“Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) has come a long way since it allegedly was first documented by John Audette and Bruce Clay in 1997. When search engine algorithms were simpler, webmasters could saturate a page with keywords, ensuring a higher rank in search engine results. Ultimately, as users wanted the most relevant data, search engines worked to make their algorithms stronger to avoid “Keyword Stuffing”.
Using a single SEO tool will rarely result in the #1 search engine ranking for your site. As a result of this, there are literally hundreds of tools available on the internet that aid in SEO, competing for the attention of today’s busy webmaster. Rapid development of search engines makes most SEO tools archaic, so you need to change with the times and get updated with new tools in order to keep your sites optimized.
Without further ado, here are some of the best tools you should consider including in your SEO strategy.
All SEO users should know this tool. It is the one of the oldest tools available on the internet. It enables users to save a substantial amount of time on linking. You can identify 10,000 links through this tool, so you can prioritize them accordingly and you can get your keyword rank and overall ranking in the search engines. For use in your own applications the SEOmoz Free API is perfect if you need relatively limited information about a lot of different websites. It’s a great way to get an overview about the quality of pages on the web. If you can budget money for the Site Intelligence API, you can dive deeper into a site or page which is great if you’re developing a highly robust application for internal or external use.
This is an excellent free SEO tool. Highly recommended by many bloggers, it spiders website links, images, CSS, script, and apps from an SEO perspective. It fetches 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 however you see fit by exporting into Excel. You can view, analyze, and filter the crawl data as it is gathered and updated continuously. It also allows you to quickly analyze, audit, and review a site from an onsite SEO perspective and enables you to export key onsite elements (e.g. url, page title, meta description, heading, etc.) to Excel to use as a base for SEO recommendations.
This software has grown quickly in popularity. It is a handy SEO tool for Firefox, Chrome browsers. There is also a beta version for Opera and Safari. SEOquake helps to obtain information about any site for a wide range of parameters such as page rank, Google index, Alexa, and many others. The Keyword Density tool serves to demonstrate the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page. It even has a parameter that highlights nofollow links. An easy to install toolbar shows values of the parameters under each search result in SERP of Google, Yahoo, Bing as well as the foreign language search engines Yandex, and Baidu.
Keyword Blaze is one of the best if not the best keyword research tool. The days of just doing simple keyword research are long gone. Now you need to be ahead of your competition and it starts with research, and Keyword Blaze can do just that for you. This tool is free and not only that, its creators also have a great Keyword Blaze video tutorial.
This is an important tool, even for SEO novices. It gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. It allows you to track visitor activity on your website and also provides a complete web analytics report including traffic sources, visitor bounce rate, unique visitors, and much more. Google Analytics prepares you to write better-targeted ads, strengthen marketing initiatives, and create higher converting websites.
This is a well-known Pay per Click (PPC) advertising tool introduced by Google for doing your site’s keyword analysis. Still highly rated by SEO experts, it can provide a number of ideas on the keywords, which are words or phrases related to your business that are highly searched. Although people are neglecting this tool as there are many tools available in the internet, I recommend you continue to use this tool since it can still be very helpful, and even enables you to get mobile search stats, for today’s webmaster on the go.
If you want to understand impressions and conversions to your websites, this is the #1 tool. It’s free to sign up – you only need to paste some code into your websites and you’re off. It enables you to improve your site’s visibility in Google search results and provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. Google Webmaster Tools provide you with Google’s view of your site and diagnoses problems. It shows how Google crawls and indexes your site and teaches about specific problems Google is having accessing it. This tool also enables you to discover your link and query traffic and share information about your site.
The digital marketing products of Webtrends enable you to measure what’s working and what isn’t for your marketing approach. Their mobile stat tool is also gaining traction. These products offer customer intelligence and behavioral segmentation, targeting + scoring, optimization + testing, mobile and social apps creation and Facebook Page management, real-time web analytics, plus unified digital analytics across mobile, and social and web.
This great product enables you to save time and get a better understanding of how your site is positioned in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Especially if you are in a competitive niche, it is crucial to find out exactly which keywords are converting and which are rising in searches. This allows you to target specific keywords that the competition isn’t. Tracking of your keywords can be done for local results and for 35 different countries. This fully automated tool checks your keywords daily. The quicker you get updated results, the quicker you can react.
Did I miss any top SEO tools for 2012? Please let me know which ones.
Mark The Marketer 
This is an excellent list and a few I need to add to my own list of secret sauce tools
Thanks for this list…knew the core options…but some new ones for us – screaming frog & keyword blaze….will check these out today! Your system must worked! Very highly ranked for this search!! 🙂 Thanks again for this share…hoping for similar success.
Here’s one more tool that uses data from many of those mentioned above: Raventools.com.
Excellent work and Do we have any free keyword tools apart from Google ???
Thanks for posting this article.
usefull post, thanks!
i think seotools like “flesch reading ease” or “synonym finder” are really important 2 for a good seo. a list of my favorutite seotools are here: http://seojuice.de/seo-tools.htm
hey great site, i enjoyed reading it. keep up the good work
There is a fantastic product called Sycara, you missed.
Great article. Thanks for sharing.
Hi there, I found your website by the use of Google while searching for a related topic, your website got here up, it appears great. I have added to my favourites|added to my bookmarks.
Can I just say what a comfort to uncover a person that actually
knows what they’re discussing over the internet. You actually realize how to bring a problem to light and make it important. A lot more people should read this and understand this side of the story. I was surprised you’re not more popular since you
surely possess the gift.
If some one needs expert view about blogging and site-building after that i recommend him/her to visit this
webpage, Keep up the fastidious work.
I comment when I like a article on a website or I have something to add to the conversation.
Usually it is triggered by the passion displayed in
the post I read. And on this article Top SEO Tools for 2012 | Mark The Marketer.
I was actually excited enough to drop a commenta response 🙂 I do have some questions for you if you do not mind.
Is it only me or do a few of these responses come across as if they are left by brain
dead visitors? 😛 And, if you are posting at other sites, I’d like to keep up with everything fresh you have to post. Would you make a list the complete urls of all your shared pages like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?
I blog quite often and I seriously appreciate your content.
This article has really peaked my interest.
I am going to book mark your blog and keep checking for new information about once a week.
I opted in for your Feed as well.
Pingback: 11 (of the) Best SEO Tools and Keyword Research Guides of 2012 « The Marketing Automation Alert
Pingback: The Top 12 Marketing Automation Articles Curated Today, Tuesday, 1/29/13 « The Marketing Automation Alert
I would like to mention Linkody which is a great tool for 24/7 backlink monitoring, anchor analysis, and link building.
Very useful information. Thank you very much. I will visit your blog more offen.
So do things like Facebook activity now contribute as SEO?
I heard they do after the latest algorithm refresh
p.s Stay away from the Warrior Forums 🙂
My developer is trying to persuade me to move to .
net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses.
But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using
Movable-type on several websites for about a year and am anxious
about switching to another platform. I have heard fantastic things about blogengine.
net. Is there a way I can transfer all my wordpress content into it?
Any kind of help would be really appreciated!
Just wanna input that you have a very nice web site , I love the design it actually stands out.
Definitely gonna check out Google Webmaster tools. I been using keyword term but feel I need more information about my website and blogs. Thanks so much!
Fantastic blog you have here but I was curious if you knew of any discussion boards
that cover the same topics discussed in this article? I’d really love to be a part of community where I can get opinions from other experienced people that share the same interest. If you have any recommendations, please let me know. Kudos!
Hey There.We are a small group of community folk and are opening a new scheme in our community.
Your website offered us valuable insight to work on. You’ve done an impressive job and our whole community will be thankful to you. Thanks, so much appreciated!
Do you mind if I quote a few of your posts as long as
I provide credit and sources back to your webpage?
My blog is in the very same area of interest as yours and my
visitors would definitely benefit from some of the information you present here.
Please let me know if this alright with you. Appreciate it!
Hey, this is a Fantastic read. I’ve undersood this sort of perspective, previous to this and you are wonderful. I actually like what you have articulated here, really like what you are saying and the way in which you say it. You make it entertaining and you still care to keep it smart. I can not wait to read more in the future from you. This is really a wonderful website. Keep up the wonderful work. Regards!
Mark,
I know this blog was over a year old, but it’s an excellent compilation of how to grow traffic with SEO tools, many of which are still popular. JACK
Nice collection. A few of them i have used.I was also looking for this kind of collection. You can add another seo tools serplab.co.uk to check the result of Google SERP of any website. I have used many tools to check my site’s health in Google SERP. But it is totally free better than any premium seo tools.