What’s The Best SEO Tool?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

The question comes up often, “What’s the best SEO tool?” I suppose that depends on how you define tool. In my book, a keyword research tool is an SEO tool. So are keywords themselves. And hyperlinks. As can be bullet lists and h2 tags. In all, there are literally hundreds of SEO tools in the SEOs tool chest. Which is the best one is a question that doesn’t have an easy answer.

I think the answer to the question largely has to do with what your goals are. Are you targeting the search engines for a specific keyword to rank a particular page one time or are you trying to boost your overall trust factor or targeting the search engines for long term? Each goal has a different strategy and therefore a different tool.

For instance, if you want to rank a particular web page your website for a long tail keyword phrase related to your niche then I would suggest using your keyword phrase frequently, optimizing your meta tags, emplace your keyword phrase in the page title and description, use an h1 tag for your page head, etc. If you’ve been in SEO circles for very long then that’s pretty simple, though not an altogether easy task.

But what if you want to fight your way to the top for a particular keyword phrase and snag the No. 1 position for that phrase? Well, that requires an entirely different strategy. In that case I would say start a blog and use that keyword phrase in every page of your blog, optimizing each page as you would a web page. Then you market the blog by bookmarking your blog posts at several social bookmarking sites and distributing articles to as many article directories as you can to promote the blog. You could even write press releases and distribute them online as well. In a word, there are a number of ways to target your key phrase, but whenever you do so, be sure to point all of your anchor text to your blog so that your blog rises with the tide.

You could do the same thing with a page of your website, but I think it’s easier to do with a blog. The point here is that every SEO strategy requires a different tool. The key to good SEO is knowing which tool to use for each occasion.