Every explorer needs his tools, in the case of seo, I use for creating complete websites: Typo3 and WordPress as complete Content-Management-Systems, php and perl to create individual dynamic websites. From a Explorers point of view these are research objects and experiments.

To measure the results there are many various tools available, which often cover almost identical tasks and deliver very similar results. Primarily I use the following:

  • Google Analytics
    IMHO the simplest and most complete free online website-statistics tool
  • Google Webmastertools
    First of all I use it to understand the quality of my websites as the Google-Bots see it (I’ll explain this in detail in a separate posting) and you get a pretty complete listing of external links to your site (also about that topic more in a separate posting)
  • LinkVendor
    This contains a whole Toolbox of seo-measuring tools, but you have to take the results with a good grain of skeptism (which every explorer and research should have plenty of)
  • SeoDigger
    This is a nice tool to find out about the most popular keywords on a website, that is with what keywords is the website best ranked in the Search Engines.

To find out the most searched keywords around the topic of a website you can use:

And of course every researcher and explorer has to read the scientific journals of his colleages. This means with SEO as the topic to read blogs but also to listen to podcasts:

  • english speakers will find alomst all interesting podcasts, or in this case live internet radio, on webmasterradio.fm, which show you want to follow frequently depends mostly on your own personal interests and taste.
  • For german speakers it’s Webmasters on the Roof
    Mediadonis and FridayNite 2 munich based top SEOs and SuperAffiliates chat in a very relaxed atmosphere also live via webmasterradio.fm every tuesday at 7 pm (CET) about news and other interesting topics around seo and affiliate marketing. Often with very interesting guests…
  • Radio4SEO
    this is the other podcast I listen to regularly. It’s a one-man-show by the seonaut who abandond his ambitious goal to broadcast live too, but still delivers a very good bi-weekly podcast, in the meantime also including interviews with guests.
    Good for beginners, too.

Recommended blogs are of course the official Goolge-blogs (analytics, adsense, webmastercentral) and the blog of Googles chief of Spam-Exorcism Matt Cutts (searchengine-spam, not eMail-spam), furthermore there are:

Good german Blogs are:

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