Best Free SEO and Website Optimization Tools List

List last updated on 11/18/2008

Review competitor traffic, keywords and links as well as analyze industry trends.

Compete.com Site Analytics - Compare traffic trends side-by-side for competing websites.
quantcast.com Media Measurement - view detailed reports for many different websites.
Niche Watch - Compare your site vs other websites that are competing for a specific keyword phrase.
SEMRush - Quickly generates a list of keywords a site is currently ranking for.
Google Insights - examine search volume trends across specific locations, categories and time frames.
perspctv - compare and analyze terms across blogs, news articles, twitters and search volume.
Blog Pulse - Review recent buzz and Trends within the blogosphere for specific search terms.
IceRocket Trends - a good alternative to Blog Pulse and displays the average posts per day.
What's the Buzz - find out the popularity of certain keywords within blogs and search engines.

Determin which keywords and phrases return the best search volume for your website.

Keyword Suggestion Tool - displays estimated daily search volumes and additional information.
Google Keyword Tool - Get keyword ideas, plus see advertising competition and the average search volumes.
Google's Search-based Keyword Tool - Based on actual Google search queries.
Term Extractor - extract terms that appear to be targeted at search engines for a given page.
Keyword Density Analysis - AN in-depth report on they overall keyword denisty and prominence of a page.
Keyword Map - an interesting approch to keyword development that maps out keyword relationships.

Review the search engine friendliness of your site learn of areas to improve upon.

SEO Browser - See your website the way a search engine robot does.
Website Grader - measure the effectiveness of your website and get advice on how to improve it.
Quarkbase - website analysis with a clean and user-friendly interface.
SEO Automatic - quickly generate a detailed overview of your websites SEO readiness.
Broken Link Checker - Check your website for broken links.
Web Page Analyzer - run this website speed test and learn how to improve performance.
Pingdom Page Test - page load time test with a web 2.0 look and feel.
Site Report Card - Reviews many website elements but I use it for spell check feature.
Spam Detector - See if a page could be considered spam to search engines.
Website Plagiarism Search - Search for copies of your page on the Web.

Find free links and learn of new link building opportunities from the competition.

Hub Finder - reviews sites that rank for a specific keyword/phrase and finds links that they have in common.
Link Harvester - analyze a websites backlinks to learn of new linking opportunities.
Solo SEO Link Search - use predefined search operators to identify sites that offer links submissions.
Dofollow Diver - search for niche blogs and post quality comments to get free a link.
Link Diagnosis - analyze a domains backlink data including the Page Rank and anchor text of the links.
Text Link Checker - see if your external links could be harmful to your website reputation.

Other Places to look for links...
directories, social bookmarking, forums, article submissions, Q&A sites, press releases, RSS syndication, etc.

Track the SEO effectiveness of your campaigns as well as look for issues.

Google Analytics - Learn about the visitors who come to your site and track your website's progress.
goingup web stats - A good alternative to Google Analytics that also offers keyword monitoring.
SERP Guard - Get immediately notified if your website has been blacklisted.
Google Webmaster Tools - See how Google crawls and indexes your site and diagnose problems.
MSN Webmaster Center - sitemap submission and get notified if MSN has problems crawling your site.
Yahoo Site Explorer - Submit your sitemap to Yahoo and check your backlinks.

These websites offer a variety of other SEO tools.

SEOmoz - over 20 SEO tools designed to help with every aspect of search engine optimization.
Link Vendor - 23 tools including; page rank analysis, cloaking detection, and a sitemap generator.
Webmaster Tools - keyword density checker, URL redirect checker, page rank prediction and many more.
SEO Chat Tools - Many tools including a robots.txt generator and keyword cloud.
Free SEO Tools - list of more free SEO tools from SEOBook.com.

Pittsburgh SEO Consultant