Yes, some of the links in this article are affiliate links, I might be evil and biased and out to rip you off, FCC requires me to say this, etc. blah blah.
I’ve been rejiggering my SEO toolbox lately: I used to focus on the ‘cool’ stuff – things I thought would impress clients, generate pretty reports, etc.. I’ve really switched to emphasize big labor-savers, instead – tools that are versatile, let me work with raw data and the like.
Here’s what I’m using these days:
SEOMOZ Pro
When SEOMOZ launched their latest toolset, I nearly flung myself into the Green River. See, I’ve been slowly chipping away at an advanced toolset that would:
- Crawl web sites automatically;
- Diagnose potential onsite SEO problems;
- Generate easy, readable reports and alerts based on the diagnosis.
Then SEOMOZ came out with their Pro toolset, which:
- Crawls web sites automatically;
- Diagnoses potential onsite SEO problems;
- Generates easy, readable reports and alerts based on the diagnosis.
Sigh.
But, their tool rocks. It’s super easy to use. Even cooler, it lets you download a crawl diagnostics file that you can filter through in Excel, generating your own reports. I’ll be doing a video tutorial on that pretty soon.
And of course, when you sign up, you also get access to Linkscape, all their nifty content, and their Q&A service.
You can get a tour of the toolset here.
Aaron Wall’s SEOBook
Aaron’s SEOBook is best known (I think) for training content and the forums.
He’s also got a kick-ass toolset. Some of the tools are free, so you can give ’em a test run. There’s SEO for Firefox, of course, and the SEO Toolbar. Plus the keyword suggestion tool.
The really cool stuff, though, is under the pay account. With membership you get access to a suite of great domain research tools, a competitive research tool and my favorite, the SEO Site Planner, which makes generating a keyword map a breeze.
Like SEOMOZ, a subscription is pricey, but it only has to save me 4-5 hours a month to pay for itself, and it more than takes care of that.
You can check out SEOBook here.
GREP
I’ve already written about this lovely command-line tool here. You can read up. It’s geekery, but it’s the Swiss Army Knife of search tools.
Majestic SEO
Another great link research tool, Majestic has something SEOMOZ’s Linkscape doesn’t have (yet): It shows link growth over time.
That’s pretty important when clients start asking ‘what have you done for me lately?’
You can also compare backlink histories between sites, check for other sites on your server, and generate pretty reports.
Python
If you’re serious about really getting into the weeds in SEO, you probably need to learn Python, or Ruby, or PERL (if you enjoy punishment).
All of these languages will let you create a crawler and include some nifty libraries for web crawling, parsing HTML pages and other geekery.
Can you be a good SEO without learning any of them? Absolutely. But if you want to really understand how a crawler ‘thinks’, nothing beats building one. I use Python scripts now to test sites, track link building campaigns and apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).
I’m a nerd, so I enjoy this stuff. If you’re not, ignore this one and move on.
Actually, you can build crawler in php as well. Nothing bad with good old PHP.
Nice read, I do enjoy reading about what other SEO practitioners use. Not sure why so many people keep their cards so close to their chest about their tool sets.
Im personally becoming a big fan of Raven Tools. Some good features within it and I do appreciate a good free trial.
P.S I clicked on the SEOmoz link in the post. So if I sign up within the next 30 days, your welcome. Affiliates for the win
Like Tom, Raven Tools is growing on me quickly. I’ve been using their trial for a few weeks now, and it’s something I would seriously consider paying $100 bucks a month for.
I think SEOmoz aims to include most of the same features eventually, but they haven’t caught up with it yet. (Word is that Analytics integration is coming soon!)
None of these tools are new to me, but it’s interesting to see what others use. Avinash Kaushik just released his list of Analytics tools, so it’s been a good week 🙂
I see you joined the SEOMoz affiliate program. Nice comps, si? It would be very white hat of you to disclose the connection in-post, but not necessary. It’s just one way to keep your readers in the know. At least you included other options as well.
I find it is a bit difficult to select which tools to use (I am not a SEO consultant, but doing some SEO on my own). Especially to judge the values of backlinks give me some challenges, as each tool seem to have their own way of calculating this. I am using SEO spyglass – do you know this, Ian?
I am curious what others think of Market Samurai. It is a new tool that my team has discovered and started using. I have found a few quirks, but overall like it so far. Maybe you could do a review of this one. I enjoy your open minded opinions and matter of fact responses to things that matter (or that don’t).
Ian – great stuff here. I’ve been an SEOmoz Pro member for a long time and LOVE Open Site Explorer for link data, but haven’t yet used their new product. Its basically the tools plus some sort of workflow feature too right?
As per MajesticSEO, I’ve always loved their data but felt the reports and “pretty pictures” have been lacking. If they can do a little more front-end work then I’d use their service much more frequently.