Open Site Explorer is a full-featured link data analysis tool that also happens to be extremely easy to use in the bargain. Designed by SEO professionals for SEO professionals, it puts all the data you need at your fingertips. The tool uses SEOMoz’s API to access their Linkscape web indexing tool, a much more in-depth tool that can provide a much more zoomed-in picture of links on the web. Linkscape works similar to other crawlers, as it starts from a core of trusted sites and crawls ever outward to discover each link. Open Site Explorer includes some interesting data from Linkscape on the main page.

Based on Urchin, Google Analytics is a top analytics tool made available to everybody for free by Google. This analytics tool can give you detailed reports about traffic behavior, content visitation, funnel information and much, much more. On the other hand, the Webmaster Console tool now gives you a good view of what Google “sees” for your site including: crawling rate, crawling speed, backlinks, highest PageRank of your site and more. These two tools together constitute the fundamentals of free search engine marketing. Beware however, because by using either you are giving Google access to all of your site data.

Let’s say that you are interested in checking the Google Page Rank and the Alexa Ranking for one of your websites and also 9 of your competitors. You have two options: 1) Go it the manual way and gather the information one by one or 2) just dump the 10 domain names into the MultiRank Checker and copy/paste the results table. I personally like this tool because it checks in bulk and saves a bit of time.

Enter a search term or terms, and you’ll be shown other keywords related to that term. You can then sort keywords in terms of search volume popularity.