10 important tools for SEO and PPC

There are many tools and products on the web that can help you better understand your site and improve your search ranking. This post will assist you in configuring your website(s) for search engine optimization within the different search engines.

1) Google Adwords: Keyword Tool

What is this tool used for? - The Google Adwords Keyword Tool provides a list of related words or phrases for a specific website or keyword. This tool helps you to choose relevant and popular terms related to your selected key term.

Simply enter a key term and this tool will query information from several Google searches and will generate related words or phrase.

URL: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2) Google Adwords Traffic Estimator

What is this tool used for? - This tool helps in finding out the volumes of searches being performed in Google for specific keywords and also calculates the bid amount for these keywords as well.

URL: https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

3) Google Insights for Search

What is this tool used for? – The tool offers a comprehensive set of statistics based on search volume and patterns. You can compare seasonal trends, geographic distributions, and category-specific searches, and you can group all these variables together to get extremely specific.

URL: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

4) Google Trends

What is this tool used for? – It is a tool similar to Google insights (though less advanced!). It allows the user to compare the volume of searches between two or more terms. An additional feature of Google Trends is in its ability to show news related to the search-term overlaid on the chart, showing how new events affect search popularity.

URL: http://www.google.com/trends

5) PageRank Lookup*

What is this tool used for? - It helps in reporting the PageRank of a URL and shows a historical view of previous PR scores.

URL:

http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/pagerank

6) Domain Age Check*

What is this tool used for? - This tool helps you find the age of your domain and when it was first spidered by the search engines.

URL: http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/age

7) Check HTTP status code*

What is this tool used for? – If you have redirected your old domain to a new domain and would like to check if the developer has implemented this correctly then use this tool. 301? 302? This tool will find out what HTTP status code a website is producing.

URL: http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/httpcode

8) Keyword Density Tool

What is this tool used for? - The keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters and search engine optimizers achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms. Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.

URL: http://www.keyworddensity.com/

9) GeoTargeting Detection*

What is this tool used for? - This tool will help you determine the hosting location of a website. It will tell you where your servers are physically located with your hosting company. Also, some search engines (such as Google) have the ability to filter search results based on their physical location (geotargeting). This could be used to determine why your site is showing in a certain country. This tool determines how well a site is targeted to region-specific search engines.

URL: http://www.seomoz.org/geotarget

10) Backlinks Lookup

What is this tool used for? – This tool reports the number of backlinks to a URL and also shows a historical view of previous backlinks.

URL: http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/backlinks

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