seo

Good morning everybody in Moz land. I’m Eric Enge, I’m the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting. I’m here to do a Whiteboard Friday here for you today. By the way, I’m also co-author of “The Art of SEO” together with the beloved Rand Fishkin.

So I want to talk to you a little bit about subject matter experts and their role in your digital marketing strategy. They play an incredibly important role. I see lots of businesses out there that publish sites and they put content out there and there’s really no identity behind them. It’s really important because, at the end of the day, your target audience wants to attach to a person more than they want to attach to a nameless entity. They want to feel like they’re interacting with real people.

By the way, your subject matter expert could be subject matter experts, plural, and that’s good, but incredibly important that you have something, somebody where people can attach to them in a material way. And at the end of the day, from my perspective, you have to have an expert or go home. You’re just not going to be able to succeed in a big way going forward if you don’t have some sort of established expertise for your business. That’s my view of it. You just have to have that expert, or you need to go home.

So with that in mind, you run into the next problem. Your experts are human beings. There are 24 hours in a day, right? They have limited time to do what they need to do, and that actually limits how much scale you can get out of their activity. Maybe they only have two hours a day. And if that’s the case, then that limits how much content and how much communication of that expertise can happen out in the wild.

So I want to talk now a little bit about how do we scale their efforts so you get more out of your expert, and that’s where we lead to a few ideas I have over here. All right.

Best thing to do is see if you can get some smart young people, don’t necessarily have to be young, but smart people to assist your subject matter expert in a number of different ways. Some great things you can do to help them out, one is you can research article topics. I know for myself, when I get up on Saturday morning, which is when I tend to write my columns, I sometimes spend two hours trying to come up with an idea for what the column is going to be about. It can be very painful, very frustrating. If you have somebody there helping you, coming up with ideas and really giving you a set of things that you can look at and think about for that next column or blog post or whatever it is, it can be a big, big help for you.

You can even potentially have them draft articles for you. You need to be careful about this. I’m actually not a big fan of ghost writing, because keeping in mind that people want to attach to an expert, if the thing is truly ghost-written, well, it’s not really the expert that’s writing it, and to me that relationship gets weakened. So I think it’s very important to have the subject matter expert really be involved in writing the article. But you can have someone draft an article as long as the subject matter expert sort of recuts it and tears it apart, not just simple editing, but actually turns it into their own voice. Can be very helpful though to have that drafted article.

Find influencers. Very, very important thing to do. Who do you want that subject matter expert to build relationships with? That can be a lot of work to figure out too. You can use a variety of tools to figure this out. You can do social media research, just bum around on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, whatever your social site of preference is, or all of them, and help identify people that you want have the subject matter expert interact with. Figure out how to contact them, do research on what they like, help get that relationship process going. Subject matter expert has to be the one to do the outreach, but you can make it easier for them by doing some research up front.

Next thing, just monitoring social media sites. I’m going to use Twitter as an example. Find tweets by key people, maybe by influencers, maybe just by good friends. Have your assistant, basically, help the subject matter expert by monitoring, in this case Twitter, more frequently and more thoroughly than they can on their own. So that’s a very valuable service. So you look at tweets by key people and tweets by others, direct questions that get asked of you, or breaking news, all these sorts of things to allow the subject matter expert to be responsive without having to live in the social media site.

Next up, you can draft actually social media posts, be it a tweet or Google+ or Facebook or whatever it is, and then send your subject matter expert proposed things that they can put out on social media. Again, a big time-saver.

You can curate content for them. The assistant can go ahead and research other articles and find things going on and actually suggest comments on those articles.

Creating graphics, I’m lucky enough that I have someone who is able to create graphics for me. So I can walk in, in the morning and say, “Hey I want to do this post today,” and I can sketch out a little design, here’s what I want to do, I want this, sort of build a little design for them, and then they go off and create it and then two hours later I have a beautiful graphic which I can go ahead and use for my post. I actually end up with a lot of custom graphics in my posts that way, which is really cool.

They can also just edit your articles. Hopefully, that’s not too painful for them, because hopefully your subject matter expert is a good writer. But this is another valuable service. It’s really great to have that person, that other set of eyes on the article to help you with that.

The big key in all these services that I’ve talked about, which will help us lead to our happy SME down here in the bottom, is all about the relationship between the assistant and the subject matter expert. The assistant has to be doing things the subject matter expert finds valuable. So, if I’m a subject matter expert and I don’t find your curating content for me valuable because I’m just too opinionated or I don’t want to put that stuff out there, then having you do that for me doesn’t help. So the subject matter expert and the assistant or assistants, as the case may be, have to build a special relationship so that they understand how to work together and really make it work.

So that’s some ideas for you on how you take your subject matter expert, you give them a little more time, and help them scale their efforts, leading to a happy subject matter expert and good results for your business.

Thanks for listening to me today, and have a good day.

Free Tools

Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool

http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php

Link Research, Technical SEO

Worried about Google’s Penguin algorithm hitting you for over-optimized anchor text? Simply type in your URL for a full report of which links might raise flags.

Bing Webmaster Tools

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Tools Suite, Diagnostic

Similar in function to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing offers a suite of interesting research tools and resources for webmasters.

Bitly

https://bitly.com/

Social, Analytics

Most people use Bitly for URL shortening, but the real power of this platform comes from its analytics.

Boomerang

http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Email, Productivity

Boomerang lets you follow up on emails, even when you forget. Great for link building or any time you send a lot of emails.

Buffer

https://bufferapp.com/

Social

Optimize your online social media sharing. Buffer allows you to share with your audience at the optimal times for greater visibility.

BuiltWith

http://builtwith.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Use BuiltWith to discover what technology nearly any website was, well, built with. Great for competitive intelligence as well.

Buzzstream Tools Suite

http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building

Link Building, Tools Suite, Email

Most people know Buzzstream as an outreach platform, but they also offer a number of free link-building tools. This company gets it.

Caption Tube

http://captiontube.appspot.com/

Video

Free and easy resource used to create captions for YouTube. Helps with usability and offers viewers a readable transcript.

CircleCount

http://www.circlecount.com/

Social, Analytics

Google+ analytics ramped up. Free resource to track your followers and analyze your shares. See how many followers you’ve gained over time.

Content Strategy Generator Tool

http://seogadget.com/content-strategy-generator-tool-v2-update/

Content

This tool from SEOgadget helps you plan your content strategy intelligently, using keyword research and estimating your audience size.

Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML

http://word2cleanhtml.com/

Content, Productivity

Despite the rise of Google Docs, Word still dominates much of the world. Copying and pasting has always been a hurdle, but this tool makes it easy.

Copyscape

http://www.copyscape.com/

Content

Copyscape serves both as a plagiarism checker and a duplicate-content checker. Great to use if your content has been distributed across the web.

Domain Hunter Plus

http://domainhunterplus.com/

Link Building

This magic extension for Chrome not only helps you find important broken links, but also tells you if the links point to an available domain.

Easel.ly

http://www.easel.ly/

Infographics

Free tools for creating and sharing inforgraphics. The templates allow anyone to create a professional-looking graphic.

Email Format

http://email-format.com/

Email, Productivity

Email Format helps you find the proper structure for thousands of companies and organizations across the web.

FindPeopleonPlus

http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/

Social

The ultimate Google+ directory that’s great for research, outreach, and link building. Sort by keywords, profession, country, and more.

Frobee Robots.txt Checker

http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check

Robots.txt, Technical SEO

Many robots.txt files contain hidden errors not easily visible to humans. Run your file through this tool and you never know what you’ll discover.

GetListed

https://getlisted.org/

Local, Moz

This awesome local SEO tool scores your local SEO visibility and gives you actionable next steps to raise your score.

Google Keyword Planner

http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner

Keyword Research

The tool to replace Google’s popular keyword tool has been derided by some, but still offers data not available anywhere else.

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Analytics

The most popular of all the analytics tools available, Google Analytics continually innovates and sets the standard.

Google Analytics API

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008004?hl=en&ref_topic=1008008

API, Analytics

The Google Analytics API is great for building custom reports and tools, and also for pulling data straight into Excel or Google Docs.

Google Map Maker

http://www.google.com/mapmaker

Local

Among other things, Google Map Maker allows you to contribute to public map information, which may be shared and incorporated into Google Maps.

Google PageSpeed Insights

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Speed

Tools, data, and insights to improve your page speed. Page speed is correlated with better rankings and user engagement, so this matters.

Google Public Data

http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory

Content

Drawing on vast public databases, Google public data offers a great starting point for content research, infographics, and more.

Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

Technical SEO, CRO

That SEO Mofo! Use this tool to see how your snippet may appear in Google’s search results. Add structured data, review stars, and more.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Structured Data, Technical SEO

If you use Schema.org microformats or any other type of structured data, this tool will verify your markup.

Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/

Keyword Research

See what’s trending in Google search results and view keyword search popularity over time. A must for trends.

Google Webmaster

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Tools Suite, Diagnostic

The interface recently received an overhaul, and Google Webmaster remains a must-have resource of diagnostic and health tools for site owners.

IFTTT

https://ifttt.com/

Productivity

IFTTT stands for IF This, Then That. The tool allows you to create automatic triggers between various apps, like Gmail and Twitter.

Infogr.am

http://infogr.am/

Infographics

A great free Infographics resource that allows you to easily create graphics and data visualizations.

Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO Tools

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/tools/

Tools Suite

The Ninjas are some of the best SEOs and online marketers out there, and they’ve put some of their best tools online for free.

Linkstant

http://www.linkstant.com/

Link Building

This nifty analytics tool alerts you anytime someone links to your website. Great for outreach and intelligence gathering.

Linksy.me Email Guesser

http://linksy.me/find-email

Email, Link Building

Need to send an email, but you don’t have the recipient’s address? Type in what you know and this nifty tool will help you figure it out.

MailTester.com

http://mailtester.com/

Email

Need to send an email to an untested address, but you don’t want to spam them? Check it first with this mail tester to verify.

MozCast

http://mozcast.com/

SERP Tracking, Moz

Want to know if Google is testing its algorithm this week? MozCast gives you a daily weather report to track changes in the SERPs.

MyBlogGuest

http://myblogguest.com/

Link Building, Content

Guest blogging is still alive and thriving. MyBlogGuest helps you find the good opportunities out there.

Panguin Tool

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Analytics

This awesome tool connects with your Google Analytics account to help you see if and when you’ve been hit by Google Algorithm updates.

Pingdom

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Speed

Pingdom offers an entire suite of speed tools to help analyze page load, DNS issues, and connectivity.

Piwik

http://piwik.org/

Analytics

Piwik is a lightweight web analytics solution, and a great alternative to Google Analytics.

Rank Checker for Firefox

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

Rank Tracking

This light and easy desktop tool checks rankings with the click of a button. Quick, easy and free.

Rapportive

http://rapportive.com/

Email, Link Building, Productivity

Rapportive works with your Gmail inbox to give you near-instant rich contact information for almost everyone you want to reach. A must-have for marketers.

Remove Duplicate Items

http://ontolo.com/tools-remove-duplicates

Productivity

Ontolo offers a suite of link building software and a few helpful productivity tools for link builders. The remove duplicates tool solves a common problem.

Robots.txt Checker

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml

Robots.txt, Technical SEO

Use robots best practices and discover hidden errors in your robots.txt files that may cause search engine crawling problems.

Schema Creator

http://schema-creator.org/

Structured Data, Technical SEO

Everyone loves using Schema.org, but the microformats are difficult to write by hand. This generator from the folks at Raven simplifies the task.

Scraper for Chrome

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/

Productivity

If you’ve never scraped a webpage, you’re missing out. Scraper for Chrome puts the power of simple web scraping in your hands without the need for code.

Seer Toolbox

http://www.seerinteractive.com/seo-toolbox/

Tools Suite, Analytics, Link Research

SEER opened up its internal toolbox for everyone in the world to use. These are the same tools used in-house at SEER, and they rock.

SEO Toolbar

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

Tools Suite, Toolbar, Technical SEO

On of the most popular tools available, The SEO Toolbar puts a ton of information at your fingertips including backlinks and competitive research.

SEO Tools for Excel

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

Tools Suite, Analytics, Social

You don’t need to be an Excel ninja to use Niels Bosma’s SEO Tools for Excel. This plugin does so many things many SEOs won’t work without it.

SEOgadget Links API

http://seogadget.com/api/

API, Link Research

The SEOgadget Links API lets you easily gather not only backlink data but contact information as well. A huge time saver.

SEOgadget Tools

http://seogadget.com/tools/

Tools Suite

This suite of tools from the Gadget lab includes several Excel plugins, a content strategy generator, and more.

SEOQuake

http://www.seoquake.com/

Toolbar, Tools Suite, Technical SEO

More raw data than any other SEO toolbar out there.

SharedCount

http://www.sharedcount.com/

Social, Analytics

Want to know how any piece of content was shared socially across the major services? This is the tool to use.

SharedCount API

http://www.sharedcount.com/documentation.php

API, Social

Harnessing the combined statistics of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and more, the SharedCount API puts a ton of social data at your fingertips.

Similar Page Checker

http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

Content, Technical SEO

Use this tool to check for duplicate content issues. The Similar Page Checker will give you a score of how closely the HTML of two pages resemble each other.

Sitemap Generators

http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

Sitemaps

Google offers a slew of free, top-notch sitemap generators. Most of these live on your server and generate new sitemaps automatically.

Social Authority API

https://followerwonk.com/social-authority

API, Social

How much reach and social authority do your followers have? How about the people you’re trying to connect with? The free Social Authority API will tell you.

Social Crawlytics

https://socialcrawlytics.com/

Social, Analytics

Social Crawlytics allows you to conduct competitive research by showing you your competitors’ most-shared content. Lots of other features as well.

Social Mention

http://www.socialmention.com/

Social

Social mention offers real-time social media search and analysis. Enter a search term and see who’s sharing what, right now.

Text Cleaner

http://www.textcleanr.com/

Content

Some of the best tools solve the simplest problems. Text cleaner cleans up all kinds of text formatting when copying and pasting between aplications.

Ubersuggest

http://ubersuggest.org/

Keyword Research

Every SEO loves Ubersuggest for its ease of use and wealth of keyword research ideas. Utilizing the power of Google Suggest, it returns hundreds of potential results.

URI Valet

http://urivalet.com/

Technical SEO

A great tool for digging into server headers, canonical information, analyzing redirect problems and more.

Virante SEO Tools

http://www.virante.org/seo-tools

Tools Suite

Virant offers a number of high quality SEO tools to the public. These are often the same tools developed for the Virant team, opened up for public use.

Wayback Machine

http://archive.org/web/web.php

Competitive Intelligence

Want to see the history of your website or your competitor’s site? The Wayback Machine allows you to step back in time and track important changes.

WebPagetest

http://www.webpagetest.org/

Speed

Quick and easy website speed tool. Offers suggestions for improving performance.

Wordle

http://www.wordle.net/

Content

Create beautiful word clouds. Great for visualizations, graphics, and research.

Wordstream Free Keyword Tools

http://www.wordstream.com/free-keyword-tools

Keyword Research, Tools Suite

In addition to its paid offerings, Wordstream offers a suite of free keyword tools offering access to thousands of keyword suggestions.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Diagnostic, Technical SEO

Winner of the ugliest-SEO-tool-on-the-planet award, Xenu is also one of the most useful. Crawl entire sites, find broken links, create sitemaps, and more.

XML-Sitemaps.com

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Sitemaps

XML-Sitemaps offers probably the easiest sitemap creation solution anywhere. Great for smaller sites when you need a sitemap in minutes.

Yahoo Pipes

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Content, Productivity

A great mashup tool that combines different feeds into content and other magical creations. Used for link building and whatever you can dream of.

Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Technical SEO

If you could only choose one WordPress plugin for you site, the first would be from Yoast, and so would the second. This one sets the standard.

YouTube Analytics

https://www.youtube.com/analytics

Video, Analytics

Offers video-specific analytics for YouTube videos. A must-have for YouTube video publishers.

Free and Paid

Ahrefs

https://ahrefs.com/

Link Research, Link Building

One of the more popular link research tools, Ahrefs offers a large index and nice anchor text distribution charts. Mostly a paid tool, but they offer some free data.

Banana Tag

http://bananatag.com/

Email

Banana Tag allows you to track your emails after you send them. For example, check your email open rates from Gmail.

CloudFlare

https://www.cloudflare.com/

Speed

How do they make CloudFlare free? It works both as a CDN and a security service to provide your website with speed and safety.

Followerwonk

https://followerwonk.com/

Social, Analytics, Moz

Perhaps the coolest thing about Followerwonk is the ability to track your followers. Smart SEOs also use it for outreach and research.

Keyword Eye

http://www.keywordeye.com/

Keyword Research

Keyword eye adds a twist to keyword research by adding rich visualizations — essential when you want to move beyond keywords to valuable concepts.

KnowEm

http://knowem.com/

Social

KnowEm allows you to check 100’s of social profiles at once to check availability. Looking for the perfect brand name? Check KnowEm first.

Majestic SEO

http://www.majesticseo.com/

Link Research, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building

You’ve probably seen Majestic SEO link charts all over the Internet. Great crawling technology combined with several free options make for great link research.

Majestic SEO API

http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/majestic-seo-api-now-explained/

API, Link Research

Majestic makes much of its backlink data available for free via its API.

MozBar

http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

Tools Suite, Toolbar, Moz

The standard SEO toolbar for legions of marketers, the MozBar allows you to perform over 50 key tasks right from your browser. Highly recommended.

Mozscape API

http://moz.com/products/api

API, Link Research, Moz

Companies everywhere incorporate the Mozscape API into their own products, but it’s also available to individuals, and much of the data is free.

nTopic

http://www.ntopic.org/

Content

nTopic is one of the few proven methods for giving your content a relevancy score and offering keyword suggestions to improve it.

Open Site Explorer

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Link Research, Moz, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building

When Google and Yahoo started removing backlink data from the public, Moz built Open Site Explorer to fill a huge need. See backlinks, anchor text, popularity metrics and more.

Piktochart

http://piktochart.com/

Infographics

A cute and easy infographic generator. No experience required.

RowFeeder

https://rowfeeder.com/

Social, Analytics

RowFeeder allows you to track social usernames, hashtags and keywords and load that information into Excel for easy social media monitoring.

Screaming Frog

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Diagnostic, Technical SEO

A powerful website crawling tool with a ton of features and customizations. A must-have for most serious SEOs.

Searchmetrics Visibility Charts

http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research

SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence

Track the search visibility of any website, in addition to tracking winners and losers in Google’s search results.

SEMrush

http://www.semrush.com/

Tools Suite, Keyword Research, Competitive Intelligence

The paid and organic keyword data offered by SEMrush is often scary good and comprehensive. Also great for researching competitors’ ads.

SERPmetrics

http://serpmetrics.com/flux/

SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence

SERPmetrics flux charts track the flux for US search results across Yahoo, Bing and Google over a 30-day period. A paid API is also available.

SimilarWeb

http://www.similarweb.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Impressive competitive intelligence across a number of online industries. Competitor website stats are hard to come by, but Similar Web does a good job.

StatCounter

http://statcounter.com/

Analytics

Free, quick, and lightweight analytics solution. Often used by those who want to avoid using Google Analytics for privacy reasons.

Trello

https://trello.com/

Productivity

Project management and tracking made simple. Used and endorsed by Moz.

Whitespark Local Citation Finder

https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/

Local

Finding local citations is key to local SEO. Whitespark offers a number of free and paid solutions to find the local citations to rise above the competition.

Whois Lookup

http://whois.domaintools.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Find registration, contact, and administrative information for any domain.

Wistia

http://wistia.com/

Video

The king of online video, Wistia offers SEO-friendly solutions for video hosting. Both free and low-cost options available.

Free Trials

Moz Analytics

http://moz.com/products

Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Moz, Rank Tracking, Social

The flagship of the Moz software suite, Moz Analytics offers a dashboard of all your important marketing data in one place with actionable analytics for better marketing.

Optimizely

https://www.optimizely.com/

A/B Testing, CRO

Easy A/B testing and analytics to help you move toward success in your CRO efforts.

Raven

http://raventools.com/

Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Content, Social

Raven offers a classic suite of SEO, content, and research tools popular with many marketers.

Visual Website Optimizer

https://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/

A/B Testing, CRO

Visual Website Optimizer allows you to run A/B tests with a simple online editor that lets you test content without knowing code.

Wordtracker

http://www.wordtracker.com/

Keyword Research

A powerful keyword research suite used by many top marketers, Wordtracker offers a generous free trial option.

Free Tools

Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool

http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php

Link Research, Technical SEO

Worried about Google’s Penguin algorithm hitting you for over-optimized anchor text? Simply type in your URL for a full report of which links might raise flags.

Bing Webmaster Tools

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Tools Suite, Diagnostic

Similar in function to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing offers a suite of interesting research tools and resources for webmasters.

Bitly

https://bitly.com/

Social, Analytics

Most people use Bitly for URL shortening, but the real power of this platform comes from its analytics.

Boomerang

http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Email, Productivity

Boomerang lets you follow up on emails, even when you forget. Great for link building or any time you send a lot of emails.

Buffer

https://bufferapp.com/

Social

Optimize your online social media sharing. Buffer allows you to share with your audience at the optimal times for greater visibility.

BuiltWith

http://builtwith.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Use BuiltWith to discover what technology nearly any website was, well, built with. Great for competitive intelligence as well.

Buzzstream Tools Suite

http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building

Link Building, Tools Suite, Email

Most people know Buzzstream as an outreach platform, but they also offer a number of free link-building tools. This company gets it.

Caption Tube

http://captiontube.appspot.com/

Video

Free and easy resource used to create captions for YouTube. Helps with usability and offers viewers a readable transcript.

CircleCount

http://www.circlecount.com/

Social, Analytics

Google+ analytics ramped up. Free resource to track your followers and analyze your shares. See how many followers you’ve gained over time.

Content Strategy Generator Tool

http://seogadget.com/content-strategy-generator-tool-v2-update/

Content

This tool from SEOgadget helps you plan your content strategy intelligently, using keyword research and estimating your audience size.

Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML

http://word2cleanhtml.com/

Content, Productivity

Despite the rise of Google Docs, Word still dominates much of the world. Copying and pasting has always been a hurdle, but this tool makes it easy.

Copyscape

http://www.copyscape.com/

Content

Copyscape serves both as a plagiarism checker and a duplicate-content checker. Great to use if your content has been distributed across the web.

Domain Hunter Plus

http://domainhunterplus.com/

Link Building

This magic extension for Chrome not only helps you find important broken links, but also tells you if the links point to an available domain.

Easel.ly

http://www.easel.ly/

Infographics

Free tools for creating and sharing inforgraphics. The templates allow anyone to create a professional-looking graphic.

Email Format

http://email-format.com/

Email, Productivity

Email Format helps you find the proper structure for thousands of companies and organizations across the web.

FindPeopleonPlus

http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/

Social

The ultimate Google+ directory that’s great for research, outreach, and link building. Sort by keywords, profession, country, and more.

Frobee Robots.txt Checker

http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check

Robots.txt, Technical SEO

Many robots.txt files contain hidden errors not easily visible to humans. Run your file through this tool and you never know what you’ll discover.

GetListed

https://getlisted.org/

Local, Moz

This awesome local SEO tool scores your local SEO visibility and gives you actionable next steps to raise your score.

Google Keyword Planner

http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner

Keyword Research

The tool to replace Google’s popular keyword tool has been derided by some, but still offers data not available anywhere else.

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Analytics

The most popular of all the analytics tools available, Google Analytics continually innovates and sets the standard.

Google Analytics API

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008004?hl=en&ref_topic=1008008

API, Analytics

The Google Analytics API is great for building custom reports and tools, and also for pulling data straight into Excel or Google Docs.

Google Map Maker

http://www.google.com/mapmaker

Local

Among other things, Google Map Maker allows you to contribute to public map information, which may be shared and incorporated into Google Maps.

Google PageSpeed Insights

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Speed

Tools, data, and insights to improve your page speed. Page speed is correlated with better rankings and user engagement, so this matters.

Google Public Data

http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory

Content

Drawing on vast public databases, Google public data offers a great starting point for content research, infographics, and more.

Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

Technical SEO, CRO

That SEO Mofo! Use this tool to see how your snippet may appear in Google’s search results. Add structured data, review stars, and more.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Structured Data, Technical SEO

If you use Schema.org microformats or any other type of structured data, this tool will verify your markup.

Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/

Keyword Research

See what’s trending in Google search results and view keyword search popularity over time. A must for trends.

Google Webmaster

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Tools Suite, Diagnostic

The interface recently received an overhaul, and Google Webmaster remains a must-have resource of diagnostic and health tools for site owners.

IFTTT

https://ifttt.com/

Productivity

IFTTT stands for IF This, Then That. The tool allows you to create automatic triggers between various apps, like Gmail and Twitter.

Infogr.am

http://infogr.am/

Infographics

A great free Infographics resource that allows you to easily create graphics and data visualizations.

Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO Tools

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/tools/

Tools Suite

The Ninjas are some of the best SEOs and online marketers out there, and they’ve put some of their best tools online for free.

Linkstant

http://www.linkstant.com/

Link Building

This nifty analytics tool alerts you anytime someone links to your website. Great for outreach and intelligence gathering.

Linksy.me Email Guesser

http://linksy.me/find-email

Email, Link Building

Need to send an email, but you don’t have the recipient’s address? Type in what you know and this nifty tool will help you figure it out.

MailTester.com

http://mailtester.com/

Email

Need to send an email to an untested address, but you don’t want to spam them? Check it first with this mail tester to verify.

MozCast

http://mozcast.com/

SERP Tracking, Moz

Want to know if Google is testing its algorithm this week? MozCast gives you a daily weather report to track changes in the SERPs.

MyBlogGuest

http://myblogguest.com/

Link Building, Content

Guest blogging is still alive and thriving. MyBlogGuest helps you find the good opportunities out there.

Panguin Tool

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Analytics

This awesome tool connects with your Google Analytics account to help you see if and when you’ve been hit by Google Algorithm updates.

Pingdom

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Speed

Pingdom offers an entire suite of speed tools to help analyze page load, DNS issues, and connectivity.

Piwik

http://piwik.org/

Analytics

Piwik is a lightweight web analytics solution, and a great alternative to Google Analytics.

Rank Checker for Firefox

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

Rank Tracking

This light and easy desktop tool checks rankings with the click of a button. Quick, easy and free.

Rapportive

http://rapportive.com/

Email, Link Building, Productivity

Rapportive works with your Gmail inbox to give you near-instant rich contact information for almost everyone you want to reach. A must-have for marketers.

Remove Duplicate Items

http://ontolo.com/tools-remove-duplicates

Productivity

Ontolo offers a suite of link building software and a few helpful productivity tools for link builders. The remove duplicates tool solves a common problem.

Robots.txt Checker

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml

Robots.txt, Technical SEO

Use robots best practices and discover hidden errors in your robots.txt files that may cause search engine crawling problems.

Schema Creator

http://schema-creator.org/

Structured Data, Technical SEO

Everyone loves using Schema.org, but the microformats are difficult to write by hand. This generator from the folks at Raven simplifies the task.

Scraper for Chrome

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/

Productivity

If you’ve never scraped a webpage, you’re missing out. Scraper for Chrome puts the power of simple web scraping in your hands without the need for code.

Seer Toolbox

http://www.seerinteractive.com/seo-toolbox/

Tools Suite, Analytics, Link Research

SEER opened up its internal toolbox for everyone in the world to use. These are the same tools used in-house at SEER, and they rock.

SEO Toolbar

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

Tools Suite, Toolbar, Technical SEO

On of the most popular tools available, The SEO Toolbar puts a ton of information at your fingertips including backlinks and competitive research.

SEO Tools for Excel

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

Tools Suite, Analytics, Social

You don’t need to be an Excel ninja to use Niels Bosma’s SEO Tools for Excel. This plugin does so many things many SEOs won’t work without it.

SEOgadget Links API

http://seogadget.com/api/

API, Link Research

The SEOgadget Links API lets you easily gather not only backlink data but contact information as well. A huge time saver.

SEOgadget Tools

http://seogadget.com/tools/

Tools Suite

This suite of tools from the Gadget lab includes several Excel plugins, a content strategy generator, and more.

SEOQuake

http://www.seoquake.com/

Toolbar, Tools Suite, Technical SEO

More raw data than any other SEO toolbar out there.

SharedCount

http://www.sharedcount.com/

Social, Analytics

Want to know how any piece of content was shared socially across the major services? This is the tool to use.

SharedCount API

http://www.sharedcount.com/documentation.php

API, Social

Harnessing the combined statistics of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and more, the SharedCount API puts a ton of social data at your fingertips.

Similar Page Checker

http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

Content, Technical SEO

Use this tool to check for duplicate content issues. The Similar Page Checker will give you a score of how closely the HTML of two pages resemble each other.

Sitemap Generators

http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

Sitemaps

Google offers a slew of free, top-notch sitemap generators. Most of these live on your server and generate new sitemaps automatically.

Social Authority API

https://followerwonk.com/social-authority

API, Social

How much reach and social authority do your followers have? How about the people you’re trying to connect with? The free Social Authority API will tell you.

Social Crawlytics

https://socialcrawlytics.com/

Social, Analytics

Social Crawlytics allows you to conduct competitive research by showing you your competitors’ most-shared content. Lots of other features as well.

Social Mention

http://www.socialmention.com/

Social

Social mention offers real-time social media search and analysis. Enter a search term and see who’s sharing what, right now.

Text Cleaner

http://www.textcleanr.com/

Content

Some of the best tools solve the simplest problems. Text cleaner cleans up all kinds of text formatting when copying and pasting between aplications.

Ubersuggest

http://ubersuggest.org/

Keyword Research

Every SEO loves Ubersuggest for its ease of use and wealth of keyword research ideas. Utilizing the power of Google Suggest, it returns hundreds of potential results.

URI Valet

http://urivalet.com/

Technical SEO

A great tool for digging into server headers, canonical information, analyzing redirect problems and more.

Virante SEO Tools

http://www.virante.org/seo-tools

Tools Suite

Virant offers a number of high quality SEO tools to the public. These are often the same tools developed for the Virant team, opened up for public use.

Wayback Machine

http://archive.org/web/web.php

Competitive Intelligence

Want to see the history of your website or your competitor’s site? The Wayback Machine allows you to step back in time and track important changes.

WebPagetest

http://www.webpagetest.org/

Speed

Quick and easy website speed tool. Offers suggestions for improving performance.

Wordle

http://www.wordle.net/

Content

Create beautiful word clouds. Great for visualizations, graphics, and research.

Wordstream Free Keyword Tools

http://www.wordstream.com/free-keyword-tools

Keyword Research, Tools Suite

In addition to its paid offerings, Wordstream offers a suite of free keyword tools offering access to thousands of keyword suggestions.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Diagnostic, Technical SEO

Winner of the ugliest-SEO-tool-on-the-planet award, Xenu is also one of the most useful. Crawl entire sites, find broken links, create sitemaps, and more.

XML-Sitemaps.com

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Sitemaps

XML-Sitemaps offers probably the easiest sitemap creation solution anywhere. Great for smaller sites when you need a sitemap in minutes.

Yahoo Pipes

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Content, Productivity

A great mashup tool that combines different feeds into content and other magical creations. Used for link building and whatever you can dream of.

Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Technical SEO

If you could only choose one WordPress plugin for you site, the first would be from Yoast, and so would the second. This one sets the standard.

YouTube Analytics

https://www.youtube.com/analytics

Video, Analytics

Offers video-specific analytics for YouTube videos. A must-have for YouTube video publishers.

Free and Paid

Ahrefs

https://ahrefs.com/

Link Research, Link Building

One of the more popular link research tools, Ahrefs offers a large index and nice anchor text distribution charts. Mostly a paid tool, but they offer some free data.

Banana Tag

http://bananatag.com/

Email

Banana Tag allows you to track your emails after you send them. For example, check your email open rates from Gmail.

CloudFlare

https://www.cloudflare.com/

Speed

How do they make CloudFlare free? It works both as a CDN and a security service to provide your website with speed and safety.

Followerwonk

https://followerwonk.com/

Social, Analytics, Moz

Perhaps the coolest thing about Followerwonk is the ability to track your followers. Smart SEOs also use it for outreach and research.

Keyword Eye

http://www.keywordeye.com/

Keyword Research

Keyword eye adds a twist to keyword research by adding rich visualizations — essential when you want to move beyond keywords to valuable concepts.

KnowEm

http://knowem.com/

Social

KnowEm allows you to check 100’s of social profiles at once to check availability. Looking for the perfect brand name? Check KnowEm first.

Majestic SEO

http://www.majesticseo.com/

Link Research, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building

You’ve probably seen Majestic SEO link charts all over the Internet. Great crawling technology combined with several free options make for great link research.

Majestic SEO API

http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/majestic-seo-api-now-explained/

API, Link Research

Majestic makes much of its backlink data available for free via its API.

MozBar

http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

Tools Suite, Toolbar, Moz

The standard SEO toolbar for legions of marketers, the MozBar allows you to perform over 50 key tasks right from your browser. Highly recommended.

Mozscape API

http://moz.com/products/api

API, Link Research, Moz

Companies everywhere incorporate the Mozscape API into their own products, but it’s also available to individuals, and much of the data is free.

nTopic

http://www.ntopic.org/

Content

nTopic is one of the few proven methods for giving your content a relevancy score and offering keyword suggestions to improve it.

Open Site Explorer

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Link Research, Moz, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building

When Google and Yahoo started removing backlink data from the public, Moz built Open Site Explorer to fill a huge need. See backlinks, anchor text, popularity metrics and more.

Piktochart

http://piktochart.com/

Infographics

A cute and easy infographic generator. No experience required.

RowFeeder

https://rowfeeder.com/

Social, Analytics

RowFeeder allows you to track social usernames, hashtags and keywords and load that information into Excel for easy social media monitoring.

Screaming Frog

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Diagnostic, Technical SEO

A powerful website crawling tool with a ton of features and customizations. A must-have for most serious SEOs.

Searchmetrics Visibility Charts

http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research

SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence

Track the search visibility of any website, in addition to tracking winners and losers in Google’s search results.

SEMrush

http://www.semrush.com/

Tools Suite, Keyword Research, Competitive Intelligence

The paid and organic keyword data offered by SEMrush is often scary good and comprehensive. Also great for researching competitors’ ads.

SERPmetrics

http://serpmetrics.com/flux/

SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence

SERPmetrics flux charts track the flux for US search results across Yahoo, Bing and Google over a 30-day period. A paid API is also available.

SimilarWeb

http://www.similarweb.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Impressive competitive intelligence across a number of online industries. Competitor website stats are hard to come by, but Similar Web does a good job.

StatCounter

http://statcounter.com/

Analytics

Free, quick, and lightweight analytics solution. Often used by those who want to avoid using Google Analytics for privacy reasons.

Trello

https://trello.com/

Productivity

Project management and tracking made simple. Used and endorsed by Moz.

Whitespark Local Citation Finder

https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/

Local

Finding local citations is key to local SEO. Whitespark offers a number of free and paid solutions to find the local citations to rise above the competition.

Whois Lookup

http://whois.domaintools.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Find registration, contact, and administrative information for any domain.

Wistia

http://wistia.com/

Video

The king of online video, Wistia offers SEO-friendly solutions for video hosting. Both free and low-cost options available.

Free Trials

Moz Analytics

http://moz.com/products

Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Moz, Rank Tracking, Social

The flagship of the Moz software suite, Moz Analytics offers a dashboard of all your important marketing data in one place with actionable analytics for better marketing.

Optimizely

https://www.optimizely.com/

A/B Testing, CRO

Easy A/B testing and analytics to help you move toward success in your CRO efforts.

Raven

http://raventools.com/

Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Content, Social

Raven offers a classic suite of SEO, content, and research tools popular with many marketers.

Visual Website Optimizer

https://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/

A/B Testing, CRO

Visual Website Optimizer allows you to run A/B tests with a simple online editor that lets you test content without knowing code.

Wordtracker

http://www.wordtracker.com/

Keyword Research

A powerful keyword research suite used by many top marketers, Wordtracker offers a generous free trial option.

Free Tools

1. Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool

http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php

Link Research, Technical SEO

Worried about Google’s Penguin algorithm hitting you for over-optimized anchor text? Simply type in your URL for a full report of which links might raise flags.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Tools Suite, Diagnostic

Similar in function to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing offers a suite of interesting research tools and resources for webmasters.

3. Bitly

https://bitly.com/

Social, Analytics

Most people use Bitly for URL shortening, but the real power of this platform comes from its analytics.

4. Boomerang

http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Email, Productivity

Boomerang lets you follow up on emails, even when you forget. Great for link building or any time you send a lot of emails.

5. Buffer

https://bufferapp.com/

Social

Optimize your online social media sharing. Buffer allows you to share with your audience at the optimal times for greater visibility.

6. BuiltWith

http://builtwith.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Use BuiltWith to discover what technology nearly any website was, well, built with. Great for competitive intelligence as well.

7. Buzzstream Tools Suite

http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building

Link Building, Tools Suite, Email

Most people know Buzzstream as an outreach platform, but they also offer a number of free link-building tools. This company gets it.

8. Caption Tube

http://captiontube.appspot.com/

Video

Free and easy resource used to create captions for YouTube. Helps with usability and offers viewers a readable transcript.

9. CircleCount

http://www.circlecount.com/

Social, Analytics

Google+ analytics ramped up. Free resource to track your followers and analyze your shares. See how many followers you’ve gained over time.

10. Content Strategy Generator Tool

http://seogadget.com/content-strategy-generator-tool-v2-update/

Content

This tool from SEOgadget helps you plan your content strategy intelligently, using keyword research and estimating your audience size.

11. Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML

http://word2cleanhtml.com/

Content, Productivity

Despite the rise of Google Docs, Word still dominates much of the world. Copying and pasting has always been a hurdle, but this tool makes it easy.

12. Copyscape

http://www.copyscape.com/

Content

Copyscape serves both as a plagiarism checker and a duplicate-content checker. Great to use if your content has been distributed across the web.

13. Domain Hunter Plus

http://domainhunterplus.com/

Link Building

This magic extension for Chrome not only helps you find important broken links, but also tells you if the links point to an available domain.

14. Easel.ly

http://www.easel.ly/

Infographics

Free tools for creating and sharing inforgraphics. The templates allow anyone to create a professional-looking graphic.

15. Email Format

http://email-format.com/

Email, Productivity

Email Format helps you find the proper structure for thousands of companies and organizations across the web.

16. FindPeopleonPlus

http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/

Social

The ultimate Google+ directory that’s great for research, outreach, and link building. Sort by keywords, profession, country, and more.

17. Frobee Robots.txt Checker

http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check

Robots.txt, Technical SEO

Many robots.txt files contain hidden errors not easily visible to humans. Run your file through this tool and you never know what you’ll discover.

18. GetListed

https://getlisted.org/

Local, Moz

This awesome local SEO tool scores your local SEO visibility and gives you actionable next steps to raise your score.

19. Google Keyword Planner

http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner

Keyword Research

The tool to replace Google’s popular keyword tool has been derided by some, but still offers data not available anywhere else.

20. Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Analytics

The most popular of all the analytics tools available, Google Analytics continually innovates and sets the standard.

21. Google Analytics API

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008004?hl=en&ref_topic=1008008

API, Analytics

The Google Analytics API is great for building custom reports and tools, and also for pulling data straight into Excel or Google Docs.

22. Google Map Maker

http://www.google.com/mapmaker

Local

Among other things, Google Map Maker allows you to contribute to public map information, which may be shared and incorporated into Google Maps.

23. Google PageSpeed Insights

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Speed

Tools, data, and insights to improve your page speed. Page speed is correlated with better rankings and user engagement, so this matters.

24. Google Public Data

http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory

Content

Drawing on vast public databases, Google public data offers a great starting point for content research, infographics, and more.

25. Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

Technical SEO, CRO

That SEO Mofo! Use this tool to see how your snippet may appear in Google’s search results. Add structured data, review stars, and more.

26. Google Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Structured Data, Technical SEO

If you use Schema.org microformats or any other type of structured data, this tool will verify your markup.

27. Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/

Keyword Research

See what’s trending in Google search results and view keyword search popularity over time. A must for trends.

28. Google Webmaster

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Tools Suite, Diagnostic

The interface recently received an overhaul, and Google Webmaster remains a must-have resource of diagnostic and health tools for site owners.

29. IFTTT

https://ifttt.com/

Productivity

IFTTT stands for IF This, Then That. The tool allows you to create automatic triggers between various apps, like Gmail and Twitter.

30. Infogr.am

http://infogr.am/

Infographics

A great free Infographics resource that allows you to easily create graphics and data visualizations.

31. Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO Tools

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/tools/

Tools Suite

The Ninjas are some of the best SEOs and online marketers out there, and they’ve put some of their best tools online for free.

32. Linkstant

http://www.linkstant.com/

Link Building

This nifty analytics tool alerts you anytime someone links to your website. Great for outreach and intelligence gathering.

33. Linksy.me Email Guesser

http://linksy.me/find-email

Email, Link Building

Need to send an email, but you don’t have the recipient’s address? Type in what you know and this nifty tool will help you figure it out.

34. MailTester.com

http://mailtester.com/

Email

Need to send an email to an untested address, but you don’t want to spam them? Check it first with this mail tester to verify.

35. MozCast

http://mozcast.com/

SERP Tracking, Moz

Want to know if Google is testing its algorithm this week? MozCast gives you a daily weather report to track changes in the SERPs.

36. MyBlogGuest

http://myblogguest.com/

Link Building, Content

Guest blogging is still alive and thriving. MyBlogGuest helps you find the good opportunities out there.

37. Panguin Tool

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Analytics

This awesome tool connects with your Google Analytics account to help you see if and when you’ve been hit by Google Algorithm updates.

38. Pingdom

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Speed

Pingdom offers an entire suite of speed tools to help analyze page load, DNS issues, and connectivity.

39. Piwik

http://piwik.org/

Analytics

Piwik is a lightweight web analytics solution, and a great alternative to Google Analytics.

40. Rank Checker for Firefox

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

Rank Tracking

This light and easy desktop tool checks rankings with the click of a button. Quick, easy and free.

41. Rapportive

http://rapportive.com/

Email, Link Building, Productivity

Rapportive works with your Gmail inbox to give you near-instant rich contact information for almost everyone you want to reach. A must-have for marketers.

42. Remove Duplicate Items

http://ontolo.com/tools-remove-duplicates

Productivity

Ontolo offers a suite of link building software and a few helpful productivity tools for link builders. The remove duplicates tool solves a common problem.

43. Robots.txt Checker

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml

Robots.txt, Technical SEO

Use robots best practices and discover hidden errors in your robots.txt files that may cause search engine crawling problems.

44. Schema Creator

http://schema-creator.org/

Structured Data, Technical SEO

Everyone loves using Schema.org, but the microformats are difficult to write by hand. This generator from the folks at Raven simplifies the task.

45. Scraper for Chrome

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/

Productivity

If you’ve never scraped a webpage, you’re missing out. Scraper for Chrome puts the power of simple web scraping in your hands without the need for code.

46. Seer Toolbox

http://www.seerinteractive.com/seo-toolbox/

Tools Suite, Analytics, Link Research

SEER opened up its internal toolbox for everyone in the world to use. These are the same tools used in-house at SEER, and they rock.

47. SEO Toolbar

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

Tools Suite, Toolbar, Technical SEO

On of the most popular tools available, The SEO Toolbar puts a ton of information at your fingertips including backlinks and competitive research.

48. SEO Tools for Excel

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

Tools Suite, Analytics, Social

You don’t need to be an Excel ninja to use Niels Bosma’s SEO Tools for Excel. This plugin does so many things many SEOs won’t work without it.

49. SEOgadget Links API

http://seogadget.com/api/

API, Link Research

The SEOgadget Links API lets you easily gather not only backlink data but contact information as well. A huge time saver.

50. SEOgadget Tools

http://seogadget.com/tools/

Tools Suite

This suite of tools from the Gadget lab includes several Excel plugins, a content strategy generator, and more.

51. SEOQuake

http://www.seoquake.com/

Toolbar, Tools Suite, Technical SEO

More raw data than any other SEO toolbar out there.

52. SharedCount

http://www.sharedcount.com/

Social, Analytics

Want to know how any piece of content was shared socially across the major services? This is the tool to use.

53. SharedCount API

http://www.sharedcount.com/documentation.php

API, Social

Harnessing the combined statistics of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and more, the SharedCount API puts a ton of social data at your fingertips.

54. Similar Page Checker

http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

Content, Technical SEO

Use this tool to check for duplicate content issues. The Similar Page Checker will give you a score of how closely the HTML of two pages resemble each other.

55. Sitemap Generators

http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

Sitemaps

Google offers a slew of free, top-notch sitemap generators. Most of these live on your server and generate new sitemaps automatically.

56. Social Authority API

https://followerwonk.com/social-authority

API, Social

How much reach and social authority do your followers have? How about the people you’re trying to connect with? The free Social Authority API will tell you.

57. Social Crawlytics

https://socialcrawlytics.com/

Social, Analytics

Social Crawlytics allows you to conduct competitive research by showing you your competitors’ most-shared content. Lots of other features as well.

58. Social Mention

http://www.socialmention.com/

Social

Social mention offers real-time social media search and analysis. Enter a search term and see who’s sharing what, right now.

59. Text Cleaner

http://www.textcleanr.com/

Content

Some of the best tools solve the simplest problems. Text cleaner cleans up all kinds of text formatting when copying and pasting between aplications.

60. Ubersuggest

http://ubersuggest.org/

Keyword Research

Every SEO loves Ubersuggest for its ease of use and wealth of keyword research ideas. Utilizing the power of Google Suggest, it returns hundreds of potential results.

61. URI Valet

http://urivalet.com/

Technical SEO

A great tool for digging into server headers, canonical information, analyzing redirect problems and more.

62. Virante SEO Tools

http://www.virante.org/seo-tools

Tools Suite

Virant offers a number of high quality SEO tools to the public. These are often the same tools developed for the Virant team, opened up for public use.

63. Wayback Machine

http://archive.org/web/web.php

Competitive Intelligence

Want to see the history of your website or your competitor’s site? The Wayback Machine allows you to step back in time and track important changes.

64. WebPagetest

http://www.webpagetest.org/

Speed

Quick and easy website speed tool. Offers suggestions for improving performance.

65. Wordle

http://www.wordle.net/

Content

Create beautiful word clouds. Great for visualizations, graphics, and research.

66. Wordstream Free Keyword Tools

http://www.wordstream.com/free-keyword-tools

Keyword Research, Tools Suite

In addition to its paid offerings, Wordstream offers a suite of free keyword tools offering access to thousands of keyword suggestions.

67. Xenu’s Link Sleuth

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Diagnostic, Technical SEO

Winner of the ugliest-SEO-tool-on-the-planet award, Xenu is also one of the most useful. Crawl entire sites, find broken links, create sitemaps, and more.

68. XML-Sitemaps.com

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Sitemaps

XML-Sitemaps offers probably the easiest sitemap creation solution anywhere. Great for smaller sites when you need a sitemap in minutes.

69. Yahoo Pipes

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Content, Productivity

A great mashup tool that combines different feeds into content and other magical creations. Used for link building and whatever you can dream of.

70. Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Technical SEO

If you could only choose one WordPress plugin for you site, the first would be from Yoast, and so would the second. This one sets the standard.

71. YouTube Analytics

https://www.youtube.com/analytics

Video, Analytics

Offers video-specific analytics for YouTube videos. A must-have for YouTube video publishers.

Free and Paid

72. Ahrefs

https://ahrefs.com/

Link Research, Link Building

One of the more popular link research tools, Ahrefs offers a large index and nice anchor text distribution charts. Mostly a paid tool, but they offer some free data.

73. Banana Tag

http://bananatag.com/

Email

Banana Tag allows you to track your emails after you send them. For example, check your email open rates from Gmail.

74. CloudFlare

https://www.cloudflare.com/

Speed

How do they make CloudFlare free? It works both as a CDN and a security service to provide your website with speed and safety.

75. Followerwonk

https://followerwonk.com/

Social, Analytics, Moz

Perhaps the coolest thing about Followerwonk is the ability to track your followers. Smart SEOs also use it for outreach and research.

76. Keyword Eye

http://www.keywordeye.com/

Keyword Research

Keyword eye adds a twist to keyword research by adding rich visualizations — essential when you want to move beyond keywords to valuable concepts.

77. KnowEm

http://knowem.com/

Social

KnowEm allows you to check 100’s of social profiles at once to check availability. Looking for the perfect brand name? Check KnowEm first.

78. Majestic SEO

http://www.majesticseo.com/

Link Research, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building

You’ve probably seen Majestic SEO link charts all over the Internet. Great crawling technology combined with several free options make for great link research.

79. Majestic SEO API

http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/majestic-seo-api-now-explained/

API, Link Research

Majestic makes much of its backlink data available for free via its API.

80. MozBar

http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

Tools Suite, Toolbar, Moz

The standard SEO toolbar for legions of marketers, the MozBar allows you to perform over 50 key tasks right from your browser. Highly recommended.

81. Mozscape API

http://moz.com/products/api

API, Link Research, Moz

Companies everywhere incorporate the Mozscape API into their own products, but it’s also available to individuals, and much of the data is free.

82. nTopic

http://www.ntopic.org/

Content

nTopic is one of the few proven methods for giving your content a relevancy score and offering keyword suggestions to improve it.

83. Open Site Explorer

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Link Research, Moz, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building

When Google and Yahoo started removing backlink data from the public, Moz built Open Site Explorer to fill a huge need. See backlinks, anchor text, popularity metrics and more.

84. Piktochart

http://piktochart.com/

Infographics

A cute and easy infographic generator. No experience required.

85. RowFeeder

https://rowfeeder.com/

Social, Analytics

RowFeeder allows you to track social usernames, hashtags and keywords and load that information into Excel for easy social media monitoring.

86. Screaming Frog

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Diagnostic, Technical SEO

A powerful website crawling tool with a ton of features and customizations. A must-have for most serious SEOs.

87. Searchmetrics Visibility Charts

http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research

SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence

Track the search visibility of any website, in addition to tracking winners and losers in Google’s search results.

88. SEMrush

http://www.semrush.com/

Tools Suite, Keyword Research, Competitive Intelligence

The paid and organic keyword data offered by SEMrush is often scary good and comprehensive. Also great for researching competitors’ ads.

89. SERPmetrics

http://serpmetrics.com/flux/

SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence

SERPmetrics flux charts track the flux for US search results across Yahoo, Bing and Google over a 30-day period. A paid API is also available.

90. SimilarWeb

http://www.similarweb.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Impressive competitive intelligence across a number of online industries. Competitor website stats are hard to come by, but Similar Web does a good job.

91. StatCounter

http://statcounter.com/

Analytics

Free, quick, and lightweight analytics solution. Often used by those who want to avoid using Google Analytics for privacy reasons.

92. Trello

https://trello.com/

Productivity

Project management and tracking made simple. Used and endorsed by Moz.

93. Whitespark Local Citation Finder

https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/

Local

Finding local citations is key to local SEO. Whitespark offers a number of free and paid solutions to find the local citations to rise above the competition.

94. Whois Lookup

http://whois.domaintools.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Find registration, contact, and administrative information for any domain.

95. Wistia

http://wistia.com/

Video

The king of online video, Wistia offers SEO-friendly solutions for video hosting. Both free and low-cost options available.

Free Trials

96. Moz Analytics

http://moz.com/products

Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Moz, Rank Tracking, Social

The flagship of the Moz software suite, Moz Analytics offers a dashboard of all your important marketing data in one place with actionable analytics for better marketing.

97. Optimizely

https://www.optimizely.com/

A/B Testing, CRO

Easy A/B testing and analytics to help you move toward success in your CRO efforts.

98. Raven

http://raventools.com/

Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Content, Social

Raven offers a classic suite of SEO, content, and research tools popular with many marketers.

99. Visual Website Optimizer

https://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/

A/B Testing, CRO

Visual Website Optimizer allows you to run A/B tests with a simple online editor that lets you test content without knowing code.

100. Wordtracker

http://www.wordtracker.com/

Keyword Research

A powerful keyword research suite used by many top marketers, Wordtracker offers a generous free trial option.