

Ask HN: Best free SEO tools? - si2

What are the best free search engine optimization tools?
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SwellJoe
Your brain: Use it to write useful content.

We've made zero SEO effort, and our sites are PR7, and get a total of several
hundred thousand uniques per month, and they mostly come from natural search
results. Our products are boring system administration tools, and we don't
worry about traffic (we care about sales), so there is nothing "viral" about
what we're doing, but we have _tons_ of useful content on our sites, and we
are rewarded generously by Google because of it.

An SEO guy "analyzed" our site for a blog post a year or two ago, and
suggested we were doing a horrible job with our SEO, because we use none of
the standard SEO tricks. Go figure.

The benefit to this method of SEO is that I don't have to worry about Google
changing their policies or ranking rules. It won't effect us, because our
ranking is not fragile and based on tricks. Our PR only goes up because we're
always getting better and better at helping people accomplish things. (That
said, we are about to destroy our current site and launch a new one with all
new URLs, whic will probably stomp on our PR for a while...but I'm not too
concerned. The content remains, and we'll try to do something about the old
URLs.)

