In my last SEO University (SES Toronto – Day 2 – SEO University) post I promised that I would provide you with a comprehensive list of the top free / cheap tools for building your business online. The recommendations come from Ken Jurina, a founder of Epiar and one of the panelists at Search Engine Strategies Toronto’s session: Tool Time: The Search Marketer’s Free-to-Cheap Goodie Bag. Ken’s presentation was my favorite from last year’s conference and I was excited to see what new tools he had to recommend.

• 1) Firefox Extensions (https://addons.mozilla.org/en‐US/firefox/) – Add-ons are extensions of the browser that add new functionality to Firefox or change its appearance
• Pros: Tools work right within your browser, very quick, very powerful, and very free
• Critiques: None ‐ critiques usually resolved with extension updates
• Cool: Audit a clients site live: SE issues, opt. improvement – SEO Extensions: SEOpen, Search Status, Web Developer, Groowe Toolbar, CustomizeGoogle, SEO Quake – Others: PDF Download, Google Image Preview, Roboform
  
• Cost: FREE

• 2) IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com/) – IceRocket is an Internet search engine specialized in searching blogs.
  
• Pros: Real‐time monitoring of blogs/social media, Link, topic & trend tracking tools
• Critiques: Can’t search videos directly, Some searches take up to a minute to load
• Cool: BigBuzz Search
• Cost: FREE

• 3) Google Geo Search (http://www.contentranch.com/google-geo-search-tool/) – The Google Search Tool is a simple tool that creates a url to the official google search page based on the location and data center you choose.
• Pros: Search Google by region, Simple to use, quick and streamlined
• Critiques: None
• Cool: No ads, No clutter
• Cost: FREE
  

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• 4) Domain Report Tool (http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm) – The Domain Report tool will check Google, Yahoo! Search and Live Search to see how many pages for each site are indexed in each engine.
• Pros: Tally & compare search engine indexing, Determine competitor search presence
• Critiques: No export option, Can take up to 5 minutes
• Cool: Free! Even without ‘Bruce Clay’ subscription
• Cost: FREE
  

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• 5) BackTweets (http://backtweets.com/) – Search for links on Twitter.
• Pros: Search Twitter for links to your site, See’s through compressed URL’s, Sort results by date or user
• Critiques: None
• Cool: Set up regular RSS updates
• Cost: FREE
  

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• 6) Know’em (http://knowem.com/) – KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media websites.
• Pros: Check brand‐name availability for 120 social networks, Very quick and easy!
• Critiques: Occasional network error when pinging site(s)
• Cool: Promote brand cohesiveness, Monitor brand/identity theft, Can automatically register your username for extra$$
• Cost: FREE

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  7) Backlink Checker Tool (http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php) – Enables webmasters to check their pagerank, monitor the PR of competitor’s backlinks, estimate a value of their site, and more.
• Pros: Quickly oversee a site’s backlinks, Show which links have the ‘nofollow’ tag, List anchor text for incoming links as well as their PageRank
• Critiques: Don’t forget the ‘http://’ or it returns no results
• Cool: Smartpagerank.com also has other useful tools
• Cost: FREE

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  8) SpyFu (http://www.spyfu.com/) – Spy on your online competitors and download competitors keywords and adwords.
• Pros: Great competitive insight on PPC & Organic, Works in browser, quick & thorough, Free stuff is good – though you can subscribe for more
• Critiques: Busy interface, Not intuitive as to what a particular button/tool does
• Cool: Dashboard: charts and data mash‐ups
• Cost: FREE plus subscription options

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  9) GSiteCrawler (http://www.spyfu.com/) - Windows Generator for Google SiteMap Files.
• Pros: Crawl simulation provides detailed spidey‐vision, View canonical and duplicate content issues, aborted URLs, page, file sizes and more, Automatic XML sitemap creation
• Critiques: Large sites may take a few hours and need to be run overnight, Crawlers will get stuck in a loop on sites with dynamic URLs
• Cool: One‐stop audit shop, Exports multiple reports
• Cost: FREE

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  10) Google Insights for Search (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#) - With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
• Pros: Identify phrases by topic/brand/category you want to rank on, Geo‐target where to sell your products, Identify product seasonality, Identify if news stories relate to spikes in searches
• Critiques: No “real” search frequency number only relative comparison
• Cool: Breakout tool identifies phrases rising in search frequencies
• Cost: FREE

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  11) Epiar Negative Keywords Lists (http://www.epiar.com/ppc-negative-keyword-lists/) - Negative keyword targeting is becoming increasingly popular to weed out worthless impressions and clicks in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
• Pros: Save 5% to 40% on PPC spend! And maintain/increase sales, Quick! Set of 14 or 19 online questions, Premium NKL custom keyword research per PPC campaig, Instantly generates list of top 2500 or 5000 negative keywords
• Critiques: Not free
• Cool: Premium NKL prioritized: Top 250 for Yahoo! or Top 65 for MSN
• Cost: One time fee; no subscription

What other tools do you find useful to help you manage your online business?