Whether you are doing the SEO for your site in-house or you are hiring an external agency like us to do the SEO of your pages for your, you should at least have a minimum knowledge of what SEO is and what techniques are allowed by Search Engines and which ones are frowned upon.

Certain tools will help us determine the state of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of our site and what’s the path we should follow, and the use of these tools will allow us to have a better idea of what to expect from our in-house or agency SEO team.

This is a list that will grow with time as new tools become available.

SEO Keyword Research

There are several tools that can help do the much needed keyword research that should be done before any SEO optimization on your site.

WordTracker

Very useful tool that allows you to manage several different profiles so you can define several different projects and save your findings in a tidy way.

WordTracker has been historically one of the most used tools by SEO and PPC experts, the fact that you can check related keywords with their search counts and anchor text used makes this tool invaluable for any serious Keyword research.

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Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Yet another free tool offered by Google, but the fact that is free doesn’t make it any less valuable. You can search keywords related to a term or you can ask the tool to crawl a certain site and it’ll return a list of related terms that you can easily add to a list that you can later expert in TXT, Excel or CSV file.

It provides very valuable information such as competition in Adwords (relative), local amount of searches per month and worldwide amount of searches per month.

SEMRush Keyword Research

SEMrush is an extremely useful tool, both for SEO and for PPC especially if you work in wither the US, German, French or Russian markets; even the free version gives you a lot of information about a site keywords it ranks for, which keywords deliver the most traffic and how many keywords a site ranks for in Google.

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Ranking Tools

In this section we describe the tools that will help us with checking our rankings and comparing our rankings against our competition’s.

SEOBook Ranking Checker

SEOBook  is one of the best SEO reference sites that there are on the web, and they have created a good variate of free tools that can help us with our SEO tasks, their Rank checker is a fantastic free tool for keeping up with our rankings for out top 100 preferred keywords.

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