Best Free SEO Tools - Used Daily by Pros

There is an old saying you've probably heard said before:

"A bad workman blames his tools."

Well in the case of SEO, in our experience not enough unsuccessful SEOs with mediocre results blame their tools, and we come back to this "free" paradigm again, for once again, what is "FREE" really worth?

If your time is worth anything, then "free" has to be evaluated for what it is, and if you waste time working on non-important things, or with an incomplete picture or inaccurate data or theories, and do not achieve the required results, then "free" isn't really so free after all?

However, that said, there are many good free SEO tools out there, you just have to know and understand the limitations, and most importantly, how overlaying and correlating information from several tools together can give you the best understanding possible.

Although there are several tools which claim to be the One-Stop-SEO solution, in practice using several at once together gives you a far superior overview of your situation.

Obviously there are excellent paid versions of some of these tools which if you're serious about SEO you should probably think about subscribing to, but it is entirely possible to do a good job using only free tools if you know what you're doing. 

In this hub we aim to show you the free SEO tools that we use daily, and how they fit together to give you a more complete overall picture of things.

This all-singing all dancing SEO software has been a firm favourite for several years because of the ease and convenience of multi site account management, however although the software has virtually every other facility you might want, we use the paid version primarily for:

• Rank tracking & reporting
• FTP uploader and online file editing

However the free version has full functionality, it is limited to 5 keywords per profile on the rank tracker, so just set up more profiles if you need to check more than 5 keywords ;)

Check out: Web CEO Professional SEO Software

• Google Webmaster Tools

Essential, there are multiple reasons you should be signed up and verified, and if you are not you are operating virtually blind to how Google perceives your site.

• Google Analytics

Google's free Analytics package is the benchmark in web analytics, there are other good paid systems but GA is the most advanced and comprehensive of the free analytics packages.

• Woopra - very cool real-time analytics package -not as in-depth as Google Analytics, but gives great insight into user behaviour that you dont get from GA

It must be understood that Google's keyword tool is often very unreliable with respect to the actual traffic you will actually receive from a keyword or phrase. The figures are an good starting point to reference keyword volumes against each other, but the numbers are likely to be on the high side compared to reality.

Use your ongoing analytics to identify outlying phrases that are bringing traffic, but could rank better and so bring a lot more traffic.

• Google Adwords Keyword research
• Google Adwords GEO Preview Tool
• Google Search based KW Tool

• Wordtracker FREE
• Keyword Discovery - powered by Trellian
• Wordtracker SEO Blogger (free plugin install, check kws as you blog)
• SEMRush - basic free, paid membership is extremely good for PPC work.

Now we're getting to the crux of it. These are all installed on all machines and browsers and are usually in daily useage.

• SEOBOOK’s – SEO For Firefox - Firefox browser Plug In SEO Tool. Lots to play with.
• SEOMoz Toolbar for Firefox & Chrome

These are both good, but we think the Moz Toolbar is the better option now, because it includes the MozRank data (their version of pagerank) live in the SERPs, and the Google chrome toolbar plugin from RedFly works particularly well. You can also toggle switch "Nofollow" on and off to see at a glance what's going on with links.

• SEOBOOK’s SEO X-Ray - Great tool for fast competitor onsite research.
• YOAST De-Personalized search– Avoid getting Personalized search results by default.
• Firebug – allows direct access to the coding for the page element you highlight with your cursor, although not strictly an SEO tool, it may surprise some in these days of Wordpress, that proper SEO's look at page coding ;)

It's worth understanding that Google Toolbar Pagerank last fully updated nearly 11 months ago, with the dynamic fast changing state of the web, the last Toolbar Pagerank readings are virtually worthless now, and hence so are the tools that relied on this data.

SEOMoz & Majestic SEO Do Not Rely On This data!!

• Majestic SEO - Advanced link analysis tool. Majestic basically built their own link graph of the web, much the same as:
• SEOMoz - Linkscape / Open Site Explorer - the benchmark in link analysis. Seriously consider Pro membership here if you have serious SEO tasks.
• JOOST’S Link Analysis - was a firm favourite, losing value now as Google slowly do away with toolbar Pagerank altogether?
• Link Diagnosis. - same applies.

Internal Linking Research & Planning

• SEO Design Solutions – Internal Linkbuilding Tool - Easily work out which pages are best to link to (and get links from) from where within your own site.

Bookmark these.

• Lynx Viewer – invaluable** - see your page like Google do,

**Remember the "First link rule" - if you don't know this, you need to digest this. (2008 news)

• XML Sitemap Generator - From XML Sitemaps - the fastest way to cache site changes bar none, is to delete and re-submit your XML sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools.

Bonus tip - if you want to examine someone's site structure in detail, run the site through XML sitemaps and download the HTML sitemap. Voila ;)

All of these are occasionally invaluable, ie the server header tool, to follow other people's 301 trails, or ensure you are serving a 404 not a 200 to broken URLs, that kind of thing, through to the Google Agent Spoofer which allows you to view your site like Google, in case it's been hacked and cloaked to only show Google the gambling links.

• Online Page Analysis Tool - From SiteReportCard
• Server Header Check Tool - From Webrankinfo.com -
• Googlebot User Agent Spoofer - check for cloaked hacks
• Google Data Center Tool - from SEO Critique - have you vanished from everywhere for that big keyword, or just one data center? Check here, (breathe deeply :)
• Bad Neighbourhood Links Checker - are you linking to naughty people?
• Supplemental Index Ratio Calculator - do you know what it is? you should! ** Note this tool doesn't appear to be working any more, but we've left the link so you can google and read about it.

Web Development Tools (or SEO's to check you didn't break it!)

• Cross Browser Checker - super tool, see your work in browser types to debug.
• Chris Pedrick’s web developer Toolbar - again. more development than SEO. but allows all kinds of views and disabling etc.

Ok, so hopefully there's a few tools here you haven't seen, and maybe something you hadn't thought about before. Hope it's been helpful, any questions please do feel free in the comments.