SpyFu

Unfortunately, SpyFu is one of the more expensive tools for SEO, SEM and Keyword discovery, but, as they say, ‘you get what you pay for’. SpyFu is one of the best in the arena, comprising several different tools in one. SmartSearch, for example, offers keyword suggestions and discovery, whilst SpyFu Classic works much the same as SEMRush, supplying data related to budget and keyword for the queried domain. The best tool however is SpyFu Kombat. SpyFu Kombat allows you to see common and site-specific keywords for 3 websites, with results displayed in Venn diagrams. You can also Monitor your competitors SEO and keyword rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo. Plus, search for any domain and see every place they’ve shown up on Google: every keyword they’ve bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last 6 years.
You can of course try it for FREE.

KeywordSpy

KeywordSpy enables you to gain insight into your competitors keyword efforts. Keyword Spy is a paid tool but also offers a lifetime free trial with some great features. Keyword Spy’s tools can give you an estimation on how much a competitor is spending on paid search, what keywords they are spending their money on, and who their competitors are.

Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis is a software designed to help online businesses boost their website traffic. It is an all-in-one tool for search engine optimization, pay-per-click monitoring and general market research. Whether you’re aiming to get traffic from paid methods or through search engine optimization, Traffic Travis is an indispensable research tool. With it you can not only track your own site’s performance, you can also peek under the hood of your competitors’ sites. Select the no-fee version of Traffic Travis, the 7 day $1 trial or the Pro Edition of Traffic Travis.

SEMRush

Given a competing site’s URL, SEMRush will show you their organic search positions for the keywords they’re tracking. SEMRush can also tell you the commercial value of not only your existing keywords but also your competitors keywords and potentially save you money in AdWords. They collect massive amounts of SERP data for more than 95 million keywords and 45 million domains, including: AdWords ad copies and positions, organic positions for domains and landing URLs, search volumes, CPC, competition, number of results, and so on. SEMRush is a paid tool, but offers a free trial with limited data points.

ClickTale

If you require more than traditional web analytics, try ClickTale. ClickTale’s analytics service is qualitative and provides a full video playback option for each individual visitor’s session. In addition, it uses meta statistics to create visual heatmaps and behavioural reports, as well as conversion analytics and traditional web statistics.
See my article, What is ClickTale Web Analysis Software, for more informaiton.

AWStats

One of the most popular web analytics services is AW Stats, which is available for free with most hosts. AWStats is an open source Web analytics reporting tool, suitable for analyzing data from Internet services such as web, streaming media, mail and FTP servers. AWStats parses and analyzes server log files, producing HTML reports.

WordTracker

WordTracker generates words and phrases for search engine optimisation (SEO). Wordtracker makes the data easier to understand. With the Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI), for instance, you’ll get an up-front appraisal of each keyword’s potential based on volume and competition. You can also create keyword maps to help you structure your website in a keyword-rich way. Wordtracker offers a 7-day free trial, then moves to $69 a month. Wordtracker is a wonderful keyword research tool. If you want more traffic to your site or just want to better understand what your market is looking for you should explore Wordtracker.

Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery, compiles keyword search statistics from all the major search engines world wide, to create the most powerful Keyword Research tool.

• Over 80% of all online transactions begin with a keyword search.

To compete, you need to target all the relevant keywords. Keyword Discovery can tell you the search phrases people use to find products and services, as well as the search terms that drive traffic to your competitors.

Good Keywords

Good Keywords, which queries the popular search engines to identify good words and phrases for you to use is a Fantastic Time Saver! It stores your entire Google keyword research so that the data is always available to you (even when not online). You can copy and paste the generated keywords into any external application. You can also organize the keywords into groups and export it to text files.

Internet Business Promoter

IBP is a top-rated website promotion software tool that helps you to get more customers and sales through high rankings on Google and other major search engines. IBP is fully compatible with Google’s new June 2012 algorithm and your website will get the best possible rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo! You can get the FREE version of IBP here.

Keyword Chief

It’s a long, long job to research your keywords, keyword phrases, LSi’s etc. and then write to content for your chosen search term that has the perfect keywords, and the perfect density of those keywords.
This plugin looks at the top 10 Yahoo (free version) and top 10 Google (registered version) search engine results pages for your search term, compares them to each other, and then tells you the keywords that all the top 10 pages are using in their content, plus the density of those keywords. In less than a minute you will know exactly which keywords and their relevant density to include in your website copy so that it matches the Yahoo or Google’s exact keyword expectations. You can get the FREE version of KeywordChief here.

Keyword Research & Article Writing & Marketing

We all know article writing and marketing is an extremely powerful marketing method to drive traffic to your web site using backlinks. It can also be used to drive traffic to your to splash pages. It’s also a fact you need unique new content to get indexed by the search engines.
Unfortunately, writing articles is very time consuming. Fortunately, there are tools such as SpinnerChief and The Best Spinner which can help. Within a very short time these word spinners can generate as many unique high quality article as you require.
These applications work quite simply, you write an article and then use the word spinners thesaurus to generate a selection of keywords and phrases for your article. The word spinner will then generate new, unique, articles based on your selection of keywords. That sounds confusing but it’s really quite simple.
Personally, I use the software mainly as an idea generation tool as I rarely need more than two or three version of an article. Which is best? That’s a matter of preference, try them both, they’re free.
You can get the FREE version of Spinner Chief here.
You can get the FREE version of The Best Spinner here.

Dictionaries & Thesaurus

If you’re going to write web content you will need a good dictionary and thesaurus. Admittedly Microsoft word, Apache Open Office [http://www.openoffice.org/] and many others have dictionaries and thesaurus’s included but lets admit it, they’re pretty boring to use. So why not try a visual thesaurus?

Visual Thesaurus

What is a Visual Thesaurus? A Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words. There innovative display encourages exploration and learning. You’ll understand language in a powerful new way.

There are two that I would recommend, Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus and Snappy Words Visual Online Dictionary.