Free SEO Tools

The mission of every SEO practitioner is to improve their clients' websites both for visibility and for conversion. To accomplish that mission they need a complete understanding of not only the clients website, but also the websites of the client's competitors. That understanding comes from finding answers to the following questions.

How is the website structured? How is it linked both externally and internally? What are it's weaknesses and strengths? Who are the primary competitors? How successful are those competitors?

The answers to these questions slowly build up an understanding of what changes will be needed to improve the client's website, their search engine ranking and increase targeted traffic to the site.

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Free Online SEO Tools

Customer focus calculator - http://www.futurenowinc.com/wewetext.htm
Here's a tool I wish more businesses were aware of. Far too many company websites focus on the company. "We're the leader in our industry." "We've been in business for 50 years." "We're the greatest thing since sliced bread." (For this reason the tool is also known as the We-We tool.) In fact, most customers could care less about the We-We talk. Most customers only care about how well you can help them meet their wants and needs. To be successful, web pages need to focus on the customer rather than the company. This tool looks at the language used on a web page to determine whether the page is company focused or customer focused.

Google Alerts - http://www.google.com/alerts 
While Google has a stable full of useful tools, this is one of the best. Create an alert by adding a keyword or key phrase and tell Google where to search and how often to provide results. Monitor your company name, URL, products or industry. Monitor your competitors. There are hundreds of uses. You'll need to create a free Google account to begin.

Keyword density - http://www.pagerank.net/keyword-density-analyzer/
Keyword density is not the be-all end-all of SEO. Some experts even say it's irrelevant. I see it as simply one more piece of useful information about a website. Keyword densities on top ranked sites rarely go above 3%-4%. But exceptions do occur.

PageRank checker - http://www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/
PageRank is a very rough and always outdated indication of the importance of a web page, from Google's point of view. This tool allows you to type in your url and those of your top competitors and see the comparison quickly.

SEO Analysis - http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html
This tool looks at on-page factors such as relevancy of meta tags, keyword frequency, alt tags, etc. Good information is provided, but the analysis is lacking the depth an expert can provide. I use it primarily for the meta tag analysis.

SEO Analysis Website Grader - http://website.grader.com/ 
This SEO analysis tool is a bit more comprehensive than others I've reviewed. The analysis is reasonable but mechanical. Automated analysis can't replace human expertise.

Web page file size tool - http://www.pagerank.net/web-page-size/
Web visitors are notorious for their lack of patience. Pages that don't load quickly will have far fewer visitors. One important factor in load time is the file size of the web page. This tool will determine the actual file size of web pages including the HTML, images and multimedia content.

Web page speed and performance tool - http://websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
This tool calculates page size, composition, and download time in detail. Based on the results, it then offers a number of suggestions on how to improve page load time. This tool is a bit more technical than some others.

Google Analytics - http://www.google.com/analytics/

Backlink Watch - http://www.backlinkwatch.com/