philadelphia seo

A free web-based “instant SEO audit” tool that provides pretty much every fundamental, old-fashioned SEO data point you’d expect.  Including header tags, meta tags, title tags, page size, index reports, PageRank, backlinks… you get the idea.

Review: It couldn’t be easier to use.  No login/sign-up necessary.  Though I don’t find value in some of the data, I know some traditional SEO’s still may.  And for an instant audit, it’s a great choice.  My major complaint is you can’t export to a .csv file.

Another free web-based “instant SEO audit” tool that provides some competitive data from Quantcast, Alexa, and Compete. Also some Twitter data, domain data, and the like.

Review: It’s free like Xinu Returns, and also requires no login or sign-up. Pretty good for the quick competitive snapshot. This is great stuff for a client proposal.

A free tool that let’s you profile a site for top keywords, both natural and paid.

Review: Very cool tool – I use it in a lot of proposals. It’s the kind of tool that will give you a free taste but there’s a fee to unlock it’s full abilities. I haven’t bought the subscription yet, but I probably will (I’ve been kind of cheap lately). It’s built by the folks that created SEO Digger – which I loved – and the SEO Quake toolbar, so they have some good experience put into this tool. It shows.

A free web-based backlink checker with details like anchor text, follow or nofollow, and a great ability to filter.

Review: Though this is web-based, to really get the details out of this tool you need to install the Firefox extension.  It provides the ability to download a .csv file. Unfortunately the only thing it doesn’t do that I’d like is trend. Or at least tell me when a new link is captured. Sure, I could create some formulas in Excel to figure this out, but Excel and I are definitely not friends.

The latest version of Link Diagnosis lets you save reports, so when you run them again you can find out what is new.  I like that.

A free Firefox extension that tracks the ranking of any keyword (or group of keywords) on Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

Review: Great tool. If you’re a traditional SEO, rankings may still be important to you. I usually use a paid tool (Web Position 4) because I can set it on a scheduler, and it gives me trending reports I love. But if I’m looking for something quick and on the fly, this is the way to go. The export feature is useful. And the great thing about this tool is its ability to go much deeper in the search engine result pages than #30 (which is only as far as Web Position 4 goes).

A free, powerful keyword tool from Google that suggests terms based on popular Google queries.

Review: Can’t ever go wrong here. I use Keyword Discovery and WordTracker, but I always start with this tool. It’s the same tool inside an AdWords account (but you don’t need to login to use this), complete with the basket and export feature. This tool can also give you estimated searches, which I use quite often to help me decide on my final keywords.

(once I have my terms, the keyword mixer helps you concatenate other variations – nice!)

A reliable tool to check server headers for 301s, 302s, 404s, and more.

Review: There are several of these tools online but I always found this one to be the most reliable. Pretty straight forward tool. It tracks the complete redirect path until the end – definitely something that should go into an audit.

A free Firefox plugin providing site audit stats and a NoFollow detector.

Review: Great tool that you acts as a mini, on the fly (and in the SERPs) Xinu Returns. For some it may be all you need. But what I love about it is when activated, it can detect the NoFollows on a page. Want to see if the link you’re receiving is passing PageRank? Activate the tool (with the new button on the bottom of your browser), click reload, and look for a highlight around the link.

A free Firefox plugin that views pages like the Lynx text browser. This is presumably how search engine spiders see the site as well.

Review: So there are a lot of good spider emulators. I like the Yellowpipe one because, well, I love Firefox plugins. And more importantly because when you just have to right-click for a view in a new window. Very clean. Very quick. It even partitions out the links so you can see clearly how they appear (or how junked up with JavaScript they are).

A free platform that provides a bit of Javascript that attributes your link to any copy that is copied and pasted elsewhere.

Review: Incredibly cool.  Put the code on your site, and now when a scraper or user copies your content, it will have a link pasted into it.  The free analytics tool lets you know what was copied, when, and where it went.  Good for generating links.