There is such a wide variety of SEO tools to use on the internet all with the same claim of getting you a guaranteed top 3 position etc. This is a list of tools I found useful when starting out SEO they are all free initially for what you will need to do, some have restrictions on the free versions and depending on how far you want to go with SEO or how useful you find them you may want to consider upgrading them to a premium or pro version, but you can make your own mind up on that.
1) SEO Moz’s beginner’s guide to Search Engine Optimisation- This is quite in depth for a beginners guide but definitely reading through in detail and making sure you understand each chapter. It covers all the important areas of SEO from indexing and how search engines operate to the complex world of link building.
2) Google’s webmaster tools- This is great for an overview of your site on the web, setting this up is a priority and should be at the top of your list once your site is live, ensuring sitemaps are functioning, which files are restricted by robots, how frequently your site is being crawled and many more useful features.
3) Ad words editor- I am a big believer in using PPC for SEO as you can see the trends in users search terms and the effect of keywords quicker than you would by making changes to the keywords for your site. Ad words editor allows you to easily manage your campaigns offline and highlights duplicating keywords and problem ads that won’t be approved.
4) A1 sitemap generator- This software will crawl your site and build you a search engine friendly xml sitemap, within the software you can also ping your sitemap off to the most popular search engines all in one go, very handy tool saves a lot of time doing this manually.
5) Web developer extension for Firefox- This flexible tool lets you just about anything to a webpage, it is handy for SEO as you can quickly view Meta data, JavaScript’s, heading tags and external links.
6) Google Analytics- Lets you know all the important information detailing traffic sources, individual campaigns customize reports anything going on with your website you can find in analytics. Setting up Goals and funnels is a must to put targets on your website, I suggest using a tutorial to help learn how to do this step by step.
7) SEO Quake Add on- A Useful tool that I mainly use to measure keyword density on any given webpage or file, this helps as some articles sites are fussy worth their keyword density and some people obsesses over having it at nor more than 5% etc.
8) Google Page Rank Tool- Named after Larry Page not webpage rank (just a little SEO fact for you). This lets you know 3 important pieces of information at a glance, the page rank of any site, a cached snapshot of a page letting you know when Google last visited and the back links of a site (which sites are linking to any given site).
9) Page Rank Bot- This has now replaced Web CEO they do pretty much the same thing, letting you know where you are ranked for a given search term on different search engines. However I find it easier to use on the web as opposed to fiddling around with an application.
10) SEO Book’s toolbar- This has all the usual page rank and site information features (actually the page rank info. Is usually a little bit quicker at loading than Google), the main extra I like and find extremely useful is highlighting no follow links, this is very useful for link building using in sites like forum you can tell if links are to be followed by engines or not, obviously saves you wasting your time posting in forums that don’t have search engines follow their links.