txt file for your site, which allows you to hide files or folders that you don’t wish to be indexed.

ROI Calculator
This measures the ROI (return on investment) of a CPC (cost per click) campaign. Fancy little thing this is!

Search Engine Keyword Position
This tool checks the search engine result pages of Google, Yahoo, and MSN to see what position your site holds for a particular keyword phrase.

Site Link Analyzer
This tool will analyse a given web page and return a table of data containing columns of outbound links and their associated anchor text.

Spider Simulator
This tool simulates a search engine spider by displaying the contents of a web page in exactly the way the spider would see it.

URL Redirect Check
This tool checks for valid HTTP 301 headers.

URL Rewriting
This tool converts dynamic URL’s to static URL’s You will need to create an .htaccess file to use this tool.

Future Page Rank
This tool will query Google’s many data centres to check for any changes in Page Rank values for a given URL. Take this one with a pinch of salt! It’s only a toy.

Some more great SEO link tools from www.webconfs.com

Back link Anchor Text Analysis
It is not enough just to have a lot of back links, it is the Quality of back links along with the Quantity that help you rank better in Search Engines. This tools help you determine the back links of your website and the link text used by your back links to Link to your wesbite.

Back link Builder
This tools help you build a LOT of quality back links, it searches for website’s of the theme you specify that contain key phrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL” etc. Most of the results could be potential back links

You won’t find all the tools for your kit here but if you use these from day to day you will have a distinct advantage over your competitors who are not savvy to such tools! I am always happy to hear about other free tools that are available.