When approaching an SEO campaign it’s necessary to have a good idea of what you are doing, and there are many (free) tools available to aid you with this.

Link Analysis

There are a couple of market leaders out there, namely Majestic SEO and Linkscape. Both of these tools analyse a websites profile and deliver a reasonably accurate authority rating based on various factors. My preference is Linkscape which gives you a quick (and rough) answer as to whether a website is worthwhile or not.

Another tool I regularly use is the bad neighbourhood checker which does exactly that; it checks all of the outgoing links on the specified website and returns how many (if any) questionable links it finds. Pretty useful if my client is selling designer clothes and their link is found on a page that also links out to viagra websites!

Website Analysis

Another free SEO tool that I sometimes use is the Website Grader. This performs a quick check on any given website for basic page elements like heading tags and the existance (or not) of a blog.

Keyword Analysis

There are hundreds of keyword analysis tools available, probably because they are quite simple to make. There is no reason why I use this one in particular other than that it is in my bookmarks. Essentially it lets me see very quickly the sort of words a page is associated to.

For keyword popularity research I always trust the Google AdWords tool, but I’m guessing you already use that!

Storage & Reporting

If I identify a potential link partner or blog that I like the look of, I sometimes store the information in Evernote for easy access later. This seperates it from my bookmarks and keeps things tidier.

When preparing a report for a client I always rely on trust Microsoft Excel which allows me to report on links gained, ranking changes and other information.

And lastly… my brain!

These tools are useful additions to my SEO campaigns but ultimately, I rely on my common sense and experience to gauge a website and/or links value.