SEO Tools

So many tools for so many different jobs. Here are the ones I recommend:

Keywords

Wordtracker: Identify the keywords and phrases your visitors are using and how many competitors are using them, too. Free trial, plus a weekly, monthly or yearly subscription.
Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Find keywords and determine the level of search volume, trends over time, pay-per-click competition and estimated cost per click.

Google Analytics: Powerful and free. Helps you figure out how visitors got to your website, which pages drive the most conversions and which pages simply drive people away.
Crazy Egg: Much easier to work with than text logs. Shows you exactly where and how many people are clicking on your pages. Test different versions of your pages to see which version works best.

SEOmoz Page Strength Tool: Designed to satisfy the curiosity of webmasters, surfers and web marketing professionals seeking a better metric to quickly assess a site/page’s relative importance and visibility.
Web Page Analyzer: How fast do your pages load? Are excessive images and script slowing your site down? Get free analysis and advice here.

Solo SEO: A web-based project management tool that helps you organize all of your SEO efforts into one place. Two-week free trial.

Del.licio.us: Organize your bookmarks with tags. Find other people who have bookmarked the same websites, and find other bookmarks in the same category.
Digg: Don’t bother reading the comments if you’re a sensitive soul.

FeedBurner: Web-based tools to help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.
Google Reader: A clean and simple RSS aggregator so you can keep up to date with all your favorite blogs and news sources. Can also integrate with your Google home page.

SEO for Firefox: Pulls useful data right into Google’s and Yahoo!’s search results, including PageRank, Alex rank, age of domain, WhoIs info, backlinks, del.icio.us bookmarks and a lot more.
IE Tab: Embeds Internet Explorer into your Firefox tabs, so you can easily see how your pages render in IE without opening the browser.

Search Engine Optimization for Dummies by Peter Kent. An easy-to-read primer on the basics of SEO. By the time I read it, I was already doing most of the things discussed in the book, but it still helped reinforce those core ideas.
Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Gradiva Couzin and Jennifer Grappone. SEO in bite-size chunks for those of us with way too much to do. The companion website has lots of useful worksheets and templates you can use.
Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. SEO is a lot easier when you start with a well-designed website. Conversely, all the SEO in the world won’t help if your website turns visitors away in droves.

Thanks for sharing!