Any successful foray into SEO would have the need for tools to help us build and analyze our results and alter our strategies accordingly. Without using these tools, our job would be significantly harder than it should be.

What kind of tools are most appropriate and most effective to the professional SEO? Virtually anything on the Internet can be used in such a way as to provide some value to us. However, what we want to focus on for this article is a discussion of the applications designed to achieve one specific goal to improve the results of your website.

Look at YouTube – this site contains many tools all rolled into one. YouTube can provide a whole host of information about how your videos are viewed, by whom, how often, and so much more. Therefore, we could spend days talking about all that YouTube can do for you and your videos, so let’s save that discussion for another article… or two.

For an extensive array of tools in one concise package, look no further than the Google Toolbar. The main feature of benefit to an SEO is the PageRank display. The PageRank feature provides you with ballpark rating as to how important Google believes a page to be. It takes many factors into consideration including the number of oneway inbound links in addition to perhaps as many as a dozen or two others.

Want to know where the pages of your website rank in the major search engines? Checkout Webpostion’s reporting tool to know exactly where your pages rank on any given day. Let it run over night and in the morning, just review the reports.

As you have learned in SEO, it?s absolutely crucial to select the correct keyword(s) for your topic; otherwise your work could be lost in the search engine shuffle. There are a number of keyword tools to help you. One of the best keyword tools out on the web is the Google Keyword Tool. This application returns the volume of searches for the keywords you input and gives alternate suggestions and their volumes as well.

Yahoo!’s Keyword Suggestion Tool is one that has been around a long time however, its usefulness now is waning. Once the near-defacto free keyword researc tool, it is now plagued by congestion due to his usage by searhers and advertisers alike. Another problem is its inability to distinguish between plural and singular versions of keywords.

The defacto statndard of professional SEOs for nearly a decade has been Wordtracker. What sets it apart from virtually all other tools is its default „phrase match“ paradigm. Although most people do not enclose their searches in double quotes, doing so when researching keywords can lead to more accurate predictions. Wordtracker is now available in both a paid and free version; however, keep in mind – you get what you pay for; pun intended.

If your time is valuable like mine, you may want to invest in a professional paid tool such as Keywordtopia. This time-saving keyword research tool conducts searches through multiple tools in a single search providing you with a comprehensive list from which to narrow down and refine to locate both the ‚research‘ and the ‚buying‘ keywords of your target market.

As small, yet powerful free tool from those guys over at Google provides you with a quick estimate of clicks and bid prices for your keywords. Keep in mind that as competition heats up for organic search engine optimization, businesses turn to advertising using the ‚cost per click‘ or CPC or CPA ‚cost per action‘ model to attract prospects to their sites. The Google Traffic Estimator can be found in their Adwords toolbox. Check it out.

A tool from Windows Live, Demographics Prediction – this predicts the target demographic for a particular keyword or URL, based on gender, age, and other demographic data, and based on what search terms they use and what sites they visit. This is a good way for merchants to learn more about their customers and come up with suitable marketing campaigns.

Search Funnel, also from Windows Live, this helps you to determine the sequence of keywords searchers usually use. This is to find out how users narrow down or refine their query, by looking at what they would search for next after the first search term.