There are many various tools which help make the job of SEO quicker. These are
some of my more commonly used tools. All the tools in this section are free.

• FireFox browser – browser allows tabbed browsing, which saves a ton of
time when I am looking at about a half dozen sites at the same time.
(http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox)

• Firefox Bookmarks and Extensions – extensions and bookmarks I use to
customize Firefox to make SEO easier.
(http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/bookmarklets.html)
• Internet Explorer
(http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx)
• Internet Archive – shows the history of websites.
(http://www.archive.org/)
• Digital Point keyword ranking, backlink, and PageRank checker – I use this
tool to view my position for various websites in Google, Yahoo!, and
MSN. It also helps me hypothesize some of the ways they may have
changed their algorithms.
(http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords)
• Xenu Link Sleuth – finds broken links on your site, and helps you build a
sitemap. (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html)
• Sitemaps Protocol – official xml sitemap protocol supported by the major
search engines. Please note that these xml sitemaps are different than your
internal sitemaps. (http://www.sitemaps.org/)
• Free Meta Tag Generator – helps you create the code for your page title
and meta tags
(http://tools.seobook.com/meta-medic/)
• The Google Toolbar – good for highlighting keyword proximity and usage
and doing many things like giving you a quick glimpse of a cached copy of
a page. (http://toolbar.google.com/) If you are doing lots of exceptionally
aggressive promotional techniques it may be unwise to install any toolbar
distributed by a major search engine since it will help them track and cross
reference your sites.
• Google Toolbar buttons - if you use the Google toolbar for Internet
Explorer you can create custom buttons to act as an RSS reader or link to
various useful tools, like a site’s WhoIs history. I created a number of
buttons here (http://tools.seobook.com/buttons/)
• Show IP – FireFox extension shows what IP Google results are coming
from (http://l4x.org/site/node/1078)
• GoLexa – SEO Swiss Army Knife tool (http://www.golexa.com/)
• Office application. Things like spreadsheets make life much easier as an
SEO. I use MicroSoft Office sometimes (http://office.microsoft.com/)
and sometimes I use OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/). Either
will probably work for most jobs. OpenOffice can create PDF documents

for free. The newest beta version of Internet Explorer also can produce
PDF documents from web pages.
• Myriad Search – meta search service which makes it easy to compare the
top search results from the major search engines
(http://www.myriadsearch.com/)
• Espion – Free download application which makes it easy to change your
user agent to check for user agent based cloaking.
(http://tools.webguerrilla.com/new-browser-app/)
• Content generation & scripting: http://www.elance.com is an online
auction where people bid on your projects. You can find real bad deals and
real gems there. http://www.constant-content.com is a content bank full
of content for sale. The US government and the BBC are also offering free
RSS feeds. Some people also use sites like http://craigslist.org/ to look for
affordable writers.