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Here are some essential free tools that will help make the effort of optimizing your websites for search engines faster and more efficient.

1. Good Keywords – As the name implies, this is a tool for helping you find good keyword phrases. The very first step of optimizing a site for search engine traffic is to select your target keyword phrases. You have to do this before you do anything else. Using this software, you can enter a simple keyword and get suggestions for a more specific phrase. You can also get search stats from Overture US for the previous month. This is only a portion of total searches on all search engines, but it does give you an idea of the popularity of search terms.

2. Google – Of course everyone knows and uses this search engine. However, paired with Good Keywords (described above), you can quickly find the ratio of a given keyword’s popularity versus its competitiveness. Doing a simple search on the keywords you choose using Good Keywords, will quickly show you how many pages are competing for that keyword. The total number of results are displayed in the upper right hand corner of the page. If you discover that a keyword has far too much competition, you will want to return to Good Keywords and look for a more specific keyword.

3. Broken Link Detector – Having a neat, clean site structure free of broken links is key to getting good page rankings, as well as getting all of your pages indexed. This free software spiders your site and gives you a report of broken links and orphaned pages (pages that are not linked to any other page).

4. Robots.txt Generator – Use this site to quickly generate a robots.txt file that tell search engine spiders where to search, and where not to search, your site.

5. Free Site Map Generator – Free software that spiders your site and creates an xml format sitemap. An xml format sitemap helps search engines spider your site. Once your sitemap is created and uploaded to your site, go to Google Sitemaps (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/) and submit your sitemap information, so Google will know where your where to look for it.

6. Link Popularity Checker – Website that lets you quickly check the number of backlinks pointing to your site, with results from Google, Hotbot, MSN, and Yahoo.

7. Google PageRank Indicator – Find out your site’s Google PageRank even if you do not have Google’s Toolbar installed. Also, download code that will display your page rank on your site to users who don’t have Google’s toolbar.

8. Page Rank Predictor – Predicts future page rank for your site.

9. Directory Submission Tool – Submit your site to multiple web directories simultaneously.

10. Keyword Density Checker – Submit any URL and get a report on the keyword density for up to three separate keywords. This is a helpful tool for optimizing your own site, as well as checking out the competition.

About this author
John Case is the author of http://www.easy-learn-to-earn.com, a free guide to making an income online, and maintains an SEO site at http://www.awordsworth1000pictures.com/