10 SEO Must-have Tools for Your SEO Supremacy Kit

If SEO, as a method of online marketing, keeps changing all the time, the tools in your closet grow, age, and die.

According to Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, the SEO industry is very fragmented and has grown too diverse to have any one set of tools forever. As for most things, your SEO tools portfolio needs a relook every once in a while. Thanks to the recent spate of changes in Google’s policing of the web, there are more changes in order and tons to do as far as SEO is concerned.

Here are at least 10 SEO tools you must have to regain SEO supremacy for your business:

Open Site Explorer

It was as big as it is today but Open Site Explorer is a free but extremely practical tool for SEO professionals. It’s now expanded on its functionality and usage. It’s also flexible, cost effective, and has a large, ever growing index as far as data is concerned. It’s almost always the first tool you ought to fire up before working on your SEO analysis. Enter your website URL and you’ll immediately see the inbound links and attributes related to your website.

SEOmoz Tools

Although Open Site Explorer is also a part of the SEOmoz toolset for SEO, we decided to cover that separately. SEOmoz has fully transitioned into creating tools and software for SEO for a while now and they have, by far, some of the best tools for SEO in the market. Further, it’s not like they’d create software without taking the ever-changing SEO scene; they almost always keep their software updated while prowling for new acquisitions all the while working to create new tools.

Raven Tools

If there’s another set of all-inclusive toolset we can recommend after SEOmoz’s own, it should be Raven tools. They are so good that Rand – in spite of being a direct competitor admires and respects the company. With more than 30+ online tools to help you with your SEO and online marketing efforts, it’s a company with a monomaniacal mission to aid your marketing efforts – from SEO Research to metrics and reporting.

Authority Labs

Authority labs has been getting a few rave reviews lately and they provide you with a web-based Interface where you can add domains or pages, keywords or groups of keywords, track your competition, and bypass Google’s strict rules and pretty cat-and-mouse games. If you have to, you can narrow down your search efforts to as low as city and zip level tracking.

Search Enabler

Usually software development is slower than the pace at which SEO itself changes. Yet, SearchEnabler comes to your rescue. With an easy to use interface and in accordance to SEO best practices, it helps you with SEO Campaigns, Website analysis, Backlink analysis, On Page optimization, Keyword rankings, and even reporting using dashboards and reports.

Featuring a 360 degrees approach for SEO, it provides you with quick SEO campaign set up, inline recommendations for Google, Domain analysis, website crawl analysis, content analysis and much more. SearchEnabler also integrates with social media (drawing on social signals) and with Google Analytics.

Search Enabler is a must have tool for any businesses. More so if you are an SEO professional who needs a robust tool for effective SEO campaign deployment.

Google Analytics

No SEO is worth it without using the stupendous power of real-time reporting, search traffic trends with respect to your own web properties, and insights on your visitor behavior. No tool comes close to the irresistible value proposition Google Analytics provides for SEO efforts.

Working across channels such as paid search, organic search, direct visits, and social media, you could glean all the information you ever needed to analyze visitor behavior using Google Analytics. We agree that there are many more analytics tools and you might even want to use them to complement your Google Analytics usage.

Yet, Google Analytics stands alone as a tool that no one with anything to do with SEO can afford to ignore.

Google Webmaster tools

If your SEO efforts about trying to get found on leading search engines such as Google, what’s better than Google’s own set of Webmaster tools available for SEO professionals, web masters, and business owners? Further, Google provides continuing web education for SEO purposes (Videos and articles), web master tools, and a full-time support center.

SEO Sites Tools Plugin for Chrome

Wouldn’t it be nice to know everything you had to by just using a browser addon instead of an entire suite of software? Since full-fledged SEO suites aren’t for everyone and because gleaning information off a browser is so much more efficient, the SEO Sites Tool extension for Chrome browser stands out. Search Engine Journal swears by it too, just in case you were looking for some social proof.

WooRank

More than 800,000 small businesses trust this little web-based tool called WooRank – for a simple reason: it just works. WooRank is free to start with and follows a “pay more if you want more” model. It features continuous search tracking, competitive analysis, smart dashboard, tasks manager, inside page tracking, and KPI monitoring.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

If more than 63% of the websites in the world are powered by WordPress, chances are that you’d be using WordPress as your primary CMS. In that case, you’d still have plenty of options for optimizing your blog for SEO but nothing works better than WordPress for Yoast. The plugin is robust, complete, and is always updated. It deems to work for any business as long as it runs on WordPress. Technically, it’s not software but it’s a plugin that you can’t possibly miss.

Of course this isn’t an exhaustive list. SEO will change in a few months by the time you read this — the key is to keep on top of information and pick up new tools as they come by.