Useful Free SEO Resources

Free Keyword Research Tools

  • Google Alerts: Allow Google to dig through its billions of indexed webpages to find content that fits the keywords you seek. This tool works especially for staying up-to-date with blog chatter about your business and the products in your industry. Just set Type = Blog when adding an alert. Also works well to find people talking about your business.
  • Microsoft adCenter Labs -- Demographics Prediction: While the margin of error on this tool should be seen as very high, you can find extremities in demographics for a your niche, such as male/female ratio.
  • SEO Chat -- PageRank Lookup: This is my favorite PageRank lookup tool. You can enter up to 100 URLs to find their PageRank.
  • Soovle: A very... strange keyword search research tool that searches Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and a few other websites for your keywords. This is more entertaining than useful.
  • Google Trends: Learn how the waves of the Internet are breaking by researching trends in search over the past few years. For example, "foreclosures" shows a strong increase in early 2008 (and has yet to go down).
  • DMOZ Human-edited web directory: The holy grail of web directories. In my opinion, it is pretty much the only directory that matters. Google loves DMOZ. This should be a first stop for every online entity once their site is up and running. Acceptance into DMOZ can take up to several months, so make your request ASAP and be patient.
  • Wordpress: This is one of the most popular and user-friendly content management systems in use today. Wordpress is a blog out of the box, but can be turned into a full-fledged ecommerce website.
  • SXC stock photos free: While limited in their selection, most images are high quality and free to use. This is the quickest way to find images without paying or getting into sticky copyright laws.