All SEO professionals agree that doing SEO with your bare hands is a dead end deal. SEO software makes that laborious and time-consuming job so much faster and easier. There are a plethora of SEO tools designed to serve all website optimization purposes. They help you at every stage of SEO, starting with keyword research and ending with analyzing your SEO campaign results.

Today you can find a wide range of completely free SEO tools available on the web. And this overview of the most popular free SEO tools will help you choose the ones that can make your website’s popularity skyrocket.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Keywords are the cornerstone of any SEO campaign. Therefore, discovering and faceting keywords is the initial step on the way to the top of Google. Of course, you can put on your thinking cap and make the keyword list on your own. But that’s like a shot in the dark, as your ideas can differ significantly from the terms people actually type into Google.

Here, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool comes in handy. Even though this tool is originally meant to help Google AdWords advertisers, you can also use it for keyword research. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool helps you find keywords to target, shows the competition for selected keywords, lets you see estimated traffic volumes, and provides a list of popular keyword suggestions. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool has an easy-to-use interface and is completely free. You can use other paid alternative tools like Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery that can also be effective, but Google AdWords Keyword Tool is the definite leader among free keyword research tools.

XML Sitemap Generators

To make sure all your pages get crawled and indexed, you need to set up sitemaps for your website. They are like ready-to-crawl websites for Google spiders allowing them to quickly figure out which pages are in place and which have been recently updated. Sitemaps can also be beneficial to human visitors as they organize the entire structure of website content and make website navigation much easier. The XML Sitemap Generator allows you to create XML, ROR sitemaps that can be submitted to Google, Yahoo! and many other search engines. This SEO tool also allows you to generate HTML sitemaps that improve website navigation for humans and make your site visitor friendly.

SEO Book Rank Checker

To check whether your optimization campaign is working well or poorly, you need a good ranking checker tool to measure the fluctuations of your website rankings. SEO Book Rank Checker can be of great help in that. It is a Firefox add-on that allows you to check rankings on the Big Three: Google, Yahoo! and Bing and easily export the collected data. All you have to do is enter your website URL and the keywords you want to check your positions for. That’s it and in a few seconds SEO Book Rank Checker provides you with your ranking results. It’s fast, easy to use and free.

backlink clock

Links are like the trump card in Google’s popularity game. The point is that the more quality links in your backlink profile, the higher your website will rank. That’s why a good SEO tool for link research and analysis is a must in your arsenal. Backlink Watch is an online backlink checker that helps you not only see which sites are linking to your page, but also gives you some data for SEO analysis, such as link page title, anchor text of the link, it tells if the link has a dofollow or nofollow tag, etc. The only downside to this tool is that it only gives you 1,000 backlinks per website, regardless of the actual number of backlinks a website has.

To compete

To compete[dot]com provides a wealth of analytical data for fishing. It is an online tool for monitoring and analyzing online competition that provides two categories of services: free site analytics and subscription-based paid search analytics that allow you to take advantage of some additional features. Compete with a comprehensive SEO tool that allows you to view traffic and engagement metrics for a specific website and find the sites for affiliate and link building purposes. Compete is also a great keyword analyzer as it allows you to run analysis on your competitors’ keywords online. Some other features to mention are subdomain parsing, CSV export, tagging, etc.

PowerSuite SEO.

SEO PowerSuite is an all-in-one SEO toolkit that allows you to cover all aspects of website optimization. It consists of four SEO tools to perform all SEO tasks. WebSite Auditor is a great help in creating amazing content for your website. Analyze your top 10 online competitors and come up with a secure plan based on optimization best practices in your niche. Rank Tracker is great for monitoring your website’s rankings and generating the most click-through keywords. SEO SpyGlass is a powerful SEO software for backlink checking and analysis. This is the only SEO tool that allows you to discover up to 50,000 backlinks per website and generate reports with a ready-to-use website optimization strategy. And the last and most advanced in this row is LinkAssistant. It is a powerful, feature-rich SEO tool for link building and management that takes on the main aspects of off-page optimization.

The free versions of these four tools allow you to tackle major optimization challenges. You can also buy an extended version of SEO PowerSuite with advanced features to complete your optimization campaign.

Summing up, we can conclude that there are many SEO tools that will never burn a hole in your pocket and will allow you to effectively run your website optimization campaign with a minimum of costs and efforts.