Successful SEO’s rely on the use of the tight tool for the job. Consitently producing top ranking pages requires a broad array of tools from a wide variety of sources.

Let’s start off by defining specifically what type of tools we’ll be discussing. The sheer number and variety of ‘tools’ on the Internet to help professional SEO’s is staggering. What we need to focus on for this article are the ones designed to solve one single piece of the puzzle.

When it comes to analyzing and optimizing your videos, YouTube, by it’s close integration to Google makes it a powerful resource in the professional SEO’s tool chest. Although you could classify YouTube as a tool, it is really a very large collection of more specific tools and would take far too long to cover them here in this article.

Now let’s look at a sister application – the Google Toolbar which is loaded with functionality such as popup blocking, bookmarking, and more, but it’s most important function to the SEO is the ‘PageRank’ feature. The PageRank display provides a rough estimate of the number of inbound links on any given page. Of course it takes into consideration much more than just the inbound links, but that is one of the many key factors.

If you find yourself wondering where exactly your webpages are among the ranks of major search engines, this tool will tell you what you want to know. You can leave it running for a night and find your results in the morning. Webposition tracks the exact rank of your pages on each search engine.

The first critical decision you must make when planning your SEO campaign are the keywords you plan to target. StomperNet is already copying our giveaway naming their version ’7 Deadly SEO Mistakes’ – they’re not ‘Deadly’, they’re not going to kill you or your SEO efforts per se. Using Google’s Free Keyword Tool will give you great insight into what people are using when they search for your products or services; it also provides you with alternate suggestions and the associated volumes.

Here?s another free keyword tool, this time from Yahoo. While useful for determining how competitive a keyword can be, it has its own weaknesses. It does not distinguish between singular and plural keywords, so you can?t determine which of these has a higher search volume. It also seems to be hit hard by congestion due to high usage of both searchers and advertisers alike.

Another effective keyword tool, Wordtracker has two versions. The first is a free tool freekeywords.wordtracker.com which simply displays your results with related keywords and their corresponding search volumes. The paid version version ? (The defacto standard), wordtracker.com provides many other functions, like allowing you to store your keywords, perform different kinds of searches such as comprehensive and compress searches, and provides you with customer support.

Other awesome keyword research tools include Keywordtopia which integrates many of the other keyword research tools into a single (paid) application. So, if you don’t want to have to perform a bunch of searches at a hald dozen different sites, just enter your searches at Keywordtopia.com once and receive comprehensive results from all the major keyword tools such as Google, Yahoo, Overture, Wordtracker, Ask, and several othes all at once – a big time saver.

The Google Traffic Estimator is one of the tools found under Google Adwords, this small tool allows you to do a quick estimate of bid prices and ad clicks for new keywords, without having to add them to your account or sign up for Google Adwords. You can even select the language and countries you want to focus on.

Some more unique tools are now available from Windows LIve. If you’re targeting a particular demographic group and want to know what search terms they use, ‘Demographics Prediction should be your tool of choice. You can input either a web address (URL) or keyword and flter your results based on data such as gender, age, marital status, or a variety of other demographic data to hone in on your niche market.

Another useful tool from Windows Live is Search Funnel. Use this tool to discover the best sequence of your keywords based on historical data. Searchers often modify the search query as they transition from researching a topic to searching to buy something.