Last week I brought you some of my favorite SEO tools. These are ones I use on a regular basis to help improve my clients search engine positioning.

But as I was thinking about it today, I missed some other very important ones as well. One’s that can help show problems the other tools may have missed.

In this article I look at these other tools and how they can help you.

The nice thing about SEO is that if you look hard enough you will find a tool to do what you need, so you don’t have to build it yourself.

All too often I come across tools that were built for an entirely different purpose but have found them extremely useful in my day to day SEO efforts.

One you will read about is somewhat obvious but the others may not be so obvious. So I’ll start with these less obvious ones first.

IDServe

This is a simple free little utility that allows you to query the server for any URL.

Not only does it help you identify the server type (that is the server that is hosting the website) but it can also show you some errors which may be generated.

For example, if you query amazon.com you will find that the site serves a 301 redirect.

Further, you can see the site’s IP address, and any cookie information associated with the URL.

Finally, you will see how the server identifies itself.

Ideally, if you use this on your site, you want to see it return a “200 OK” code. This indicates that there is no redirection and no errors being generated – your site is serving the home page as it is supposed to.

Checkload

This is a nice little app that shows you the load time of your site, or it’s pages. It too is free and has helped me troubleshoot many problems in the past.

You see, if a search engine can’t load your pages fast enough, over time they will adjust their spider habits to request your pages less often. Ultimately an extremely slow loading site will get removed from the search engine index because crawlers can’t visit and index it.

Using this tool, you can get an idea of how long it takes for your site to pop up in a users browser. While you may not think its an issue when you load your site, sometimes seeing that time in seconds can shake you up.

Another reason to use it is to improve your visitor experience. Research has shown that a site must load within a few seconds on a broadband connection. If it takes more than 10 seconds there is a good chance that the user will abandon the site in favor of a faster one.

Therefore, to help improve the user experience and ultimately your sales, you want to be sure your site loads as quickly as it can.

I recently used this on a clients site and found that the home page loads in 25 seconds on high speed. This was because of a large flash component which ate up half the screen. However, when the reduced the flash component and replaced much of it with plain HTML, the page load time dropped to 5 seconds. The user experience wasn’t affected because the average user wouldn’t notice the difference, however spider visits increased and rankings ultimately improved.

Lynx Browser

Many people may not realize but the text based Lynx browser (which is as old as the hills, in internet terms) is one of those “must have” tools.

This is because Googlebot is built on Lynx.

Sure it’s likely been changed and upgraded many times since then, but at its core, Googlebot IS Lynx.

So what could be better than looking at your site as Googlebot (and likely most other crawlers) see it?

You may be amazed at just how different a website looks when you turn off CSS, JavaScript, images and Flash and get down to just the core text and hyperlinks.

You will find websites that host web based lynx versions, but I recommend downloading and installing this application locally on your computer.

It’s a little tricky at first, because navigation happens with your keyboard (no mouse allowed!) but it’s pretty easy to pick up. Once you get used to it you’ll find you can actually navigate the web quicker with it than Firefox or IE. (At least I do)

Another great thing I found out about Lynx was, as a Linux user, when my desktop crashes and absolutely will not start, I can still browse the web with Lynx to research my problem and find a solution.

You can find out more about Lynx for Windows here.

As you can see, these are three small, simple to use applications that can make a world of difference to your SEO campaign, especially if there are some technical issues which perhaps you can’t quite put your finger on.