I came across a rather strange thread in an SEO forum recently, where this particular gentleman kept insisting that the time had come for bidding farewell to cheap Google SEO and that one needed to have very deep pockets for survival in the current scenario.

In fact he went on to say that no respectable SEO firm could exist without having it’s own private blog network. Translate it into dollars and it means, smaller businesses like mine, and those of many of my clients have no hope of surviving! Honestly, it’s rather amusing the kind of panic people like to spread through their misinformed prophecies of doom.

Agreed, Google has made a life a little difficult by de-indexing affordable and popular blog networks. However, that’s only for those who do not want to spend time and effort on quality content writing for diversifying their links.

There are still a lot of cheap Google SEO sources and free web tools that can help keep your SEO costs in control. The following are the top 3 free web tools that I recommend:

Firefox No-do Follow Plugin: This is a brilliant tool for those looking for genuine sources that provide do-follow links. All you have to do is to download the tool and activate it by clicking on the “NoDo Follow’ option in the Tools menu of your browser. You will see the Do-follow links on every page you visit highlighted in blue and the No-follow ones highlighted in red.
So, you can check all blogs and social bookmarking sites that you have shortlisted to see if the backlinks they provide are actually do-follow.

SEO SpyGlass: Download the free version of the software, run your own URL through it to monitor your backlinks and their indexing rate. You may also run your top competitors URLs through the software, make a note of all the sites they are linking to and start placing requests for your inbound links on the same sites too.

LinkAssistant.com: This site offers a premium as well as free service. While the premium service obviously offers more value, you can get a reasonable number of do-follow backlinks from sites related to your niche area by exchanging links with them.

The list is by no way comprehensive; there are several other free tools that I use regularly. Check again for more of these lists.
Till then…