My Favorite SEO Tools

When I speak with clients about keyword research and content optimization, they often ask me what tools I use to gather the data or make recommendations. Here I will give you a little insight to some of the tools I use regularly.

One of the best places to start with keyword research is Google.  Google offers a suite of free tools that you can use to insights about the keywords you are researching.  One that can be used by aspiring SEO’s and paid campaign managers alike is the keyword tool.  This tool will give you some approximate statistics and other recommendations for your keywords.  You can get additional data about your keywords with Google Insights and Google Trends.

Another component of page optimization is keyword density. We recommend that your pages each consist of at least 200 words of text and have approximately a 4% keyword density.  To check what keyword has the highest keyword density, you can use the MoreVisibility keyword density checker.  If you need to check the density of copy you are writing for new or revised pages, you can use the live keyword analysis tool.  It allows you to copy content and past it into the provided fields to get the statistics.

Another set of tools I use to checks PageRank, backlinks and cache date.  These items are good to monitor so you can see how the search engines are viewing your site. Downloading the Google Toolbar is what you need if you are using Firefox or Internet Explorer as your browser. If you use Google Chrome, I have found that the Chrome SEO Extension works pretty well.

While there are many other tools out there, some paid and some free, the few that are mentioned above will give you a good start to researching and analyzing your SEO efforts.