Essential Tools for SEO

If the extent of your search engine optimization toolkit is the Google search box, with which you periodically check your search rankings, you're in real trouble.

An SEO practitioner is only as good as his or her tools. Before you spend another dime blindly trying to increase search traffic, make sure you have the proper tools at your disposal.

The tools below are not meant to be a comprehensive set, but merely a sampling of tools that we recommend. Some are free, some are paid.

Before deciding on content, taxonomy, link architecture and the like, your first port-of-call is the keyword research tools that will help you identify the best keywords to target in your SEO initiatives. Keyword research tools fall primarily into one of two camps: qualitative and quantitative.

The qualitative tools are especially helpful on the front end of keyword research to help build out a broad seed list. During this brainstorming period, we aren't concerned about demand; we're just uncovering as many base terms and modifiers as possible from which our deeper research will spring.

We'll turn to our quantitative tools to help with selection later, as they report on keyword search volumes on one or multiple search engines. Even though the quantitative tools are not exact, they do bring a relative demand relationship to our keyword pool.

Don't forget to gauge how competitive the keyword is before targeting it. There's no point expending energy chasing an unattainable goal, like being number-one for the top trophy term.

That's not to say that you can't earn that spot, but be honest with yourself about what is attainable today. It may be better to rank at the top of page-1 results for the secondary phrases than on the bottom of page 2 for the top phrases.

Remember that a good keyword list needs to start broad. Then it actually gets broader and deeper at the same time. Only then does the process of filtering and narrowing come into play.

QUINTURA

(http://www.quintura.com) Quintura provides a fun, interactive tag cloud interface, which makes for an excellent place to start your keyword research.

Alongside the tag cloud sits a traditional search results page. Results are powered by Yahoo — and that's okay, because we aren't focused on the search results themselves but on the interactive tag cloud.

We can use this visual tag cloud to see word relationships that we may otherwise have overlooked. We can also negate words or phrases from our search query.

During this process, just let the tag cloud continue to reshape and reveal word connections. You may want to open up a spreadsheet or notepad and continue to add terms to build your seed list.

GOOGLE (SUGGEST)

(http://www.google.com) Here's a way to use our old friend Google that might be new for you. Start with the basic search input box, but instead of searching, look for what Google reveals as you type.

This was formerly known as Google Suggest and was a somewhat hidden tool that's been brought front and center to the default Google search. Google has removed the “number of results” information for each of the phrases, but then people often mistook that number as searches (demand), not results (competing pages).

YAHOO! ASSIST

(http://search.yahoo.com) Yahoo has enriched its basic search box as well, with Yahoo Assist. The information here is based solely on Yahoo's search demand, but that's fine — we're just trying to build out the strongest seed list for our research.

Yahoo's tool has a unique feature for this stage of the process. Unlike Google, which makes suggestions by “predictive continuation” of our search phrase, Yahoo Assist includes search phrases that may start with other words and include what we have typed anywhere within the search phrase.

SOOVLE

(http://www.soovle.com) Want to kick your seed list creation up a notch — or seven? Soovle shows you real-time search terms as you type them, ordered by popularity, just like Google Suggest and Yahoo Assist.

In fact, Soovle is a one-stop-shop that taps into those features of those top search engines — and much more. It also polls YouTube, Amazon.com, Bing, Wikipedia and Answers.com for top related search terms, refreshing dynamically each time you pause during your typing. You have to like a tool that lets you tap into seven top resources at once.

GOOGLE INSIGHTS FOR SEARCH

(http://www.google.com/insights/search/) Google offers some great free tools for identifying good keywords to go after. Another relatively hidden gem, Google Insights for Search allows you to graph out keyword popularity for one or more search terms.

Like Google Trends, Insights for Search graphs historical trends of various Google searches, showing you what is popular right now, and what has traditionally been popular during certain times of the year and in certain geographic areas. Best of all, Google recently began including forecasting on the phrases.

Besides filtering by geography and date range, you can also filter by type of search (Web search, image search, product search) and industry/category. Our favorite feature is the keyword suggestions that are rising rapidly in popularity, so you can capitalize on breaking trends.

As you can see, this tool begins the transition from qualitative to quantitative, and from seed list generation to keyword phrase selection. In fact, this tool is especially useful during optimization for comparing similar phrases when you are trying to narrow selection.

KEYWORD DISCOVERY AND WORDTRACKER

(http://www.keyworddiscovery.com and http://www.wordtracker.com) Both Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker started out as and remain primarily paid tools. But both quickly offered limited, free, open-access interfaces when the old Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool quit working.

While the free versions are limited and don't provide the heavy hitting features that the paid toolsets offer, they return results based on their full databases used for the paid versions. The free interfaces are great for quick, on-the-fly checks or to get a feel for the data they provide.

They both also offer free trials of their paid versions. Keyword Discovery pulls data that includes searches on many different search engines and goes back 12 months, while Wordtracker pulls data that includes searches made on Dogpile and Metacrawler over the last 140 days or so (Wordtracker continues to expand the timeframe).

Next Page: GOOGLE ADWORDS KEYWORD TOOL