Free tools to evaluate competition for SEO

Whenever you start building an entity on Internet the first 'homework' that needs to be done is find out how the competition or the industry going about optimizing their websites for search engines. Here are some free SEO Tools that can be handy while trying to evaluate competition

Free SEO tools to evaluate competition

1. Blekko - One of the most underrated SEO tool. This tool by itself should be give you enough armor to fight the war! On the face of it Blekko is like a 'normal' search engine. If you look at the results little closely there are links below each search result which can give you wealth of SEO parameters of your results. I'm amazed that this tool is free and has not been lapped up by the biggies (you know who I'm talking about). I intend to a full post on the details of how to use the tool. 
2.  Compete - There is a free and a paid version. The free version does a decent job though.
3. Alexa - Though it is not rated as highly but still does give you some idea about the competition
4. HowSociable - Find out how social media is being used by the competitors and the industry.
5. Social Mention - Another social media research tool that can help you know how the competition is leveraging social media marketing
6. Website Grader - Use this tool to evaluate any website on the Internet.
7. SEOmoz Crawl Test  - The free version crawls upto 50 pages on a website. For bigger sized websites you need to buy the subscription
8. Yahoo Site Explorer - Yahoo's site explorer is still going strong.
9. AttentionMeter - A search engine which does a comparative SEO analysis 

Most of the small business owners will find these tools provide you overwhelming information. You have to wise to go after the right statistics for as they say that

        "Statistics hide as much as they reveal!" or
        "Statistics are like bikinis.  What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."
 :-)