by Glenn Magas

Created on: March 22, 2010

If you want to increase your Google page rank and are interested in learning SEO, a great way to start is to use free online SEO tools that are available. Using these tools will get you started on Search Engine Optimization and help your website move up the search results in Google’s SERP and eventually your Google page rank will move up in importance.

The following are three great online SEO tools to help you research keywords for content, and to keep track of your Google page rank.

1. Tracker: Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
2. Google-Adwords: Keyword Tool
3. Google Tool Bar

Once you begin your SEO process and you build a list of keywords, the following three tools will help you research Advertiser Competition, Search Volume, Page Rank, and a whole lot more.

1. Word Tracker: Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

If you start with Word Tracker: Free Keyword Suggestion Tool, you can start building a strong list of keywords and phrases for SEO. By entering your keyword or phrase, Word Tracker will provide the top 100 search results for you with the number of exact times someone in the United States entered that keyword/phrase into their partner search engine in the last 365 days.

So if you see a search count of 1000 for a keyword, this means that that exact keyword has been typed into a metacrawler one thousand times by real people in the last year. 

If you search “free seo” you will find that “free seo tools” was searched 35 times in the last yea by real people in the US

2. Google-AdWords: Keyword Tool

The Google-AdWords: Keyword Tool provides additional information. The results can be added to a keyword list and uploaded to your Google-AdWords account if you want. But the basic information provided is a wealth of information.

For SEO, you can search keywords based on a Broad, Exact, Phrase or Negative match type.  A graph on Advertiser Competition is provided to see what keywords are being bid on – this helps you see competition. And their Local Search Volume for previous month as well as a Global Monthly Search Volume (which shows an average monthly search for Google and Search Networks).

In this case, “free seo tools” has 6,600 in Global Monthly Search Volume.

Google-AdWords: Keyword Tool is the most popular ‘free’ online SEO tools available.

3. Google Toolbar

In order to see what your website is up against, you want to see the PR (or PageRank) of the sites at the top of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). By researching PR based on a specific search, you can see the importance of each site’s PR. If the PR is high importance, and the top 4-5 results have high PR, this keyword may not be the right one for SEO.

Google’s Toolbar has an option of seeing a page’s PR once you click on the search result and onto the page. From “No Page Rank Available” to the importance level of the page from 1/10 to 10/10. The higher the value, the more important the page is.

If you are finding your SEO keywords are up against web pages that are 5/10 to 10/10, you will find it incredibly hard to compete against these pages.

These free online SEO tools will get you started on finding the right keywords for SEO. By spending time using them, you will be able to find keywords that are SEO for your web site and avoid wasting time with keywords that you cannot rank with.  SEO is an important process to drive your relevant pages up in the SERP, but knowing the PageRank of your competition will make sure your SEO is efficient and effective.

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