Ask HN: Best free SEO tools?
What are the best free search engine optimization tools?
We've made zero SEO effort, and our sites are PR7, and get a total of several hundred thousand uniques per month, and they mostly come from natural search results. Our products are boring system administration tools, and we don't worry about traffic (we care about sales), so there is nothing "viral" about what we're doing, but we have tons of useful content on our sites, and we are rewarded generously by Google because of it.
An SEO guy "analyzed" our site for a blog post a year or two ago, and suggested we were doing a horrible job with our SEO, because we use none of the standard SEO tricks. Go figure.
The benefit to this method of SEO is that I don't have to worry about Google changing their policies or ranking rules. It won't effect us, because our ranking is not fragile and based on tricks. Our PR only goes up because we're always getting better and better at helping people accomplish things. (That said, we are about to destroy our current site and launch a new one with all new URLs, whic will probably stomp on our PR for a while...but I'm not too concerned. The content remains, and we'll try to do something about the old URLs.)