When starting a new search marketing project, technical folks will tend to lean on a trusted set of tools to help them. New players, or complete newbies will want to know what tools to use, and not waste time with losers, and not get the correct results to complete their search marketing strategy.

The below is a fairly complete list, that will take you there. In fact, a recent article on Google Blogoscoped discusses a senior search marketer’s top choices.

Here are links to the top tools that you should use:

Webmaster Central and their blog for webmasters

Google AdWords Keyword Tool – updated with search volumes, incredibly valuable

SEO Book keyword tool – API to Wordtracker – many more features, must include

Google Traffic Estimator – number clicks and $ estimates for keywords

Microsoft Ad Intelligence Download – Excel 2007 – shows Microsoft real search data in Excel – powerful

Google Analytics – Free

Google Trends for Websites

Google Insights for Search

Clicky – inexpensive analytics tool – whitelabel for search agencies

Mint – paid, realtime data, powerful

Free rank checking tool – Firefox plugin – free – use it now

Advanced Web Ranking – paid – popular desktop ranking tool

SEO Link Analysis – Firefox plugin

Blog Search Google - Detect links from blogs (note: use the link: site (replace ‘site’ with your url)

Xenu Link Sleuth – free – deep crawler for bad links and more

Advanced Link Manager – paid – track new links by competitors

Backlink Analyzer – free tool

Compete.com – free analytics search data – and paid

KeyCompete – find out what competition is buying

SEO Digger – what organic keywords are you ranked for – free and paid

URLTrends – similar to SEO Digger – free

This should be a complete list for 99% of your projects. What other tools have you found useful?

Sept 19 — UPDATE –

Recommended additions from another expert, listed below:

3 more worth taking a look at:

Escape’s Web Page Analyzer – http://www.the-escape.co.uk/tools/pageanalyzer/  – This web page analyzer breaks down the structure and content of your web page and assesses the build quality and content quality from an accessibility, usability and search engine point of view.

Page Rank Checker for Internal Links – http://www.livepr.info/internal-pages-page-rank3.php  — Check Page Rank of Internal Pages – This is one of my favorite SEO tools and particularly useful after every pagerank update. The only downside is, it only registers 100 entry before it comes to a stop.

Seo Site Checkup – http://www.seositecheckup.com/  — Analyze your site to rank better in search engines and get more traffic!