Doing SEO without the proper tools can be quite challenging. Thank to a lot of folks that are dedicated to develop the best SEO software, we have plenty of options that help us doing a more effective job.

I have to say that not everything relies on the tools, they just serve us to give us data faster, or in a more detailed way.

6 recommended tools for link building:

1. Open Site Explorer
2. Yahoo Site Explorer
3. Raven SEO Tools
4. SEO for Firefox
5. Majestic SEO
6. Google Webmaster Tools

You can get a fair amount of data using these tools, however, still a lot of analysis will be needed to get the most out of them, and to apply it to any SEO campaign.

International SEO

These tools (specially Open Site Explorer and Yahoo Site Explorer ) would help you analyze and find the most valuable links of your competition, and will also let you see which local links they’re getting.

Identifying the local links of your competition will help you position your site better in that specific market. For example, if you’re trying to rank a keyword in Google Mexico, you would need to have some links coming from any .mx domain.

The Long Tail is a very interesting topic when it comes to SEO. It has been discussed a lot by many SEO experts, and yet, we see a lot of people focusing only on a few terms that would compose the “head” of the search demand graphic.

Most of the times, it is a bad idea if you focus only on getting rankings for two or three main terms.

Tool for determining Long Tail Keywords

We found a great tool that would help a lot to research and discover potential long tail keywords.

v-seo is a nice tool to explore keywords, and to discover potential long tail terms:

This tool is very simple to use. First, you need to enter a main keyword, then the depth of the search, and finally the desired language [which is also great to be able to select keywords in multiple languages]

We did a test using the keyword “miami beach hotel”, and the results were:

Which is a very nice set of keywords.

What we liked the most of this tool, was the way that the information is presented to the user, and the way it organizes the keywords into small groups.

V-SEO Features

Another nice features from this tool are:

• It shows the number of results for each generated keyword, which is really helpful to get an initial idea of how competitive a term is. And also to compare the competition level between similar keywords.
• It lets you download all the information as a .CSV file, which is really helpful to organize  or integrate this information with other keyword research that you could have done before.

This is a nice tool to implement a long tail strategy for your clients.