Best 20 Free SEO Tools and Plugins

SEO and Free SEO Tools are fun and despite what people say, it’s not hard. There really isn’t that much “skill” involved. You just have to know your stuff. , get your overall strategy right, adapt to the search engines and use a wide variety of backlinks. Now I don’t give a crap what the guru’s or SEO companies have been telling you, artificially creating backlinks is your only option. But what about natural links? I don’t think so, I mean come on… in today’s competitive market you can’t afford to sit around and wait for the links to come. News flash people, you’re hardly going to get any natural links, not enough to compete with today’s marketers anyway. Ok, there are a few exceptions as I just know I’m going to stir up a few arguments here. Site’s like Wikipedia and other massive authority sites are all natural. But that’s only because everyone under the sun knows about them and that they’re information is probably correct 99% of the time. So webmasters reference them left, right and center, they steal their content and link back to the original source.

If you’re an average person with a blog or website that’s not 10+ years old and isn’t known worldwide, you absolutely must take advantage of the resources you have available. This means using Best 20 Free SEO Tools and Plugins to automatically build backlinks for you. So here’s a list of  Best 20 Free SEO Tools and Plugins that are must haves in today’s ever-growing market place.

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1. Ranking Checker by SEOmoz.com

This nice SEO tool allows you to check your rankings for up to 5 keywords per day for FREE and it keeps an archive for you. All you need is to sign up for a free SEOmoz account. The coolest part is that you are able to download your archived rankings as CSV. When you install the “browser button” it automatically copies the URL of the page that you are visiting into the tool for a fast ranking check. Since this free tool can handle up to 5 keywords daily, you’ll be able to check approximately 150 keywords monthly.

2. MultiRank Checker by iWebtool.com

Let’s say that you are interested in checking the Google Page Rank and the Alexa Ranking for one of your clients and also to do the same for 9 of their competitors. You have two options: 1) Go it the manual way and gather the information one by one or 2) just dump the 10 domain names into the MultiRank Checker and copy/paste the results table. I personally like this tool because it checks in bulk and saves a bit of time.

3. Fiddler Web Debugging Tool by Fiddlertool.com

Let’s say that you don’t like the Charles debugging tool
because you have to pay a whole $50 for it. Don’t panic, Fiddler does basically the same and yes, it is for free. Currently it’s available only for Windows and it needs the .NET framework that you can download from their web site as well. The main benefits of this tool is the capacity to analyze all the background communication that goes on between the browser and the servers. I know what you are thinking about: Why not just use firefox and install Tamper Data? Well yes, that is a possibility. But if you are looking for a tool that won’t freeze your browser (seems to be a common occurence with Tamper Data) then Fiddler can become handy. Professional SEOs absolutely need a web debugging tool like this in their toolbox.

4. SEO Analyzer by Sitening.com

The SEO Analyzer is a great tool to start off optimization efforts. It is a report that gives a detailed list of SEO components that might require a closer assessment with a web site. The coolest part is that this tool keeps a copy of your previous reports and you can download them as PDF with a click of a button. This tool is definitely not intended to substitute a complete SEO site analysis though. The interface is very user friendly and it also gives you a score that you can use to quickly assess how much work a site might need.

5. Strongest Subpages Tool by WeBuildPages.com

This tool gives you an organized list of the strongest pages on any web site. This is important because by looking at the results you can easily determine what pages are carrying the most amount of inbound links. This tool is especially useful for webmasters looking at competitor’s strongest pages and, at least for us, running this tool on a competitor always spawns some creative ideas for building link campaigns via content additions.

6. Backlink Checker by WeBuildPages.com

Every SEO needs a backlink checker tool. This free tool is an excellent free backlink checking tool. It’ll come in useful if you need a place to start with your linking campaigns. You can also analyze competitor backlinks as well as your own using the Neat-O tool.

7. Firefox with the Web Developer Extension by Chris Pederick

Firefox in itself is the most flexible browser out there. But when you pair it with the Web Developer extension Firefox becomes a useful SEO tool. With it you can easily remove the cascading styles (inline, external or both), you can take a fast glance at all the external links in a page, or you can remove all the javascript components at once just to name a few of its features. The nicest part of the extension is that you can add your own SEO tools to the menu (online or desktop).

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8. SEO for Firefox by SEOBook.com

There is no other tool out there that could give you the amount of information that this tool does right from either the visited page or the search engine. Perfect for a quicky competitive overview. This tool will give you PageRank, cache date, domain age, backlinks in Yahoo, number of .edu links, the number of cached pages, and many other stats for any given page with a simple right click. The most amazing feature is that you can export your information directly from the SERPs to CSV.

9. Google Analytics / Google Webmaster Console by Google.com

Based on Urchin, Google Analytics is a top analytics tool made available to everybody for free by Google. This analytics tool can give you detailed reports about traffic behavior, content visitation, funnel information and much, much more. On the other hand, the Webmaster Console tool now gives you a good view of what Google “sees” for your site including: crawling rate, crawling speed, backlinks, highest PageRank of your site and more.

This two tools together constitute the fundaments of free search engine marketing but beware because by using either ou are giving Google access to all of your site data.

10. Keyword Selector Tool by Overture.com

This tool is one of the first keyword tools that was available to webmasters. It’s still very useful and is still free. Lots of newer keyword tools build over the last few years are based on the Keyword Selector tool. If you use it in conjunction with Google’s keyword tool then you could get really crazy. 😉

11. XENU’s Link Sleuth by Tilman Hausherr

XENU is one of those tools that you download for free and keep a copy just in case the owner decides to start charging for it. This tool is basically a spider. And the benefits of having a spider in your SEO toolbox is priceless. Using this tool you can determine if a site has endless loops, broken links, redirect detections and much more. As its name indicates, Xenu is like having a detective look at your site – a free detective that is.

12. Xinu BETA by Miguel Camps Orteza

Yeah the name is similar to XENU but these are two totally different tools. This excellent SEO tool will give you detailed stats about any site including rankings, syndication, social bookmarkings, validation, indexation and backlinks from several major search engines: ALL IN ONE PAGE! Also the best part is that it is open source, so not only you can use the tool, you can download it an install it in your own server.

13. Keyword Density & Prominence Tool by Ranks.nl

This tool allows you to crawl a particular page and analyze the density of keywords not only in the content of the page but also in the tags.

14. Visual PageRank by iWebTool.com

If you are a graphic person, then checking page rank in your site is probably as boring as watcing Home Shopping Network on a saturday night. Well now you can check your page rank visually with sweet tool. This tool gives let’s you see your web page and overlays that page rank for each one of your links.

15. GeoTargeting Detection Tool by SEOmoz.com

16. SEO Book Tool Bar

Where would a workman be without his toolkit? This is another great toolbar which contains a lot of valuable and essential tools of the trade. It has many of the same features as SEO Quake but also a few more hidden up its sleeve. You can compare up to 5 different sites which is great for link analysis for competitor research and another great gem is an easy no follow link highlighter.

17. Open Site Explorer

This is one of the best link analysis tools around (without paying) Essential for any link building campaign , it will show you up to 10,000 links to a page or site based on Page Authority OR Domain Authority. You can even see the anchor text used, compare two domains side by side, and which content is drawing the most links on your competitor’s website. AND if that wasn’t enough they even offer a good sorting and filtering option for reports and can be exported to CSV for further analysis. How considerate of them.

18. SEO Quake

This powerful tool is compatible with a range of browsers and gives a user a wide range of SEO parameters. It saves you so much time it must be similar to hiring a personal assistant, without the tea making ability. You can utilise it to see a quick overview of number of links to page and domain, number of internal & external links from individual pages, age of domain, keyword density and other important SEO factors of a page. Go see for yourself.

19. Yahoo Web Analytics

Yahoo Web Analytics is a highly customizable free web analytic tool .The only problem with it is that you cant use it directly you have to know someone who is a member of the Yahoo Consultant Network.

20. Bing WebMaster Tools

When talking about SEO most of us pays attentions to Google search only . Bing and Yahoo search are generally ignored . We should keep in mind that Bing and Yahoo together consist of 30% of search market. With Bing WebMaster Tools you can improve your blog or sites ranking on Bing . Bing WebMaster Tool provides information pertaining to content performance: content crawled, indexed, and trafficked.

Did we leave any other free SEO tools or plugin out of the list? Let us know of any additional ones below.
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