SEO Analysis Tools

You'll find a wide range of SEO analysis tools available to help you optimize your web pages and sites. From the viewpoint of your pocketbook, there are two kinds of SEO analysis tool:

Free tools: these free tools generally tackle a single piece of the SEO puzzle, such as generating good keywords, understanding how Google operates on specific sites and keywords, checking who links to your sites, and displaying rankings in multiple search engines at once
Commercial SEO analysis software that must be licensed for a fee.

11.1. Free Tools

There are a myriad of free SEO tools available, and even many sites that list these free tools (the compendium sites are generally supported by advertising, and must therefore practice good SEO themselves to be successful!).

Some good sites that list (and provide links) to free SEO analysis tools http://www.trugroovez.com/free-seo-tools.htm, http://www.webuildpages.com/tools/, and http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/11-link-popularity-tools.html.

Some of the most useful (and free!) single-purpose SEO tools are:

NickeBot: a keyword discovery tool that helps pinpoint the right keywords for optimization, http://www.nichebot.com/.
The SERPS Tool: the SERPS (or Search Engine Positioning) tool helps you discover your ranking across Google and other major search engine in one fell swoop, http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/se-pos.php.
Meta Tag Analyzer: checks meta information for errors and relevance to page content, http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/se-pos.php.

These tools can definitely be time savers, particularly if you have a large amount of content you need to optimize. The price is certainly right!

Individual tools also can serve as a reality check: by running your pages through one of these tools you can get a pretty good feeling for how well you have optimized a page. However, you should bear in mind that there is nothing that one of these tools can do for you that cannot also be done by hand given the knowledge you have learned from this article.

Individually, SEO analysis tools available on the Web can help you with your SEO tasks . However, to get the most from these tools you need to understand underlying SEO concepts, as explained in this article, before you use these tools.

Over time, as you progress with SEO, you will probably accumulate your own favorite SEO analysis toolkit.

11.2. Commercial SEO Analysis Software

Commercially-licensed SEO analysis software is unlikely to prove worth its cost unless you are in the business of performing SEO for numerous web sites and a great deal of content, or for a major enterprise. If the advertising for this kind of software claims too much, beware!

Essentially, the closer a commercial SEO product comes to true enterprise web analytic capability, like that provided by Google Analytics or WebTrends , the more likely it is to provide valuebut only to larger enterprises . So it's fairly rare for software labeled specifically for SEO purposes to be worth the licensing feeyou can either do the job yourself manually, or a free tool is available.

If your need for SEO analysis falls into the enterprise category, I'd suggest you start with Google Analytics, http://www.google.com/analytics/, or WebTrends, http://www.webtrends.com/, even those these products are not specifically aimed at SEO.

If you do want to look into licensed SEO software, some of the better known commercial SEO analysis products are:

Keyword Elite (keyword analysis) and SEO Elite (automated SEO analysis) available under commercial license from Top Software, http://www.topsoftwaredownloads.co.uk/SEO.htm.
Clicktracks: a variety of commercial analytic packages that show how visitors react to your site, and provides SEO analysis for those sites, http://www.clicktracks.com/.
SEO Administrator: a suite of SEO analysis tools, http://www.seoadministrator.com/.