I thought it would be a fantastic idea to show you some of the SEO tools that you can use to analyze your site, and make changes if need be. If anything, these tools are just simply fun to use, and you can check all of your friends sites as well! Nothing wrong with a little healthy SEO competition, right?

Here are six of my favorite SEO Tools to get you started:

1. Backlink Anchor Text Analysis – This tool is especially useful, as we all know that anchor text (if you don’t, then take my word for it) plays a huge part in the weight given to a link to your site. By inputting your URL, you can check all of the backlinks pointing to your site and the anchor text used for each. Quality, relevant, keyword related anchor text is the best way to link to someone, so if you see people that are linking to you using the infamous “click here”, kindly shoot them an email and ask them to change it if they have time. It’s worth the trouble.

2. Free Keyword Suggestion Tool – Okay, so I covered this a little in my last post, but it’s definitley worth listing again. As you know, it’s an quick way to nail down some nice keywords, and get a general idea of the amount of search volume each one commands. Quick, easy, and fun.

3. Domain Stats Tool – Yeah, spying on your competitor is so much fun! This tool comes in handy if you just can’t seem to figure out why your enemies are ranking higher than you (other than the normal stuff). Input a URL, and it will tell you things like domain age, big directory listings, backlink count in the big 3 (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Nothing too detailed, but it may be useful information at one point or another.

4. Keyword Difficulty Check – This seo tool is just downright cool. In your quest for the ultimate keywords, wouldn’t it be nice to see how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword? Problem solved. This famous tool over at SEOChat will do just that. It will tell you how hard it’s going to be percentage wise to rank for whatever keyword you put in. For instance, the keyword “SEO” gets a score of 78.5%, compared to “Florida SEO Company” scores a 42.03%. I could actually do this for hours, so I better move on before I digress….

5. Google Vs. Yahoo Search Results – Talk about interesting. This tool lets you put in a keyword or keyphrase of your choice, and after it runs, it will present you with a graph showing where they rank on each site. Lines are drawn across the graph for matching domains. It’s very cool to see how each search engine ranks pages for certain keywords. For instance, I ran a query on the keyword “seo tips”, and I noticed that the 3rd result site in Google is ranked well over 40 in Yahoo. Not all of them are that far apart..some are actually really close. By the way, does anyone know the algorithms for each? I just need to borrow it real quick….

6. Term Extractor – This little handy tool will let you input a URL, and after analyzing, it will tell you what it thinks is a search engine targeted term. This is a VERY clever tool, which I recommend you run on your site periodically, that way if you’re trying to target “garden tools” and the term extractor tells you that it thinks “sea monkey poop” is more SE targeted, that you have some work to do, keyword density wise!

There you have it, six fun and potentially very useful tools that you can use to help keep things in check, as well as kill time. Once you start playing with these fun online seo tools, it’s hard to stop! I’ll be posting more tools in the future, so stay tuned.