No good optimizer goes to work without an arsenal of tools. These tools aid in the mundane chores of optimization, and in some cases, give you the information you need to analyze the data at hand.

I have a great set of tools I use all the time. My first, and I believe most important tool may surprise you. You probably think that FrontPage, or DreamWeaver are the best tools for writing HTML, and therefore, optimizing HTML. Well, it's really a matter of choice. Everyone in my office uses DreamWeaver. Noone uses FrontPage. I definitely don't want to see you use FrontPage. As a matter of fact, you de-optimize or un-optimize a website simply by using FrontPage.

I guess DreamWeaver is OK, I don't use it though. What I use is a simple little program called NoteTab Pro. It cost me all of $20 USD. Yes I typed $20 USD.

It is a programmable word processor, basically like Note Pad that comes with Windoze, except it is robust, feature rich, and does everything you could ever want it to do ... and then some. I'm not kidding.

Anyway, that is my first tool of choice. I don't even view source code without it!

I am not putting these tools in any particular order from here on. I'm just listing as they come to mind.

WordTracker
Great keyword tool. Gives you the competition, number of times a keyword is searched for, and more information. It's involved. It takes some time to really research your list of keywords, but hey, that is what it is all about anyway. So spend the time. It's costly. I hope you can afford it.

GoogleMon
Free Monitor for Google ... Googlemon ... yo mon it be gooowd. No kidding. This tool will show you where you site is in the Google index. You can get a free API from Google to allow you to query their database (up to 1,000 queries a day) which should pretty much suffice for one site. This is a good tool that I use regularly.

Calipers
This little gem is something I have found that I just can't live without. I have an old free version, they charge for it now. I think it's only $20 though. Like the name says ... Calipers is an onscreen calipers that allows you to measure the pixels across the screen, image, space, table or what have you. It comes in very handy when you want to know how many pixels are in that left hand navigation column, or what size is that picture, or any of a myriad of other reasons to adjust pixel size onscreen to fit something into your web page. Great, great program.

Softkeys
The name doesn't do this software justice. I use this all the time. Let me repeat. All the time. It is such a time saver, and quality control too! Softkeys is like a pasteboard where you can spit out anything that you like onto the screen. I use it for quite a bit of the monotonous HTML code that I generate all the time. I have developed a method of using this software to eliminate keystrokes by the thousands.

To use Softkeys you launch the program, then click on the icon to add a new items. You name the item something, and then in the larger box you type in all of the keystrokes of this item. Now, whenever you type the name you provided for this item, all the keystrokes spit themselves out onto the screen. Voila! You saved a bunch of time.

I frequently use tables in my HTML. I type do-table and the entire line of setting up a table appears on my screen, saving me all of those keystrokes. Here is what would show up for me:

<table width="" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" bgcolor="#">
<tr>
<td>
Pretty kewel hey? It gets better. Like I said, I developed a method of use for this program. I utilize xx as I call it. For the lack of a better name. For the most part I never type xx together for any reason, so, I never have some keystrokes spit out onto the screen 'cuz I typed in xx. Point is, you don't want to name a softkey something that you will be typing onscreen, because you'll wind up with a bunch of stuff in a place you don't want it to be. So, I setup things that I need a lot into softkeys.

Here is another example of how I use it. In this case with my reciprocal linking campaigns. I use xu-name, xt-name, xd-name and xr-name for the URL, Title, Description and Reciprocal link page URL. Of course name would be replaced with the website name. I use it for my clients so I have things like xu-client1 or xr-client2 or xt-client3 ... get it? Now when I'm filling out forms over and over again in my search for reciprocal links it's a simple matter of typing xu-name and my URL spits out! No typos either! Those long descriptions are suddenly a piece of cake. Definitely kewel.

The signature I use all the time with my emails ... well, I have my hand in numerous pots, so I can't utilize one generic all purpose email signature. I need a few. Softkeys is the answer. I type xx-sig1 and my basic signature spits right out. I type xx-sig2 and another one spits out. Fantastic!

AXS Visitor Tracking System
Here is a gem of a tool that you will spend hours using. You'll be so fascinated by the information it gives you you'll spend a lot of time using and analyzing the data. It's a free tool which makes is superb!

AXS is a tracking system that will tell you where your visitors came from, i.e., which engine or if they came without a referring URL (meaning they typed your URL in or came from a bookmark), what keywords they used, what browser they used, and more. It is a fantastic and very rewarding tool to use.

Now you may be rich, or well endowed, or for some reason have some other stats tool like Urchin or Web-Stat. Those tools are great. They show you all kinds of information in all kinds of cool graphs and charts. AXS is just about as good and it is free (as of this writing). I recommend it's use and I recommend you check it at least once a week to see where your traffic is coming from and how they are finding you. I find AXS to be indispensable.

Here is the link to download AXS Visitor Tracking System

FDSE - The Fluid Dynamics Search Engine
A great tool for many things. I use it to create the site map for all my sites. It goes to the site and spiders it, returning the page title as the anchor text, and the META description tag for the description. It provides me with a very informative site map!

Web Position
I use it. Google plainly states in their Terms of Service (TOS) that they do not want automated queries of their database. I do not use it on Google. I do use it on AOL however, which is supplied by Google, so I get what I'm looking for anyway! I'm sure they'll figure this out someday and we'll be in trouble for doing automated queries against the Google database.

It's worth mentioning here, every now and then, while in the office, I get an error when I do a search on Google. It tells me that someone using my IP# is doing automated queries against the Google index and I can't do my search now. So they do pay attention to this issue.

Web Position, if you don't know, takes a list of keywords and goes from engine to engine looking for your URL. It then displays a table of where you are listed for the keywords you provided. Very good information to have.

Best Promotion Keywords
This tool supplies the number of times any keyword was searched for last month (Overture figures) and the number of competiting sites on Google. By competing sites we mean the number of sites that Google has in it's index. You can also see this by simply typing the keyword into Google and reading the number of sites it lists.

Well, not the best tool in the box but I do use it. Problem is, it's not exactly accurate. I could go into a long discussion as to why, but it's not worth it. Just accept that a lot of SEO people use it, and it's biased simply because of the way the engines are. Overture, where it gets the number of searches done, is delivering a count that includes lots of other factors, including yourself as you query it, and all the other SEO types around, and site owners, who are also doing this. It's just not 100% accurate. But, for a quick idea of how many searches are done on any particular keyword, or to get a competition number, it works. Overture itself also offers this tool right from their website, albeit, without the competition numbers.

Google Toolbar
By far the easiest way to see what a website's PageRank is. It's also got a great PopUp blocker! It's also a very nice and convenient way to search Google. Go into the setting and make sure you have the PageRank set to display, and also the information button. Click on the blue I and then on the "Cached Snapshot of Page" and then "Cached Text Only". What this shows is what Google has in their index. This is invaluable in showing that those fancy javascript navigation buttons and bars on your site are killing you because Google can't index those links! Now just how do you expect Mother Google to index your entire site when you don't give it the URLs to all the pages? Huh?!?

There are actually a ton of tools online. I would be negligent of my duty to teach you optimization if I didn't tell you to go to Google, or any major engine, and do your own searches. Search for "seo tools" or whatever. SEO. Search Engine Optimization. You will find more and more tools online everyday as time goes by. SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are becoming a regular part of our vocabulary as I type.

Instant Position
Instant Position offers a lot of good tools and information. Check out their site and spend some time using the different tools they have. Some are really good, offer good information, or useful in some form or other. SEODoctor is probably my favorite. I don't hold complete stock in this tool, or any other for that matter. Make a note that SEODoctor uses the META keywords and description tags as the basis of their grading your site. Since the major engines do not use the keywords tag anymore, this is a rather faulty bottom line tool. But I just love to see that meter go flying over to the right.

whois.sc
WhoIs lookup source. Good one. Quick easy, down and dirty.

AnyBrowser
http://www.anybrowser.com. Check it out. Definitely worth a visit.