SEO Tools

Here are tools and services I use and personally endorse. It’s all high quality stuff.

LiquidWeb (aff link) – An excellent host. Great for shared hosting or VPS. I started out with the $25 a month plan that gets you your own IP, and ended up upgrading to the VPS. Couldn’t be happier with them. For people like me who hate to pick up the phone or wait on an email response, their live chat support is great.

Screaming Frog - When it comes to technical SEO, there really aren’t any better tools out there. The Screaming Frog spider crawls your site really quickly, and returns reports that include status codes, page titles, content headings, and more for each page of your site. Free and paid versions are available.

SEOMoz (aff link) – If prospecting high quality links is your game, SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer is a good product for the job. They’re almost always offering a 30 day free trial, so try it out for yourself before you buy.

Ahrefs - The link data in this toolset is updated much more frequently than the data you’ll find over at SEOMoz. It also includes a lot of lower quality link data, which gives you  a more accurate picture of what a particular site is up to.

Web Dev Tools

Genesis (aff link) – I build all of my WordPress sites using the Genesis Framework. It blows the competition out of the water, as far as I’m concerned.

NameCheap (aff link) – I register all of my domains through NameCheap. If there’s a better registrar, I haven’t found it. Unlike GoDaddy and Network Solutions, they don’t try to upsell you $1k worth of nonsense when you just want a domain.

Notepad++ - It’s amazing that this is a free product, because I can’t imagine using anything else to write PHP, JavaScript, or HTML on a Windows box. When I have to use my Mac, I use Coda (you have to pay for this one, but it adds a ton of pretty handy features including built-in FTP).

WAMP Server - Run apache websites from your PC’s desktop. I have backup installs of all my WordPress sites running locally, so I can test on my own machine before pushing to production.

Filezilla – My FTP client of choice.

Note: You’re welcome to contact me if you have an SEO or web development tool that you’d like me to consider adding to this list. But be forewarned: I won’t add it unless I love it so much that I can’t imagine my life without it. And I have no interest in auto link building software or spam.