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We have used, reviewed, and analyzed many of the free seo tools online and have put together a short list of the top 15 free seo tools online.

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).

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

Google Street View

Today Google announced the launch of Street View trike (yes, trike) in Sydney.

Google has realised that many of the world’s most interesting and iconic places aren’t accessible by their Street View car so they’ve come up with a solution: the Google Trike. The Google Trike is “a mechanical masterpiece comprising three bicycle wheels, a Street View camera, and a very athletic cyclist in customised Google apparel.”

It was launched in Taronga Zoo, Sydney which is apt considering many Sydneysiders probably got lost there when they were a kid!

Google is now asking for suggestions of where the Trike should travel to next whilst in Oz… I think a cycle to the top of Uluru would be a suitable challenge for Google’s “athletic cyclists”!  But if you have more achievable ideas (maybe the Bondi to Bronte walk?), Google would love to hear them!

The power of urban myth is not something to be toyed with.

In a recent meeting a debate arose after I said that Google doesn’t use the keyword metatag. I was challenged on this point by someone confidently asserting that Google is indeed using the keyword metatag once again. He inferred that any suggestion that they weren’t was simply uninformed.

We agreed to disagree. The customer was confused. My creditability was compromised.

I blogged about the keyword metatag back in 2008. More recently even Google’s Matt Cutts once again debunked this urban myth, but the mighty keyword metatags’ magic powers will continue to persist…

My point is that there is so much SEO mis-information that the sheer mass generates its own pseudo-creditability much along the lines of …Oh yeah that must be true because I heard it the other day….

Metatag Basics

A metatag is a special place inside the web page HTML code that can store variables for example the Description meta tag which is used in SERPs

The keyword meta tag is one of a number of common HTML metatags, traditionally used to store a string of words that represent the content on that page.

Its use has persisted, particularly in Content Management Systems where editors are invited to add ‘search words’ etc that are then published into the keyword metatag by the CMS.

The keyword metatag was identified as being open to abuse around 2002, and no longer used by Google from that time and I suspect by many other search engines for the same reason.

The majority of mainstream industries are saturated online with an overwhelming number of websites, blogs, portals and online shops. New businesses entering the online world can find it tough to compete against older, more established websites that have greater repour with customers and a longer history with search engines, something the engines now consider relevant when determining a website’s rankings.

Some of the most successful internet-based business are those that identify a niche market based on market or ‘keyword’ research. Businesses in a niche can find it easier to compete because of less competition, and at the same time customers searching for a niche product may be more ready to buy.

For example, a large portion of searchers looking for ‘promotional products’ could be unsure of what to buy and may be looking for ideas. There will be less people searching for a keyword like ‘promotional ball point pens’, but searchers are more likely to be buyers.

Applying this logic to a web-based business means that you should consider identifying a small market niche before attempting to tackle established players in the industry. There are various keyword research tools available online that can identify niche markets. A search for ‘keyword research tool’ on Google will reveal a whole range of useful tools to help with your decision criteria.

As of today, we’re starting to notice little favicon.ico next to both verified and unverified domains in Google Webmasters Tools. This not only looks pretty but also makes it easy to visually jump to the right website. We find it particularly handy due to a massive list of domains we have in our account.

Another thing our system administrator pointed out was the fact that some search engines and browsers always query for favicon which can add a light, yet unnecessary load to your server and also pollute server logs with 404 errors.

Using Google Webmaster Tools you can now easily and at a glance discover which of your sites are missing the favourite icon and organise quick placement.

Do take time to add a favourite icon to your website, it’s a great little branding tool. It’s easy to create one – simply save your 16×16 pixel gif file as .ico and upload it to your server. Also you can use one of many available icon generators which can produce even animated icons – keep in mind though that animation feature works only in some browsers.

Illustrated above is the actual screenshot from our webmaster tools account comparing sites that have the icon setup and those that do not.