Marjolein Hoekstra sent me a note about a beautiful collection of free
SEO tools at http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html.
I remember seeing this site early last year. It’s improved dramatically.
You have to scroll down through a bit of advertising, but it’s well worth
it. There are some real gems here, like finding out how old your domain is
and comparing it to your competition’s, a Sandbox tool, Class C Range
Checker to make sure your sites are on different Class C networks, just to
name a few.
They are easy to use, run quickly and the SEOCompany.ca folks have
clearly spent a lot of time organizing and adjusting the appearance of the
site. What I particularly like is that they use RSS to send out updates on
new tools. What a relief it is to see SEO folks using RSS. If only more
would do that, especially for reports that need to be run and accessed via
login periodically.
I’ve been doing SEO work now for 5 years. The quality of the free SEO
tools has made giant steps forward. Though it’s difficult for me to know for
certain how well these tools are maintained, maintanance was a problem in
the past. The longer you used the tools, the more you could tell they were
written once, put up, and rarely, if ever, updated.
The other issue with free SEO tools is you don’t get to archive a history
of your results or keep results as projects for future reference. And that
makes sense, really, because compiling databases of results and keeping
histories takes storage and login security, so simple tools start becoming
complex – quickly. This is why you pay for the better tools – e.g.,
Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSet and others – they keep track of your SEO project
reports for you.
Anyway, check out the SEOCompany’s free SEO tools. I can promise you’ll
find at least one you’ll use on occasion, even if you’re paying for an
integrated toolset that has all the bells and whistles. There’s always room
for improvement, and it so often comes from the edge.
Tom
