If you’re the Do-It-Yourself kind of guy/girl when it comes to SEO, you’re probably wondering which tools (among the thousands available!) should you bother using. What you have to understand is that expensive tools aren’t necessarily the best ones. Also, some tools are entry-level while others are geared towards more advanced users. In this post we will present some of the best SEO tools that we came across this year. You should definitely check these out, regardless of your SEO skills. In no particular order, here they are…

SEOmoz Pro Tools
(30 days Free)

The cream of the crop! Recently updated to include a few Social Media features, it now even has Google +1 Support. With SEOmoz you have everything you need to create/monitor/optimize your SEO campaign. They offer a set of extremely useful tools that no one in the industry matches. With SEOmoz Pro Tools, you can track your rankings, monitor your competitors rankings and analyze your pages’ content. It will even crawl your site every week to dig up those hard-to-find SEO problems and automatically alert you when new problems arise! They currently offer a 30 day FREE Trial. Don’t miss this chance!

CopyScape & CopySentry
(Free & Paying Versions)

Content is King. If your content is duplicated, your rankings can get hurt. Protect your content with CopySentry, and you will receive instant emails whenever your content is copied. CopyScape is the industry’s leading protection against plagiarism. They have a free version, but it is really worth it to invest a few dollars and get their Premium account. On a premium account you can enter your domain name, and CopyScape will scan your whole sitemap in minutes and build a detailed report on which pages have been copied and by whom.

Raven Tools
(30 days Free)

Similar to SEOmoz, Raven provides a series of tools to help you manage both your SEO and Social Media campaigns. The difference with SEOmoz is that they aren’t so much focused on SEO. Raven actually extracts some of their SEO data from SEOmoz and SEMRush. Raven Tools wants to be your All-in-One dashboard to manage all your online marketing campaigns. It lets you set up several users and allows you to quickly build branded reports that you can present to your management or clients. They are also offering a 30 day FREE Trial. Check it out!

Rank Tracker
(Free and Paying Versions)

When it comes to tracking your rankings, no one does it better than Rank Tracker. You can build customized rankings reports and select which search engines and keywords you want to track. Rank Tracker also lets you create your own custom report templates. Perfect for companies and agencies that want to add their logo and contact details. Rank Tracker is also a great tool to track your competitors’ rankings and see what they are doing better than you.

Google Analytics
(Free)

No one can deny that Google Analytics is a must. No other company than Google themselves can give you this amount of detailed information and stats on your website, visitors, traffic and referring sources. Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, pay-per-click networks, display advertising,  digital collateral and e-mail marketing such as links within PDF documents. You can also monitor your content quality and know which pages have a high associated bounce rate.

Google Webmaster Tools
(Free)

Free tool for Webmasters that allows you to monitor your website from a “Robot” perspective. With GWT, you can submit and check a sitemap, check and set the crawl rate and view stats detailing how Googlebot accesses and views your site,  generate and check a robots.txt file. It also helps to discover pages that are blocked in robots.txt by chance. With GWT you can also see which websites are linking to you and see if any unnatural link building patterns have been detected by Google.

Google Keyword Tool
(Free)

Unvaluable tool! This is simply the best and most reliable tool when it comes to researching keywords. Type in a few keyword combinations and let Google give you a list of relevant keywords and their monthly Search Volume (both locally and internationally). Make sure you select “Exact” in Match Types if you want to know exactly how many times that specific keyword is searched by itself.

Google Insights
(Free)

Extremely useful for checking the search volume of a specific keyword over the years. Use it in combination with the Keyword Tool to see which keywords are worth optimizing. Think about the future! A keyword that has a low search volume today might be quickly rising in popularity and might generate large traffic in a year or two.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider
(Free & Paying Versions)

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a light program you can install on your PC or MAC which crawls through websites’ links, images, CSS and scripts from an SEO perspective. It extracts key onsite page elements for SEO, presents them in tabs by type and allows you to filter for common SEO issues, or slice and dice the data how you see fit by exporting into Excel. Now, there are a few tools on the market that do similar work, but we found that this one does it better than the competition! Try it out and see for yourself.

Link Sleuth
(Free)

This 100% free tool developed by Xenu can crawl your entire website and find all your broken links. It checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Amine Rahal

Passionate about the world wide web since 1995, Amine has been working as a Web Developer, SEO & Social Media Marketing Specialist for several Organizations in the United States, Canada and China.