I’ve been working on several Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns lately and started to wonder how I ever did anything without the great reporting tools that are out there today. Keeping regular reports of your SEO efforts is not only great for sending to clients, but is also essential for tracking your progress on do-it-yourself campaigns.

Here are my top 5 SEO reporting tools and a brief review of each to help you get your feet wet:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

As the first step in your SEO campaign, you’ll need to compile a list of targeted keyword phrases to optimize your site for. Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you can input a general keyword phrase and it will very quickly return a list of related keyword phrases along with their estimated monthly search volumes.

This tool is intended for Adwords campaigns, but the data it delivers is very relevant to your SEO efforts. In just a few minutes, you can export (txt, excel, csv) a list of keyword phrases for your niche and then sort by search volume to decide which keyword phrases you want to try and tackle.

Link Diagnosis Backlink Reporter

I’ve used Link Diagnosis since it was first announced 2 years ago, and I must say that I have never been disappointed. Enter your website’s domain name and click start. You are returned a breakdown of all links pointing back to your site from other websites. Check the PageRank, anchor text and no-follow status of your backlinks on one screen.

This tool has evolved very much since its first release, and you can now create an account to save your reports and even group and track progress on individual projects. Export your reports to CSV to further analyze or format your data. You can also try their Site Diagnosis tool, where you enter your XML Sitemap address and discover what pages on your site are actually indexed.

Rank Checker Firefox Extension

Another lifesaver from Aaron Wall, author of SEO Book. This tool installs directly into Firefox as an extension so that you can run ranking reports while you’re browsing. Enter your website’s domain name, then paste in your list of keywords to add them to the queue. Click start and Rank Checker will begin fetching your rankings for Google, Yahoo! and Live.

Export your findings to a CSV file for further analysis, and save your queue for 1 click reporting next time. You can save multiple jobs, complete with historical data reporting, and even schedule regular scans for no hassle reporting. Also be sure to check out Aaron’s other SEO tools.

Website Grader

Hubspot’s Website Grader was referred to me by Suzanne Willis a few years ago, and I have been using it regularly ever since. Just enter your website’s domain name and click generate. It is great for evaluating a website’s SEO status at the start of a project, as well as at regularly scheduled increments during project execution.

You can get a quick glance at SEO vitals like: metadata and alt description usage, domain age & expiration, number of indexed pages, last crawl date and more. I include these stats with my monthly SEO reports to make sure everything is in order and to keep an eye on progress.

Google Analytics

We can’t forget about the bottom line: traffic. Google Analytics allows you to analyze your website’s traffic to see where visitors are coming from. Traffic sources are clearly broken into search engines, referring sites (links) and direct traffic. You can quickly see how you are doing at any point in your campaign, and this data is vital for your SEO efforts.

Simply add the Google Analytics tracking code to your site and it will start tracking your traffic sources, average time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit, most popular pages, referring keyword phrases and more. Then, add your goal conversion pages and track your conversion rate.

Conclusion

I hope you find these free SEO reporting tools to be as useful as I have. If you need further help, each tool provides ample documentation to help you get started. Best of luck with your SEO endeavors!

What SEO reporting tools do you use? Comment below.

As a web consultant, I interact with business owners every day. The questions I am asked most are usually about SEO, with some very widely (and wildly) misunderstood concepts. Here are my top 5 SEO myths:

5) SEO is some sort of black magic or voodoo

SEO is not black magic or voodoo, though it can sometimes seem like it. The reason is because Google and other major search engines do not fully disclose their complex search ranking algorithms. In addition, sometimes they update their algorithms, and you can see an unexpected shift in rankings. This is obviously not black magic, and you can keep up on all of Google’s algorithm updates by subscribing to the blog over at Search Engine Roundtable.

4) You have to submit your website to 100′s of search engines to get ranked

In the old days of search, it was recommended to submit your site to hundreds or even thousands of search engines. However, things have changed, and sometimes it is not necessary at all (and it definitely wont have any effect on rankings). To get crawled and (hopefully) indexed by the search engines, you simply need a popular site linking to you. I say popular because if your link is on an unpopular site, it takes Google and the other engines longer to find your link, as they visit more popular sites more often. You can still add your URL at Google, however there is no guarantee that it will ever get crawled.

3) The more domain names you own, the better you will rank

Somewhere, someone started a rumor that by creating mass amounts of mini-sites or having multiple forwarded domains will help your rankings. The concept makes sense, but in reality I feel that your efforts are better spent building one large, authoritative, content rich site than spreading your resources over multiple smaller sites. What about building a great site and copying it over and over? It’s spam, and Google has a rule against it called Duplicate Content. Regarding forwarded domains, Google will only index the final domain where the forwarding finally resolves. Nice try!

2) Solely participating on social media sites will get you ranked

Don’t get me wrong, social media is great for SEO. However, it is not simply the act of participating in social media that helps you rank. It takes a bit of creativity, building of trust and know-how to truly boost rankings using social media. The concept is that through social media, you have the opportunity to network and acquire inbound links from other sites, which will definitely improve your rankings. It is usually not the profile links on the social networks that achieve this (as most profiles, walls and time-lines are either not indexed or use no-follow), but it is the individual site owners you build relationships with and kindly help your bottom line by linking to you.

and finally, my number one SEO myth is:

1) Meta keyword tags will get you ranking at the top

Ahhh, finally, my arch-nemesis, the ol’ meta keywords tag. This actually did work for awhile! It is a hidden tag in the HEAD section of every web page (in your browser click: View > Source to see it) that lists all of the keywords that you would like to rank for. Simple, right? Wrong! It was abused time and time again, so the engines dropped it completely. What? You just viewed the source on this page and you can see that I’m still using it? Well, you’ll still see some of the smaller engines and site search functions use the tag for indexing. In addition, some people believe that since it does not necessarily hurt your rankings, its a good idea to include them for good measure. I find that it is best not to stuff the tag though. Stick with, perhaps, 5-6 of your most relevant keywords for that page.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed my top 5 SEO myths. If you did not understand some of the concepts, I recommend reading up on Search Engine Optimization over at Arron Wall’s SEOBook. Also, be sure to subscribe to our feed to receive my upcoming SEO Crash Course.

What are some of the most outrageous SEO myths you have heard? Comment below.