Technology Rants|Where technology meets humanity

With Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing becoming one of the hottest trends in web technology. There are hundreds of paid tools that cost well over 100 dollars a month. If you are just starting out there are a number of free tools that will help you optimize your site and increase conversion. Use this tools correctly and you will be on your way to increase traffic, page rank, and high search engine rankings.

1. Google External Keyword Tool - Google is one of the biggest and most powerful search engine, so it just makes sense to use them to give you detailed reports and related keywords. Google external keyword tool is great for PPC marketing, you can find out the search volume per month and also the price you will pay per click.
2. XML-Sitemaps – If your serious about SEO, then you know you need a sitemap. XML-Sitemaps.com has a great site map generator. I have used there free versions for many of my smaller websites, But i also own their paid version to handle my larger sites. I set up a cron job so it’s pretty much a set it and forget it type of thing
3. Google Trends – Google trends is a great way to optimize you PPC campaigns. You can use it to find what months that keyword or your product is most popular. For example type in roses in google trends, and no surprise there is one spike every year. can you guess what it is?
4. Google Toolbar for firefox – Here is another great tool provided by google. With this tool you can check the pagerank, back links, and the cached date with a single click.
5. MSN ADLabs – MSN ADLabs is used by almost every affiliate marketer. You can use this tool to determine the demographic of who is typing in your keywords. Why is this important? This is important so you can customize your ads for the demographic that is doing the searches, if your demo are males 18-25, you don’t want your ad to say “Moms, buy your sons roses”
6. Dead link checker – Do you have 404 errors and dead links? Search engines hate these. Find them and fix them
7. Seobook Toolbar – Among their useful set of tools they also have a rank checker to check the results of your hard work.
8. Web CEO – Web CEO is definitely my favorite tool out of this list. There are a lot of tools out there that promise this and that. But this product really delivers. It’s an all in one package that pretty much does all the SEO for you. If you are in need of a serious SEO Tool This is it.
9. Keywordspy – keyword spy has a limited free trial you can do use to determine if you competitor is using PPC and what keywords they are using. It’s a great way to check up on your competition.
10. SEO Chat – Just a lot of tools. you got to check it out.
11. Google Rank Checker – Type in your keyword and your domain, and you will find out where you rank with google. But honestly web CEO does a better join because you can have it search multiple keywords at once instead of one at a time.
12. Duplicate Article Checker – Google loves orginal content, remember content is king.
13. Google Analytics - This is a must have tool, simple to install, and has a lot of reporting features.
14. Google Website Optimizer – Another free tool from google. This tool is used for A/B testing. Before you do any design changes make sure you are getting a better conversion with the new design. 
15. More to come.

Paid tools

1. Shoemoney Tools -Has a limited time offer. For about 9 dollars you can get one month of access to their tools. I have poked around there tool for a little and they have some pretty good tools that I haven’t seen before.
2. More to come