MSNBC has another feature on Internet marketing courtesy of Entrepreneur.com (we covered one on blogging last month). This week, they have a list of “Free SEO tools you should know about.”
Groundbreaking? Not really: this article is aimed toward SMBs trying to get started on their own SEO. The list is pretty thorough, though. Among the tools listed (in order of mention):
- Incoming link searches at Google and Yahoo Site Explorer
- Xenu dead link checker
- Google Page Rank
- Alexa
- Keyword Discovery/WordTracker, Overture
- Link popularity tools: “Elixir Systems and Marketleap, as well as the tools from We Build Pages, which include anchor text information.”
- webconfs.com’s Keyword Density Checker: “A recommended number is 3 percent to 5 percent for a page of 600 to 800 words.”
- Spider simulators
- XML sitemap builders
- Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Central
- Domain age (at whois.sc: Seychelles??)
- Competition monitoring: Archive.org, Compete.com, Spyfoo.com
- Firefox (and 9 SEO plugins)
- Google Suggest, Google Groups, Google Zeitgeist, Yahoo Answers, Rankpulse
- Lynx Viewer
- Crazy Egg
Pretend you’re an SMB dabbling in SEO. Overwhelmed yet?
Let’s simplify: Free SEO tools you’ll actually be using, in possible order of use:
- Firefox (it’s just better)
- Xenu dead link checker
- Spider simulators (maybe once or however frequently you need to do it to convince your site designer to stop putting all the text in Flash/images)
- XML sitemap builders (intially and then periodically after adding new pages to the site)
- Keyword Discovery/WordTracker, Overture
- Incoming link searches at Google and Yahoo Site Explorer with maybe one of the aformentioned the link popularity tools
- Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Central
- Competition monitoring: Compete.com, Spyfoo.com
- If you’re quite advanced and have exhausted most of the other stuff: Crazy Egg
Plus one serious oversight:
- Some type of free analytics software!
It’s not remarkable that Entrepreneur.com covered this; they have regular Internet marketing features. While Entrepreneur.com has its own subsection on MSNBC (where this story is top billed), I find it interesting that even this type of news is featured on MSNBC. Makes you wonder if the left hand (’Live search’) knows what the right hand (MSNBC/Entrepreneur.com) is doing/saying all the time, especially since Live search/MSN/whatever doesn’t have a single tool on the list (anymore).
