Some of My Favorite Tools For SEO and Competitive Research

[mlongley]

DomainTools.com – This is a awesome service for doing domain research and tracking. Although many of the tools are free, I would recommend getting at least the silver Membership so you can track domains on any IP address. You can also get reports every time your competition purchases new domains.

Google Alerts – Get emailed when you or your competitions products are being discussed. Use your company name or domain name along with your competitions, and every time they are discussed online, you will get an email about it. Many times your competition won’t realize that people are talking about their products, and you can get in the conversation early and direct people to your website. Also, it is nice to defend yourself if someone is speaking poorly of your business. Another way to use this service is to monitor your high converting keyphrases.
Along with monitoring Google alerts, it is a good idea to do searches on yahoo answers and twitter for your main keyphrases and brand names, and then subscribe to the rss feeds. Make sure to monitor these feeds so you can get in on conversations early. Some times by the team google indexes these sites and you get an update, you are already too late to get involved in the conversation.


Xenu Link Sleuth- Helps you to find broken links on your sites or other webmaster’s sites. I use this tool all of the time for finding broken links on my sites, but have you ever thought about using it on other webmaster’s sites in order to get backlinks. If you have a site that you would really like to get a backlink from, create an organized report of their broken links, and mail that to them requesting a backlink for your efforts. You may not get a backlink every time, but you are way more likely to get one then just emailing them and asking for one. Also, you may build good relationships with many webmasters in the process. If you would love to have a link from a site – run this tool on their site and send them a nice broken link report. Then ask for a link in return.

Spyfu – This is a great tool to spy on your competition's PPC. Although the data spyfu gets is readily available, they put it in a very nice format to make it easy for you to analyze the data. You can view your competitions adwords campaigns, monitor the organic phrases that they rank for and many other useful tools for competitive research.

Niche Watch - Free tool to figure out why your competition is beating you for a keyword. This tool is simple but very effective. It is not always 100% accurate, but usually it is pretty close.

Traffic Estimate and Alexa - Track traffic on competition or on possible link partner’s sites.
If you are thinking about advertising on someone’s site, and they tell you they get x amount of hits, notice they don’t usually say unique visitors, then check their traffic on these two services. They are not 100% accurate but between the two, you will get a pretty good idea.

Backlink Analyzer - Great tool for analyzing your backlinks. Find out who is linking to you and what anchor text they use. A better but paid version of this tool is SEOelite.

Allinanchor search – Many people don’t use this advanced search operator enough. Using all in anchor, you detect backlink networks and other important information about your niche.

Blog Pulse - Is a search engine for blogs. Using this service you can find bloggers in your niche. Once you find them, check their site’s traffic and PR. Then you can buy links, oops… I mean request to advertise on their blog. You can also pay them to do reviews on your products or offer to do a guest post. You would be surprised at how helpful many bloggers are to other bloggers and webmasters.

Archive.org - Shows you what pages use to look like. If you are thinking about buying a site, check to see what these sites use to look like. You may find that your friendly health site use to be a porn site… If you are smart you will Block archive.org - from archiving your site. This will be nothing but trouble for you. Many times if you have a legal issue, lawyers will use archive.org in a court case to prove what your site use to say.

SEC Filings and Seeking Alpha - Transcripts and other important documents from larger companies. When researching a new niche you may want to check some of your larger competitions for important documents that might change your direction when creating your marketing strategy.

Ranks.nl - Lots of great tools for SEO. Some of these tools are a little bit dated, but many are still really good.

Optispider - This tool works great for managing your site’s page reputation and finding duplicate content/duplicate title tags. The nice thing about it is that it works on MAC, PC, or Linux.

LinkScape This is a tool created by SEOmoz. SEOmoz has many useful tools, but this tool will show you many of the backlinks that yahoo and google wont. Having better backlink data helps you in many ways, but the main thing is that you can easily check your anchor text reputation on a larger scale.

IBusiness Promoter – This is paid desktop software, but I have found it to work very well for analyzing a page’s seo. It is not 100% accurate, but it is a very helpful tool for analyzing your site’s SEO.
Those are some of my favorite tools, what are your favorite SEO and competitive analysis tools?

Tools Added To List From Other Warriors

Web Tool Hub - Resource of Free SEO and Webmaster Tools ~added by pluto1

What's The Buzz - Tool to monitor Blogs, Technorati, Social Bookmarks and Google Trends for specific keywords ~added by zuluranger

Backlink Watch - Free tool to check details about your backlinks. ~added by ajparker

NicheBot - Paid Keyword research tool to find highly phrases and monitor competition.
~added by ajparker

SEO Elite - Paid tool for doing competitive analysis and many other SEO functions. Similar to Backlink analyzer, but with more functionality. ~added by VladWorks

Google Keyword Tool - Google Adwords keyword tool. Free, easy to use and works very well. Don't forget about this one. ~ added by VladWorks

Micro Niche Finder - Paid software that helps you to uncover niche markets. ~Dan Sherman Marketing

[John Hocking]

This is a very extensive list. I have bookmarked it so I can have a chance to check everything out.

Thanks for sharing.

[mlongley]

Originally Posted by John Hocking

This is a very extensive list. I have bookmarked it so I can have a chance to check everything out.

Thanks for sharing.

Hi John,
No problem, I have many more but those were some that I thought of while I was making the post.

[mlongley]

does anyone else have tools that they could add to the list?

[pluto1]

Thanks for the informative list with explanations. I use many web tools at Free Webmaster Tools, Web Tools especially this Position Finder to check the position of my web sites for certain keywords. It tells me the web site positions in some countries and I can optimize my web sites accordingly.

[zuluranger]

What about What's The Buzz? It tells you who's talking about a certain keyword.

[ajparker]

I really like Backlinks Checker Tool - Backlink Watch and have just started using NicheBOT | Keywords | Keyword Phrases that drive Huge Traffic (pay) and am really liking some of the featureset.

[VladWorks]

Great List...

I think you left out the obvious Google Keyword Research Tool....I also use SEO Book Keyword Tool. SEM Rush.......

Big fan of SEO Elite also.

[mlongley]

Just updated the list, thanks for your help! I also added Niche Watch to the list.

[justinw]

In what ways do you find ibusiness pro inaccurate? I am debating buying this as I think it could be a useful tool. Was just evaluating the demo version and find it tempting. I love the idea of the professional reports that I could give to clients as well.

[flaminjo]

Originally Posted by mlongley

....

can you suggest some good and free tool to check the position of my Keyword(s) on google?

[AJsVRE]

This is a really useful, helpful post, I hit the thanks button! To add to it, I like using the Seobook toolbar. Has a lot of nice options and things you can check with it. I hate toolbar clutter, so with firefox it's really easy to hide this toolbar and then just with two clicks I display it and turn it on.
The SEO Toolbar

[Josh-A]

I'd suggest you to add Web CEO, it's an awesome SEO software which includes tools for keyword mining, on-page optimization, site submission, link analysis, link partners search, ranking check, web analytics, site uptime monitoring, site maintenance etc. I've used this tool, it's great.

[Josh-A]

Yeah, that's true here's that plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/500

[mlongley]

Originally Posted by justinw

In what ways do you find ibusiness pro inaccurate? I am debating buying this as I think it could be a useful tool. Was just evaluating the demo version and find it tempting. I love the idea of the professional reports that I could give to clients as well.

Well, no automated tool is going to be 100% right all of the time. This tool will find the major seo changes that should be made, and I found the tool to be more accurate than any other script that I have used. So for a quick report for a client, it is definitely worth the money.

[ppcpimp]

spyfu FTW and we use another one that wasn't mentioned for quick, detailed key word research.

campaignsniper.com

[singleshooter]

I like builtwith.com
it is very nice and free or pay seo tool

[Dan Sherman Marketing]

Has anyone mentioned micro niche finder? It's a very good tool for doing market research and keyword research. It is very robust.

[pluto1]

Originally Posted by flaminjo

can you suggest some good and free tool to check the position of my Keyword(s) on google?

I use this position checker tool to find the rank of my web sites for certain keywords in google Canada, US and UK. Gives me pretty accurate results.

[flaminjo]

yes, it looks nice... and the best part is that it is free...

[kimaroc]

Thank you for the list, very useful

[mlongley]

Originally Posted by pluto1

I use this position checker tool to find the rank of my web sites for certain keywords in google Canada, US and UK. Gives me pretty accurate results.

Thanks Pluto, but I have already added webtoolhub.com to the list of tools.