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Here’s a list of essential SEO tools to help you optimise your web site:

Google keyword tool

Keyword research is an essential part of your SEO strategy and the best place to start is with Google’s keyword tool becasue it’s free – you don’t even need to register to use it! The AdWords keyword research tool shows you monthly search volumes for keywords, both locally and globally – it also shows you how much competition there is for advertising space on those keywords.

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

Google webmaster tools

This is a free service but you need to register and add some code to your site to prove you own it. It’s quick and easy and once done you can configure and submit your xml sitemap and robot file to Google and also access lots of diagnostics on your site. These will show you things like whether Google is having any problems indexing your site, if you have any duplicate meta content and also what search terms your site has ranked for but not necessarilt been clicked on.

www.google.co.uk/webmasters/

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a professional level keyword research tool  that lets you seek out those elusive keywords that will help you rise above your competitors in search engine rankings. They also show you alternative keywords, competition (with real stats unlike Google’s tool that just gives you a graphic bar) and KEI. This is fantastic software and the one I use daily – they do a 7-day free trial so check it out!

www.wordtracker.com

SEO Moz term extractor

You might think you’ve optimised your web pages for a particular keyword phrase but you’d be surprise how often the search engines can disagree. This tool analyses the content of your page and extracts the terms that you appear to be targeting – very insightful!

www.seomoz.org/term-extractor

Google insights for search

Use Googles’ insights for search to find out what the hot topics are in your niche. Enables you to compare search volumes across location, time and category.

www.google.com/insights/search/

CuteRank – Free Keyword Postion Checker

CuteRank is a keyword position checking tool that means you can easily monitor your keyword ranking performance across multiple search engines. You just download the free bit of software to your computer and after a short (and easy) set up you get an overview of how your site’s doing. Normally I use Advanced Web Ranking to monitor my sites and CuteRank does give the same results as this professional level software. All I would say though is that the reports that CuteRank generates don’t look great so you couldn’t really present them to your clients. Other than that it’s brilliant and if you SEO your own websites then definately use this to monitor how you’re getting on.

www.cuterank.net