Competitive Analysis

Review competitor traffic, keywords and links as well as analyze industry trends.

• Compete.com Site Analytics – Compare traffic trends side-by-side for competing websites.
• quantcast.com Media Measurement – view detailed reports for many different websites.
• Niche Watch – Compare your site vs other websites that are competing for a specific keyword phrase.
• SEMRush – Quickly generates a list of keywords a site is currently ranking for.
• Google Insights – examine search volume trends across specific locations, categories and time frames.
• perspctv – compare and analyze terms across blogs, news articles, twitters and search volume.
• Blog Pulse – Review recent buzz and Trends within the blogosphere for specific search terms.
• IceRocket Trends – a good alternative to Blog Pulse and displays the average posts per day.
• What’s the Buzz – find out the popularity of certain keywords within blogs and search engines.

Keyword Research

Determine which keywords and phrases return the best search volume for your website.

• Keyword Suggestion Tool – displays estimated daily search volumes and additional information.
• Google Keyword Tool – Get keyword ideas, plus see advertising competition and the average search volumes.
• Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool – Based on actual Google search queries.
• Term Extractor – extract terms that appear to be targeted at search engines for a given page.
• Keyword Density Analysis – AN in-depth report on they overall keyword denisty and prominence of a page.
• Keyword Map – an interesting approch to keyword development that maps out keyword relationships.

Website Analysis and Graders

Review the search engine friendliness of your site learn of areas to improve upon.

• SEO Browser – See your website the way a search engine robot does.
• Website Grader – measure the effectiveness of your website and get advice on how to improve it.
• Quarkbase – website analysis with a clean and user-friendly interface.
• SEO Automatic – quickly generate a detailed overview of your websites SEO readiness.
• Broken Link Checker – Check your website for broken links.
• Web Page Analyzer – run this website speed test and learn how to improve performance.
• Pingdom Page Test – page load time test with a web 2.0 look and feel.
• Site Report Card – Reviews many website elements but I use it for spell check feature.
• Spam Detector – See if a page could be considered spam to search engines.
• Website Plagiarism Search – Search for copies of your page on the Web.

Link Building and Research

Find free links and learn of new link building opportunities from the competition.

• Hub Finder – reviews sites that rank for a specific keyword/phrase and finds links that they have in common.
• Link Harvester – analyze a websites backlinks to learn of new linking opportunities.
• Solo SEO Link Search – use predefined search operators to identify sites that offer links submissions.
• Dofollow Diver – search for niche blogs and post quality comments to get free a link.
• Link Diagnosis – analyze a domains backlink data including the Page Rank and anchor text of the links.
• Text Link Checker – see if your external links could be harmful to your website reputation.

Other Places to look for links…

directories, social bookmarking, forums, article submissions, Q&A sites, press releases, RSS syndication, etc.

Progress Tracking

Track the SEO effectiveness of your campaigns as well as look for issues.

• Google Analytics – Learn about the visitors who come to your site and track your website’s progress.
• goingup web stats – A good alternative to Google Analytics that also offers keyword monitoring.
• SERP Guard – Get immediately notified if your website has been blacklisted.
• Google Webmaster Tools – See how Google crawls and indexes your site and diagnose problems.
• MSN Webmaster Center – sitemap submission and get notified if MSN has problems crawling your site.
• Yahoo Site Explorer – Submit your sitemap to Yahoo and check your backlinks.

Comprehensive Tool Sets

These websites offer a variety of other SEO tools.

• SEOmoz – over 20 SEO tools designed to help with every aspect of search engine optimization.
• Link Vendor – 23 tools including; page rank analysis, cloaking detection, and a sitemap generator.
• Webmaster Tools – keyword density checker, URL redirect checker, page rank prediction and many more.
• SEO Chat Tools – Many tools including a robots.txt generator and keyword cloud.
• Free SEO Tools – list of more free SEO tools from SEOBook.com.