I’ve already talked about free SEO tools, but I found 3 new tools that are very helpful.

Social Poster

I found this tool from Raj. This tool prefills the submission forms of 40 social sites including the high traffic ones like Digg, Netscape, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. If you use social media to drive traffic to your sites, this tool can save you a lot of time. Before using Social Poster, just make sure you’re logged into the sites you want to submit to.

Also, Social Poster has a submission bookmarklet that works with FireFox. The bookmarklet saves you even more time. Simply go to the URL you want to submit and then click on the bookmarklet. It will fill in the all the fields in the submission form except for the description field.

SEO Digger

I found this cool tool on Sphinn. (By the way, Sphinn is a great place to chill with other search marketers.) This tool holds a lot of promise. I’ve been waiting for somthing like this.

SEO Digger goes through popular keyword SERPs and gives you the top 20 rankings of your site. Basically, this tool tells you which popular keywords your site ranks for. SEO Digger has 44 million keywords in its database. Also, for each keyword you rank for, it gives the keyword’s search volume data from Wordtracker and Overture. Nifty.

If you don’t see your site while using this tool, you’re not ranking for the keywords in SEO Digger’s database. However, you can send keywords to SEO Digger and they’ll add them.

Make sure to register or you won’t be able to use the tool on your internal pages.

Internal Pages PR Checker

I found this tool via Bob Meets World. This tool looks at a domain and spits out the PR of the internal pages in the domain. Also, it can sort the internal pages by PR. You can use this information find high PR internal pages on your site and then sell links on those pages. Also, using this tool is great way to see if your internal pages are getting enough link juice.

New Features On Our Backlink Checker

While we’re talking about free SEO tools, check out our backlink checker. We recently added two new features. It now tells you if a backlink has the nofollow tag. Also, it gives the anchor text of each backlink.

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Just because online tools are free doesn’t mean they are low quality. Because of the open source movement, APIs, and the generous online community, many free tools today are high quality.

For keyword research, my favorite free tool is the Google Adwords tool. I use this tool countless times every work day. It is the only free tool I know of that gives the estimated value of contextual ad clicks. The data of this tool is more useful than other tools because it is based on Google’s search engine. Google’s engine accounts for over half the global search volume. In comparison, Wordtracker, a popular paid keyword tool, accounts for less than 5% of the global search activity. Also, the Adwords tool gives a lot of related search terms including synonyms. The only thing I don’t like about this tool is the lack of specific numbers for search volume. Instead, there are just 5 levels of search activity.

Many people use the Overture tool, but it has become less useful. It is not very precise, since the singular and plural forms of a search term are lumped together. Its results are old – from January 2007. Also, Overture is slow and crashes a lot.

For researching the competition, you can’t beat the SEO for Firefox extension. This tool is super convenient because it works right on the SERPs. On each result on the SERPs, you can find out the PageRank, age, number of links pointing to the domain and specific web page, and other site information including number of Bloglines subscribers and del.icio.us bookmarks.

Also, I use the good old Google search engine to get the big picture of my competition. I like to search with quotes. This gives the number of competing web pages that are optimized for the specific search phrase.

For tweaking the keywords of a web page, I like using SEO Book’s Keyword Density Analyzer Tool. This tool helps me whenever I work on pre-exisiting sites. For example, an SEO client asked me for help in ranking for more search terms. I did some keyword research in my client’s niche. After I found relevant keywords, I checked the content of my client’s web site using this tool. Then, I added the keywords to web pages that were missing them. You’ll be surprised how often web sites are missing tons of relevant keywords in their content.

For tracking web pages in the SERPs, I like using Earners Forum Keyword Tracker Tool. This tool keeps track of your keyword rankings in Google. All you have to do is enter the search phrase and URL of your web page. You can track hundreds of keyword phrases and web pages. Also, this keeps track of the changes in your rankings.

What about a PageRank (PR) and backlink checker? Of course, I like using our tools here at Smart PageRank.

Check out our PageRank checker. I like our tool because it has extra features not found in other PR checkers. For example, you can be emailed whenever your PR gets updated. Also, this tool will tell you if a web page’s PR is fake.

Our backlink checker has a great feature. Instead of just giving the number of backlinks, it will also give the PR of each of the backlinks. This is helpful in knowing the real link popularity of a web page.

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