SEO research tools are not really the most enjoyable part of your SEO business.
Research alone is a bit time-consuming and a little tiring especially if you don't have the tools to help you do your task; however, it is very important.
It's a good thing that there are some simple research tools we can use.
In order to make our job easy to do, SEO research tools are available for us to use.
Some are even freely available for use so we could research our competition, or find out what other websites link to them and even what other websites the owner is hosting.
The following are some free competitive research tools for your search engine optimization tasks: 1.
WhoIsHostingThis.
com - This will help you find out what hosting company is being used for a website.
Although for most people, this information may not matter that much, this can still be used in grey-hat SERP strategies.
2.
Quarkbase.
com - This is the most comprehensive and easy to use research utility for any given website because it is helpful in researching a mash-up of some top research utility that you would check for any site -- from the number of links on social bookmarking sites, basic domain and web server information, related sites, company information and most especially comparison of some different "traffic ranking" utilities.
3.
SEOPro Link Checker - It is a free service to check website's back-links including the anchor text used and the homepage and link PR.
Note that it is useful to see what links your competition are using that helps build their SERP and the links that have the potential to improve.
4.
Redirect Check - This tool will tell you all the paths that must be taken to reach a specific domain.
It is also useful in knowing if they're using multiple re-directs; and this tool helps you identify every stop along the way.
5.
What is hosted on that IP? This is a tool from SEO Egghead that can tell you what other domains are being hosted on the same IP or domain.
6.
Domain Tools - This website has load of tools that are useful in hunting down: the owner of a website or finding similar sites which includes basic WHOIS information and META tag information - to the previous owners and name-server changes to name a few 7.
Social Mention.
com - SocialMention.
com is great for finding out where people are talking about your competition or niche.
Best example of this is Twitter.
8.
BuiltWith.
com - Use this site to let you know the basics of figuring out what platform a certain website is using to host their content.
These eight SEO research tools may help make your research task an easy and enjoyable one.