As a webmaster, which tools should I use for SEO? A question that I get frequently every time I attend a conference and people approach me for a quick chat. To make everyone’s life easier, I decided to put together a collection of free tools that I can safely recommend in a blog post.
The amount of webmaster and SEO tools used to be a scarse resource a few years ago, and often were only available to a small number of SEOs. But that started to change when search engines decided to offer some of those resources as a public tool.
Google Resources in a video
Before I put out my list, there is a video that deserves special attention. It was done around 2008 by Wysz, one of my team colleagues in Search Quality and gives you good advice in how to make easier for Google to find your site.
There is already a big number of YouTube videos, that you can watch in order to understand better how stuff works and do some site analysis, which is by far less boring than having to read big chunks of text. But not everything is in video yet:
- Google Webmaster Help Channel: As the name suggests, it’s a channel dedicated to webmasters, SEO, search and many questions answered by Matt Cutts.
- Google Analytics: I think no introduction needed here, it’s Google Analytics dedicated channel, includes videos of examples and tutorials about how to use this tool in the most diverse ways, including filters, segments, you name it.
- Google Website Optimizer: Similar to Google Analytics channel, Google Website Optimizer includes examples on how to create A/B testing, how to implement these tests and to maximize your site’s conversion.
Google Tools and Documentation
List of tools and documentation provided by Google, when used and interpreted together this array of resources can and will be your best friend. The isolated use of tools can often be misleading.
- Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: No matter what people tell you, always start here if you are planning to build your first website. I recommend special attention about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which includes the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide;
- Google Webmaster Tools: This one should be obvious to any serious webmaster. Lets you have a notion of the “health” of your site in Google’s index, from the analysis of robots.txt, meta data, link information, keywords, your site’s performance to the ability to see your site like GoogleBot sees it;
- Google Analytics: What is the goodness is having a website and having no idea how your visitors interact with it? Google Analytics lets you measure your site’s success on the web and with your visitors;
- AdWords Keyword Tool: Familiar to many, this is a fee public tool that Google gives to webmasters, SEOs and marketers so they can find and research keywords relevant to their websites and campaigns. If you want o see some examples about this tool, there is an excellent list of videos on YouTube that will give you some insights on how to use the AdWords Keyword Tool; *
- Google Insights for Search: Similar to Google Zeitgeist but in real time, provides valuable data on searches done on Google. With this tool you can get an idea of the most searched words by country, region, etc…;
- Google Trends: for a broader view on search data, gives you an idea of the popularity of search terms over a certain period of time;
- Google Webmaster Help Forum: One of the best online communities to discuss anything related to your website on Google;
- YouTube Keyword Tool: Similar to the AdWords Keyord tool mentioned above, but specific for video;
- Video Sitemaps Central: Explains what is the use for Video Sitemaps, how they work and how to submit a Video Sitemap.
- Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: So you won’t lose all those nice tool updates, lots of basic and advanced useful articles or anything related to Google and webmasters.
- Google Webmaster Central on Twitter: If you are a heavy Twitter user, follow Google Webmaster Central on Twitter.
Yahoo! Resources
Yahoo also provides some resources to help and complement the services provided by Google.
Bing Resources
And finally Bing, that already offers some services for webmasters
Nice listing! I will try to keep this post updated with both new features in existing tools, or new tools that help SEO’s and webmasters improve their sites. If you like in particular any tool listed here, share experiences and tricks, or if you know any useful public tool that is provided by the major search engines fell free to share it in the comments. I hope this has some level of usefulness to everyone 
* In the Portuguese version of this post, I have a mention to the Search-based Keyword Tool. Since Google decided to sunset this tool I’m removing the mention here.
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Good post Pedro.
For me, outside of the search engines own SEO tools, it has to be –
* Xenu Link Sleuth – http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
* Screaming Frog SEO Spider – http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
* Open Site Explorer – http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
All free (some with paid versions) and all offer so much value!!