Alright! I’m back and ready to blog twice as much before and I have added a whole new category section just for Search Engine Optimization aka SEO.

This post is all about the best SEO (free ones at least) tools on the internet. Enough of all this talking, let’s get the show on the road. I know there are perhaps hundreds of SEO tools out there, but these are the tools I find myself using on a daily basis, and so I regard them as the best.

Website Grader

Perhaps one of the most useful “All In One” SEO tool out there. Website grader calculates a grade based on a number of different factors like:

• Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Headings
• Images
• Page Rank
• Indexed Page
• Inbound Links
• Directory Inclusions
• Delicious Bookmarks

For a basic SEO evaluation, this is one of the best tools available. This can really help you get your site in SEO order. I always start with this site when performing SEO evaluations either for me, or for clients.

QuarkBase

Similar to Website Grader above, this is another all in one SEO tool. There are some differences to the website grader which is why I decided to include this tool on the list.

For example on the social media popularity, while website grader only covers Digg & Delicious, QuarkBase covers:

• Delicious
• Digg
• Reddit
• Yahoo Answers
• Technorati
• Wikipedia
• StumbleUpon
• Google Groups

Social media links are a rising force in the off page SEO world, and in many cases can make or break a websites popularity.

Keyword Density

Keyword density can definitely be a factor in OnPage SEO work. Densities should be carefully calculated when possible for optimal levels.

When it comes to the “Seed Keyword” your website should have a density of between 8% to 12%. The seed keyword is the most important keyword for your site, in almost all cases this keyword will appear on every single page on your site.

As for the rest of the keywords on your site, there should be a sloping scale starting at about 4%. That is to say, your second most important keyword should have about a 4% density, your third most important keyword should have about a 3% density and so on and so forth.

Text to Code Ratio

The text to code ratio of your site is an important one. Google is a content whore and the more the better for it. A lower text to code ratio makes Google think that your website does not have a large amount of valuable content.

Some easy things you can do to fix this are:

1.      Remove any inline CSS and place it into an externally linked stylesheet.

2.      Remove any inline JavaScript and place it into an externally linked page.

3.      Remove any tables, and convert them to CSS div’s.

Following these following methods can drastically increase your text to code ratio without even adding any more content to your website.

Lynx Viewer

Lynx is a text browser similar to the one that the search engine bots use when crawling your website. By looking at your website through Lynx, you can find any trouble areas where the search engines might not be able to crawl your site easily.

SEO Moz

SEOMoz is more than just a website full of tools. They also have one of the best SEO blogs on the internet. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have gone to SEOMoz to use a tool and end up spending 3 hours reading the blogs.

Some of the tools they have to use for free are:

• Rank Checker
• Crawl Test
• Keyword Difficulty
• Term Extractor

And many more.

Firefox Web Developer Extension

The web developer extension by Chris Pederick has been installed on my Firefox for over 2 years now, and I will continue to keep it installed as long as I can. While this tool is really built mostly for web designers and developers, it also includes a few different tools useful for SEO.

This extension gives you tools to view a ton of different elements related to SEO. Some of those include:

• Meta Tag Viewer
• Link Information
• Document Size
• Outline Headings

And much more

Firefox Search Status

This FireFox extension is aimed specifically at SEO. It includes some great features like:

• Google Page Rank
• Alexa Rank
• Compete Rank
• Highlight No Follow Tags

Again, this is another extension that will remain installed in my FireFox for a long time.

Google Webmaster Tools

This is an obvious one, which is why I put it at the bottom of the list. It’s one of the most important tools for any webmaster in optimizing their website.

The webmaster tools offer the following features:

• Sitemap Evaluation
• 301 Redirect Logging
• 404 Error Pages
• Index Pages
• Inbound Links

Google Analytics

Yet another obvious free tool to track what type of traffic you are getting. In addition, it also gives you information on the types of keywords that your site is being found for. This isn’t a tool I use every day, but definitely an important one.

Google Insight

Google Insight is a new tool that is still in Beta that really has some great features. The way it is used is to basically analyze what type of traffic based on keyword is being searched for. This is a great tool for researching different keywords you should be using on your website.

This post was a sort of short and to the point list, but it should provide you everything you need to know about the different tools.