Aside from his impressive martial arts skills, huge budget, and tricked out batmobile, everyone knows that what makes Batman so effective is all the cool gadgets he has. Well, here at Get Found First, we’d be lying if we said we didn’t use some pretty sweet tools tocombat appease the search engine gods. In an effort to spread the SEO love, I’ve created a list of some of the best SEO tools that we use in the Get Found First bat cave on a daily basis, and best of all, they are all free! Here they are(in no particular order):

1. Firebug – This gem is mostly a web development tool but comes in super handy when doing on page optimization. You don’t have to be fluent in HTML but it will definitely help. Firebug allows you to not only inspect elements on a page but also make changes to the code so that you can visually see what a page will look like with an image moved, an H1 added, or text changed. You can also view page load/speed issues. It’s ranks right up there in awesomeness with the Batarang.
2. SEO Book Rank Checker – Okay, so you know your site isn’t on the first page of Google for the term you want it to be, but where is it exactly? Instead of searching page by page on Google indefinitely, just add the URL of your site and the keyword in question and viola, instantly know where you rank. Rank Checker lets you save all of your keywords so you can come back and check them whenever you wish.
3. SEO X-Ray – Though not as powerful as superman’s x-ray vision, this is yet another handy add-on from the fine people over at SEOBook. Want to check the Meta tags or see what heading tags are on a page quickly without having to go into the page source of a site? With the click of the mouse, SEO X-Ray provides a heads up display of the webpage displaying Title, Description, and Keywords while highlighting and marking all the heading tags on the page. Internal and external links are also shown and a keyword density report can be run as well (if you decide that keyword density is important).
4. Hubspot Website Grader – This is a nice tool that crawls your site and gives you an overall grade of your website compared to other sites on the web. Some nice features include telling you if there are missing alt tags on images, too many images, if a blog is found, and how many links you have. Great tool to give you some ideas on how to make your site better for those.
5. Yahoo Site Explorer – Rumor has it that this tool may soon cease to exist due to the Bingahoo merger. So far it is still active and working. It gives a great view of your backlinks and allows you to export the list. I use it mostly to count the number of links for tracking purposes. Word on the street is that Yahoo site explorer is not crawled as often these days so links may not be as current.
6. SEOMoz Opensite Explorer – If/When Yahoo site explorer gives up the ghost, Opensite Explorer will most likely be the dominant backlink tool. By filtering only external links on competitor sites and exporting the data to a spreadsheet, you can get a good idea of their strategies and adopt them for your own site. Of note, I have noticed that links on here are not always an accurate measure of actual links, but it will still give you a good idea as to where you stand. So just because a link isn’t showing, doesn’t mean you don’t have it.
7. Majestic SEO – Awesome tool for doing backlink analysis on your own site or competitor sites. Big help when you want to get an idea of how well your historical link building efforts are going.
8. SEM Rush – Good tool for organic and adwords competitor keyword research. Also one of the few tools I know of where you can enter your competitors URL and it will spit back the organic and Adwords keywords they are ranking for.
9. SEOMoz Tool bar – This is probably one of the coolest SEO gadgets and the closest thing to having a H.U.D. like the inside of the batmobile. Includes everything from SERP and analyze page overlays, one click highlighting of no follow links, and instant access to some great SEO tools, this is must have for any SEO.
10. Keyword Spy – Another great tool for doing competitor keyword research. Keyword Spy allows you to enter a Keyword, a domain, destination URL, or even ad copy, to do research on. Great way to get an idea of what your competitors are up to and how much they may be spending on.

For those with more of a Bruce Wayne budget, stay tuned. In my next post, I’ll put together a list of some of the best paid SEO tools.

-Matt