The Tools/Websites of an SEO

I received an E-Mail from a reader, Jeff, asking to make a blog post on the tools that I would use when developing a website to check on their status, as well as research a website before buying it.

Essential Tools/Websites

Now there are some tools that I think are a definite must for any webmaster that simply owns a website (ordered by importance):

Google Analytics - Now many of the webmasters who use cPanel would argue that AWStats is working just fine for them, but I guess they haven’t used Google Analytics yet. This website will list not only the essentials of a tracking script, but it will provide detailed graphs of visitors, pages and allows you to setup goals to track and follow your visitors before they accomplish or abandon a goal.

SEO for FireFox - This is the one of the best side-tool for any SEO to see what’s REALLY behind a website. It shows links with NoFollow and puts up links to do keyword research and trends when you do a search on a search engine.

Google Sitemaps - Since Google is one of the leading search engines on the web, it would be a great idea to see what they think of your website and it’s pages, it would give you an overall idea of how other search engines could think of you as well.

DNScoop Research - If you’re thinking of buying a website and would like to know the essentials of the age of the domain name, PageRank, Alexa Ranking, BackLinks, List of Other Domains on Server (checked via IP) and your Text Link Ads Value. This also checks to see if the domain has a fake pagerank.

BackLinks Analyzer - This is a tool for the advanced webmasters to see exactly which websites are linking to your website, specifically those indexed by search engines.

DigPageRank - If you feel that there is a Google PageRank Update going on and want to see what your pagerank is on different Google Servers, this is the classiest and quickest AJAX way to see your PageRank!

Other Tools I Use

Now the tools above are important, but there are a couple other tools that I use every now and then (based on what I like the best):

PageRank Prediction - If you’re looking to buy or invest on a website, it would also be a good idea to simply see what your backlinks would predict your pagerank would be.

Supplemental Page Index - This will check the amount of supplemental pages that you have for your website in many of Google’s different datacenters, and gives you the average.

Google Update History - Not much of a tool, but a great way to see Google’s past update history and guess when the upcoming pagerank update will take place.

Keyword Difficulty - Now even though Aaron Wall’s FireFox SEO Tool will show you a ton of information where you can make an educated guess, this simply checks the amount of pages and offers a simple guess on how difficult it would be to rank for that keyword.

SEO Badge - A good badge if you plan on selling a quality website and you want to grab your readers attention to display your SEO Factors.

Hope this was a good resource for you!

Technorati Tags: Google Analytics, cPanel, AWStats, FireFox, SEO, PageRank, Alexa, BackLinks, Google