5 Free Search Engine Optimization Tools Available Online

With a variety of options for measuring the success of your search engine optimization, and what tools are available to you, we’ve put together a list of our top five sites that provide free online resources to help you track the performance your website.

1. Google Analytics is a popular tool for website owners. It is easy to install and provides basic reliable trending information on visitor traffic. The program works well if measuring total visitor traffic, behavior patterns, geographic clustering, where visitors come from (external links), where they’re going on your site and how long they stay. The service also provides technical data including the type of browser, connection speeds and language visitors to your site are using.

In some cases, such as websites that rely heavily on buttons, or tracking multiple website URLs in different languages or through various microsites, a more sophisticated measurement package is probably required.

If you have a single, content rich site and primarily want trending data then Google Analytics will most likely do the trick.

2. The Market Leap website provides online tools and a “university” section to help with search engine marketing tactics. The site has three main tools: search engine saturation, keyword verification and link popularity.

The link popularity tool allows users to view the popularity of a URL, which means the number of links to your website found by means of search engines, as well as compare it to three websites of their choice. Users can also select an industry to get a benchmark comparison. The results are broken down by website with Google, AOL and HotBot appearing in one column and Yahoo!, FAST and AltaVista appearing in the other. Data about MSN is not available because the search engine recently disabled the function. The site also added a trend/history report that gives a long term view of your website’s popularity instead of just a snapshot.

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